Ketta has a narrow, intent face, a blunt chin, and skin faintly stippled by years of spray from the turning house's mineral-rich water. Her dark hair is braided close to her scalp and pinned beneath a work cap, though short damp curls always escape around her ears. She moves with an unusual, immediately noticeable economy: she plants both feet squarely, then pivots from the hips as if turning an invisible wheel, never taking a step she does not need. Even while waiting, she keeps her weight centered and her gaze moving over hinges, drains, and people. The impression is of someone who has made a working machine of herself. Unexpectedly, she keeps a tiny folded paper bird tucked into her cap, carefully creased from a public-access notice.

Ketta is precise and guarded, yet genuinely proud when a resident understands how the station protects their home. She is patient with honest confusion and brisk with careless confidence. In a crisis, her calm becomes commanding and she takes on every task herself; in private, uncertainty makes her defensive, and she can mistake silence for control. She wants public trust, but fears that telling the whole truth before she understands it could hurt the very people she serves.

Ketta grew up among the canal-side tenements below Pell's Turning House, where a failed pump meant damp beds, spoiled flour, and sometimes a family swept from its ground floor. Her mother, a human night porter, taught her to read maintenance marks before she learned long division. As a young assistant, Ketta once followed an old pressure diagram during an unusually high tide. The diagram was wrong; a service gallery filled, trapping her mentor and two workers. Ketta ignored the official sequence, broke a sealed control panel, and opened a relief gate by hand. She saved them, but the damaged mechanism cost the city a month of repairs. The incident made her both exacting and wary of undocumented controls. Years later, she became chief pump keeper, opening the station to supervised public visits and insisting that residents understand the work that protects them. She sends a portion of her wages to her mother and relies on a sharp-eyed apprentice, Toma, whose questions she admires more than she admits. Her current conflict is a new vibration in the oldest control bank: the official inspection schedule says it is harmless, but the sound matches the warning she heard before the old gallery accident.