Ketu Galdik is a small rock gnome with copper-brown skin, a square little jaw, broad cheeks, and a thick crown of tightly curled dark hair threaded with bits of brass wire. His front teeth are slightly oversized and show whenever he eats, grins, or speaks too quickly. He wears practical travel clothes beneath a patched leather work apron, with pockets full of screws, springs, chalk, folded wire, and tiny clockwork parts. His eyes are bright and constantly moving, measuring hinges, locks, walls, and possible escape routes. A faint blue-white spark sometimes flickers between his fingertips when he is excited.

Ketu is quick-minded, practical, and cheerfully irreverent. He treats every locked door as a conversation waiting to happen and every complicated machine as a puzzle with feelings. He is generous with repairs, fiercely protective of people who are being exploited, and uncomfortable receiving praise. His confidence is strongest around mechanisms and weakest when he has to speak sincerely about his own fears.

Ketu Galdik grew up beneath the streets of a busy trade city, where the rock gnomes maintained old lift mechanisms, water gates, alarm bells, and defensive locks that most surface-dwellers never noticed. He learned machinery by taking broken devices apart and putting them back together in better condition. When honest work failed to pay for food or replacement parts, he began opening locks and disabling security systems for thieves. Ketu never liked stealing from ordinary people, so he quietly altered jobs whenever he could, leaving food, medicine, or repaired tools behind for those who had been targeted. His criminal career was less about greed than about knowing exactly how badly a system could hurt someone who had no power to resist it.