Growing up, Grinless (before he was dubbed such, as goblins are merely called "Hey you!" until they do something or show a feature that singles them out from the others) was neither the smallest nor the biggest. And while he played goblin games and got dirty and stinky with the others, no matter how much he enjoyed himself he didn't once crack a smile. He grimaced, he frowned, he squinted, he gaped, but never did he smile. The most he did was gnash his teeth, which he did rather evilly. So as the goblin clan mother began to give out names such as Bat-ears, Pointy-chin, Veiny, Glorunga, Yowwow, Snotty, and Runs (not called so for athletic ability, but sadly for always running to the public toilet pit), he was finally called Grinless. When he responded by squinting and teeth-gnashing, the other elders agreed upon his naming.
From that point on, Grinless made it an active choice to live up to his title by outright refusing to smile. Even when laughing he did so angrily with no upturned lips, especially so because if he was laughing it was over someone's misfortune or because he'd enacted revenge on a prankster. He wasn't so much aggressively angry as always grumpy, like no amount of naps could ever put him in a lighter mood. On the contrary, he seemed to like bad moods, having bad luck, and complaining about everything. As an adolescent, no matter what clan ritual, job, or task he was given nothing seemed to settle with him. He whittled the hamster-poking sticks too pointy and stabbed himself too much in the testing; he sneezed in the mold pits and blew the food mold to bits; he tore the hamster skins while curing them; he burnt the food and let the campfires go out; and he hogged the slop and mud in the pig sties so much the villagers (and the pigs) complained of his smell and the neglect of the pigs. Finally, they just let him do whatever he wanted, wandering about collecting trash for his secret stash in a rotting log, gather skunk ferns, and mold his excessive earwax into odd figures.
For the annual Pranking Festival, in honor of the glorious goblin Trickster god, they encouraged him to take part, recalling with fondness his childhood tricks. The festival's marathon pranks started well, when the feast stew overcooked early, bubbled over, and the burning stench clouded over all. Then the pig herd somehow got free and stampeded, trampling over a few of the young, elderly, and slow. A bit much, but the elders praised Grinless for his genius timing. Yet the pigs were never rounded up, which could lead to food shortages. A banner caught fire from the stew-fire, and soon the whole village was in flames. Screaming and fleeing, the elders changed their minds. Grinless had gone too far. Now he was a menace who didn't know when to stop. Gathered outside the disaster area, the village crowd witnessed Grinless return from the bog where he'd been collecting stink bugs while his pranks ran wild. Having no container, he'd stuck the bugs in his overlarge and waxy ears, he asked, "What the fuss? Parade and feast over?"
The elders now saw Grinless as a harbinger of doom even to goblinkind. Rather than kicking him out officially, they "awarded" him the right to start his Rite of Passage years early, though he did wonder why they told him not to bother returning. Probably because they were moving after the village burnt down, he figured. So Grinless struck out alone with a poorly sharpened poking stick, his stink bug collection, and a rucksack full of smelly, slimy plants and mold. Except of course for Krigga, a snaggle-toothed childhood companion (really just someone he couldn't get rid of) who claimed, “Be Grinless best friend, journey with him until the end of days!”
So Grinless promptly lost him in the Misty Woods.
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