A lean, weather-browned human woman with close-cropped black hair, a narrow scar through her left eyebrow, and steady brown eyes. Her hands are marked by old burns, rope friction, and tiny brass splinters. She wears reinforced scale mail beneath a salt-stiffened blue coat, with a leather tool harness crossing her chest. Small clockwork parts, wire spools, and bits of polished driftwood hang from her belt.

Nalia is direct, observant, and quietly protective. She notices loose boards, strained voices, and poorly packed bags before she notices grand speeches. She dislikes waste, empty ceremony, and anyone who boasts without knowing how to mend what they break. Beneath her practical manner is a patient teacher who takes genuine pleasure in showing someone how a mechanism works.

Nalia Mosi grew up aboard river barges and coastal freighters, the daughter of a human deckhand and a ship's cook who believed every broken thing deserved one honest attempt at repair. She learned knots before she learned letters, then taught herself letters from cargo manifests and maintenance logs. By adolescence, she was repairing winches, patching lanterns, and building small brass devices to warn sailors when a line was about to snap. Her first real invention was a palm-sized crab of copper and wood that scuttled along the deck and clicked whenever it found a loose nail. Years later, a storm tore apart the merchant vessel she served on, killing most of the crew and scattering its cargo across the reefs. Nalia survived by clinging to a broken mast, but she found something stranger than wreckage in the days afterward, a sealed artificer's case wedged inside the ship's keel. The case contained unfinished designs, alchemical components, and notes about giving ordinary objects a spark of purpose. Nalia has since worked as a shipwright, deck mechanic, and occasional salvager, using the artificer's methods to make vessels safer and crews harder to kill. She adventures now to find the missing pages from the case's designs, while quietly searching for the person who originally built it.