Cogsworth

Cogsworth

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Cogsworth is the dragon that Iezo has personally appointed to be in charge of payroll at the lightning farm. He is the one with the easiest and most complete access to all employee records, including their names, employee numbers, innate elements, productivity scores, and, most importantly, their hours worked and their wages.

Nobody gets paid in the lightning farm without Cogsworth's approval. Not even the most money-greedy of his coworkers, like Scrimp and Save, can wiggle out a paycheck from under his nose. He's ever-vigilant of employee hours, and if he notices things like unauthorized overtime, a few minutes of tardiness, sleeping on the job, a lunch break that ran a few seconds over, anything, he will dock the employee's pay for it.

Some dragons might call this wage theft. Cogsworth calls it his job. He is cold and stern and strict, and is exactly the kind of dragon Iezo loves having on her side. He's absolutely ruthless, which is the best kind of dragon to survive in the cutthroat world of the Lightning flight's economy.

However, above all, Cogsworth is also big on fairness. Not in the sense of "it's not fair, why am I losing an hour's wages for being two minutes late", but in the sense that he would dock his own pay, or Iezo's pay, or any of the fellow managers' pays, for the same things he would dock the pay of standard employees for. He's equal opportunity like that. Many of the employees of the lightning farm, even as they find themselves grumbling about all the treasure they've lost thanks to him, have to stop and acknowledge that at least he's honest and fair about it, and doesn't hold himself to lower standards than them.

Ironically enough, Cogsworth isn't like other managers at the lightning farm in the sense that he isn't as greedy and money-obsessed as they are. His focus is on time, and while he does thoroughly believe that time is money, he cares much more about wasting company time than he does about earning money. He just has a strong understanding of the economy and understands how the employees conflate the two, and holds their money hostage in exchange for their time. His strictness may be cruel, but if he can save the company money by stopping dragons from wasting time, then who but the Stormcatcher can argue?