Biz

Biz Balomo is a high elf cleric of the Trickery domain, and Aristonia's underworld knows him as a smooth, unbothered operator who works the nobility almost exclusively and never seems to have two coins to rub together despite it. He is "aggressively medium" by his own description — average height, average build, brown hair — which suits a man who prefers not to be remembered. Worm is never far from him: muscle, partner, and the one who ends up holding the coin purse when things go sideways. Between them they have a rhythm that works better than either would admit, built on one rule Biz states plainly whenever it comes up: "You do not steal from me. I steal. You do not steal from me."

The party first crossed his path at a bare-knuckle fighting pit beneath Little Pandemonium, where he was already in disguise, already picking a pocket, and already on first-name terms with the promoter running the show. He talks his way into rooms with fake names — Alabaster White, on one memorable occasion — and talks his way out of trouble on nerve alone, though the nerve outruns the delivery often enough to be a running joke: a lie the Black Blades saw straight through the moment he told it, a pickpocket fumbled so badly the City Watch was shouting before he'd even cleared the crowd. He is, by his own cheerful admission, gray-brown colorblind — which means ordering a drink at the Boot, where the ale, the coffee, and the water all answer to shades he can't tell apart, is beyond him.

He has been at the center of the party's biggest breaks in the case that started at the Ashveil estate — the read that caught the flash of betrayal on Maren Ashveil's face when House Betony's name came up, a charmed conversation that got a scared lieutenant talking, a stretch of stealth recon outside the estate that let Randy place a noble house's sigil before anyone else had a name to put to it. He picks locks, cracks strongboxes, and reads a room's angles faster than anyone else in the party. His Invoke Duplicity has done real work more than once — a duplicate mimicking his every move from a corner of the room while he worked underneath the table unseen, or, on the crossing to Saltmoor, a duplicate sent overboard to spook an entire ship's crew for the fun of it — and in the fight beneath the Vex Caves he closed out an old score of Worm's in person, finishing the relic hunter called Ghent in the personal duel the two of them had been locked in for the whole fight.

He is, at the moment, the one voice in the party inclined to deal rather than run. Facing V's standing offer to fetch relics from places the man himself cannot go, Biz has floated the idea of a tentative agreement — not a commitment, just enough to buy the party room to breathe while they figure out what they are actually dealing with. Whether that instinct proves shrewd or reckless is still an open question.