I've been working on writing character profiles and back stories for TMJ and thought I would share the history of everyone's favorite shopkeeper: Old Man Skunk! You can read about the other characters here.

---

Old Man Skunk comes from a long line of shopkeepers in the Skunk family, all of which inherited the family business past their primes. The current OMS is actually the 32nd in the bloodline. Olde Mann Skunk, the 1st, opened his shop in a mud and twig hut, where he somehow sold the leftover mud and twigs to villagers in a region full of nothing but mud and twigs.

His son, Olde Mann Skunk, the 2nd, renovated the shop by digging out the foundation for his "whine" cellar (where he would whine about the other villagers in his private). In doing so, he hit a mother lode of rocks and quickly added them to the dismal inventory. Business flourished.

By the time Olde Mann Skunk, the 3rd, came along, many of the villagers were letting their kids run rampant through town. When the village kids kept playing on his grass (against his better wishes and cane waving), the lawn quickly turned brown and died. This opened up a new product line, hay, that caused business to flourish.

Some believe that the story of the Three Little Pigs was adapted from the tale of some portly brothers who bought building supplies from OMS, the 14th. They all wanted to buy just rocks for brick housing, but OMS, conned two of them into buying weaker materials at higher prices. A particularly hairy and unshaven burglar capitalized on this.

Fast forward to OMS, the 30th, where branch locations of the thriving family business are in every village. Each shop has a plethora of complete junk for villagers to buy at astronomical prices. Those who are strapped for coinage may wish to sell or pawn their goods to OMS for next to nothing, an addition to the business by Old Man Skunk, the 23rd. New to OMS, the 30th, is crafting of goods. Some may find those rates reasonable, but they are sure to not inform his grandson, or the prices will soon skyrocket.

OMS, the 32nd, has been known to give away junk he finds in his back yard in an effort to sucker potential customers into buying even more junk from his back yard. It's no loss to him because he also runs the village landfills, so villagers are just getting back what they paid him to take in the first place.