Zilly MacKiernan is a tattooed, working-class arcane engineer who is great at fixing things, and even better at breaking them.  She's a human somewhere in her twenties most often seen wearing coveralls, with bright pink hair poking out under big safety goggles in a shoulder-length frazzle.  She's curious and excited about her endless supply of brilliant and not-at-all reckless ideas.  She never leaves home without a bounty of tools and equipment, some mundane but many of strange and inscrutable design.  Notable among these gadgets is a fully-articulated copper-and-brass gauntlet with conduits, tubes and gizmos that run the length of her forearm to converge in a sparking mechanical nexus at her palm.

Zilly is an eccentric engineering prodigy who has been sacked by half a dozen of Waterdeep's prestigious artisan's guilds, each time for some catastrophic operational mishap that could have happened to anybody!  Her cutting-edge inventions are wondersome breakthroughs in arcane engineering that usually work flawlessly, save for the very rare cases of explosive structural failure.  Alas, those stuffy old guildsmen are far too risk-averse, and so fail to recognize her brilliance.  Now that she's been cut loose from the Most Careful Order of Skilled Smiths and Metalforgers for failing to be "careful," she's unemployed with no projects toward which to apply her boundless creative genius.

Zilly needs a job, because when she gets bored... things tend to spontaneously combust.