Igna Tynn Nimblepipe Bifimp Giltpurple Flint was, by a considerable margin, the oldest Gnome in Little Lockford, having lived decades beyond the span typically allotted to her people. Age had done little to soften her disposition; she was widely regarded as crabby, rude, and thoroughly disliked by nearly everyone in the settlement. Whatever goodwill she failed to earn through temperament, however, she commanded through sheer ability, as she was without dispute the most talented Mage in the mining settlement.
Despite her general unpleasantness, Igna played a formative role in the lives of two of Little Lockford's more consequential figures. She taught the eventual-Mayor Zamzu Quickzipper Ukkem Zapp Mulberry Kreem the basics of crafting Wondrous Items, a subject for which he retained a lifelong fondness, and also partially trained the Artificer Tixie Taffebeser Tockworth, though the arrangement did not last. Tixie's confidence in her own methods soon outpaced her patience for Igna's, and the two butted heads over questions of technique and ambition until instruction gave way to open rivalry, one that persisted between them for years afterward.
Working from design documents for the legendary Apparatus of Kwalish, Igna developed her own variant, the Apparatus of Igna, a tunneling vehicle that became indispensable whenever the shifting Deepways produced cave-ins or other structural crises beneath the settlement. Her inventions drew attention well beyond the workshop, and the Abbot Kavoda Zilhink Dazzlehat Urvi Oofenklanger publicly characterized her works as gifts bestowed by Luhtari, the god of magic. Igna received this praise as an affront to her own painstaking craftsmanship, and the remark left her with a deep and lasting hatred of both the Abbot and the Deep Luhtari Abbey he presided over.
It was this same distrust of outside intervention, coupled with her general unwillingness to be managed, that had led Mayor Zamzu to pass her over for oversight of the settlement's defenses in favor of Tockworth, a decision Igna was widely believed to have resented, though she said little about it directly.
When the Big Little Lockford Lockdown erupted and Tockworth's Constructs turned upon the town, Igna did not join the general retreat through the tunnels beyond the city gates. Instead, she took shelter within a warehouse, one that came under attack from monsters of the Undermire during the chaos, and sealed herself inside her own Apparatus for the duration. She remained holed up there for weeks, surviving on stored rations as the interior became increasingly more foul.