Baron Mantella: she/her
funks: funk/funks (i'm kidding it's actually he/him)

Baron Mantella is a refugee living in the rotten garden to escape punishment from the Dragonhome Preservation Guild. she once worked for the guild as a lowly spelunker, albeit more successfully than she let on. Mantella would skip lunch breaks and instead return to the mines in secret, her adeptness as a shadow dragon allowing her to work in the darkness without an attention-grabbing lantern that would otherwise give her away. she would pocket thousands of treasure in worth of the extra crystals, gems, and precious metals collected during her raids, keeping them hidden by stashing them with Funks, a citrine cave jewel she befriended over time down in the caves. her unregistered excursions were eventually found out when a tools supplier found that Mantella was requesting replacement pickaxes and repairs twice as often as the hardest workers and launched an investigation! she was permanently exiled and all of the gems she collected on-record were confiscated, but they never located the riches hidden with her beloved bioluminescent buddy. eventually, Mantella launched her plan to return and break out Funks, at the cost of being on the run from the guild for the rest of her life! the foray was successful and both even returned with some of the hidden gems, but a little cave lizard can only hold so many at a time. nowadays, Baron Mantella spends her days in the garden full of one-sided conversations with Funks, plotting and planning how they would one day collect the rest of the stash.