First appearance: Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG · watch it on YouTube
Muffy is a two-foot-five fennec fox with light fur, sharp bright-blue eyes and a deep, jolly laugh that seems far too big for her. She is a painter of near-photographic skill, a ferocious warrior whose paintbrush slices like a sword, and fiercely devoted to the Grandmaster. She is played by JustSeum. In the first arc of Pieces of a King she joined Grimnar Stormclaw and Nehebka on a mission to Dämmerung. Along the way she painted mustaches on nearly everything, killed a Titan with a rainbow, and learned that the brother she had mourned might be alive.
Story
Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG
Muffy was introduced in a sociable courtyard of The Dread Fortress, putting the finishing touches on a portrait of the Grandmaster so lifelike “you can see her pores.” Then, just as she finished, she painted a black mustache on it. The watching knights laughed and groaned. The fortress staff, tiny goblins and “occasionally a rogue chinchilla,” started chanting “hang it, hang it, hang it.” Muffy dug a hammer and nails out of the goblins’ tool crates and hung the painting herself. It ended up two feet off the ground, where only people her size could admire it. An elvish Dread Knight brought her a summons and kindly suggested “Perhaps a little higher next time.” As she left, the knight told her to keep her creative spirit alive, because “we’re going to need it in the coming months.” Muffy noticed the knight’s face fall and growled a little.
In the star-filled study of Knight Commander Stolas, Muffy bonded with the commander over his hand-stippled drawings. She then heard the briefing: shadows were gathering at the edge of The Void, and they looked a great deal like The Shadow King. She was handed the squad’s one-use relay stone, which would call them home if broken. When Stolas told her to be careful, she snapped back, “Don’t treat me like a child.” Before leaving she cleaned her paintbrush like a soldier sharpening a blade and nicked her finger on bristles she’d forgotten were so sharp.
At the portal relay room she guffawed over the shoulder of Zzhitopp, the relay master, who was reading a cheesy barbarian comic. She promised to bring him back “great art.” When he begged them not to bring him any fecal matter, she asked how many times he’d gotten it and whether it went into the fortress’s resurrection “goo pit.” His answer was three large barrels of the stuff, sealed with iron lids. She also confessed that she can’t swim. “Last time I went swimming, I almost drowned,” she said, though really she had just walked into the four-foot deep end at two feet tall. Riding the shimmering planar vein (“Whee!”), she showed Nehebka what her ordinary-looking brush could do: its bristles barely touched a sheet of paper and cut it cleanly in two, then turned soft at her touch. Nehebka declared, “There is a warrior within you,” and protected that warrior with a cage of sand around Muffy’s heart.
The squad crashed down in the middle of a battlefield, right in the path of a retreating army. Muffy ducked between legs and vaulted over shoulders, steering Grimnar and Nehebka through the stampede so that none of them were trampled. Then she went to war. Raging, she pulled her palette off her back, where it filled with rainbow paint pots as she held it, and flung magenta paint that bubbled into the joints of the patchwork constructs and ate away their metal. Purple paint melted a soldier into a puddle (“Be free, my paint, be free!”). Each time a Blade Scout swung at her and missed, she added a little paint to its blade. When it finally fell, she hopped up and painted a mustache on its face. “Magnifique.” In the retreat, Nehebka swept her up in a whirlwind of sand, and Muffy screamed the whole way, reaching for her brush. Once safe in the tunnels of the Rust Blood Alliance, she dry-heaved like a dog from all the sand and drained an entire goblin’s flask to wash it out.
Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL
At the Alliance war camp, Grim vouched for Muffy as “one of the most dexterous and nimble things I’ve ever seen.” In the mess tent she rose up on her hind legs, gaining about three inches, to reach the counter. When the bugbear chef asked what the Dread Fortress was, she told him simply, “I paint there.” A sharp read of the chef told her he genuinely had never heard of the Grandmaster, and she and Grimnar started plotting to sign him up for the Deathmatches. “It’s very entertaining,” she assured him, with the widest of fennec-fox grins.
When a table of Kuo-Toa from the 34th Deep Divers asked what squad they were from, Muffy answered without blinking: “We’re 35th.” The fish-folk took this as a sign that their squads had not all been wiped out. They chanted “three, five, three, five,” and the party were adopted on the spot. That evening Muffy used a dry brush on the single sheet of paper she always carries, which she never replaces and simply lets change paintings. Out of it she drew a map: the mountain, a tiny crevice for an entrance, and a magenta glow that matched the enemy’s eyes, all under a sky slick with chaos. Later she ran a dice game called “Cabals and Krakens” for the barracks. She was a horrendous game master, making up rules as she went, and it was the highlight of the night.
When the masked Nightingales arrived and their leader, The Physician, removed his helmet, Muffy greeted him with “What big eyes you have.” He leaned down and answered, “And what large ears you have.” She ducked behind Grimnar. She reached for the “call to home” on her back and learned that for five years the Warmind had blocked every attempt to leave Dämmerung. When the Physician explained that his mother had wanted him to have a long, important-sounding name, Muffy offered her own family history: “Mine just called me Muffy.”
Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead
Muffy rose early and painted as a morning meditation. She worked on a portrait of the three of them as “the 35th,” which she kept for herself as a gift she hadn’t yet shown her friends. Soldiers crowded around her for unit insignia, like customers at a small-town tattoo parlor. She also produced a mustached portrait of the Grandmaster she had brought along by accident. “See? It’s art,” she said. Grimnar suggested it might also be treason. When a Nightingale came to fetch them, Muffy saluted it with the Fortress salute: two fingers raised, one arm tucked behind her back, and the words “up, up and away,” meaning “the Fortress, reporting for duty.”
At the war council, War Mistress Trissavin asked whether Muffy had family. “I have a lot of siblings. There was a whole litter of us,” she said, and she would do anything to protect them. When Trissavin asked whether she would enforce order to protect them from chaos, Muffy replied, “I’m committed to the Grandmaster. If she asked me to do anything, I would do it.” Nehebka stepped in front of her, even though Muffy was the strongest of the three. Later, Muffy needled the chief artillerist Gund Ashbrow about commanding from a tent, with Grimnar looming behind her like a giant bear. She left him twitching: “Have somebody paint me a picture so I can make sure of it.”
At the corpse of the fallen Solar she painted a mustache on the angel and walked away giggling. When the Warmind’s army attacked, Grimnar mirrored Nehebka’s protection and set a jolt of lightning by Muffy’s heart, which left her fur standing on end like eighties hair. Nehebka carried her through a tree deep into the enemy line, and Muffy tore into the flare-firing lieutenant and broke its knees. “They can’t go for those toes, but we can go for theirs.” She leaned on her brush in the lieutenant’s foot while Grim’s fireball blew it apart, then gave him a thumbs up through the ringing in her ears.
Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind
In the thick of the battle for the Solar, a rattled squad of Kuo-Toa, bugbears and hobgoblins called Muffy over. She conducted them with her brush like a maestro, drawing battle plans of clouds, X’s and arrows in the air itself, and the line held. “You’re going to be our new mascot,” a soldier told her. “Yes,” she agreed. When a Titan was brought down and began to rise again, she painted a rainbow in which every band was a different kind of destruction, added little clouds at the end, and pushed it into the machine. Fire burst from its eyes, it crumpled, and the troops chanted “Muffy! Muffy! Muffy!”
Deep in the Warmind’s mountain, the party found two knights of the Order of Shadow, Glauccous and Taupe, who had already brought the great brain down. Muffy’s arrival was not exactly stealthy: “Yoo-hoo, we’re right here.” Glauccous squinted at her and asked, “Meir?” Muffy explained that Meir was her brother, a great artist, “But he died a while ago. I even have his paintbrush.” The knights insisted he was alive, one of their allies, and that he talked about her a lot. Muffy turned away for a moment.
When talks broke down, Muffy dashed in, her brush’s bristles turning to fine threads that pierced like quills, and stabbed Taupe twice. She plugged her ears against the knights’ pleas (“Sorry, I can’t hear you”). When Taupe whispered that she didn’t want to die there, Muffy lowered her hands and asked, with genuine curiosity, “Where would you like to die?” (“Preferably on a beach with a drink.”) Then she wrestled Taupe into a headlock and gently choked her unconscious, whispering, “It’ll stop hurting when you go to sleep.” Glauccous threw Muffy off like a bull off a cape. She explained “I put her to sleep,” muttered “I’m sorry, mom,” and handed him over to Nehebka.
While the others dug the remnant of the Shadow King out of the brain, Muffy suggested that Grimnar’s lightning and Nehebka’s sand could combine into glass, which she would then paint. “That’s us, team stained glass,” Nehebka declared. Muffy pressed Glauccous about her brother: “Why is he there and hasn’t come home? If he were alive? Riddle me that!” With Meir’s brush, which makes ink without paint, she wrote him a short note signed with her name, and Glauccous promised to deliver it. She also argued that there is only one Grandmaster and painted the proof: Elusia, with a mustache. Glauccous’s Grandmaster, it turned out, has a beard and a mustache, so Muffy drew a beard too.
When Grimnar and Nehebka decided to hide the remnant and follow the knights to Umbracor, Muffy backed them, pointing out that “They also might have my brother,” and her waystone gave them an escape route. Later she suggested they skip the extra steps, go home and get paid, but she came round and agreed to go along. When Grimnar warned that this could be treason, she shrugged: “Well, it’s just a regular Tuesday.” Before leaving she accepted the wounded Physician’s thanks with a stanky little smile (“Oh, yeah, you wouldn’t have. You’re welcome.”). Then she headed into the Void toward Umbracor.
Personality and Abilities
Muffy is small, bouncy and relentlessly sunny. She bounces on her feet like a fencer, flashes gummy happy-pup grins and treats the whole Void as a canvas. Under the cheer runs a cold-blooded streak that startles even her allies. She will ask a wounded enemy where they would like to die and mean it as a polite question. Her loyalty to the Grandmaster is absolute, and her signature move, painting mustaches on portraits, monsters and fallen angels alike, she considers art, and she is sure the Grandmaster would love it. She’s also a terrible game master, an enthusiastic recruiter for the Deathmatches, and cannot swim.
In battle she is a raging holy warrior. Her paintbrush is always pristine and never frays; at her will it cuts like a blade, turns soft as a whisper, or sprouts quill-like bristles. She keeps it sheathed like a sword. Her palette is her shield and fills with paint the moment she holds it. Her paint corrodes metal, and in her hands it can become anything from a corrosive magenta to a rainbow of pure destruction. She can also paint battle plans in thin air or reveal hidden images on her single, ever-changing sheet of paper. She carries her dead brother Meir’s brush, which makes ink without paint. She calls on chaos as a primal force, without being especially religious about it.
Relationships
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: Muffy’s idol and ruler. She would do anything the Grandmaster asked, and she firmly believes the Grandmaster would love the mustache.
- Nehebka: A squadmate on her first mission. Nehebka saw the warrior in her and repeatedly shielded her, even though Muffy can more than hold her own.
- Grimnar Stormclaw: A squadmate and fellow artist. He loomed behind her when she bullied Gund and set a lightning ward on her heart, and she thinks “Grimnar is so smart.”
- Grim: The goblin commando who rescued the squad. He fought on her flank and decided she gets “cooler and cooler every day.”
- Gund Ashbrow: The grumpy chief artillerist, whom Muffy happily needled to his face.
- The Physician: The illithid leader of The Nightingales. She charmed him and teased him, and took his thanks with a smirk.
- Meir: Muffy’s brother, whom she believed dead. The Order of Shadow says he is alive at Umbracor, and she sent him a note.
- Glauccous and Taupe: Knights of the Order of Shadow. Muffy fought them, put Taupe to sleep, and argued Grandmasters with Glauccous before following him to Umbracor.
Memorable Quotes
- “Don’t treat me like a child.” (Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG)
- “Mine just called me Muffy.” (Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL)
- “I’m committed to the Grandmaster. If she asked me to do anything, I would do it.” (Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead)
- “Have somebody paint me a picture so I can make sure of it.” (Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead)
- “Where would you like to die?” (Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind)
- “Well, it’s just a regular Tuesday.” (Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind)