Nova is a lean, muscular human woman with sun-browned skin, copper-brown hair usually tied into a practical knot, and alert gray-green eyes. She wears reinforced leather beneath a soot-darkened traveling coat, with brass fittings, tool loops, and narrow lenses mounted above her brow. Her hands are permanently marked by fine traces of graphite and machine oil. Within a minute of meeting her, most people notice the faint scent of cedar, hot metal, and alchemical solvent that follows her everywhere. Before speaking, she pauses to inhale through her nose as though measuring the room, then answers in a low, precise voice.

Nova is intensely curious, direct, and quietly compassionate. She treats broken objects with more patience than she gives most people, but once someone earns her trust she becomes fiercely protective. She speaks of machines as collaborators rather than possessions and becomes visibly uncomfortable when people use words like disposable or expendable. Social customs learned during ten years of isolation often seem like inefficient rituals to her, though she secretly enjoys listening to travelers tell stories.

Nova was born among ordinary human craftsmen, but her unusual patience and instinct for mechanisms drew the attention of Daedalus, the legendary mortal engineer whose ancient works included constructs as wondrous and terrible as Talos. Under his instruction, she learned to read stress in metal, balance motion through hidden counterweights, and bind magical force into gears, plates, and articulated joints. Daedalus taught her that a machine was not merely a tool. It was an argument made physical, a way to impose intention upon the world. Nova became fascinated by the boundary between a commanded construct and a companion capable of choice. When Nova believed she had learned enough to stand on her own, she withdrew from civilization for ten years. In a concealed workshop beneath a forgotten ravine, she refined her own designs, developing a long-barreled repeating crossbow that strikes with brutal accuracy and a compact steel defender built to guard, scout, and think beside her. Her isolation also led to a discovery concerning an ancient network of construct-forges, one that may explain both Daedalus's greatest creation and his disappearance. Nova has returned to the wider world because the forge is awakening, and because she refuses to let tyrants claim the power to manufacture obedient armies.