Gremlin

Small, sharp-featured, and quicker of hand than anything else alive. Where a Leprechaun builds, a gremlin unbuilds — they can find the weak point in any mechanism by touch, and their magic hastens rust, fatigue, and failure. They swarm the scrap hills of the Rustlands, taking Faerie artifice apart for components and putting it back together as something meaner.

They insist their reputation for malice is a slander. Things break; gremlins happen to be nearby; the Kingdom has never been interested in the distinction.

Appearance

Knee-high, wiry, with oversized ears and hands, and eyes that reflect light at odd angles. Rustlands chemistry marks them — mottled skin, odd colorations, the occasional extra joint — which the Kingdom cites as further proof of degeneracy and which the gremlins consider an occupational hazard of living downstream from everyone else's garbage.

Attuned Magic

Entropy. A nascent gremlin can seize a hinge or fray a rope. A powerful one can age a mechanism a decade in a heartbeat, make a bridge fail at the moment of maximum load, and — the trick that earns them their reputation — sense exactly which component in an unfamiliar machine is bearing the most stress, without looking at it.

Society

Camps that move as the heaps collapse, which is often. The Sump, a valley where the runoff pools, is where salvagers gather to trade parts and news; Nix of the Sump holds the closest thing to authority by controlling who gets told what. Everything of value in the Wilds that cannot be grown or dug comes out of here.

Relations

The Winterworks buys most of it while maintaining that it does not, which is the entire commercial relationship between the Kingdom and the Outer Wilds in miniature: real, substantial, and officially nonexistent.