Xenoverse origins / R-072
Roxie RustOrigin story
Roxie Rust and the Weight of a Worthless Thing
A Scrap Magnet Spotter stakes her savings on a peculiar crane and must surrender her favourite possession to keep an entire scrapyard from following it into the sky.
Read the origin ↓
Roxie Rust bought the crane because everyone laughed when she said she could make it useful. Had they laughed a little less, she might still have had her savings. Instead, she owned an antique lifting machine, a disputed receipt and the most expensive silence she had ever purchased.
Roxie's bargain crane measures attachment instead of metal, and her secret salvage collection makes an excellent target.
Worthless to you is not the same as light.
From the dossier
Prologue — Sold to the Loudest Objection
The Goblin Council's salvage auction took place in the Junkyard beneath a leaking canvas roof. Roxie attended in her work boots, red ponytail tied high, intending to buy a replacement mug. She worked as Scrap Magnet Spotter and had strong opinions about machines being judged by their paint.
Lot Seventeen was an abandoned crane with a round magnet and a brass operator's chair. Its catalogue description read OBSOLETE, TEMPERAMENTAL, SENTIMENTAL. Councillor Vetch tapped the final word with his auction hammer and invited the crowd to imagine machinery with feelings. Everybody laughed except Roxie.
Vetch knew her from allocation arguments; she knew him as the councillor who measured expertise by how quietly it accepted his budget. He asked whether she had a professional objection. She said obsolescence was what management called equipment after declining to maintain it. The crowd made an appreciative noise.
That noise cost her dearly. When Vetch offered the crane for one coin, she bid two to prove a point. He immediately closed the sale, added storage charges and presented the receipt. The mug she had intended to buy went to somebody with better priorities.
Roxie kept her smaller finds in a timber cabin behind the salvage fence: cracked cups, a stubborn clock, a green door rescued from a demolished house. She had no house for the door. She liked its weight and the little window that made every view resemble a possible home.
From the cabin she watched her crane settle against the darkening sky. Its magnet turned slowly towards her green door, though nobody occupied the operator's chair. Roxie told herself old machinery moved strangely in the wind. Then the door lifted half an inch from the ground.
Act 1
A Different Kind of Load
Act I — A Different Kind of Load
By morning, the green door hung horizontally beneath the magnet. It was wooden. Roxie stood under the shelter of her cabin porch and considered several explanations, rejecting the ones that would require apologizing to Vetch. The crane waited with an air of courteous expectation.
She fetched a rusted iron wheel. The magnet ignored it. She fetched her cracked mug. The mug rose gently from her hand and joined the door. When she shouted at the crane, the brass chair turned towards her as though inviting her to present a more interesting argument.
A tiny plate beneath the seat read LOAD CALCULATED BY RELUCTANCE TO PART. Roxie read it twice. The catalogue had been accurate after all, which felt unnecessarily hostile. She tried lifting a bolt she did not care about. Nothing happened until she decided she needed it for the test.
Word spread. Workers gathered to watch watches, keepsakes and lunch tins drift towards the crane. Nobody was injured; the objects rose with infuriating delicacy. Roxie cleared the surrounding yard, then sat at the controls. The levers were marked MINE, YOURS and ARE YOU QUITE CERTAIN.
Vetch arrived to offer a generous solution: sell the crane back for half a coin. He had recognized its potential for recovering disputed property. Roxie refused before considering the consequences. Her stubbornness had already purchased the machine. She was reluctant to admit it might also purchase the sequel.
The crane lifted her entire cabin three inches. Inside it, the green door's absent outline showed pale against the wall. Roxie stopped arguing long enough to hear the timbers creak. Everything she had rescued was now a single load, held together by the fact that she would not leave it.
Act 2
The Collection in the Air
Act II — The Collection in the Air
She tried indifference. She announced that the cabin was ugly, the clock useless and the mug barely fit for plants. The crane raised them another inch. It could evidently distinguish an assessment from a lie. Roxie found this an offensive feature in equipment bought at auction.
The magnet's shadow spread across the yard. A worker's toolbox trembled. Vetch's ceremonial hammer tugged at its wrist cord. Roxie realized the crane was learning from the crowd: each worried owner added another point of attachment, and each point gave it a larger idea of what belonged together.
Vetch proposed declaring everything Council property. The crane ignored his proclamation. Actual attachment proved inconveniently different from entitlement. He stood in the mud reciting ownership clauses while his hammer strained towards the sky like a dog that had recognized a better walk.
Roxie climbed the staircase to the brass chair. From there she could see her cabin floating among a loose constellation of ordinary treasures. It looked less like a disaster than a room taken apart carefully. She remembered rescuing each object, and how rarely she had used any of them.
The green door had become the centre. She had imagined it attached to a future house so often that the magnet treated the imagined house as part of the load. Beyond the fence, roof tiles began to shiver. The machine was trying to gather a home around her promise.
Roxie could abandon the crane to Vetch or give up the promise that fed it. Neither choice looked like winning. She called for the carpenter who worked in the next yard and asked whether he still needed a door for the workers' shelter. He said yes, if it ever came down.
Act 3
A Door Used by Other People
Act III — A Door Used by Other People
She told him the door was his. Nothing moved. Of course nothing moved: she was still picturing herself reclaiming it when she found the right house. The magnet hummed overhead. Roxie had spent her whole life spotting loads; she had never expected to be part of the load herself.
She described where the carpenter could fit it. She argued about which way it should open. She imagined muddy workers passing through it without asking her permission, scratching its paint and hanging ugly notices over its little window. The image annoyed her. It also made the door belong somewhere else.
The magnet lowered it. The cabin followed, landing with a soft, reproachful thump. Objects drifted back to their owners. Vetch caught his hammer and immediately pretended he had been testing the atmosphere. Roxie stayed in the brass chair until the carpenter had carried the green door out of sight.
She kept the crane. Selling it to Vetch would have made her mistake profitable to somebody worse. Instead she rented its services for a narrow purpose: locating objects people had genuinely lost among the scrap. Payment bought a search, never a promise that she could make anyone let go.
Her cabin seemed smaller without the door against its wall. She began using the rescued cups. Some leaked. One was excellent. In the workers' shelter, her green door acquired an ugly notice within the afternoon. Roxie complained about the lettering, then held it open for someone carrying tea.
On her first paid search, the magnet pointed beyond the Junkyard, towards the hill where the Council buried its retired monuments. Vetch cancelled the appointment and offered to buy the crane again. Roxie named a price he could not misunderstand: tell her what he had lost. He took off his hat before answering.
The value that scrap prices miss
A Scrap Magnet Spotter reads a crowded Junkyard through distance, position and changing loads. Roxie's invented adventure adds a different kind of weight: the private importance of objects that the Council has already priced for disposal.