Entry body
Jerry Kessler / keeper of the shop
A Berkeley print-shop owner, poker mythologist, and practiced liar whose relationship to the fax machine is too calm to be accidental.
Jerry enters like an old-world mechanic accidentally left standing in a crack in time. He is shabby, specific, funny in a dry private way, and far too composed around impossible paper traffic to be treated as merely eccentric.
What makes him powerful is not spectacle but tempo. He knows how to slow a room down, how to redirect cops without raising his voice, and how to move a frightened artist from chaos into apprenticeship with a three-hundred-dollar gamble and an hourly wage.
In story terms, Jerry is the keeper of local rules. He does not reveal the machine all at once. He trains the witness to earn the next layer of truth.