Overview
The Tinker-Sight Gnome is the patient, remembering eye of the Tinker Hollows, a brass-rimmed workshop gnome of the hollows who sees through every machine and keeps the machinery of the clan running, one repair at a time. It stands under a meter tall, watchful and social, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in seen repairs rather than years. Where the Idea-Brand gnomes brand the idea, the Tinker-Sight gnomes see the machine, and they have been seeing the first machine in the first workshop for a very long time. It does not speak much that is not a seeing, and when it sees, every word is a slow line spent on the brass.
Habitat
The Tinker-Sight Gnome keeps to the machine-halls of the Tinker Hollows, a range of soft, workshop-fed ground where the machinery is a promise and the brass is a treaty. Its dwellings are dug into the faces of the machine-walls, hollows of shaped stone and woven brass-cable coaxed into a home that catches the warm work-light on its inner face and the shelter of the hollow on its outer. It favors the older halls where the machinery runs oldest and the sight is deepest, the places where a machine can be seen without the hollow's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Tinker-Sight Gnome stands about 0.95 m tall, small and sight-bound, with pale cream skin and copper freckles that read as bright in the hollow's own light. Its hair runs soft copper, worn short and bound so it does not catch the cable, and its eyes are honey-gold, bright and watchful beneath the brow, the color of the work-light's own glow at dusk. Its inner wrist bears the Idea-Brand, a deliberate mark in the pale cream skin, one for every machine it has seen, worn as a record of the long art.
Behaviour
The Tinker-Sight Gnome is watchful, slow, and profoundly certain, a creature of long sights and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It observes before it sees, often for hours, watching a hall or a person or a bargain until it understands the shape of the machine, and only then does it see, and then with a watchfulness that feels rehearsed over years. It is not unkind, but it is not easily moved, and a debt named by a Tinker-Sight gnome is a debt the hollow will keep long after the maker has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Tinker-Sight gnome is no open-ground fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the machine and the brass itself, not force. Its primary defense is the hall, for it knows every corner of the machine-halls and can lead a pursuer through the Tinker Hollows for days until the pursuit loses its nerve and its balance. Should it be forced to act, a Tinker-Sight gnome is slow and precise, 5 m/s through the halls and watchful, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, cutting a cable, dimming a light, or seeing a machine until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Tinker-Sight gnome has no magic of its own, and it does not want any, and the not wanting is the whole of its way of dealing with the world, for a gnome that has a machine and a word and a brass does not need a spell. It is not attuned to any art, and it is not bound by any word that is not its own, and the not being bound is the whole of its way of being free. Its one signature thing is the seeing, which is not a magic but is a thing that the gnomes of the hollow have seen for a very long time, and the seeing is the keeping, and the keeping is the whole of its power.
Society
The Tinker-Sight Gnomes live in the Tinker Hollows in small, watchful, and sight-bound packs of perhaps four or five, bound by the sights they take together rather than by blood or by place. There is no elder and no ruler, for a gnome that has seen the most and kept the most is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a seeing and the seeing is the whole of their society. Decisions are made in the hall, by a company of gold-eyed seers that has already decided and is only agreeing, and once made they are kept, for a gnome that breaks a sight is a gnome that has broken the whole of what it is.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Tinker-Sight Gnome is a culture of the seen machine, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is watchful and sight-bound is the only honest word in the hollow. They keep no records, for a gnome that has seen a machine does not need a record, the seeing is the record, and the seeing is watchful and sight-bound and does not fade. Their stories are slow and watchful, told in the hall at the dusk, and they are stories of machines seen and repairs made and the watchful, sight-bound difference between them, told in a voice that is quick and means every seeing.
Home
The Tinker Hollows is the Tinker-Sight gnome's home and its seeing, a range of soft, workshop-fed ground where the machinery is a promise and the brass is a treaty, where the gnomes see their machines and their watchful, slow words. It is a strange and watchful place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Tinker-Sight gnome has learned to live inside that brass rather than against it. The warm work-light that runs up through the halls is the hollow's own, a soft copper glow that the gnomes have come to read as the color of a seen machine.
Relations
The Tinker-Sight Gnome keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of the Tinker Hollows, a truce of seen machines that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing in the hollow. To the warm work-light of the machine-halls the Tinker-Sight gnome is a watchful, sight-bound, and absolutely certain presence, a gold-eyed seer that is at home in the halls and in the brass, and the light has learned to glow wide and let the seeings pass, for a gnome that has seen you has decided you are a keeping and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the hollow, the Tinker-Sight Gnome is the watchful, slow edge of the tale, the place where the machines are seen and a machine is read and a keeping is read. It is the figure that sees a new machine in the dusk and holds the brass very watchful and very certain, and the figure that, when the truce with the idea-gnomes grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old machine watchful and sight-bound and absolutely certain.