Khalon

Gale's Thoughts: Khalon

While Chiaroscuro has housed its fair share of trade workers over the years, we didn't have a dedicated mechanic for quite some time. It wasn't until after we'd been well established in the Hewn City for a few decades that Khalon finally came to us.

And as much as I hate to say it, sometimes I feel like we wouldn't be quite as well-off as we are now if he wasn't around.

I'm overexaggerating, I know, but it's so unbelievably nice having someone around who just... knows how things work and is adept at fixing them. We have our resident engineer, Shockwave, who's a brilliant mind all on his own, and I'm not ever going to belittle his skills, but Khalon's got an eye for the little details that blows my mind sometimes.

Khalon used to be an engineer before he decided that maintaining someone else's creations suited him better than coming up with ideas for his own. While he probably still counts as one by most definitions of the word, he much prefers the "mechanic" title. I actually hired him more than once while he was still working freelance and spent most of his time in the shifting expanse. He worked quick, his rates were cheap, and I never had to call him back to fix the same thing a second time.

I was a tad surprised when he decided to move his shop here to us, but the only reasoning he gave me then was that we kept giving him steady work and he wouldn't have to travel as much if he just stayed here. I later found out that he was not nearly as beloved in the lightning realm as he is in our little corner of the world, and that he had more than a few enemies who were finally fed up with him.

I feel like I know Khalon pretty well by now, though, and while I'm not sure of his enemies' motivations, I think it's likely they were just jealous of his success, because there's not a mean bone in his body. He doesn't downplay his skills, but he's not a braggart either. He's remarkably inoffensive, some might even argue almost boringly so. He's got just the right amount of confidence and and more than enough competence that other dragons trust him implicitly without him having to do much. This all leaves him with somewhat of a mysterious air, however, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd love to know a few more of his secrets. I especially want to know what happened to his wings; whatever horrific accident must have befallen him, he's patched them up well-enough to fly, but it must have been terribly traumatic.

Over the years, he's adopted a small, crooked smile as one of his quirks, and while it's weird to see it on a fae's face (barring someone like Elita's, maybe), it's clear he's done it so much that now it's ingrained in him to show it off whenever he's even vaguely satisfied or happy about something. A small gesture like that can be enough to sway other dragons' opinions of him, since I've met plenty of dragons over the years who often have difficulty with the fae way of monotone communication. I'm not sure if he thought about that beforehand or if he had some other reason, but either way I find it charming.

Khalon's a good guy to have around and is someone I'm willing to trust with almost anything. He's got a level head on his shoulders and that's more than I can even say about myself some days, so clearly even clan leaders can learn something from this hard-working fae.

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Baseline Stats





Again, he's maybe the most inoffensive dragon I've met. Nothing too outstanding, but he has a few charming quirks and a level of confidence that makes him decent in the social world, if not particularly memorable.



There's a reason he hired Caspia as a bodyguard to protect him. He knows how to use some of his tools well enough that they could probably pack an okay punch, though, so I guess that's not nothing.



Level-headed and good at picking up new concepts even when they don't always apply directly to him, Khalon's got such a meticulous way of looking at the details that if he wanted to, I bet he could apply them to anything. I will say he's not quite as street smart as someone in his profession in the Shifting Expanse should be, though, and I wonder if that's what got him into his terrible accident in the first place.



An injury like his should have been fatal and shouldn't have been able to be patched up that successfully to boot. He was pretty down the middle in this category before, but some God must favor him because I don't know how he's alive.



He's more proficient than I expected! Most fae mechanics use their magic heavily, so that wasn't a shock, but that was before I realized that he fixed his own wings (I dropped by one day while he was doing some maintenance on them). It's not rare, but certainly uncommon to have a Lightning-born healer in a clan. Every magic can heal, but Lightning's is more specialized than most, and Khalon used a combination of his mechanic skills and healing magic to patch himself up in a way that still allowed him to fly. Even for master healers, recovery on that level is rare and to be applauded. He admitted to me when I walked in on him that day, though, that he probably couldn't fix anyone else the with the proficiency which he fixed himself, if only because he knows his body so well and he's always been more in-tune with how machines work than other dragons.



While his recovery was technically successful, and he thankfully seems largely mentally over whatever trauma he was put through, he's still very weakened, and is far stiffer and sorer than any dragon his age should rightfully be. He's only going to get worse as he gets older, and his physically demanding profession doesn't help. Winters are downright painful for him, even with the milder ones we get here in the Sunbeam Ruins, and while he can fly thanks to his ingenuity, he'll never be able to do any kind of long-distance travel without a companion ever again.