Conduit

Conduit

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Conduit is the muscle-dragon who guards Cadfael's workshop from unwanted visitors. He serves as Cadfael's personal security, and is in charge of protecting the workshop and all the inventions inside. Whoever Cadfael deems should be kept out of the workshop, Conduit works to keep out. He keeps a notebook filled with the names of all the dragons Cadfael refuses to allow entry to: the royal family, anyone deemed too careless, anyone who Cadfael has a personal beef with...

The problem is that Conduit really isn't smart enough to be trusted with this task. He's big and bulky and strong enough to strongarm unwanted guests from entering, but he's dumb as a rock, and that's an insult to the rock. He's just Cadfael's yes-man; he doesn't understand what the smart inventors in the workshop are talking about, so he just goes along with whatever Cadfael says, even though he doesn't really know what it means.

He doesn't keep pictures along with the names in his notebook, and he's not great with faces, so anyone on the list can wiggle into Cadfael's workshop just by giving him a fake name. It's not really his fault; he has a lot of clanmates to keep track of, and he probably has some form of prosopagnosia. Cadfael has occasionally tried to coach him through it, but the truth is that Cadfael is a very busy dragon, and doesn't really care that much anyway; he's more than capable of scaring off his own unwanted guests if Conduit lets them through, or he has Breaker to alert him.

So why does Cadfael bother keeping him around? The truth is that Cadfael regularly gets frustrated at his work being disturbed and regularly considers just replacing Conduit with a security robot, but he likes how agreeable and manipulable Conduit is. He kind of sees Conduit like a toy, a dragon he can mess with and keep in his pocket, someone who will always back him up. He couldn't get that from a robot.

But when his revolution comes, things will change. After the end of the royal family's reign that he strives for, Cadfael fully intends to replace Conduit with a robot. He wouldn't even hesitate. And Conduit remains entirely naive to this; he doesn't fully understand what a geniocracy is, and thinks his loyalty is enough to earn him a place by Cadfael's side. He thinks he'll still be Cadfael's workshop security in the new world. But Cadfael thinks very differently, and is just exploiting him for the time being, and intends to dump him to the side under his new system.

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