At the well-known tavern, the Grim Grimoire, a popular establishment for wandering travelers passing through the village, Caitria, as she's known by her friends and acquaintances, has a reputation for being one of the most upbeat, pleasant barmaids currently working there. Able to memorize an order with a particularly quick speed, able to weave through large crowds with an efficiency and balance that's normally unheard of, you'd...barely be surprised if told that, come nighttime, she freelances as a hero-for-hire for adventuring parties.

Known as 'Kuni' the rogue to the Adventurer's Guild within her small town, the commonly hooded coon-girl has a reputation for being particularly light on her feet, athletic and flexible to a near-extreme, and particularly good with a dagger if a job or task comes to it. Seeing as she generally spends the early mornings darting from rooftop to rooftop in her quaint little town, it's pretty easy to tell that same level of training allows her to scale craggy cavern walls, or dart perfectly from the shadows to flank some terrible monster's back in the heat of battle!

That said...even as proficient as she is, despite being a relative newcomer to the profession, her peculiar curse tends to speak volumes about how over-her-head she gets with a regular consistency.

Ever since she just so happened to loot the wrong dungeon with the wrong adventurers at the wrong time, she's carried around a particularly humiliating and debilitating curse that does nothing but make both her real job and her secret job all the more difficult under the wrong circumstances. What is it? Well...

If Kuni's body becomes doused with water or any water-based liquid, she shrinks in size.

It's extremely frustrating when you try and carry one extremely heavy pint from one end of the room to another; it's even worse when some little hip-nudge not only means that you need to refill that glass and clean up later, but that you also have to do both of those things while scrambling around between the other bar-patron's knees. It's even worse when you're fighting some huge water elemental in some cold, dank cavern, and suddenly become relatively useless in a fight when one undodged attack means you're left struggling to carry a bag that's totally bigger than you are.

All in all, it's an annoyance, and a particularly strong one that's admittedly near impossible to remove (and oh god she's tried; exorcists the world over have been baffled on how to remove this particularly stubborn enchantment.) As luck would have it, however, she's learned to adapt. Being small just means that those weird days where she doesn't pull herself out of her bath in time means that she can instead practice scaling the edges of countertops and darting over fabric fibers. If she needs to reclaim something stolen by bandits, it's extremely easy to at least sneak in while she waits to grow back. All of this and more, because if nothing else, Kuni is pretty darn adaptable.

In creating Kuni, I really wanted to make a character with a ridiculously easy, common trigger that caused her to shrink. The concept of any liquid quickly becoming an impromptu shrink potion mostly came from the logical conclusion that having her being shrink-allergic to air would mean she'd basically be shrinking just about every moment of her life, which, while cute, would make it pretty much impossible for her to live a normal life.

Oh! And Kuni's totally included in the unnamed Fantasy World setting that a few of my other characters belong to.

This awesome art is part of a larger image, and all of it was drawn by the incredibly-awesome DoD ! Go visit his page for more of this awesome stuff!