Player: Ming Ming
Race: Gnome
Sex: Female
Age: 108
Height: 3'7"
Weight: 39.8 lbs.
Occupation: Human-Gnome Relations Liaison and Gnomish Considerations Advocate
Children: Aubmyrn "Myrna" Vaporgate and Bunkerbrig "Rigley" Vaporgate
Buoyansie is a lively middle-aged woman of the gnome race. She stands just above three and a half feet tall, and has the wiry build of one who spends most of her time trying to keep up with the walking pace of humans. Her habitual gait is thus unnaturally quick and vigorous, and seems to either fuel or reflect the great deal of energy the gnome exudes.
Her face is also a portrait of barely contained exuberance. The rounded, characteristically gnomish protuberances of cheeks, chin, and nose-tip are bound by the Asiatic angles of her heritage and give the impression of a hot-air balloon threatening to burst out of its netting. Her complexion is tan and ruddy and quite prone to wrinkles, for she seems to have no moderation in her degrees of facial expression.
Her personality is undeniably abrasive. She is aggressive in any emotion she expresses, and is usually in an up-beat mood, but with the obvious undercurrent of an intention to hold tightly to her opinions and her comfortable lifestyle. She also shows no awareness or caring of polite company, and voices her thoughts on crass subjects frequently and eagerly.
Buoyansie keeps her dark auburn hair in a short shag style, which she'll stuff into a wool cap to keep off the cold in winter, or tame into a short, upward-pointing ponytail when the summer gets humid. She generally clothes herself in tight leather breeches and flexible moccasins. She owns a somewhat grotesque necklace of a dried pig's snout on a leather cord--the end of a large snout, sliced thinly, and dried, with the cord looped through its sinewy nostrils. Buoyansie claims it was a gift from her son's father, but no man will admit to bestowing her with either. She keeps her small, girlish breasts bound in a stiff bodice, usually of cotton and leather, though occasionally she'll wear a loose shortdress over her breeches. She'll gladly tug up the lower edge of her bodice to show off her two cesarean section scars to anybody with the guts to ask.
Aubmyrn and Rigley are both half-gnome, half-human. Aubmyrn, at 72 years of age, has clearly shown the tendency to age at the same slow rate as her gnome counterparts. Rigley, at 45, is also presumed to be aging slowly, as he hardly looks a day above 18. The children don't seem to show much of an aptitude for anything other than sloth, and are known to spend most of their time languishing in the home with the curtains drawn. When they do venture out, both have done little to improve their reputations as low-moraled vagabonds. Aubmyrn, with the proportions of a petite human, enjoys seducing married men. Rigley regularly binge-drinks to the point of aggravating his liver condition and requiring emergency medical care, for which he shows no remorse, and really a great deal of enjoyment at the attention he receives.
Possessions: Drumbox. The Drumbox is an ingenious and one-of-a-kind device built by Buoyansie's brothers. It produces customized percussion loops through a complex mechanical system of gears and winding keys. Bosie is in possession of the device, which she rents out to interested parties, and which has been the target of attempted theft more than once.
Revolver. The gnomish revolver is of a size that suits Bosie, and she keeps it in a simple holster on her hip.
Snout necklace. A verifiably non-magical charm, the snout is still an item of fascination to some, and supposedly holds the secret to the identity of Bosie's illegitimate son's father.
Other assets. Aside from her notable possessions, Bosie also draws a considerable living salary that helps her support two adult children as well as assist her mother, sister, and nephew. She owns a comfortably furnished townhouse.
Strengths: Legal expertise. Buoyansie is among the best-versed lawyers in the city, and when it comes to matters petty enough to slide past the notice of the guard--say, the rate of a tailor's markup, or the tenancy of apartments in her neighborhood--she has a way of bullying things in her favor through citing obscure laws and generally bamboozling dissenters.
Marksmanship. She is the proud owner of one only a few dozen gnomish revolvers in the city. She has never fired it at another intelligent being, but has shown herself to be a crack shot in taking down forest pigeons and riverbank-dwelling rodents. She is rumored to have pointed the barrel at other civilians once or twice, but she shrugs such accusations.
Connections. While not a very important employee of the government, she can sometimes call in favors on behalf of other like-ranked ministers.
Weaknesses: Liver disease. Bosie and her children both suffer chronic hepatitis, the result of a virus passed to her by her daughter's father.
Her children. She's immoderately proud of her deviant offspring, and any threat to their wellbeing is all it takes to immediately distract her from any other situation.
Bad blood/Reputation. While Bosie is a skilled liaison between humans and gnomes, there are those who distrust her based on her position or her abrasive personality. She has difficulty creating peaceful relationships. She has very little chance of holding a stable romantic relationship because of the stigma of miscegenation.
History: Buoyansie "Bosie" Vaporgate is the third child of Torcke Vaporgate and his wife, Brunwhindmill "Whindy", nee Tungs. Torcke is descended from a long gnomish line of aeronautical engineers native to the former settlements around Thar Shaddin, and most recently the city of Marn. Brunwhindmill's roots lie in a large, nomadic clan with outposts between Thar Shaddin and the central doldrums of the Northern Trade Route. This clan, from which roughly half of the gnomish families in Marn claim ascendancy, is thought to carry the blood of both hardy Northern Eyropan "mountain gnomes" and spry Eastern gnomes. Hybrid vigor is a mark of pride amongst the clan, and they seem to exhibit a slightly longer average lifespan than their homozygous counterparts.
Torcke and Whindy married one-hundred-thirty years ago, in 251 PW, and made their home with Whindy's clan. Because of the mounting political tensions in the growing town of Marn, they opted to live on the road rather than settle a homestead. Whindy bore two sons, Dragg and Tenshion, and a daughter, Buoyansie. Torcke and Whindy supported their family equally--he, as a journeyman engineer to the less mechanically inclined gnomes of the clan, and she as a self-managed stage entertainer specializing in comedy. The Vaporgate children were thus exposed not only to a lifestyle of travel, but also to a variety of vocations, and weren't pigeonholed, as many gnomes are, into the physical sciences.
The decision to settle in the growing city of Marn was made so Torcke could take advantage of the job market's need for engineers. The population of the city was swelling rapidly at this point, and work for gnome specialists was abundant. The Vaporgates made a small home in the low-rent region of the residential district. Whindy contented herself as a homemaker and bore a fourth child, the girl Lyft.
At the time, it wasn't customary for gnomes to attend primary education alongside humans, so the children were educated in the home. Between Torcke and Whindy, the Vaporgate children became well-versed in physics, mathematics, literature, and rhetoric. They made playmates of the human children in their neighborhood, who also bore no ties to society or formal education. Buoyansie took particularly well to human company; her outgoing personality was charming to the lower caste, and frequently excused her tendency towards mischief.
The Vaporgate boys came of age and joined their father in the engineering trade. Having amassed a modest wealth in the engineering and construction boom, Torcke left the mainstream to pursue his passion of aeronautics. He and his sons started a series of projects of varying success. The frequently ventured out to the banks of the Ofriyu Mar to conduct their experiments with flying contraptions, and even made several trips to the Sooqui Plains to take advantage of the flat land and open spaces.
Buoyansie found she preferred the social sciences over her father's field. A fortunate combination of economic circumstances saw Buoyansie into university: the boom times of Marn were ending, and her family's modest fortune was welcomed as a substitute for good racial breeding or formal primary education. She eagerly consumed texts on anthropology and law. While she was an apt student, her academic progress was hindered by her social dalliances.
Early in young adulthood, Buoyansie was courted by a local gnome youth. Their courtship was awkward and ended swiftly when his advances went largely unrequited. Bosie determined she was far more interested in the company of her human classmates. She kept frequent and casual company with several young human men and thus developed a very unsavory reputation as a loose girl--men who favored her also found themselves saddled with the stigma of miscegenation. She was furthermore remembered by classmates for her crass sense of humor and loudly voiced opinions.
Bosie graduated with no great academic distinction other than being the only gnome in her class. Unofficially, she was praised by several instructors as an exceptionally bright young mind, but she simply couldn't keep up the grades to take honors. With her father retired and her family's money whittled to a subsistence bank, Bosie had to give up her leisurely scholar's lifestyle and join the workforce.
Her first job was as a clerk at the city library. She was quickly promoted to Head Librarian of the Gnomish Texts department. Bosie found this work hospitable, as the short hours and modest government pay allowed her a great deal of leisure time, during which she preferred to socialize in human company. She kept a very small apartment near the downtown neighborhood.
For more than a year, Buoyansie had both a steady job and a boyfriend. Dewba Gali was a foreigner, a swarthy middle-aged businessman from south of Thar Shaddin. As an outsider of local society, he found himself untroubled by the issue of his relationship with the ill-famed gnome woman. Others kept their distance, in general.
At about the same time, Bosie lost both her career and her lover when circumstances forced her to take maternity leave. She was refused her leave, and the library took their moment to terminate her position; some coworkers were heard to declare the managment had been looking for an excuse, besides. Dewba disappeared from Marn, leaving behind only mystery and rumors--and of course, a child.
For some time, people in the city were bewildered and embarrassed by the change of the snappy, obnoxious gnome librarian to a sobbing, destitute, and ever-more bloated nuisance. Once again, the political climate in the city came to Buoyansie's advantage. Gossip had gotten out about some new, extreme laws the government was considering enacting. While high-ranking politicians crafted the anti-magic laws that would soon come into effect and assembled their powerful guard, their lower-ranking advisers busied themselves in quieting public dissent before the plans were readied. Bosie's situation was scandalous, and thus had gained infamy in the city. Attention to her case was one of several charitable gestures made by the government in order to promote patriotism. She was granted medical attention for her considerable prenatal needs as well as a modest living stipend. The people of the city were impressed with the government's great benevolence.
Buoyansie's figure swelled to accommodate the unnaturally big half-breed child, and for some months she had to walk with a cane; in her last trimester she had to use a wheelchair to get about. She gestated for about one year before giving birth to a daughter, Aubmyrn "Myrna," by cesarean section, which was performed by an elderly doctor and magic-user, registered under the brand new strictures on magic. The girl was healthy and vigorous, with nut-colored skin, dark hair, and sharp eyes.
Bosie's despair over losing her job and her lover was quickly extinguished by her immoderate pride over her new daughter. The infant was too large for the gnome to carry herself, or even nurse without aid. She rented a cheap wet nurse for most of her baby's feedings and spent most of the rest of her time parading the girl around town in a pram that outsized herself.
With the dissenting population controlled sufficiently, Bosie's highly publicized government stipend slowed in its regularity before ceasing to arrive at all. With her meager savings, the gnome could barely keep up feeding her daughter and herself. She returned to the Vaporgate home to live with her family. She stayed at home with her mother while her father and brother experimented in the fields. Her sister Lyft was being provided for by her husband, the very gnome youth whom Bosie had rejected years before. The Vaporgate boys occasionally brought home a bit of cash from odd jobs around town. but was an unexpected invention of Whindy's that really saved the family from the poorhouse.
Brunwhindmill was no longer fit for the stage, as her brand of humor was out of style with the human populace. She still, however, held a passion for entertaining, and came upon the idea of constructing entertainment machines to satisfy the human fascination with the gnomes' greatest skill. With Whindy's direction, her husband and boys were able to put together a number of entertaining devices, including self-playing lute that operated on a concept similar to a complicated music box, a variety of mechanical games of chance, and most spectacularly, the drum machine. The drum machine was a wooden box the size of a steamer trunk that could produce single- and poly-rhythmic percussive beats, determined by a set of user-controlled levers and wheels, on a continuous loop. While most of the machines built by the Vaporgates during this period were sold for a decent profit, they made the wise decision to keep the "Vaporgate Drumbox" to rent out to dancers, musicians, and entertainment halls. In high demand, the drumbox became a source of modest, steady income for the family.
Outrage struck the Vaporgates shortly after they got back their financial bearings: Lyft and her infant son were abandoned by the boy's father and her husband. He left with all his assets at the first signs of depression hitting Marn and disappeared to find his fortune elsewhere. Lyft found herself utterly without recourse. There were civil laws in place that bound human couples to share their assets upon divorce--laws enacted to prevent upstanding abandoned women from turning to shameful deeds to survive. But, a semantic loophole in the law created a situation where these strictures did not apply to non-humans, including gnomes. Neither the absent gnome husband nor his family could legally be held responsible for Lyft's situation.
Invigorated by the perceived injustice, Buoyansie took her loud opinions public once more. She lobbied vehemently with the Civic Court for reform in human-gnome relations and demanded that the governing body of humans pay their responsibility of governance to all citizens. She dug up and quoted texts from a seemingly endless supply of legal and philosophical volumes; her experience deep in the library stacks was paying off. Eventually, the meek civic judge who had been placed on her case caved to Bosie's incessant shrillness and gave a ruling in favor of Lyft which forced the family of her estranged husband to pay minor reparations.
Buoyansie found herself instilled with purpose. Human-gnome relations were uneasy for several years after the anti-magic laws were passed. Law-abiding citizens felt obligated to distrust beings of magical origin, and yet neither the civilians nor the governing powers could afford to alienate those who maintained their mechanical infrastructure. Bosie lobbied on behalf of a handful of civil cases in relation to gnome interests, and eventually the city offered her an official position--likely to keep her outbursts in line, more than anything, as her activities proved a draw on government resources as it was. Her job title became "Human-Gnome Relations Liaison and Gnomish Considerations Advocate."
For the past seventy years, Bosie has held her position, which is known colloquially as "Gnome Liaison."
During her second pregnancy, a decade into her tenure, she didn't even ask for maternity leave, but carried on about town in her wheelchair, boisterous as ever. This time, her condition elicited no sympathy from the citizens of Marn, but just as much gossip as ever--Bosie has never revealed the identity of the father of her second-born, and no man has stepped forward to claim the embarrassing deed. Her second cesarean section was assisted by the young doctor Metarie, whom Bosie still trusts exclusively for her medical care. The boy, Bunkerbrig "Rigley" Vaporgate, is also a half-human half-gnome, and has a much fairer complexion and coloring that his sister.
Nearly all of the gnomes in Marn know of Buoyansie, if they are not acquainted personally, and most humans who have done almost any kind of business with gnomes have crossed paths with her at some point. Over the years, her position has evolved to include not only advocacy on behalf of gnomes, but also assistance in communications between the races as a neutral party. Her preference for human company is widely known. While many humans consider her a foreign force to be reckoned with, some gnomes, alternately, consider her a race traitor.
Currently, she lives with her two unemployed adult children in a two-bedroom townhouse in the middle-rent neighborhood of the city's residential district. She frequently visits and helps support her mother, sister, and nephew at the Vaporgate home. Her father and brothers have been off traveling for the last decade, enjoying their latest model of blimp.