Chen'razghul

Orange Archmage Cheegal (a.k.a. Cheegal the Clown, Ringmaster Zeetee)

Cheegal the Clown was born to young goblinese couple in Deathsport: Cheezag, a local acrobat, and Zeeta, who was happy as a housewife. While he would spend his childhood looking up to his father, even becoming a street performer so he could, one day, become part of a troupe with him, tragedy would hit his family. During what should have been yet another performance, Cheezag fell from an unexpected height, landing on the back of his neck and rendering him paraplegic.
As a result, Cheezag could no longer play the role of the provider, forcing Zeeta to step up in various unskilled roles around the capital to provide for household. Young Cheegal, at this point a clown in his own right, would tell jokes through the day and come home to miserable arguments about how his family's finances would be satisfied. In the end, his father would, in his eyes, abandon the family, leaving Cheegal and his mother alone while Cheezag roamed about as a homeless, wheelchair-bound street sweeper.
Cheegal never questioned his mother's narrative on the situation; according to her, Cheezag abandoned them out of a senseless male pride, and that was that. While Cheegal would be regularly approached by his father and assured that he was loved, he spurned his father at every turn, dedicating himself to his street performances in the hopes of being picked up by a troupe one day.
These dreams had to be accelerated when Zeeta would, out of nowhere, develop a degenerative disease which rendered her musculature too weak to reliably walk, along with causing rapid scale and hair shedding. As such, Zeeta could no longer be a primary earner, and Cheegal upped his game, performing whenever he could and immersing himself in the clowning cultures of old, in particular coming to admire Pedro el Payaso, the eponymous clown from the play written by Santoro Solerro. In it, the titular clown would fall for a princess he had no way of being with, and so he hid his misery with a painted smile, focusing on bringing happiness to others rather than dwelling on his sadness.
As such, Cheegal adopted an almost toxic philosophy that everyone, everywhere (except for his much-loathed father and himself) deserved to smile, no matter what they were going through. He viewed clowning as a special, beautiful outlet of positivity, there to remind people of the world's joy amidst the crushing difficulties everyone faced. Draining as it was, his approach worked, and soon he was picked up by the Sunshine Circus.
It was the job of a lifetime; he'd earn more than enough to support his mother and even stood a chance at hiring a healer to cure her of whatever illness was claiming her. The only issue was that it was a travelling circus, meaning he'd need to leave his mother, who'd grown dependent on him for everything from house cleaning to food, alone. As such, he agreed to the job, but would spend half his salary on a maid to take care of Zeeta.
In the Sunshine Circus, he would quickly make friends in the form of Jezza, an acrobatic gobliness who he would come to crush on, along with the somewhat pompous, but good-humoured Rasmus the Illusionist, and enemies in the form of Ringmaster Vardyn, a boss who despite the generous payment, was openly apathetic to matters of safety and mental well-being of his acts.
Life in the Sunshine Circus started strong; in his solo act, Cheegal would make pointed political jokes for the adults and audience participation slapstick for the children. It was beloved enough that Jezza took notice of Cheegal's clear passion, and over the first half of their tour, he would begin dating her. However, a few too many fat jokes at his ringmaster's expense had left Cheegal in a poor professional position, and after a noble-targeting joke caused Razarkha Fel'thuz of Moonstone to storm out of the audience in anger, Ringmaster Vardyn made his move.
He proposed that the solo act was getting stale and relied too much on alienating folks that could be considered the business's 'whales'. As such, he wanted to bring the focus onto slapstick, and introduced an orcish stage hand, Taskmaster, who'd wanted to be a performer for a while, to Cheegal's act. The proposed narrative was that of Taskmaster, as an idiotic boss, making exceptional, impossible demands of Cheegal, who would nevertheless try his hardest to fulfill the demand. The punchline would be Taskmaster walking in right as he's made the first mistake of the day, followed by an over-the-top slapstick display as a result.
However, when the first performance of the new act came, Taskmaster didn't hold back; in front of everyone, he would beat Cheegal in a very much genuine manner, and the audience, believing it to be an act, would encourage more of it. Following this performance, Cheegal would retire to his caravan in shame and misery, at this point under obligation to keep performing for his mother's sake.
The beatings kept coming and the audience kept laughing. While Cheegal rationally knew that they simply didn't know any better, his philosophy shifted from toxic positivity to a cynicism that concluded that people didn't want witticisms or encouragement; they just wanted to see someone less fortunate than themselves suffer. He would withdraw from Jezza and after a show in Starfall, he'd be approached by a seer in green Order of the Shade robes, claiming to have a respite from his misery.
This brought him into the local Order of the Shade lodge, where a goblin man named Azkag would give him some comforting words, game soup, and some vials of liquid shade, an arcane stimulant that would, amongst other things, numb Cheegal's pain, keep him energised, and bolster his confidence on-stage, no matter the misery. Seeing as the drugs were being offered for free, Cheegal would make a habit of visiting an Order lodge in every city the circus toured to. His addiction would foster a mean streak within him, and soon, he'd completely alienated Jezza, the one good thing in his life.
Eventually, the circus returned to Deathsport, and Cheegal hoped to see his mother once again. Instead, he came home to find a weeping maid and an empty house. In Zeeta's bedroom there was nothing but overly clean bedding, an urn full of ashes, and a suicide note. It explained what Cheegal had never seen fit to ask: Why his father left.
It turned out that Zeeta had come to consider Cheezag a burden, too crippled to be a 'true' husband, and that it was her decision that forced him out of the house. Somewhere along the line, the guilt from Cheegal's constant financial and emotional support had driven her to end it all. Cheegal's effort, all his endurance of abuse, it had all amounted to a life with a dead mother, an alienated father, and a woman who he could have loved despising him.
He announced his intent to resign to Ringmaster Vardyn, who managed to wring out one final effort from him: As the troupe's fortune teller, Verision, was mysteriously missing, he would fulfill the promises on the circus posters to ensure the Sunshine Circus didn't nix two acts on such short notice. This would prove disastrous for all involved.
Lost in a maelstrom of liquid-shade-induced numbness, horror and grief, misery and expectation of abuse, Cheegal anticipated his last few shows in Deathsport. When the act went through to the punchline, however, something changed. He looked at the audience, the sadistic monsters who would laugh at an orc beating a grieving man into the ground, and decided to give them an even 'funnier' show. His natural pyromancy flared up and he started by setting fire to Taskmaster's crotch, then the rest of his fur. A few fireballs missed and hit the big top's scaffolds, but precision wasn't Cheegal's main concern at the time.
Eventually, the tent was aflame, full of screaming audience members, while Taskmaster had burnt to death and Vardyn, suicidally stupid man that he was, confronted Cheegal. The end result was the elf cooking in his own velvet suit. Cheegal enjoyed the chaos for a moment before his shade buzz wore off, and following that, Jezza, the woman he once loved, confronted him. She expressed anger and self-hatred at the notion she could have ever loved him, and told him, point blank, that he was the worst thing to happen to him, before diving for the kill.
Cheegal instinctively knocked her away, leaving her to fall into some nearby embers and lose her eyes, and soon, the horror and regret of the situation kicked in. His psychosis abated and the realisation caused him to vomit. He would collapse to see the silhouette of Azkag looming over him, before falling unconscious.
When he awoke, he found himself in an Order of the Shade infirmary, surrounded by numerous members of the Order; Orange Archmage Chen'pazchi, who he'd known as Azkag, Green Archmage Mid'seran, the leader of the Order's seerish division, and a couple of her young, strong men. Here, he would, despite his past in clowning, attempt some mental acrobatics. First, he claimed that Azkag somehow knew what would happen, then, as Mid'seran's plainly advanced precognition made itself clear, he shifted the blame to the seer.
While Mid'seran admitted to nudging certain actors in the right direction, she maintained that the only one responsible for Cheegal's actions was Cheegal. The lesson would take a few failed attacks to sink in, but eventually, Cheegal would accept this. In exchange for a safe haven beyond Deathsport's authorities, he would become an acolyte of the Order of the Shade under the name Chen'razghul, specialising as a soldier working underneath Orange Expert Chen'clathnam.
Chen'clathnam was a kindly old lady who, while a tad overzealous regarding the Order's grand purpose, proved to be the mother figure Cheegal needed. Over the course of his time in the Order, she would groom him to become an expert, then a challenger to Archmage Chen'pazchi. By the time he'd demanded a duel, Cheegal was as ambitious as he was vengeful against Azkag for what he deemed to be the ruining of his life, and he would successfully kill the middle-aged goblin, becoming orange archmage at the relatively young age of twenty-eight.
Two years into his tenure as archmage, he would be sent out on a recruitment mission by Green Archmage Mid'seran, who, in her typical fate-obsessed way, insisted that someone of note would be found in the Flowerfields. Instead, Cheegal would grow depressive and drink at the questionable cabaret bar, The Blossoming Bud, where he would grow interested in the poledancer-gallows comic combination that was Naraxa.
She was, for a dark elf, everything a goblinese clown could want; funny, flirtatious, flat-chested, short, and tragically, even shared Jezza's black hair and red eyes. The only thing against her was her smooth skin, in his eyes. Using his blatant attraction to her to his advantage, he feigned interest in renting her as a working girl for the night, something her pimp, Varyx, was happy to overcharge him for, and once they were alone, Cheegal would attempt to make a recruitment pitch.
While his efforts were initially interpreted as numerous sexual requests by Naraxa, eventually the message was received and, like Chen'pazchi before him, he took her away from a miserable job and into Nightshade, partially with the promise of infinite liquid shade. And just like Chen'clatham, he would become invested in Naraxa, who would become Blue Acolyte Aor'kirin, mentoring her and generally giving her an edge over other acolytes. Within two years, Naraxa had risen to expert and murdered Blue Archmage Aor'merath, and Cheegal would continue to work closely with her as a fellow ideological slacker amidst the archmages of the Order of the Shade.
Nowadays, Chen'razghul has mellowed out somewhat. He has his own personal council separate from his expert council known as 'the Clowns', a cult of personality dedicated to, of all things, entertaining the commune of Nightshade and taking the edge off. In addition, he and Aor'kirin are noted by almost every other archmage as being exceptionally close, with most of them assuming that they're sleeping with each other. As the Order gears up for investigation of unusual magical phenomena in the Scorchpeaks (which his clowns had initially discovered not long after Aor'kirin ascended to archmage), it's unclear what Cheegal's remaining life will look like...

Physical Description

General Physical Condition

To say Cheegal the Clown looks rough is an understatement. His once-prominent nose is broken and bent, most of his teeth are wooden or metallic in place of his original, knocked-out teeth, half his scalp is bald from self-inflicted burns, and his face's scales have stopped growing back. As such, he hides his hair with his robes' hoods and covers his face with white-and-black clown makeup to minimise the ugliness on display.
He is skinny and muscular even by goblinese standards, though his chest appears to be malformed, likely due to untreated broken ribs. He's usually seen in his customised Order uniform, which is the tattered top of a standard orange division robe with the sleeves and hood intact, while beneath he'll wear baggy, stripy clown costumes, along with a utility belt and holster for Order paraphernalia and revolvers. He usually goes without shoes. When not in his Order clothing, however, he prefers to wear a Malassaian lavalava, a simple tied cloth worn around his hip.

Social

Contacts & Relations

Red Archmage Ark'golom (subordinate, occasional ally)
Yellow Archmage Kir'selai (superior, occasional fellow performer)
Green Archmage Mid'seran (superior, regular target of ire)
Blue Archmage Aor'kirin (superior and closest friend)
Indigo Archmage Ran'galchen (respected and feared superior)
Purple Archmage Mar'goritz (superior)
Grand Witch Yal'queran (leader)
Orange Expert/Clown Chen'clathnam (mentor, subordinate, and close friend)
Orange Clown Chen'rakhtaw (subordinate and fanboy)
Orange Scourge/Clown Chen'kyachai (subordinate and somewhat close acquaintence)
Jezza of Deathsport (former love interest, target of his self-perceived greatest evil)

Family Ties

Religious Views

Cheegal is maltheistic after beholding what he deemed to be irrefutable proof of the Gods' bestial, apathetic nature. During his initiation speech at the Order of the Shade, the Grand Witch opened a rift that gave him a peek into the Chaotic Realm, wherein a monstrous, idiotic god lingered.
Previously, he was a believer in Malassaian Chromatism, or worship of the Mother Malassai. This was a tradition passed down to him from his mother's side of the family, who were Malassaian immigrants, and even as a maltheist, he'll use oaths associated with Malassai worship.

Alignment

Chaotic Neutral

Current Location

Nightshade

Species

Goblin

Conditions

• Soldier's Hollowness

Ethnicity

Arkheran

Other Ethnicities/Cultures

• Malassaian

Honorary & Occupational Titles

Orange Archmage of the Order of the Shade

Year of Birth

517 AGA 34 Years old

Circumstances of Birth

Common

Birthplace

Deathsport

Parents

Gender

Male

Eyes

Orange

Hair

Orange-brown, bald along half of his scalp from burns

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Dark green scales and skin, scale coverage lacking in face

Height

3'7''

Aligned Organization

Order of the Shade

Known Languages

Common Tongue
Malassaian Goblinese (limited)
Jaranese (basic)
Old Galdusian (basic)