Scraps von Tinker

[WIP - I'll make it pretty someday]

Scraps is the owner, engineer, and captain of the airship Saucy Jocelyn, though he only really cares about the engineer title. Ever since he was a kid he'd dreamed of flying in an airship. He had thought that the only way to be able to do that was through the government and joining the navy as an engineer or captain, since the civilian airships were extremely exclusive and expensive to gain passage on. Scraps passed his general education with flying colors and perfect grades, and was well into his specialized education that would let him join the navy, when he suffered a hand injury that disqualified him from graduating. While he was waiting for his hand to heal so that he could reapply for graduation, his father, who operated the local junkyard, got his hands on an old, inoperable airship that had been decommissioned from the navy. Instead of disassembling it and auctioning off parts and materials from it as he normally would have, he kept it on a whim so that his kid could have something to mess around with while his hand healed. Over the next two years and many dozen trips to the Archive for reference materials, the veritable piece of trash garbage was transformed into something that might just actually fly.

His many, many trips to the Archive for reference materials during those two years had earned him the attention of one of the librarians about his age, Jemma [page coming soon], who had also dreamed of flying in an airship, but whose eyesight was so bad that she hadn't even been accepted into the academy in the first place. She helped him find the relevant reference materials, and helped organize the approximately one million small projects that Scraps had started on whims and never finished into a cohesive project plan once it became clear that it was possible that the airship might be flyable one day. She was even the one to give Scraps his nickname (his real name is Melvin), because he built something so impressive out of nothing but scraps. She was also the one who found the legal loophole that allowed Scraps to register the airship as a civilian commercial vessel, despite the ship itself technically being a military vessel.

Getting the ship to work on paper and getting the ship to actually fly safely were two very, very different things, they quickly found. But, after almost dying a few (dozen) times and fighting a tooth-and-nail legal battle against the navy itself, Scraps found himself the owner and operator of the first ever ex-military civilian vessel in the country. He had even picked up a few crew members along the way. Ships of that size were meant to be run by crews five or six times the size of his crew, so no one ever ran out of things to do to keep busy, but they make it work.

Scraps has a very laid-back, cheerful, get-shit-done attitude. He makes friends easily but will hold grudges for a long time against those who break his trust. He's incredibly driven and resourceful, and he always wants to do what's best for everyone, especially those closest to him (sometimes to the point that it's detrimental to his own well-being).