Maxi the troll barber (Dyrney)
Age 22
5’10”
360 lbs
Blue Eyes
Red Hair
Maxi – troll barber on Broadstreet, a friend of Kellen Greenwood and his family. Important member of the Underground.
Excerpt from WHAM! :
“Hey Tess!” said Maxi, turning to her with grand outstretched arms. “What my baby girl do be in this neighborhood by her only self?”
“I’m not by myself,” said Tess. “You’re here and nobody’d mess with me with you around.”
“That not was all what, baby girl,” he said, taking down his sunglasses for a dubious squint. “I no did brought you here…”
Suddenly she was in tears. “They took them, Maxi!” she wailed as he grabbed her up in his big arms. “They took my whole family!”
Maxi offered his barber’s chair to her as she talked. The moment she was seated, he knelt in the most respectful troll fashion, slipped off her sandal and licked her foot. When she told him how the police had beaten her mother and father senseless, he shot to his feet thumping his chest with his knuckles. “Ooot! Ooot!” he cried, flinging his arms as he tramped about the room, for her father Kellen had long been a good friend of his.
“So you see why I had to come,” said Tess. “I need your help, Maxi. I don’t have any money, but…”
“Whoa baby girl!” he cried, tramping right up to the chair. “I be always any help, but when the government took all Dyrney from the Jutwoods and keep us here, I not know enough Dyrney-brutes to get you family back. You father and I scratchy-scratch and scratchy-scratch and scratchy-scratch and scratchy-scratch all both our heads and still not know where be capitol. Not even.”
“I know you would if you could, Maxi. But I’m not asking for that. What I need is a complete make-over, and I know that you can do that like no one else.”
“Make-over? Poop! You pretty pretty pretty thing. You no need.”
“Yeh Maxi. And all the kids at school call me a freak. And the ugly face on the skinny told me that the school turned in Mom and Dad to Children and Family Assistance.”
“They be the freaks with not no any backbone,” he said from under his beetling brow as he drew his hand over his face with a sigh. “Backbone give you extra pretty pretty. And Dyrney threw gnydy ball and gnydy ball and gnydy ball katoomp katoomp into the echo deep sewer poop. We no have ugly face on the skinny.”
“My! They’d come get anyone who did that.”
“Yeh,” he said. “And we did all once. And daylight people be too many not no backbone freaks. Don’t you try, baby-girl.”
“I promise. All I need is a make-over.”
“You need hug from stead.”
“I can’t pay you, so I suppose I really ought to do it myself, though I’ve never cut it before,” she said with a sigh. “Do you think my dad’s electric razor will do to shave the sides of my head?”
“Cut? Shave? What you want that for? What be wrong with pretty pretty head?”
“Well my hair’s long enough to sit on. No one at school wears it that way. And I think Nia and I were the only ones with naturally green hair.”
“I like long and green,” he said, folding his arms with a decisive nod. “And don’t the daylight people kids have all any kind of color for hair?”
“Yeh. They dye it.”
“You want dye?”
“Nah. I want everything off the sides and the hair that’s left looking artificial…”
“Like some young Dyrney-punk?” he said with a look of astonishment.
“Yeh. With real troll swirls in the fuzz on the scalp on either side.”
Maxi the troll continues in THEN…