It is always as much of a surprise as it is a pleasure to interview Sprocket. One would hardly imagine the friendly, perpetually busy individual who offers me a glass of Brikquid Max only to spill it all over hir latest designs for a self-activating Monster Waffle toaster is one of the greatest and most influential engineers the city has ever seen.
One can believe it a little more readily when ze takes me to see hir latest plan for improvements to the Arena.
“It's still a work in progress,” ze tells me, eagerly, “but I think people are gonna really like it. It is Important that our fights feature smoke machines with the capacity for producing seven different colours and also glitter, and now our technicians can finally make it happen!!”
Readers, you'll have to trust me on the capitalisation. And the exclamation marks. They were audible.
Anyway, I am privileged enough to be given the guided tour of hir workshop - including several inventions that I am not at liberty to reveal until they hit the Monstermarket shelves. (Okay, hir actual words were 'Shhhhh! Tell 'em I'm working on a new variety of toothbrush or something instead!' but I'm extrapolating.)
It is at this point that I come face to face with the famous Nyoominator itself. An ambitious mechanical critter that many pegged as a potential Champion back in the day, it is every bit as shiny and well cared for as ever it was. It leaps up at Sprocket as soon as we enter the pen, and whilst I take a wary step back, Sprocket shows no such reservations: ze throws hir arms around it with abandon, as if it were a Monster ten times as small.
Then, ze turns to me. “Want a ride?”
Folks, I grabbed that motorcycle helmet like there was no tomorrow.
An exhilarating, windblown and faintly terrifying ten miles later, filled with leaps, wheelies and inadvisable donuts across the Bastion cityscape, we returned. It was only then that I noticed I had company in the sidecar.
“Sprocket. There's something on my -”
“Oh, that's just Cube!” ze laughs. “It's not often that it deigns to sit on people's laps. That is a Super Privileged position!”
“But how did it -?” The words 'get there' die on the tip of my tongue.
I eye the polished, featureless face of The Inertianator. Somehow, it isn't as impossible as it ought to be to tell that is is eyeing me back.
Sprocket is wrong. This isn't affection. This is an assertion of dominance, pure and simple.
It works. I get out of the sidecar faster than Nyoomie had leapt off the Hydroponics Building 3 balcony.
Sprocket giggles, and jumps out of hir seat. “I've just put on a fresh coat of paint! It's going through a pastel phase. Wanna see my latest stencils for Nyoomie?”
I hardly spare a glance for the magnolia stains on my new gray overalls. I reckon I've got off lightly.
– From 'The Arena's Darling: An Interview with Sprocket', by Rivet (originally published in SSMAS)
—
A great deal of ink has been spilled - and with good reason - on the importance of Sprocket as engineer and Arena technician. However, this chapter will focus, not on Sprocket the inventor, but something a little more nebulous, often alluded to but rarely analysed: Sprocket the icon.
Sprocket was pushed hastily into the spotlight at the beginning of hir first season after being nigh-unanimously hailed as the 'Heir to Cinder'. Ze handled the onslaught of the Fannish press with the characteristic homespun aplomb that was to become hir trademark, speaking of hope and renewal, and painting a flame-based memorial to Cinder on the Nyoominator's underside. Coming from anyone else, it would have read as opportunistic; from Sprocket, it was the utmost gesture of respect.
As Saffron rose to fame on the wave of Cinder's prior mentorship, the voices marking Sprocket as the previous Grand Champion's successor began to fade. However, from this emerged a new image: no longer Sprocket the heir, but Sprocket the prophet.
Sprocket, in all hir approachability and enthusiasm, became the poster child for the new direction in which Bastion was tending. Hir public fondness for the Nyoominator (affectionately nicknamed 'Nyoomie') and, later on, hir care and attention towards the one-would-have-thought unlovable Inertianator, marked hir out as a Monster Trainer with a difference: one of the new generation who looked on their Monsters as companions - almost equals. Hir masterful performance piece during hir last League match against Dark Steel, ending in an unambiguous call of support for Pluck's revolutionary message cemented this: Sprocket, in displaying consistent bravery, compassion and verve, embodied something like a hope - hope for a future that, at the time, was increasingly uncertain.
In this, if not in other respects, ze may well have been Cinder's successor. But, all in all, ze became something thoroughly hir own: a child of the new era.
– From Wheelies in the Wind: The Sprocket Story, by Aspirin
