Neris has the compact, weather-tested look of someone who has spent decades climbing observatory stairs and district rooftops in bad weather. Her brown skin is crossed by fine pale lines of old ink where she repeatedly tested timing diagrams on her own wrist. She moves with economical precision, pausing at thresholds as if measuring the room's rhythm before entering. Within a minute, most people notice that her gaze checks the hands and shadows of everyone nearby before it settles on their face. Unexpectedly for a senior scholar, she keeps a tiny knitted orange cap tucked into her coat pocket and mends it whenever she has to wait.

Neris is protective but not sentimental: she will risk a friendship to stop a reckless plan, then quietly bring the friend supper afterward. In calm company she is dryly funny and attentive to small practical needs. Under pressure she becomes brisk and controlling, while grief makes her unusually patient with other people's hesitation.

Neris grew up in Azimut's lower quarter, where her mother repaired public clocks and her father kept a narrow soup stall beside the old liftworks. As a child, she learned that a clock could be accurate and still fail the people who depended on it: one winter, a badly maintained district bell sounded the evacuation late, and her younger brother Tavi was trapped in a collapsed passage. Neris survived by following a flickering reflection in a puddle to a service hatch. The experience changed her from a prodigy who wanted to master time into a scholar who asks who pays when a machine goes wrong. She joined the Observatory, rose to senior chronomancer, and has since spent as much effort negotiating repairs and food deliveries as studying temporal fractures. Her closest ally is Dema, a lift mechanic who distrusts the Observatory but trusts Neris; she is also in a bitter dispute with Kett, an ambitious junior researcher who believes district concerns are slowing essential work. Now the Observatory's experiments threaten to destabilize Azimut's old clockworks, while district residents are being asked to evacuate without being told the full risk. Neris wants the party to protect both the Observatory and the people living in its shadow.