Elliot Fairchild

Elliot was a good kid who got caught up with the wrong crowd. He’d always gotten good grades and showed a particular talent for mechanics and technology. When his parents died when he was fifteen, he lost hope. Stuck with a well-meaning but ill-prepared godmother he hardly knew and a well of bottled up emotions he didn’t know how to handle, Elliot lashed out. His grades slipped, he became angry and disobedient, and he abandoned his social circle for a new one. His new friends were teenage troublemakers a few years older than him. With them, he took up smoking, drinking, vandalism, theft, and arson.

Elliot was arrested for the second time when he was seventeen. He was surprised when his godmother was not the one to pick him up, but an estranged family friend he grew up with as an uncle, with a proposition. His uncle, a former felon himself, knew about Elliot’s passion for machines and offered to let him live with him and work in his mechanic shop, on the condition that he cut contact with his mischievous and criminal friends and turn his life around before it was too late. Knowing his uncle’s background and sensing that he could relate to him better than his prim and proper, high maintenance godmother, Elliot agreed.

A year or two after Elliot began working at the shop, there was a break-in. No one was hurt as the shop had been empty at the time, but thousands of dollars of equipment had been stolen. His uncle decided the best deterrent would be a shop dog. He built a high-fenced run complete with a heated doghouse, and a week later, showed up with a German shepherd named Captain. Within a month, and much to his uncle’s dismay, Captain made it clear that he was Elliot’s dog. From the moment Elliot arrived in the morning to the moment he left at night, Captain was glued to his side and slept under his bench while he worked. Captain is not bite trained and is more likely to lick a person to death than to attack, but he is an extremely effective alarm system.

Elliot lost his right ring and pinky fingers and about a quarter of his palm when he was working on a sync. He wasn’t paying attention and let the soldering iron he was holding touch a very sensitive bundle of wires. The pain startled the sync and they seized, causing a mechanism to close on Elliot’s hand. The sync came to visit Elliot in the hospital to apologize, but he insisted upon taking full responsibility, and in turn apologized for hurting them. After the sync had left, his uncle told him how proud he was of how far he had come. When he was released from the hospital, the rest of the shop employees gifted him with a prosthetic they’d all built together. He is now fully adjusted to it and his ability to work has been completely unhindered.