Toma has the compact, slightly forward-leaning posture of someone accustomed to peering into machinery. Their brown skin is crossed by faint gray smudges that never quite scrub away, and their black hair is cut close at the sides but left long enough on top to escape its tie in wiry curls. Their hands draw the eye: broad-palmed, nicked with tiny old tool cuts, and marked by dark metallic dust in the creases. They rub thumb against forefinger before touching unfamiliar mechanisms, as if testing an invisible grain. A small brass wind-up cricket rides in their breast pocket, an unexpectedly playful ornament on an otherwise plain traveler. They move with measured care until a device misbehaves, then become startlingly quick and precise.

Toma wants to be approachable and useful, yet bristles when people treat them as a walking tool. With strangers they are matter-of-fact and mildly warm; when a machine is at risk they become focused and impatient with vague reassurance. After a mistake, they are generous about other people's limits but harsh about their own. They would rather ask a plain question than perform confidence, though they sometimes mistake caution for a duty to keep every worry to themselves.

Toma Cannith grew up among repair benches and factory yards in Sharn, where being useful earned them a place in rooms that were otherwise closed to a junior house member. They apprenticed in the maintenance of elemental-transport fittings, learning to listen for changes in vibration before a gauge showed trouble. During a test of a salvaged schema, a pressure regulator failed and trapped a fellow apprentice, Bera, behind a warped service hatch. Toma chose to cut the regulator's control line rather than wait for a senior artificer, preventing a worse rupture but ruining the prototype and leaving Bera with a lasting limp. Since then, Toma tests their own judgment relentlessly and distrusts anyone who calls a dangerous device 'nearly finished.' They now travel under a deliberately ordinary description, bound for a maintenance consultation at the old trade settlement of Glassblower's Ford. They carry a set of calibration pieces rather than a complete design: their expertise lies in feeling and interpreting a machine's vibration, knowledge that cannot be copied from notes. Toma does not know that a changeling aboard the airship has been tasked with taking them alive. They believe the journey is routine, though the overly specific questions from one passenger have begun to bother them.