Gremlin

Small, sharp-featured, and quicker of hand than anything else alive. Where a Dwarf 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.

The marks are also a chronology. A gremlin's colouration says roughly which valley they grew up working, and gremlins read each other accordingly, and are frank about which valleys shorten a life.

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.

That last is diagnostic rather than destructive, and is the actual basis of the salvage trade: a gremlin can tell you what a ruined device was doing when it died, which is how the Strata Record gets written.

Life

Camps of scrap-plate and salvaged frame, moved when the heaps collapse, which is often. Work is digging, sorting, repairing, and selling, in three shifts, with the fume days off. Life expectancy is discussed openly and worked around.

Names. For the first thing you brought up. Nix, Sprocket, Twelve-Gauge, Ashpan. It is not a joke name and it is never changed, and asking a gremlin what their name means is asking about the day they started.

Arrival. A new gremlin is put on a crew of three and given a line — the salvage rope that connects the three of them in a collapse. The line is the whole of gremlin social obligation: your crew comes up or nobody does, and a gremlin who has cut a line is finished in the province forever.

Fume days. When the wind drops, the heaps exhale and everything stops. Gremlins spend them under wet cloth, indoors, telling stories, and the entire oral history of the province was composed in a fume day.

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.

Government is licensing. A dig without a licence is not stopped, merely unrecorded, and an unrecorded find cannot be sold — so nothing needs enforcing.

Currents

The Warden's Office. Nix's licensed arbitrators, who settle claims in the field and keep the Strata Record: four centuries of the Kingdom's refuse, indexed, and a complete material history of a nation compiled from its garbage.

The Deep Cut Syndicate. Salvagers working the oldest strata, where the finds stop being Kingdom refuse and start being something else. High-paying, high-mortality, and no longer filing what they bring up.

The Tinkers' Free Bench. Artificers who repair, recombine, and have started inventing things the Winterworks has not. Nobody outside the province has noticed yet.

The Quiet Wind. Those who argue the province should stop selling and start stockpiling, because the Wilds will need an arsenal. Nix has neither endorsed nor stopped them.

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.

Playing One