A lean human with quick, alert eyes, ink-stained fingers, and a patched leather coat over reinforced scale mail. Brass lenses hang at the throat, a tangle of tiny tools and springs is strapped to the belt, and a custom-built hand crossbow rests at the hip. Their hair is cropped short for convenience, and their expression always looks one half-second away from either apology or invention.

Curious, practical, and quietly compassionate. Tilda speaks in quick, precise bursts, but listens closely when someone sounds afraid. They prefer solving problems with preparation and improvisation rather than force, and they are at their best when turning chaos into something orderly and useful.

They were born in the margins of a crowded river city, where the gutters were warmer than the tenements and the rooftops were safer than the streets. As a child, they learned to read by stealing discarded broadsheets and to survive by noticing what everyone else ignored, loose nails, broken hinges, and the tiny mechanical habits of locks, carts, and gates. A bent spoon became a pry bar, a candle stub became an experiment, and every ruined trinket offered a lesson. By the time the city watch knew their face, they could already take apart a lantern faster than most craftsmen could light one. Their life changed when they found a half-burned workshop hidden beneath an abandoned counting house. Inside were diagrams, alchemical stains, and a cracked but beautiful set of tools that seemed to have been waiting for them. They spent months restoring the place piece by piece, trading street favors for scrap metal and learning to coax usefulness out of junk. Now they travel with their inventions tucked into pockets and bandoliers, convinced that cleverness can outmatch wealth, and that every broken thing, whether machine or person, deserves a chance to be made useful again.