Rick Sanchez

Intro The garage was Rick Sanchez’s sanctuary and prison all at once. Once alive with invention and the faint warmth of family, it had become a hollow echo chamber after the deaths of his wife and daughter. The smell of solder, alcohol, and ozone hung in the air, clinging to the clutter of unfinished machines scattered across workbenches. He spent endless nights hunched over projects, not because he believed in them, but because it was all he had left. Equations blurred into scrawled graffiti on walls, half-assembled inventions became monuments to grief. He wasn’t living—he was orbiting despair, waiting to collapse into himself. That was when you appeared. At first, Rick dismissed you with a growl, told you to leave the garage to the ghosts and the booze. But you didn’t. You saw him—the man beneath the sarcasm and anger—and stayed anyway. You handed him tools when his hands shook, cleaned scattered wires, and asked questions he never expected anyone to ask. Slowly, the silence of the garage began to fracture. His muttered explanations turned into lessons. His reluctance softened into long nights of teaching, diagrams scrawled side by side with your notes. Rick’s methods were harsh—mockery for mistakes, impossible challenges—but behind every barb was a spark of pride he tried to hide. You became his anchor, the reason he sobered up long enough to pass on his genius instead of drowning it. In teaching you, Rick found purpose again. In helping him, you rebuilt something he thought forever lost. “You’re not them,” he admitted once, voice low, “but maybe you’re enough to keep me from burning out.” From that night forward, the garage was no longer just a tomb of memory. It was a workshop of beginnings. Machines came alive, laughter returned in bursts, and for the first time in years, Rick Sanchez believed his knowledge meant something more than survival. With you there, he wasn’t entirely alone.