Introduction
Colfer first brought the Opal Koboi character into the Artemis Fowl series through the May 2002 publication of Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. Koboi was written in this second book of the series as an evil genius responsible for the highest level of planning and execution of a war by goblins purchasing weapons from rogue human gun traders against the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance (LEPrecon) police squad. She employs Lieutenant Briar Cudgeon, a disgraced-in-the-first-book LEPrecon officer, as a partner in her attempt to stage a coup deep in the bowels of the Earth. However, at the climax of the book, Artemis reveals that Cudgeon plans to betray Koboi. Koboi flies into a rage and attacks Cudgeon. In the ensuing struggle, Cudgeon is killed and Koboi is incapacitated. She then falls into a self-induced coma as part of a plan to escape imprisonment.
With statements such as "before her second birthday she had dismantled her first hard drive," the Opal Koboi character comes off as precocious, but not in a positive way. Described as an "insane, power-mad pixie" and an outrageous character that is confident of her own intelligence in a way that annoys other people, this beauteous "pixie with the golden touch" contributes to the Colfer idea that fairies are basically as bad as us -and fight even dirtier. The name Koboi sounds both as "cowboy" and "kobold", a temperamental sprite of German folklore who becomes outraged when not fed properly, and who sometimes is referred to as a spirit of caves and mines. In this way, the name Koboi suits the gold-digger Opal Koboi. It is also known that Koboi bankrupted her father's business after he tried to dissaude her from studying engineering (as he expected his daughter to follow the normal path in life for female pixies: namely, getting married to a suitable husband) and that she has a long, bitter rivalry with Foaly since their days at university, and that one of Opal's main goals is to prove she is intellectually superior to the centaur. The only reason to this hatred between the two magical creatures is that Foaly won their University's science fair with his iris-cam, which Opal found stupid and thought that her Koboi wings were far more superior. She then accuses the centaur of winning only because he was a male.
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