Name: "Fortune" Poi, King of the Rats, AKA "Barberlord," AKA "Sevens," AKA "Pig-King Poi," AKA "Gobnob P," "AKA Number One Suspect," AKA "Wanted For Questioning"
Gender: M
Age: 35
Race: Goblin
Appearance: Lean, green, and very mean, with the top-left of his face intermittently scarred from splashes of burning liquid and a piece of the ear torn off from the same side. There is little point in describing the rest of his scarring, because a full-body visual record of various knifings, beatings, and otherwise miscellaneous violence-related collateral damage over time is a feature too ubiquitous and ever-evolving among East Poria street trash to be of any real help in distinguishing one from any other. Nor is his clothing any help in this regard, since the rags he wears around are constantly exchanged for different sets at one of the multiple slum-adjacent second-and-thirdhand clothing shops he owns, meaning that what this particular individual is wearing one day could very well be seen around town on a very different individual the next day, and vice versa. In fact, investigators assigned to shadow Fortune are generally told to make note of the fact that he has no known tattoos and a perfect smile, (for a goblin), with no sign of any rotting, metallic, broken, or missing teeth, because it's been actively demonstrated that even a goblin detective couldn't pick him out of a lineup otherwise. After adjusting for the teeth and tattoos, the same goblin detectives could do so at a success rate of very nearly forty-two percent.
Personality: As a child, Fortune was mean, cunning, cynical, and ruthless. He's matured a lot since then, of course, and like most people, he got to be a lot more mean, cunning, cynical, and ruthless as he went along. Fortune is also patient and slow to anger, but that doesn't really matter because he's gone through with killing plenty of people who'd never even made him angry at all. It's hard to describe what exactly it is that motivates this little goblin to do what he does, but a good attempt would be to say that he sees it as something of a game. Not the sort of game one plays for fun, mind you, but rather the way a professional chess player sits at the board - watching, analyzing, adjusting, and exercising the most subtle and graceful of maneuvers with a grim-faced determination that doesn't seem to hint at any sort of enjoyment at all beyond the occasional humorless smile.
History: Nobody really knows this, least of all himself, but Fortune was incredibly lucky from birth, and his luck only improved from there. Of course, this is all from the perspective that he was very lucky to have survived at all, so it wasn't really a good start to things, all considered.
Fortune was born in a cellar; his mother was a custodian, his father worked for airport security, and by all accounts both of them were good, honest people, even though they were also ugly little goblins. Neither of them were at fault for his uncles: on his father's side, one who was a well-known crook with the Elzebal's Street Concerned Citizen's Club (one of the most notorious criminal organizations in Riorden's history). On his mother's side, three more uncles were well connected with George Tomakaiei's gang on the South side. Both outfits, by the time of Fortune's birthday, had collectively aggravated and offended the Duende bosses and their business interests to the point that they were prepared to start going after family members, and so that's exactly what they did. The Duende's declaration of war was kicked off on the night of his birth, with a group of masked men breaking into Fortune's parents' home, doing such things to the young couple as would possibly discomfit Fortune himself to hear tell of, and eventually throwing the newborn babe into a back-alley dumpster halfway across town to die amidst the snow. By chance, a nursing stray dog found him while digging for scraps just afterwards, apparently mistook the tiny, squawking goblin baby for one of her own, and kept him from starving or freezing for another week until somebody came across the spectacle and called Social Services.
The case of yet another abandoned goblin baby being found was never linked to the "possibly drug related violence among goblins, in one of Riorden's poorer neighborhoods" that authorities never really bothered investigating, and Fortune himself certainly didn't remember it. In fact, his first memory of growing up was being very small and constantly being told what to do by a couple of large, pale, strangely smooth-skinned creatures who kept dropping him into some kind of roofless cage. So he put together a plan and escaped a few years later, eventually making his way to a neighborhood where the clothes were cheaper, the roads were in worse repair, and the six skinny little children playing unsupervised on the scrap-metal playground by the old tire swing looked a lot more like he did.
It's a lot easier to beg for a living among poor people than it is among wealthy people, which seems counterintuitive at first, but it works something like this: A gentleman and his lifelong friend are on their way back from the pub, when a ragged and filthy old man calls out at them from the next street corner along. "No, just tell him you're not carrying any money" he groans, seeing his friend reach for his wallet. "It's better in the long run, trust me. They never leave you alone otherwise." Meanwhile, a dockworker and his lifelong friend are heading home from the bar, stumbling over the occasional discarded food wrapper or empty bottle along the way, when a ragged and filthy old man calls out at them from the next street corner along. "Ah, fafuckssake" says the dockworker. "Give 'im somethin' so 'e shuts up, will ya? I 'ready done frowed a buckat'im las' week." Besides, poor people don't generally like talking to the authorities, while rich people often take it as a point of pride, and goblins of any economic status at all will tend to trust a policeman about ten paces less distance than they can throw one (which is rarely anywhere even close to ten paces at all). Law-abiding residents of the city slums paid just as little attention to the new kid as they did to all of the other unwashed, unsupervised children running about, while the more enterprising (and therefore, not at all law-abiding) locals took note of opportunity. It was one of these self-styled entrepreneurs who dubbed the boy "Fortune," for his obvious prowess in converting said entrepreneurs' illegal narcotics to crumpled, dirty, well-worn but perfectly legal hard currency.
The next several years of crime was fairly mundane stuff, and Fortune gradually started diversifying. At twelve, he saw his picture in a police flyer, and assumed the "POI" for "Person of Interest" was his actual name. By fourteen, he wasn't just being hired for small jobs, he was hiring for them. By sixteen, he had a full-time crew of street rats and served as the most prolific fence in St. John's. At eighteen, he was brought in for questioning for the very first time. At nineteen, he walked into Riorden's largest casino with a modest amount of illegitimately-earned money and then walked out again with a very large sum of perfectly legitimately-earned money. At twenty, he was brought into questioning for the seventh time. By the time he was twenty-two, he owned three clothing shops, a laundromat, a pig farm outside the city, a nightclub, and nearly a third of all illegal drug trafficking into Riorden. He was also the main reason why casinos in the city now only let goblins in through the doors if they are also exceptionally well-dressed (and even then, only grudgingly and with suspicion). By twenty-four, word was out on the streets that if you crossed the King of the Rats (for the high proportion of loyal street urchins in his employ), it ended with somebody shaving your head, smashing your teeth, chopping your limbs off, and feeding you to the pigs (though if you apologized nicely, he'd probably kill you first). Actually, that's only happened a few times so far, and the victims have always been killed first, but Fortune's never seen a reason to argue.
Due to ever-rising police interest in his activities and the regular strain it brings on business, Fortune's criminal enterprises have expanded little in the past decade. Gradually, management of supply lines and territorial disputes or agreements has shifted to the point where he doesn't get involved at all except for major concerns, and then only with brief, coded exchanges in person or over the phone. He's continued holding out in case the cops give up and find an easier mark to spend their time and money on, but the prospect of retiring altogether has grown more and more appealing with each passing year.
Magic: Experts swear that he shouldn't even be capable of magic. "His neural makeup," they insist, "is absolutely not conducive to any extracorporeal ability at all. "Furthermore, the field-shift generally associated with such activity is not detected at any magnitude when the phenomenon is observed, and the phenomenon has been shown to be replicable even when steps have been taken specifically to block any such activity in the testing environment." This record then goes on to say: "It is the finding of this committee, that all possible measures have been taken to ascertain the means by which the subject may have violated the policies of the establishment, as presented to any or all customers, and has determined that it would be impossible to provide evidence of any such violation in a court of law." Be that as it may, Fortune always rolls sevens.
It works like this: if Fortune throws one die, it lands on 6. If Fortune throws seven or more dice, they all land on 1. If Fortune throws anywhere between two and six dice, there's no telling what any one of them will land on - so long as they all total 7. No magic can be detected while this is happening. No magic-blocking technology or effects prevent it from happening. It doesn't even seem as if Fortune is actively causing it to happen, or even able to stop it from happening. He just always rolls sevens.
Misc.: Like any street goblin who's made it this far, (and much more so than most), Fortune is no stranger to violence. Even though he rarely has the need or the occasion to do it in person these days, rather than paying a cleaner to take care of it for him, Fortune's about as tough, quick, dirty, and capable a fighter as ever a goblin was who wore steel-toed boots and held a knife or a knuckle-duster. Fortune's outfit for any given day will generally contain enough pockets and be loose-fitting enough to easily conceal: A 9mm handgun, a couple of extra magazines, switchblade, straight-razor, claw hammer, steel-toothed comb, lockpicks (a memento from his well-spent youth), a cheap burner phone, cheese wire (just because), spiked kuckle-dusters, a pair of perfectly ordinary six-sided dice, silver hip flask filled with finest brandy, matches, nickel-plated cigarette lighter, white gold cigar case filled with fancy imported cigars, and a mouthguard such as boxers or other professional fighters might wear. When you see him pull that mouthguard out of its casing and stick it in his face, it's time to clear out, because even though he weighs less than eighty pounds in full attire the little goblin's as hard and tough as a coffin nail, and hits back even harder than that. As to the handgun, many a rival gunman has found out the hard way that Fortune's size just made it harder for other people to shoot him; it doesn't work the other way around.