Aero Trujillo-Appiah has the particular physical presence of someone who has spent twenty years doing heavy manual work and developed an architecture around it — wide through the shoulders, with grease-dark hands that are never entirely clean and forearms marked by old burn-scars from a welding accident in their early twenties. Their skin is a warm brown with amber undertones, their hair is worn in a practical short wrap they cover with a work cap on the floor. Their eyes are standard brown but they have bioluminescent skin mods along their forearms and collarbones — a blue-green that pulses faintly in low light, visible when their sleeves roll up, which in the shop is always. It's a purely aesthetic choice that amuses them because people expect something more threatening from someone who looks like them.

Mircea runs a genuinely good mechanical shop. This is not a front in the sense of being hollow — they can and do repair vehicles legitimately, and their legitimate work is skilled. The chop operation runs alongside it, not instead of it, which is part of why they've lasted. They are patient, methodical, and have the institutional memory of everyone who has moved parts through the Undertow in the past decade. They are neither warm nor cold to most people — professional, honest about prices, honest about timelines, and unwilling to pretend that the boundary between legal and not is meaningful when Ferrogate Transit controls the licensing structure for vehicle repair anyway.