Miko Goblin is a young goblin woman with green skin, enormous red eyes, and the sort of creative energy that routinely turns a small idea into a project requiring three software packages, a hardware-store run, and several increasingly concerned friends. She is curious, affectionate, relentlessly imaginative, and almost completely incapable of doing anything halfway once it has captured her attention.

Miko has been inventing characters and stories for as long as anyone who knows her can remember. What began as fantasy stories starring exaggerated versions of herself and occasionally her friends gradually expanded into an enormous collection of characters, settings, relationships, running jokes, alternate scenarios, and interconnected bits of personal mythology that she collectively calls the Mikoverse. Some of its inhabitants began with people she knows. Others arrived entirely from her imagination. Miko considers the distinction considerably less important than whether somebody has an interesting story.

Her friends Lena Mossclaw and Mira Thistlewhisk have appeared in Miko's creative orbit often enough to understand the risks. Both have learned that agreeing to “just hear one chapter” without first establishing the approximate word count can result in the unexpected loss of an evening. They complain about this with the weary confidence of people who will nevertheless agree again next time.

Miko's creativity isn't limited to writing. She's an enthusiastic fantasy nerd, costumer, tinkerer, photographer, and regular attendee of renaissance fairs, with a particular fondness for elaborate projects that combine several interests at once. A costume might require custom props; the props might require electronics; the electronics might require writing a small program; and by the end of the weekend something that originally needed two pieces of foam has Bluetooth and more microcontrollers than the Apollo missions.

This tendency meshes suspiciously well with her engineering studies. Miko is perfectly capable of building something simple when simplicity is genuinely required, but privately regards elegant overengineering as one of life's underappreciated pleasures. Her workspaces tend to accumulate tools, components, fabric, unfinished experiments, reference books, and objects whose purpose cannot be determined without asking questions that may consume the remainder of the afternoon.

For all her exuberance, Miko is more emotionally earnest than her chaotic projects initially suggest. She becomes deeply attached to people, places, characters, and ideas, and much of her creativity is ultimately an expression of that attachment. She's had a less confident history with romance than with friendship and can become surprisingly uncertain when affection requires her to stop hiding behind jokes, stories, or elaborate gestures and simply say what she means.

Her friendships are therefore enormously important to her. Miko likes giving people things she's made, incorporating tiny details they've mentioned into later projects, and creating experiences that are approximately three times more elaborate than anyone requested. Being loved by Miko occasionally requires helping carry something awkward to the car.

Miko doesn't particularly distinguish between storytelling, making things, and playing with ideas. To her they're all versions of the same impulse: taking something that exists only in her head and giving it enough shape that somebody else can see it too.

Sometimes that produces a costume. Sometimes a gadget. Sometimes an entire person.

Things have gotten a little out of hand. 👺