Tink

A half-raccoon, half-fox tinkerer at The Foredweller Research Facility, with a goggle set over his eyes and a second pushed up on his head, usually mid-way through disassembling a lever handle that came off something. The party met him as one of the facility's scientists. He is not one — as he clarifies in Session 55, he is the handyman and engineer the science team hired because they needed one, and whom none of them counts as a colleague: "not really, unless you consider engineering a science, which none of them do."

His two great contributions to the study of the Ancients are that they had toilets, and therefore mouths — and that their flushing toilets clean your ass, which the surface does not have.

(Almost certainly the Dr. Martin Tinker referenced on Dr. Xiao Li's Session 52 roster; her own view of his portfolio was "I trust Tink on — I don't even know what he does. Mostly toilets, I guess.")

Session 53

• Led the party pointedly to two Foredweller lavatories — handles, seats and footrests — and let them draw the conclusion: "It means the Ancients ate food. And processed it into waste, it means they probably had some kind of mouth." Magra earned an approving point for knowing why a footrest helps.
• Deduced from the changing room's footwear that the Ancients could not fly.

Session 55

• Built the sentience enclosure. On Long Tim's say-so, spent an hour throwing together a four-chamber testing pen out of temporary plyboard, plaster-wood, nails and "a bit of hard work and some redneck engineering" — with a completely soundproof interior and a tin-can-and-string speaker for instructions. Jex's honest review, delivered afterwards: "you did a nice job, like good construction. It's very soundproof in there. Very well done, I'm impressed." Tink, scratching his head: "I don't really know why I had to build it, but I hope you enjoyed it." Then knocked it down with a sledgehammer.
• Built 32-foot calipers, no questions asked. Anita asked for extra-long caliper handles to hold a god-slaying shard at arm's length; his face registered you want what? for about a second before he went and made them. Delivered at 16 feet, doubling to 32 with a switch, with the professional caveat that they'd be wobbly and might want a stand halfway along.
• Not a scientist. Points at the Foredweller fire canisters as obviously engineering — "that's what I was telling them" — and offers Jex grapes out of his pocket, holding them out like a man feeding a deer in a park, on the strength of the semi-sentience diagnosis. Jex's verdict: "Tink's cool. I like him."