Striker

With a quick hop, the young skydancer pushed himself off the rock face, catching a warm thermal with outstretched wings. He smiled grimly as lightning struck nearby; his collection coils glowed faintly with the surge of distant energy. Only a few more strikes, and he’d be done for the night. He was fairly eager to get back to his den; while he didn’t mind working, the late shift could be lonely, and the collective caves of the work detail were such comfortable places to hang out…

Striker wasn’t born under the Stormcatcher’s gaze, but his talents have served him well in the lightning flight. His nimble hands and steady temperament have made him a natural fit for the golem-building workshop his adopted clan supports and staffs. He has a strong respect for tradition and a keen, analytical mind that, when coupled with his enthusiasm for new tasks, makes him an extremely valuable member of the engineering team.

Striker’s childhood had been spent mostly underfoot in a great forge. He’d been awed by the colossal bellows worked by lumbering snappers and had fallen asleep to the rhythmic pounding of dragon-wielded hammers. He and a coterie of other apprentices kept the fires stoked and learned all they could about smithing, but what really captured the boy’s imagination wasn’t the end product, but the tools themselves.

Smithing was hot, heavy work. For some dragons, this was fine- but for others, it was unncecessarily dangerous. He saw a great deal of injury in his youngest days, and as he matured, he thought about ways to solve this. He knew that challenging Fire traditions wouldn’t work, and that wasn’t what he wanted to do at all. What he wanted to do was to find a way to make smithing better and make it easier for the metalworking artisans to express themselves without having to sacrifice their backs and muscles to the mechanics of the work. Of course, there were some things that had to always be done by hand, but why couldn’t automated hammers pound out blanks? Why couldn’t conveyor systems funnel coal into the smoking heart of the furnaces?

His first experiments weren’t particularly successful. It wasn’t that his ideas were bad, and it wasn’t even that the forgemasters were disdainful of the idea. The old coatl who’d mentored him was actually fairly thrilled at the idea of consistent coal delivery, rather than depending on young dragons who were easily distractible to shovel on time. His problem was that he had no idea how to get started. He was a metalworker, and while he knew how to cast a precise gear and how to file and smooth a crankshaft to perfection, schematics for complex machines were beyond him.

They weren’t, however, beyond the engineers of Lightning.

A few words with his coatl mentor, some long, drawn-out exchanges of letters, and Striker found himself on his way to a different sort of apprenticeship. He would go to the Shifting Expanse and learn to design. Using the knowledge he gleaned in the desert, he would come back to help his natal flight by improving forge designs in a way that would only enhance their traditions.