Piper Gearwake – Dockside Liftwright
“If it holds in a storm, it holds for anything. If it doesn’t—don’t stand under it.”
Name: Piper Gearwake
Race: Gnome
Role/Class: Dockside Liftwright
Appearance: Piper Gearwake is a compact gnome with a wiry, rope-trained build and a permanent salt squint, like she’s spent her whole life staring into glare off wet stone. Her copper-brown curls are shoved back with a strip of sailcloth, and her freckled face is peppered with tiny soot marks and windburn. One ear bears a small notch missing from an old hook accident, and she wears it with the quiet pride of someone who survived her own learning curve.
She dresses in dock leathers patched with sail canvas and riveted plates, topped with a short oilskin coat that sheds spray. A harness of clipped tools crosses her torso like jewelry: marlinspike, wrench, chalk, spare pins, a small pulley block, and a folding hand-crank. Her gloves don’t match—one thick and padded for cable work, one fingerless for knots and delicate adjustments.
Backstory
Heathdun survives because it can move weight: cargo up cliff lifts, salvage out of surf, and people off ledges when the wind turns mean. Piper grew up in the harbor’s shadow, raised by dock crews who treated her like both mascot and apprentice. She learned early that the sea is patient and gravity is honest. If a line is wrong, it doesn’t argue—it snaps.
Her first real innovation wasn’t magical or glamorous. It was a ratcheting safety pawl—simple, brutal, and reliable—that prevented lift cages from free-falling when a cable slipped. It saved three lives the first month it was installed. It also embarrassed a foreman who’d been skimming coin by ordering cheaper cable.
That’s when Piper learned the Bluffs’ deeper truth: engineering is never just engineering. It’s profit. It’s reputation. It’s who gets blamed when something breaks.
She stopped trusting “inspectors” after that. Started doing her own. She developed a second skill set alongside the honest one—how to spot tampering, how to follow money through dockside hands, and how to break things quietly when breaking them loudly would get people killed.
Now Piper is Heathdun’s most sought-after liftwright, not because she’s polite, but because she’s right. When winches seize, cages shudder, or storms threaten to peel anchor points out of the cliff, she shows up with a coil of rope, a mouth full of sharp opinions, and a willingness to crawl where others won’t. She’s also built a reputation as the person you call when you need a mechanism to fail at exactly the right moment—because sometimes the safest lift is the one that refuses to run.
