Harvey Copperbottom is a compact gnome with weathered hands, a tidy moustache cut into two brass-colored points, and a coat that looks perpetually half repaired. His skin has the warm, smoke-kissed tone of someone who has spent a lifetime near furnaces, and it is freckled with tiny pale scars from sparks and solder burns. He moves with a cautious, sidewise precision, as if every room were a workshop full of delicate balances. His left eye is bright and sharp, while his right eye is covered by a glass lens fitted into a thin copper frame, though he often forgets to lower the tiny shade built into it. The strange contradiction is that he dresses like a grim industrial foreman, all brass buttons and soot-dark leather, yet he wears a bright yellow ribbon tied around one wrist like a child’s good-luck charm. Even at rest, faint ticking seems to follow him from hidden pockets and concealed springs.