Part 10 of the How He Got Here series

Part of the arc: Unclegrumble Origin Story

Ask UG what he does for a living and he’ll tell you, correctly, Tailor and Enchanter. Not Engineer — engineering is where his heart lives, and his heart has strong opinions nobody ever bothered consulting about his actual talent for it. The tailoring guild, unlike the engineering circle, was at least willing to certify him. His face never changes underneath any of it: same wide grin, same big nose, same unmistakably gnomish look, black hair, never a beard. What changes is everything he’s stitched, riveted, or enchanted onto that face since, and the honest truth is that his tailoring isn’t very good.

That has never slowed him down. A qualified tailor with shaky hands and an engineer’s instincts is a dangerous combination, and UG’s wardrobe is the walking evidence of it — ambitious silhouettes let down by a hem that’s very slightly the wrong length, elaborate enchantment work bolted onto a seam that was never going to hold the weight of it, an eye for drama considerably ahead of his eye for tailoring fundamentals like symmetry. He makes every piece himself. His own guild, grading generously, would call him somewhere between competent and a hazard, and neither rating has slowed him down for so much as an afternoon.

The horned hood is a case in point: alarming from ten feet away, black robes, a heart-shaped bone charm at the belt, dragon-wing pauldrons catching the light — and, up close, one wing noticeably larger than the other, a stitching error he noticed on the third wear and decided, on balance, added character.

The angelic look is, by his own account, the best thing he’s ever made — gold circlet, a lion crest on the chest, actual wings. The wings do not, strictly, attach the way wings are meant to attach, and have come loose in public on at least two occasions he’s willing to discuss.

He did try to fix the wings, once — a stabilizing enchantment meant to lock them in place, engineered with the same confidence he brings to everything else. What it actually did was worse: the wings still detach, just now with a small trumpet fanfare built into the failure, triggered automatically the moment the joint gives. He has never removed the fanfare. If anything, he considers it an improvement.

The adventurer’s kit holds up reasonably well, mostly because leather forgives more mistakes than fine robes do. The pirate coat holds up rather less well — a good coat, ruined slightly by a collar he’s adjusted four separate times and still doesn’t sit flat.

None of it has made him consider a different trade. He reaches for whichever outfit fits the mood, ill-fitting shoulder or not, with the same confidence he brings to every device he’s built that technically shouldn’t hold his own weight. Reaching for whatever he’d made and wearing it with total conviction, letting the seams worry about themselves — that’s the same habit, really, that made the Greener Pastures feel less like a disaster and more like Tuesday.

By the time Chapter One opens, all of it — the tower, Lichmyface, the engineering friends, her, the whole overflowing wardrobe — is simply how things already are. Nobody’s ever asked him to explain any of it, and if they did, he probably wouldn’t manage it in under an hour.

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More in the How He Got Here series

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