[ WP ] You 're a Tinkerer , a person that can create highly advanced technology . Because of this , you 're wanted by a lot of people . What they do n't know however , is that you 're are n't like the others . You ca n't make cool guns or giant robots . Instead , you make kitchen appliances .

`` How the hell did you manage a Tinker 8 rating making *kitchen appliances*?'' 
 
 I shrug. I'm not the one who controls what others call us, anyhow. 
 
 > Mover, Shaker, 
 > 
 > Brute and Breaker. 
 
 > Master, Tinker, 
 
 > Blaster and Thinker, 
 
 > Striker, Changer, 
 
 > Trump and Stranger. 
 
 The higher your number the more you can do, or affect. A Tinker 1 could probably make a knife that takes a long time to get dull. A Tinker 12 could damn near change the definition of technology. I'm on the high end of the middle of the scale, on par with the guys who built cybernetic limbs and time-stasis-bombs. 
 
 So how the hell *did* I manage a Tinker 8 classification? Well... it all started when I tried to build a machine that could make breakfast all on its own. That's some pretty pedestrian stuff, right? I mean, they've been doing that with ordinary Rube Goldberg contraptions since at least the'80s. Except mine was n't a Rube Goldberg machine. 
 
 The more I Tinkered with it, the more I realized what I was really on to. It started out as just a clockwork device that could fry eggs. But it did n't stop there. Nobody matches Armsmaster but almost all Tinkers have some ability for miniaturization. So I started working smaller and smaller, incorporating some modern electronics. I did n't even notice when I crossed the line between ordinary tech and Tinker tech. When you're a Tinker you generally do n't. It's just, all of a sudden you've got a machine that you ca n't quite explain how it works well enough for anybody else to follow. 
 
 Pretty soon, I was looking at a machine that could *make* breakfast. Out of *anything*. You ever seen the later Star Trek shows, where they have those little boxes that can conjure food out of thin air? Yeah. Roddenberry predicted those like forty years ago but I was the one who invented it for real. You feed it a supply of raw materials, it breaks them down, does a bit of internal nano-tinkering, and *voila'*, eggs Benedict where there used to be nothing but a big-ass tank of compressed hydrogen. 
 
 Once I premiered it, started selling a few, I ended up with a knock on my door. Three guys in suits wanting to know what *else* my machine could make. I told'em to shove it; I was n't in the bullets-and-bombs business and did n't plan to start. I was trying to end *poverty* and *hunger* with my machines, not *poor people*. Still, they grilled me for about an hour, figured out that it was *possible* for my machines to produce weapons. When you have a machine that constructs things molecule by molecule, you can program it to produce damn near anything. 
 
 One of them was a Tinker himself. He gave me a schematic, one I could only just about figure out how to follow. Turns out his specialty was security devices. In about six days he'd figured out how to implement a failsafe on my machine that would *stop it* from producing bombs. Hell, I traded him a working unit for it on the spot, and that failsafe has been a standard feature ever since. 
 
 So that's how I managed a Tinker 8 classification. By edging it *down* from a Tinker 10, by refusing to ever let my technology be used to make weapons.
