Portimer is a miller in Stachys. Thanks to the mill being broken, he hasn’t had much work in the past few years. He is charged with poaching a deer on the Count’s land, which he swears he was not aware he was on. He was roughed up pretty badly by the county militia before being tossed in the Stachys jail.
He was encountered by the party during his trial in Stachys. Realizing he has important skills in engineering, they knew they needed him. Rather than upset the other nobles for allowing a poacher to go free, they faked his execution and gave him a new identity as Loukas of Absalom.
He was then hired to repair the mill and run it. His engineering skills, mostly self-taught, are surprisingly sophisticated. By claiming to have been trained at the Clockwork Cathedral in Absalom, nobody will question how Stachys ended up with a master engineer.
