{
  "character": {
    "id": "b2075086-7071-4828-ad5b-84558920cfca",
    "slug": "tock",
    "name": "Tock",
    "race": "Construct",
    "character_class": "Steel Defender",
    "jan_favorite": false,
    "is_ff_portrait": false,
    "profile_url": "https://framedfantasy.com/pages/hero?h=tock",
    "character_url": "https://hall-library.framedfantasy.com/characters/tock",
    "character_json_url": "https://hall-library.framedfantasy.com/characters/tock.json",
    "character_markdown_url": "https://hall-library.framedfantasy.com/characters/tock.md",
    "original_image_url": "https://obadckrukccwkjgpbsxa.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/portraits/1787023040088_cflnjw.webp",
    "image_url": "https://hall-library.framedfantasy.com/images/tock",
    "thumbnail_url": "https://obadckrukccwkjgpbsxa.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/portraits/1787023040088_cflnjw_thumb.webp",
    "crop": {
      "x": 50,
      "y": 50,
      "zoom": 100
    },
    "story_excerpt": "Tock began his existence as a construct - the project and product of Millie Oldclock's artifice. She built him out of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual pieces and partial and small mechanicals she scavenged from The Works in the Clockwork City over the course of a year. While her artifice w",
    "story": "Tock began his existence as a construct - the project and product of Millie Oldclock's artifice. She built him out of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual pieces and partial and small mechanicals she scavenged from The Works in the Clockwork City over the course of a year. While her artifice was certainly up to the task of creating a construct to defend her on her quest, the materials she worked with were not always completely understood. Tock's joints and mechanisms are _mostly_ classic mechanist work, but some of the materials in the ruins of The Works are- let's just say exotic. The combination of steam and spring and arcane power that energizes Tock's \"heart\" is likewise a mix of pure engineering, magical artifice, and mysterious components. The result has, slowly been becoming much more than the sum of his parts. A steel and brass being about Millie's own size, he ticks slowly abd quietly when at rest, faster and louder when he's uneasy. He \"speaks\" in ticks, chimes, and a light bell-notes that only Millie truly understands (but the Krest of the Kettleborn are learning). He is male in Millie's reckoning, and thus his own. And, lately he has been having... opinions.\n\nTock is Millie's construct, but he is also *of* the Clockwork City. He is built from the materials of a place that was once a wonder of the world, and he is linked with it, and with the catastrophe that resulted in the ruins the city is today. As Millie progresses on her quest of finding out the truth of that event, Tock's link to the city and its past - and future - fate strengthens. And so does his sese of himself.\n\nTock knows, and engages in arts no one taught him, some of them reminiscent of the lost crafts of the Clockwork City. He practices them idly, for his own pleasur, and the discovery that he did so unsettled Millie at first. But seeing the unistakeable pleasure the automaton derived from the act was something that sparked both warmth and wonder in her. Tock plainly does derive pleasure from cration. He has fancy, taste, whim, and no small artistry. \n\nOrigami: Tock emergently taught himself to fold paper- into cranes, beasts, and abstract lattices of increasing intricacy as the adventures go on, and, most recently, he has been able to animate them: tiny, essentially useless wonders that flutter and totter; but with the tantalizing promise of more in the future. \n\nCrystal: Any crystalline growth the party turns up, Tock will quietly shape as he fancies, revealing intent and delight. Perhaps later these may become more than doodles: a crystal that holds light, chimes a note, fits a lock.\n\nGlimpses: Now and then Tock shows a flash of the Clockwork City's other arts: Something woven, or poured, or evoked, as if half-remembering. Why? Why is a construct doing any of these things? Millie doesn't know, and it fascinates her that her own creation does things she cannot do, and has not asked it to. \n\nOh, she has theories; perhaps the parts she harvested carry latent memories of the City; a fragment of  its animating minds or powers retained in the ruins. Perhaps all the crafts are echoes or memories of the City itself, and Tock is part of its remembering. However it resolves, Tock may ne a living, evolving clue of Millie's own quest, and however strange it is that her construct might be becoming its own person, it is exciting far more."
  }
}