Tinker
Ratchet. That was my uncle's name. Well not his given name that was the name he took for himself. His birth name is a plain, boring and dull golding name. Kind of like mine, he was the one that inspired me to adopt the name Sprocket. We never referred to each other by our birth names. It went so far that at one time I forgot his original name and didn't have a clue who my family was talking about when they said it. This disgusted my family and irritated me. I was told it wasn't proper what my uncle did, that he was a disgrace to our family and I just couldn't see why they were so ashamed of him.
Ah yes, I led a privileged and cushy life filled with all the fine clothing, top of the line luxuries and most exquisite forms of entertainment imaginable. I was dirty, filthy rich. That statement right there describes how best I felt: dirty and filthy. I didn't ask to be born a golding any more than a troll asks to be born as they are. It was the hand fate dealt me so I had to cope and work with what I had.
This meant I completely went against my 'proper and sophisticated' upbringing. You see golding don't believe in manual labor in the upper classes. We depended on lower classes to do everything or servants. Basically anyone not a golding was a servant. We never employed other golding in our homes; oh no, that was far too degrading. Now you're beginning to see why I was so disgusted with my lot in life? Any golding that ran a shop or storefront was a member of the lower class but even they had other races working for them.
Since my family was in the upper echelons of power (not quite the level of royalty but pretty damn close) the fact my uncle owned a garage that he toiled away in inventing things was seen as a blatant disregard for our social structure. Both my mother and father's sides of the family held a tremendous amount of prestige and political power. So my uncle was a black sheep. Before you ask I'm not going to say which side of the family he came from, to me the both of us are a third branch away from the snotty aristocratic regime.
I was proud of my uncle and fascinated by his desire to break the mold and set out to do his own thing. I would abandon my classes in the study of literature and the arts to watch him work. Uncle Ratchet was brilliant; he put his entire proper golding upbringing into finding a way to replace servants. He never made anyone in his home bend their knees to him. My uncle treated the other races that he brought into his home as equals. They shared in the work of keeping the house in order and Uncle Ratchet never had them do something he wasn't willing to do himself. He allowed them to do what they wished in their free time and didn't have any fears about getting his hands dirty. I remember how rough Uncle Ratchet's hands always were. He almost always had oil staining his cuticles and stuck under his nails. But I trusted those hands more than any other golding's.
Some called my uncle mad when he tried to make machines that could toil away in the place of servants. Would you believe that the loudest voices against him were those of his own family? They cried out that he would loosen the hold the golding had on their servants enough for the servants to rebel and take away from us everything we had worked so hard to claim. They made him seem like a traitor, a kook that so hated his own people he would have us suppressed by the races we had so gracefully led through life.
No one ever called our servants slaves but that was how my uncle saw them and how I eventually saw them; it disgusted me. He wanted to set them free, to let them take homes of their own and rise above the forced level golding society held them at. I'm sure you've gotten the idea by now that the golding people aren't very nice. They keep to themselves and don't visit cities formed by other races. The rest of the world is savage in their eyes and dirty. It made me sick to hear so many foul things said about the friends I had made at my uncle's house. At times I can't even bring myself to categorize myself with the golding people.
But golding aren't without their faults. Would it surprise you to know we have a game involved in our roles of leadership? While you're automatically born into your class and can't rise up to another one there is a loophole. Royalty provides that loophole and in the most dastardly way possible. A golding can raise the status of their family by assassinating the current rulers and taking the position for themselves. Royalty is the only class a golding isn't necessarily born into. Rather murder and subversion allow a climb to the pinnacle of golding society even from the lowest reaches. By pandering to the class directly below royalty a family can protect its standing and ensure its leadership isn't revoked. My family supported such a ruling family and in turn it granted us certain perks. I was told that was the only reason my uncle wasn't simply executed; because he still bought his safety and immunity from persecution. I know he did it for the other races he shared his home with even though others tried to convince me he was still as selfish as any other golding.
I know, I know. I'm supposed to be talking about myself more than my uncle. But I needed you to understand my uncle to understand me. I believed in what he said, I yearned for golding society to become one of equal footing for everyone that lived in our cities. I had tried to convince my uncle to overthrow the ruling family; it wasn't unexpected or anything. Plenty of times a ruling family had been usurped by one of their so-called trusted supporters. My uncle refused, he said using the golding tradition was still barbaric and he wouldn't be in power long before he was assassinated and everyone he had worked so hard to protect was subjugated instead.
By this time I had taken the name Sprocket and had moved away from my proper family and in with my uncle. He began to teach me his craft and I loved building things more than simply reciting facts about our history to make myself seem well educated and a fine catch for a husband. I liked getting my hands dirty and didn't give a hoot about how other golding looked at me. I would proudly let myself been seen outside my uncle's workshop in grimy clothing with grease smeared under an eye and my hair tied back in a messy ponytail. It made me happy, it made me feel accomplished. That was life to me, learning how I could help others with my work and giving the people the golding subjugated hope.
It didn't last. As my uncle's inventions began to become known outside of the golding cities he drew attention he would rather not have. I remember the first time a group of trolls stole away into his home to proposition him with a position among Kaos's forces. They claimed it would be a way to aid races the golding wanted to repress. My uncle saw right through them, Kaos couldn't offer equality by any means. So Uncle Ratchet turned them down. But they persisted.
The trolls threatened him and were eventually joined by drow, cyclops and repurposed arkeyans. As if the chance to work with ancient arkeyan technology would tempt my uncle to the dark side. It got to the point where they were harming or abducting the people he had shared his home with in amnesty. The worst part about it? The rest of our family turned a blind eye to it and washed their hands of it. They refused to help my uncle or even keep Kaos's cronies out of the city.
We had no other choice but to fight back, the rest of our family and even city had decided what happened to us didn't concern them. I helped my uncle get our friends out of the city; we used our combined wealth to send everyone to cities in which they could start anew. The only reason they had stayed before was in hopes of striking some kind of equality for their people in golding cities. Now that their lives had been endangered by an outside source it was time to leave and call the battle lost. It broke my heart to see our focus change from trying to find equality to simply protecting ourselves from Kaos.
Uncle Ratchet and I worked tirelessly on building security systems for our shared home. We could have just moved but my uncle wasn't ready to give up just yet. He honestly thought that eventually the rest of the city would back him up. It never happened.
One morning I returned from visiting the metal yard for supplies to find our home in ruins. There wasn't a single onlooker outside to gawk at the smoldering hole that had been the front room of the house. No one had even showed up to pick through my uncle's wealth and take it for themselves. All that seemed to be missing was my uncle himself and everything from his workshop including the security bots we had built together. Some rooms were untouched, others showed signs of struggle. But nothing besides my uncle's prize machines and he himself was missing. The safe was still locked and full. The expensive artwork he had collected remained in its cases or at the most broken on the floor. It didn't make sense to me.
Lost and confused I took what mattered most to me and returned home. Oh my family welcomed me in with open arms alright but on one condition: that I drop my uncle's teachings, the name I had adopted and return to a proper golding standing. Scared and feeling hopeless I did it. For a while. Then in secret I began to build a battle suit and sought out enchanted items to give me an unlimited supply of materials to build whatever I needed. I toiled away in my free hours all while putting on a good show of becoming a 'proper young lady' again. I had to suffer through arranged courtships as my parents tried to marry me off and used my private work as the motivation to get me through the humiliation and drivel of golding courtship.
I managed to dodge every single marriage bullet, most of the time because the hopeful bachelor my parents had set me up with didn't meet their expectations. Lucky me, I didn't shame my family any further. I wish I had though. About a year after my uncle disappeared I finished my suit. It went through a short period of month long tests then I simply vanished from my home one night. I took enough wealth with me to scrap by on and left everything behind. I haven't looked back since; I keep looking for my uncle. I've had a few opportunities to confront Kaos on the issue but each time he just grins at me and claims to not know what I'm talking about.
I worked on my own for a while before I met Eon and the rest of the Skylanders. They provided me a network of support and best of all not a single one of them looked down on me because I was a golding. They knew about my people but I had managed to prove myself to them and they readily accepted me as one of them. I have a new family now, a new home. And the only thing I need to make it complete is Uncle Ratchet.
Even the curse that trapped me in plastic on Earth can't dampen my spirits. I've got a Portal Master to back me up and an army of friends that are all helping each other get what Kaos has taken from them. Together we're going to set right all the wrongs that have been committed in Skylands by the agents of the dark. I finally feel like I can be myself. I finally feel like I belong and that everyone around me supports my choice to shun golding culture. I'm a new person now and nothing's going to stop me from shining brightly.
I'm a Skylander.
Next up is someone from the fire element.