(LOF-tah)

Lofta did not begin as a person. She began as a project. She is technically the thirteenth iteration of homunculi created by the world-famous, eccentric artificer and arcanotech theorist Mickle Cobblelob , operating out of a cluttered laboratory in Seattle, Cascadia. Mickle dedicated the better part of four decades to a single obsessive goal: the reconstruction of his dead sister through alchemy and manufactured consciousness. The sister's name was Lofta. The homunculus he eventually produced bore her face, her name, her hair, and something that neither Mickle nor anyone else could fully account for — a genuine interior life that arrived not all at once, but in increments, like a lamp being slowly turned up in a dark room.

When Mickle finally achieved what he had spent his life working toward, he did what the terms of their unspoken agreement had always implied he would: he set Lofta free. The note he pressed into her hand on the morning of her release was characteristically incomprehensible, dense with alchemical shorthand, slangish nonsense, and several endearments that had been scratched out and rewritten. She has kept it ever since.

Freedom, it turns out, is a disorienting condition for someone who has only recently become fully aware that she exists. Lofta carries the eccentric intellectual fingerprints of her maker — a tendency toward lateral reasoning, an interest in the mechanics of things, a vocabulary assembled from Mickle's rantings rather than from ordinary conversation — alongside something that is entirely her own: a calm, wide-eyed innocence about the world that makes her simultaneously the most unbothered and the most unpredictable presence in any room she occupies. She does not always understand social convention. She does not always notice that she has violated it. Her consciousness is assembled rather than grown, untested by the weight of this world — and in her quiet moments, the question of what she actually is sits heavier than the freedom that came with it.

With no fixed obligations for the first time in her existence, Lofta pointed herself east from Seattle with the straightforward intention of seeing what the world contained. She made her way to the port of Nunavut and, with the guileless confidence of someone who has not yet learned to be afraid of the obvious risks, secured passage aboard the submersible ESS Albacore bound for Dresden. She boarded the way she approaches most things: with genuine curiosity, no particular plan, and the quiet certainty that whatever happens next will be interesting.