Tixie Taffebeser Tockworth

Tixie Taffebeser Tockworth was recognized from an early age as a prodigy among the rock Gnomes of Little Lockford, demonstrating an aptitude for mechanical design well before she reached adulthood. As a child she was known for an intense attachment to an imaginary companion she called "Poots", a figure she described in exhaustive technical detail to anyone patient enough to listen, and which she would later cite as an early influence on her theories of constructed personhood. Her formal apprenticeship in Smoldertown was brief, as her instructors found they had little left to teach her within a few years of her arrival.

Among her instructors was Igna Tynn Nimblepipe Bifimp Giltpurple Flint, the Mage renowned as the creator of the Apparatus of Igna. She took the young Tixie on as a student in the arcane principles underlying much of her craft, but this arrangement did not last. Tixie's confidence in her own methods soon outpaced her patience for Igna's, and the two butted heads when Tixie successfully restored an old Shield Guardian that Igna could not, despite its lack of a linked Abjuration belt. Questions of technique and ambition gave way to open rivalry, one that persisted between them for years afterward.

By the time she reached maturity, Tixie had already produced several working prototypes of what would become the Clockwork Defender and Clockwork Observer lines that came to define the town's security apparatus. The Artificer's contributions to civic defense earned her the notice of Mayor Zamzu Quickzipper Ukkem Zapp Mulberry Kreem, who elevated her to the position of Security Overseer, granting her broad authority over the maintenance and expansion of the settlement's automaton network. Thanks to her being so talented at Artificial Infusions, her Clockwork Constructs were significantly more intelligent and diverse than a typical artificer could produce, though their link to her meant Tixie had complete control over much of the town's defenses.

In this period Tixie was, by most accounts, a popular and sociable figure, known as much for her enthusiasm for craft as for her inventions themselves. She courted the town's young cartographer, Azimuth Andrea Almanac Caspian Kelshplotter, and the two were for a time considered one of Little Lockford's more promising pairings. The romance proved short-lived; Tixie ended the relationship abruptly, returning a locket that Azimuth had given to show his affection. Azimuth was left embittered even as it left her, apparently, unaffected.

In the years following, Tixie began to withdraw from the social life she had once embraced, directing her energies instead toward what she termed her craft in an increasingly literal sense. She began replacing portions of her own body with mechanical components of her own design, framing the process as a natural extension of her artificing rather than any form of affliction. Her ambitions, once confined to the construction of automatons in her own image, gradually turned inward, and she came to view full mechanical autonomy, a complete shedding of organic frailty, as the logical endpoint of her life's work.

It was in pursuit of this ambition that Tixie orchestrated her confrontation with Ragnum Stillhart, the mining union leader and the town's foremost Martial Artist, whom she regarded as the last meaningful obstacle to her claim of physical supremacy. Rather than face him directly, she constructed a purpose-built Clockwork Stone Defender and had it defeat him in single combat at the Motherlode before an audience of witnesses. Contemporary accounts differ as to whether this was intended as proof of concept, provocation, or simple vanity, though Tixie herself apparently considered the victory conclusive.

Not long afterward, she initiated the sequence of events later remembered as the Big Little Lockford Lockdown, sealing herself within her workshop and, eventually, the Overlook itself, in order to complete what she called her "apotheosis" undisturbed. The instructions she left her Constructs turned the very defenses she had built against the town's own people. Her withdrawal from public life became, in its final form, a wholesale rejection of it.