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1''Tinker'' (or ''Elfhome'') is a fantasy series with some science-fictional elements by Creator/WenSpencer about WrenchWench Tinker in a UsefulNotes/{{Pittsburgh}} that flips every so often from Earth to Elfhome and back.
2
3Thus far consisting of
4* ''Tinker''
5* ''Wolf Who Rules''
6* ''Elfhome''
7* ''Wood Sprites''
8* ''Project Elfhome''
9* ''Harbinger''
10* ''Storm Furies'' (forthcoming)
11
12----
13!!Tropes featured in this work:
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15* AccidentalMarriage: Owing to human/elf customs differing; Tinker accepts a particular kind of fancy brazier as a gift from Windwolf, completely unaware that a) this signified her also accepting his marriage proposal and b) elfin custom considers accepting a proposal equivalent to just being married.
16* AlwaysChaoticEvil: The oni and their subraces. [[spoiler: Except the tengu]]. Half-oni are more complicated. All the ones we meet are criminals, yes, but it's treated as [[NecessarilyEvil a matter of survival]], and due to massive abuse by the oni they have a mass FreudianExcuse.
17* AlwaysSomeoneBetter: Younger elves have to deal with this constantly. Not only is anything they do likely to be compared against the work of some master in their craft who was born thousands of years before, there's a good chance that said master is ''still alive'' and still producing, making it virtually impossible for new blood to get out of their shadow. One subplot in ''Elfhome'' was a group of doubles (Elves with double-digit ages) who moved to Pittsburgh so that they would have a chance to make their mark in their chosen crafts.
18* AndNowForSomeoneCompletelyDifferent: Tinker and Windwolf don't appear in ''Wood Sprites'' at all. The focus characters are two of Tinker's sisters on Earth who she's never even heard of, much less met (They, like Tinker herself, were born from embryos implanted into foster mothers), and their struggles against their biological mother's evil step-relatives, who were briefly mentioned in ''Wolf Who Rules'' but had not appeared before. ''Project Elfhome'' is a short story collection about characters of secondary importance to the first three novels if they explicitly appeared at all.
19%% * AnxietyDreams: Tinker has them.
20* ArtisticLicensePolitics: In ''Harbinger'' a minor character trying to make a point about differences between human and elven politics says "On Earth, the spouse of a ruler never has any real power. In Ireland, the president might be leader of the country but his wife can’t do anything more political than host tea parties for charity." The Presidency of Ireland is ''also'' a mostly ceremonial role with very little political power (but does serve as a patron to charities!), which an Irish character ought to know. The political leader of Ireland is the Taoiseach.
21* AttemptedRape: [[spoiler:Nathan]] attempts to force himself on Tinker shortly after her transformation. It's left a little ambiguous if it's truly this trope or a NearRapeExperience; he does seem to be thinking better of it, but Tinker's bodyguard Pony intervenes before he can completely stop of his own accord.
22* BackgroundMagicField: This is how Elfhome's magic is powered. [[spoiler:And it can leak into Earth and pool in certain locations, which is how the exiled Skin Clan elves have stayed alive all this time.]]
23* BloodKnight: They're disciplined about it, but it's an actual genetic trait of the ''sekasha'' to enjoy a good fight.
24* BodyguardBetrayal: ''Sekasha'' are expected to put down their ''domana'' overlords if they go off the reservation. This actually happens in ''Wolf Who Rules''.
25* BodyguardCrush:
26** Elves consider it to be socially acceptable for ''domana'' nobles to take lovers from their ''sekasha'' bodyguards -- even if the ''domana'' in question is already married.
27** [[spoiler:When Oilcan is turned into a ''domana''-caste elf, he hires his ''sekasha'' lover to be his First -- as he knew she would reject a marriage proposal and this was a socially acceptable alternative to allow them to be together]].
28%%* CantArgueWithElves: And don't they know it.
29* TheCavalry: Elves save Oilcan and Tinker from imposters at a RoadBlock.
30* ChildProdigy: Louise and Jillian, who are only nine but can hack anything in existence and run a film production company. Taken [[ExaggeratedTrope up to eleven]] by [[spoiler: 'the babies', who are EMBRYOS and yet capable of causing ridiculous amounts of trouble.]]
31* CloseKnitCommunity: In ''Elfhome'', especially, what they are aiming for for Pittsburgh.
32* {{Curse}}: A plague of bad luck is supposed to be impossible.
33* DamselInDistress: Tinker contemplates this trope in the opening of ''Tinker''.
34* DirtyBusiness: Windwolf really hopes that there are no [[spoiler:oni children]] to be massacred with the rest.
35* DistressedDude: Windwolf in the opening of ''Tinker''.
36* DreamingOfThingsToCome: Lain thinks she does. Tinker's dreams also show signs of this. [[spoiler:Esme's prophetic dreams led to her changing her major to astrophysics and becoming one of the captains in the colonization effort, all to protect Lain. Since this particular talent is supposed to be passed from mother to daughter, it's not surprising that Tinker has the gift too. As does her grandmother and at least one other of her siblings, Louise.]]
37* FantasticRacism: Oh yes. Pittsburgh has humans, elves, tengu and half-oni, and every group has a certain amount of contempt and/or outright hatred for some or all of the others. Even within the elven race as a whole there is this between clans.
38* ForcedTransformation: The oni and, historically, the Skin Clan are very fond of inflicting this via their magical genetic engineering. [[spoiler:The tengu are descended from humans who were forcibly combined with crows, while Lord Tomtom states that he could reduce a kitsune to a simple non-magical fox.]]
39* FourLinesAllWaiting: ''Harbinger'' attempts to provide viewpoints from every living previous protagonist and then some, including many characters previously only seen in short stories, meaning that the entire book takes place over less than 24 hours and ''no'' plotline can make any meaningful progress.
40* GadgeteerGenius: Tinker, who even from the beginning of the first book has invented hoverbikes and is draining off magic with large magnets, which no one else seems to have thought of.
41* GenderBlenderName: Tinker's birth name is Alexander Graham Bell Dufae. This causes a great deal of confusion among those people who only know her name when they're looking for her, since they think they're looking for a man.
42* GenocideDilemma: What to do with [[spoiler:the oni]].
43* HalfBreedDiscrimination: Not much shows up regarding the half-elves, surprisingly enough, but the elves can get very sniffy about any of their own with parentage from two different castes or clans; both Stormsong (half-''sekasha'', half ''intanyei seyosa'') and Bare Snow (half Wind Clan, half Water) get called 'mutts' a lot. Windwolf (half Wind, half Fire) gets a free pass due to being [[PersonOfMassDestruction mind-blowingly powerful]].
44* HalfHumanHybrid: Besides plenty of half-elves, there are the entire Tengu species, thanks to evil magic, and the half-oni.
45* HardLight: [[spoiler: The Tengu's wings.]]
46* HonoraryAunt: [[spoiler: Lain, who turns out to also be Tinker's real aunt.]] And Kitty for the twins.
47* HonorBeforeReason: Windwolf.
48* HufflepuffHouse: The Water Clan. We know that they ''exist'', but while the Wind, Stone and Fire Clans have all contributed major characters, the only Water Clan elf to appear has only featured in a couple of side-stories contained in ''Project Elfhome'' and is implied to be ''very'' atypical of the clan. [[spoiler: And even she is technically Wind Clan, just of partial Water ancestry.]]
49* IGaveMyWord: Tinker admits to herself she would have followed through.
50* InterdimensionalTravelDevice:
51** The hyperphase gate functions as this.
52** [[spoiler:The Skin Clan succeeded in breeding a caste of elves to function as this]].
53%%* ItWasAGift
54* KidnappedScientist: The NSA agents from the first book came to Pittsburgh to warn Tinker that someone -- [[spoiler:later revealed to be the oni and Skin Clan]] -- has been kidnapping and killing scientists who understand the science behind the hyperphase gate.
55* LackOfEmpathy: A dominant trait of the [[spoiler:oni]].
56* LimitedAdvancementOpportunities: The opportunities for promotion among a domi's ''sekasha'' aren't so much limited as virtually nonexistent. Rank is determined entirely by the order in which they are hired, so a ''sekasha'' who is not hired as First right from the start cannot hope to obtain the rank of First unless either everyone senior to him dies, or his domi dies and he gets hired as First by someone else. This is the reason why very few domana have more than one Hand (five) of ''sekasha'', as a ''sekasha'' hired as second or higher Hand has no real hope of ever achieving the rank of First Hand, let alone First, so as a rule only those domi important enough that the prestige of being in his/her service at all trumps the stigma of being in a lesser Hand can attract more than five personal retainers.
57* LittleBitBeastly: Some of the more fortunate half-oni end up looking like this; [[spoiler:Tommy Chang]] can pass as human if he hides his cat ears. Others are closer to full-on {{Beast M|an}}en.
58%% * MagicAIsMagicA
59* {{Magitek}}: Melding magic with modern technology is one of Tinker's hobbies. Her hoverbike invention in particular has paid off exceptionally well.
60* TheMagocracy: Elven society. All elves can use magic, but the ruling ''domana'' caste are both by far the most powerful and the only ones who can cast spells using hand gestures rather than requiring GeometricMagic.
61%% * TheMaze: In her dreams.
62* MysteriousParent: [[spoiler:Esme. Both of the twins' biological parents are also a big surprise to them, though the reader knows already by that point.]]
63* NamedAfterSomebodyFamous: Tinker's grandfather loved to do this, naming his children and grandchildren Leonardo Da Vinci Dufae, Ada Lovelace Dufae, Alexander Graham Bell, and Orville John Wright.
64* NameThatUnfoldsLikeLotusBlossom: The elves tend to have long, poetic names in this fashion which are translated in a slightly-abbreviated fashion for convenience as their Elvish name, and then shortened even further for a human nickname, in order to avoid humans picking their own worse nicknames.
65--> '''Louise:''' When elves are born, they’re taken to Summer Court and the royal fortune-tellers give them these amazing, lyrical names with great deep meaning. Their real names are really like ‘Pavana Gali Vento Ceyandalo Nagi Taeli,’ which kind of means ‘bare branches swaying in night wind.’ There are rich layers of meaning to the entire name, since most of the words don’t really have matching English words. Like ‘Ceyandalo’ means the ‘alive but not in foliage’ kind of ‘bare,’ not the ‘naked’ kind of ‘bare.’ Then the word order is different, so the name really is ‘moving back and forth to brush dark hair, branches that are bare from winter, in the night wind.’ All the elves in Pittsburgh are Wind Clan, so their ‘last name’ is always some form of ‘wind.’ Humans, being humans, started to shorten the elves’ names, chopping off the wind part and such like. Since most humans didn’t understand the nuances of Elvish, they were really butchering names and pissing off the elves. Like they accidently called that elf ‘Hairbrush.’ The elves started taking English nicknames to stop that.
66* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: Relating to the above, older ''sekasha'' and ''domana'' warlords, usually veterans of the rebellion against the Skin Clan, often have very ominous names. Some of the ones we hear include Wraith Arrow, Dark Harvest, Killing Frost and Iron Mace against Stone.
67* OneWordTitle: Whether you call the series ''Tinker'' or ''Elfhome'', it's one, and both are names of books in the series. Book 1 and three, respectively, with the fifth book being tentatively called ''Harbinger''.
68* ParentalSubstitute: Oilcan semi-inadvertantly becomes one to a group of elf children in ''Elfhome'', with the twist that - due to how elves age - they're all at least a couple of decades older than him.
69* ProtagonistTitle: Tinker, the WrenchWench.
70* RescueRomance: Tinker and Windwolf meet via saving each other. Multiple times. Sorting out who owes whom their life leads to complications.
71* RoadBlock: Tinker and Oilcan are stopped by a roadblock and asked for papers. [[spoiler:When the men see Windwolf inside, they are ordered to kill them all.]]
72%% * ScarpiaUltimatum
73* SecretLegacy: Tinker and her cousin Oilcan [[spoiler: and eventually, the twins and the embryos]].
74* ShoutOut: Several. Most prominently, ''Film/TheWizardOfOz'' is used as a major recurring motif in the second book.
75* SpellBook: The Dufae Codex.
76* SuperiorTwinTeamwork: Louise and Jillian Mayer, AKA "Lemon-Lime Jel-lo". While individually exceedingly brilliant ChildProdigies in their own rights, these two leverage their near-identical appearances and ability to cross-delegate tasks to each other's strengths to pull off a rather insane list of accomplishments. In their debut book, alone they plan and execute two successful heists (one of which is at the American Museum of Natural History), engage in cross-dimensional sleuthing, routinely hack everything from their RobotDog nannybot to classified government databases, and strip the series BigBad of most of his earthside liquid assets (over a billion dollars). They're '''9''' and the summer isn't even over yet.
77* TactfulTranslation: Elvish being what it was, to English translations often invert this.
78* TalkAboutTheWeather: When Tinker isn't sure how to behave on a first date, this is offered and eventually settled on as a safe approach.
79* TextileWorkIsFeminine: Tinker at one point contemplates how wives do laundry.
80* TeenGenius: Tinker. Windwolf is also implied to be this in elven terms (he's over 200 years old, but in terms of maturity that's equivalent to about 20 years old in human parlance).
81* {{Tengu}}: Lain has a dream where Tinker brings her a Tengu, which she describes as a Japanese elf that is sometimes looks like a crow. [[spoiler: The Tengu eventually become major players in the setting.]]
82* TrappedInAnotherWorld: The hyperphase gate is destroyed at the end of ''Tinker'', permanently stranding Pittsburgh on Elfhome. This is a problem, because the Westernlands don't have enough resources to support 60,000 humans.
83* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: The series is set in 2031, though exact dates aren't given until ''Wood Sprites''.
84* UnusualEars: The elves, as expected, have pointy ears [[spoiler:because the Skin Clan engineered it that way, to easily distinguish their slaves. The Skin Clan themselves have rounded ears, allowing them to pass as human.]]
85* WickedStepfather: Esme and Lain's stepfather is the BigBad. Can't get much worse than that.
86* WillNotTellALie: The elves. Even the evil ones find it stressful and unpleasant to lie outright, and prefer to misdirect.
87* WrenchWench: Tinker, very much so.
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