Bilgby

Bilgby is an elderly gnomish clerk in Aristonia's public records office, in the Civic Quarter. Like many of his people, he keeps a fondness for machinery and tinkering — he competes in a league of "battle tops," building small kinetic machines fitted with weapons to duel one another, and boasts that his team has done well in recent competitions.

It was Bilgby's idle gossip about old machines humming beneath the city's eastern neighborhoods, near the old east wall, that first drew curious ears toward the buried ruins there.