Bruno Brass Winggear

The Gnome Clockworks Won't Let Go Of

Bruno Brass Winggear will tell you he's nobody special, if you catch him on a bad night after enough brass-belled ale.
  Don't believe him.
  The city named him before he ever named himself.
BB Wing, they've called him for forty years, ever since a boy with a stolen guitar and a stubborn streak walked into the worst corner of the Lower Slums and made something out of nothing.
  What he made was Gear Blues, and I want to be precise about this, because precision is my whole job: Bruno didn't borrow the genre, he built it.
  He took the clank and hiss of Clockworks machinery, the rhythm of steam valves venting on a schedule nobody controls, and taught his guitar to argue with it. Six strings against a city that never stops grinding. Somehow the guitar wins every time.
  He had teachers, and he'll credit them before he credits himself, which is rarer in a legend than you'd think. Old Jasper "Steamfinger" Tinkertop taught him that a chord played wrong on purpose is still a choice. Lily "The Lark" Fairweather taught him to sing like the room owed him nothing and he'd take it anyway. He had a rival too, Rusty "Redhand" Quickdraw, who I suspect Bruno still thinks about more than he'd admit over ale.
  And there is Ruby Sparks. I won't pretend to know the whole of that story. Bruno has never told it to me straight, and I've learned not to push a man on the one subject that still costs him something to discuss. I only know this: every love song he's ever played has her fingerprints on it, whether he says her name or not.

Loved By Every Class, Which Is Rarer Than It Sounds

Here is the part that actually earns him this entry. Clockworks City sorts everyone. It sorts you by the deck you were born on, the brass you can afford, the guild that will or won't have you. It is a city built, quite literally, out of gears that only mesh one direction. And yet.
  I have watched a merchant lord's daughter climb down four levels of scaffolding in a borrowed coat, just to stand in the same room as slum workers who'd spent their day covered in oil, all of them equally silent, equally still, waiting on the same three chords. Nobody in that room outranked anybody else. Bruno did that. Not a decree, not a law, not one of the Council's endless committees on unity. A gnome with a guitar did what policy could not.
  I've asked him why he never took the offers to play the upper decks exclusively, where the pay is better and the ale doesn't come with brass in the bottom of the glass. He told me, and I'm quoting him exactly because I wrote it down the moment he said it: "Music that only some people can afford to hear isn't music. It's decoration." I didn't have a response to that. I still don't.
  That's the whole of it, really. Bruno Brass Winggear is loved by all because he made himself available to all, at the cost of every easier road open to him. He is old now, and slower, and he still plays three nights a week in the same Lower Slums bar where he started, because he says the acoustics are better there anyway. I think we both know that isn't the real reason. I think the real reason is that he never forgot who was in the room the first time it mattered.