Billy Fatch

Backstory

Billy Fatch is a thirty-two-year-old ground-born human who arrived in Aeridor seven years ago as a stowaway in the cargo hold of a merchant sky-barge, having traded his last coin for a hiding spot among crates of pickled cloudfish. He grew up in a muddy lowland town that rarely saw the sun, let alone a floating city, and the first time he glimpsed Aeridor's spires burning gold above the cloud-line, he made a decision with the total, uncomplicated certainty that defines people who don't think too hard before acting. He has never once regretted it. He is loud where others are quiet, messy where others are precise, and relentlessly, almost aggressively optimistic in a city that has recently given its residents very good reasons not to be. He talks to himself when he works, hums badly when he doesn't, and has a gift for making friends with people who initially find him insufferable. He has carved out a living as a freelance tinker and mechanical odd-job man, specializing in the maintenance and improvised repair of the gondola rigs, wind-skiff engines, and minor aetheric fixtures that the city's more prestigious engineers consider beneath them. He works out of a cluttered workshop-gondola permanently moored to a mid-tier docking strut — a floating disaster of spare parts, half-finished contraptions, and at least three inventions that technically work but probably shouldn't. He has no formal magical training and no bloodline worth mentioning, but he has an instinctive, almost tactile understanding of how aetheric machinery fits together, developed through seven years of taking things apart to see why they've stopped working. This has made him quietly indispensable to a surprising number of people across Aeridor's middle and lower tiers. Billy has no particular stake in the city's politics, no agenda, and no secret history. What he has is a workshop gondola that has started shaking in ways it shouldn't, three clients whose aetheric fixtures failed in the same week for no reason he can explain, and a personal rule — developed after an incident with a self-igniting coal stove in his second year — that when something mechanical starts behaving wrong in a way you don't understand, you find out why before it kills someone. He is not brave in any considered sense. He simply hasn't yet learned to be appropriately afraid of the things that should frighten him, and by the time he does, he's usually already too involved to leave.