Malloy and Owings

Malloy and Owings are a comically inept pair of miners working in Covetous for the Britannian Mining Company during Ultima VII''.

Description
Owings and Malloy came into the employ of the BMC after having been conned by Sullivan into purchasing a map to ore caches in Covetous that had already been claimed by the company. Threatened with legal action after they started to dig in the mine site, the pair somehow managed to convince the BMC's representative of their potential usefulness (or at the very least... their relative harmlessness) and were put to work as "mining engineers," soon after.

The project which the two were working on at the time of the Avatar's travels in the region, was purported to be a tunnel between Minoc and New Magincia - to be dug entirely with spoons to avoid any sudden movements that may trigger cave-ins. The two buffoonish miners didn't seem to realize that this foolish errand had most likely been assigned them by Mikos to keep them from interfering with actual mining operations, and believed in all seriousness that their task would eventually revolutionize Britannian industry.

During the course of conversation with the hero, the partners would rapidly descend into a slapstickish battle, with the rotund Malloy accusing the slender Owings of having taken his protective helmet. Ultimately, after many comic exchanges of both helmets and blows, the pair would trigger a tremor with their loud dispute, and would cease the argument - fearful of the unstable tunnels.

Trivia

 * Malloy and Owings appear to be modeled after the classic Hollywood comedy team, Laurel and Hardy.
 * Owings mentions that he and his partner sent a helmet to Lord British, hoping to protect him from falling objects. This references a real world incident in 1992, in which Richard Garriott was struck on the head by an eight pound magnetic metal bar attached to the door to the Origin offices. After he recovered from the resultant concussion, the programming team for Ultima VII inserted a methods of  killing Lord British based upon this incident, and furthermore bought Richard a helmet to guard against future incidents.