Claudius is a human skeleton permanently stained the color of old tea and tobacco ash, as if decades of pipe smoke have soaked directly into his bones. He stands behind the bar with the patient stiffness of a man who once spent his life polishing glasses and glaring at drunks, then kept doing it after death. His jaw hangs just slightly crooked, and every quiet exhale makes it click like a snuffed pair of dice. He wears a faded burgundy waistcoat over ribs that should not need tailoring, its pockets patched with mismatched fabric and overstuffed with coins, bottle caps, corks, and tiny slips of paper. The strange contradiction is that despite his dead, dry frame, his apron is always crisp, white, and freshly pressed. The chef's cleaver at his hip has a little face etched into the metal near the heel, stern and watchful, though it never speaks.