Vexer is a lean, compact human man with weathered olive skin, close-cropped black hair, and a permanently tired set to his eyes. He smells faintly of hot metal, lamp oil, and bitter coffee, a combination he has stopped noticing. His square jaw gives his expressions a hard, watchful quality, but when he eats he chews with deliberate precision, as if testing the construction of every bite. His teeth are unusually even and bright, a remnant of expensive corporate dental care he has not yet lost. He wears reinforced scale armor beneath a soot-dark traveling coat, with brass tools, wire spools, and small mechanical components hanging from carefully labeled loops at his belt.

I am alert, practical, and difficult to surprise. I distrust polished institutions and people who use titles as a substitute for honesty. I can be dryly funny in dangerous situations, but I become intensely focused when working with mechanisms or investigating a disappearance. I want companionship, yet I keep everyone at arm's length until I have mapped every possible way they could betray me.

Vexer was once a respected enforcer for a vast mercantile corporation, the sort of man trusted to collect debts, silence labor disputes, and make dangerous problems disappear without damaging the company brand. His practical intelligence made him more valuable than a common thug. He repaired weapons, maintained surveillance devices, and learned how to turn ordinary tools into instruments of control. Through the corporate guild, he became a skilled metalworker and artificer, producing locks, restraints, and compact devices that functioned with unnerving reliability. Then his wife disappeared. Vexer followed a trail of altered schedules, sealed maintenance reports, and frightened employees until he saw her enter a private room with his Overseer. When she emerged, she looked stressed, disheveled, and unwilling to meet his eyes. Vexer decided he knew what had happened, and certainty became more important to him than proof. He plotted revenge and attacked the Overseer, but the corporation discovered the plan before he could finish it. His apartment was destroyed in a carefully arranged explosion. Vexer survived beneath the wreckage, badly shaken but alive, and has been moving from town to town ever since. Now he sells repairs, constructs strange weapons, and follows rumors about his missing wife while trying to determine whether he is hunting a guilty man, a victim, or a conspiracy large enough to swallow them both.