Meet Teddy Ruiz, who came in the back door to borrow a vice and never went home

Last of seven. Ohmsville is invented and the kit is real — a board of springs, a drawer of parts, a manual of projects. I am Nate Pruitt, and this is the end of a run of interviews with the seven people who narrate this site.

Teddy Ruiz is the other voice in the Kids Zone, the part of the site built for eight-year-olds. He sweeps up at The Electric Connection, he fixes bicycles out the back, and he has been there since he was fifteen. On the recordings he shares a voice with Sal, which means the only difference between the two of them is what each is allowed to say. We talked out the back, where the vice is.

Nate: The back door. Tell me about the back door.

Teddy: I came in through it with a bike chain in my hands and asked if I could borrow a vice. Sal said yes. I never really went home. I fix bikes out here — chains, brakes, the wheel that has gone wobbly — and it is the same as the shop out front, only bigger, and you get to kick it.

Nate: The manual you keep under the counter.

Teddy: Relay Logic, the fourth booklet, because that is the one with the moving parts in it. Motors, a buzzer, and the relay — a little electromagnet that pulls a switch over, so a small push makes a big thing happen. Everything else in the kit sits still and gets on with it. This is the booklet where the board actually does something you can hear across a room. I like a part you can watch.

Nate: A mission?

Teddy: Slot Cars. A plain switch gives you one speed, which is flat out, and a trigger gives you every speed in between — and the trigger gets hot, which is the good bit and the bit nobody expects. The reason it warms up is that the trigger is not saving the electricity it takes away from the car; it is turning it into heat in your hand. That is exactly a brake on a bike. You do not make the speed disappear. You turn it into something warm.

Nate: The build you would hand a stranger.

Teddy: Make it click. A button and a speaker. Press it, you get a click. Let go, you get another one. A speaker only makes a sound when the electricity through it changes — sitting still it is completely silent, no matter how much of it is going through. So the press is a click and the let-go is a click, and if you could do that seven hundred times a second the clicks would run together into a note. That is the one I always go to, because it takes about eight seconds and it is the first time most people find out that sound is a change and not a thing.

Nate: And your game.

Teddy: Fix Bolt the robot. Bolt has got parts stuck in him and you have to work them loose without setting off his buzzer. I am aware of how obvious that is, given what I do out here. It is the same job: you are not putting anything new in, you are finding the thing that is jammed and easing it.

Nate: You have a line you say more than any other.

Teddy: Try it and see. And when nothing happens, that is my favourite part. Nothing happening means something is loose, and finding the loose thing is the good bit. People think the finished thing is the reward. It is not. The loose wire is the reward, because that is the only part where you get to work something out.

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That is all seven. Teddy is a made-up person and the stories are real; his page is Teddy Ruiz, and the street with the shop, the cinema, the school and Ray's garage at the end of it is the town of Ohmsville.

Every one of them has a favourite manual, a favourite mission and a build they would hand you, and from this week those turn up where they belong: on the mission's own map, on the manual's title page, and on the two games June and Teddy named. Follow one and you will end up at the person who chose it.