The Mushcranks Dynasty

I have a scar on the bridge of my nose I did not have before I went looking for the Mushcranks family. I want that understood before you read one more word of this.
I did not go there for a fight. I went there for a name in a patent record. What I got was a paranoid old gnome, two broken cartilage snaps in one afternoon, and an uncomfortable realization. Somebody else had gotten to that shop before I did. Asked the exact same questions. Left him considerably more frightened than curious.
So. A dynasty. Let's talk about a dynasty that used to matter, and the one member of it left standing who very much wishes nobody remembered that it once did.

The Name That Used to Mean Something

Three generations back, ask anyone in Clockworks City who kept half the district's machinery running. They'd have said Mushcranks without blinking.
It started, as far as the patent records will confirm, with a gnome called Jarus Bucket. Furnaces. Hot water heaters. The first working stage of what eventually became the generators half this city still runs on. All commissioned by the city council. Not a single royalty came back to the man who built them. That tells you something about how the powerful treat genius when they can get it cheap.
Whether Jarus Bucket and the Mushcranks name are the same line, or the record simply got sloppy somewhere along the way, I honestly cannot tell you with full confidence. I'd rather admit that than paper over it with a guess dressed up as fact. What I can tell you is this. Somewhere between "founding genius who built the bones of a city" and "one repair shop on Boorum Street," this family lost every royalty, every patent, and very nearly every trace of the influence that name once carried.

Mushcranks and Beyond

What's left is a shop. A faded sign, and I am not making this slogan up, reading "if we can't fix it, we can come up with something better." Shelves of recycled electronics. Glass cases of goods I would not trust with my own coin. Adrian Mushcranks runs it now, with his son, in a neighborhood too decrepit to be condemned and too stubborn to be rebuilt.
He is, by his own account, a savvy businessman. He is, by every account I trust including my own bruised nose, a frightened old gnome who has spent his whole life sitting on top of a legacy he did not build and cannot explain. Terrified of bill collectors. Considerably more terrified of anyone who comes in asking about his family's history.
I understand that fear a great deal better now. He turned hostile the moment I said his family's inventions out loud. The moment. Called me one of "several people snoopin' round here," which is not the reaction of a man with nothing left to protect. I left with a bloody nose and a working theory.
Whoever else has been asking about the Mushcranks name got there before me. Got a very different answer out of Adrian than I did. I have not yet worked out whether that answer was the truth, a lie, or something Adrian himself doesn't fully understand he's sitting on.
The Archive doesn't close a file just because the trail goes cold. I'll be back at that shop eventually. Preferably with my nose intact this time.