Aileen

Aileen Makerfield, the Watchmaker of Etika, is a refugee engineer from Lindberg, chair of the Syswitz Civil Council, and one of the few Story Experts able to operate on damaged incarnation bodies and souls. Her caution is a form of responsibility: she supports impossible plans only after asking who will pay for them and whether anyone will remain to live in the promised future.

Biography

The watchmaker's hidden council

Aileen first appears in a clock shop whose shelves Syswitz's nobles have destroyed three times. Duke Syswitz wants her to build giant soldiers, but she refuses because the work would sacrifice thousands of citizens. The nobles retaliate with an impossible tax and threaten to take Jang Hayoung. Kim's sudden payment gives her temporary room to breathe, though she immediately recognizes that the stranger is an unstable exile whose Stories are attacking one another. Treating him is not a routine favor: the scale of his legendary fragments frightens even a specialist accustomed to repairing displaced survivors. (Chapters 195–196)

The shop conceals the Civil Council, an organized resistance waiting for a credible route to destroy the Factory. Aileen has treated previous exiles partly because they might become fighters, but she has also watched every confident rebellion fail before reaching the duke. She therefore keeps Kim strapped to the operating table, requires an Oath of Existence, protects the council's secrecy, and demands a practical test. In exchange for his intervention she agrees to repair the recurrent collisions in his body and help him enter a scenario. Her suspicion is not reluctance to resist; it is memory of the people earlier “saviors” left dead. (Chapter 197)

A revolution with no true revolutionary

Kim declares himself the revolutionary without knowing the hidden role's actual holder, activating the only rebellion protocol the industrial complex permits. Aileen is furious. The scenario's executioners will target civilians and exhaust Guardians who protect the false claimant, while Kim's confidence cannot reimburse dead citizens. Yet the first Night ends without a death, and the public appearance of a Guardian changes the residents' expectations. People who once had no reason to track time begin bringing clocks for repair because they believe tomorrow may arrive. That shift, rather than Kim's bravado alone, persuades Aileen to help build “a revolution without a revolutionary.” (Chapters 200, 202, and 207)

She maps scenario positions, directs civilians against executioners, calls battlefield movements, coordinates Mark and the council, treats the wounded, and oversees evacuation when the Factory makes open fighting impossible. After the duke falls, Kim's exile body begins disintegrating beyond her ability to stabilize it. Aileen nearly identifies herself as the true revolutionary so he can kill her and enter the main scenario, but Kim recognizes the choice and refuses to purchase his survival that way. Liberation leaves her alive to govern the result. He entrusts the industrial complex to Aileen because resistance has always been collective work for her, not a title earned by dealing the final blow. (Chapters 209, 217, 220, and 230)

Physician of bodies and Stories

Aileen continues maintaining Kim's body with Story packs and even performs the induced near-death procedure that lets Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint reach Yoo Joonghyuk. The patient wakes and immediately ignores her orders, a pattern that makes their trust both practical and contentious. She also repairs Uriel's damaged symbolic doll and composes Yoo's treatment after the Demon King Selection, carefully avoiding mismatched Stories that could alter a patient's personality. When Yoo later refuses to wake despite physical recovery, Aileen identifies the problem as psychological shock instead of claiming that technical treatment can compel consciousness. (Chapters 224–228, 276, and 355)

Her most difficult operation begins when Lee Sookyung and Yoo Sangah deteriorate simultaneously and the available Soma and Nectar can initially sustain only one. Aileen states the limit plainly and addresses Kim by modifier when asking for a decision. Additional interventions buy time, but Lee Sookyung's thema has already collapsed. Aileen collects fragmented sentences with a brush, uses star fluid as adhesive, and lends Person Who Repairs the Story to people who understand the patient's identity. Kim can restore only the maternal portion; the wanderers and Han Sooyoung supply the woman he never knew. The surgery succeeds because Aileen recognizes when expertise must make room for relationship knowledge. (Chapters 340–343)

Keeper of the remaining record

After the large scenarios, Aileen remains a civil administrator and medical anchor. She operates the industrial complex's central situation room during the Outer God calamities and treats the forty-nine-percent Kim beside Lee Seolhwa. They cannot identify why his internal structure collapses, and as the Star Stream fades, Aileen's Story-based powers weaken with it. When the company chooses Group Regression, she stays behind with the people entrusted with the complex. The choice continues her revolutionary principle: someone must maintain the world being saved while others pursue its absent reader. (Chapters 459, 522, 526, and 528)

When Kim returns from the 1865th turn, Aileen is summoned with physicians and Story Experts, but preparation still cannot guarantee restoration. Later she extracts Story fragments from his sleeping body to help Han Sooyoung fill gaps in the manuscript, converting medical access into evidence for another kind of reconstruction. Her urgent call in the final chapter accompanies the renewed movement of Stories around the world. The corpus leaves her alive; it suggests the system may be responding again, but does not confirm that every former treatment power has fully returned. (Chapters 541, 550–551)

Appearance and personality

The corpus gives no stable hair or clothing description. Aileen has white skin visibly wounded when a noble strikes her, wears glasses during her later administration, and looks haggard from the work of running the liberated complex. Her expressions carry most of the characterization: she maintains a calm smile while frightened, turns pale at the scale of Kim's Stories, and works through prolonged surgery until sweat covers her forehead. A small brush, Story packs, bandages, and clinical machinery become more consistent visual markers than a fixed outfit. (Chapters 195–196, 251, and 342)

Aileen is quick-witted, skeptical, and difficult to intimidate after she understands a problem. She can accept Kim's coins before Jang Hayoung reveals him, keep a dangerous patient restrained, and challenge a newly powerful Demon King over medical negligence. Her caution never means neutrality toward oppression; she has refused the duke repeatedly and organized resistance for years. What she rejects is the idea that courage excuses avoidable casualties. As a physician she applies the same ethic by distinguishing repairable structure, scarce resources, personal meaning, and conditions she cannot cure. (Chapters 195–200, 220, and 355)

Abilities, attributes, and stories

Story Expert

Aileen's rare attribute lets her inspect how Stories compose an incarnation body or soul. She can identify fragments colliding like an immune response, estimate a patient's strength from visible legendary Stories, assess stability, and locate a damaged thema. The reading is structural rather than omniscient. Hidden Stories may remain unknown, psychological refusal is not equivalent to bodily damage, and the core meaning of another person can require memories held by family or companions. This limit is why her diagnosis becomes a framework for collective treatment rather than a claim to know the patient completely. (Chapters 196–197, 307, 342, and 355)

Person Who Repairs the Story

During major surgery Aileen gathers loose sentences with a brush, restores their context, and uses star fluids such as Soma and Nectar as adhesive. The Story Person Who Repairs the Story can temporarily dwell in another person's hand, allowing someone close to the patient to reconstruct a damaged theme. The process requires medical staff, magic power, scarce materials, time, and a functioning Star Stream. Incorrectly joined Stories can cause severe side effects; when the system fades, the technique weakens and cannot simply be repeated for every later collapse. (Chapters 276, 340–343, and 526)

Magic engineering and watchmaking

As a Lindberg magic engineer, Aileen builds and repairs precision devices, understands Story-powered machinery, and applies the same craft to symbolic bodies and Story weapons. Her clocks recreate the timekeeping of a lost home and later become civic objects through which Syswitz residents reclaim expectation of a future. She can also design communication equipment and mend Uriel's doll, but creation still needs time, parts, and an intelligible mechanism. The text does not support treating the title Watchmaker as an unrestricted ability to control time. (Chapters 195, 207, 228, and 504)

Civil and medical administration

Aileen organizes secrecy oaths, council meetings, scenario intelligence, battlefield calls, evacuation, hospital teams, and central situation monitoring. This is not a supernatural combat technique, but it is the infrastructure that lets individual feats become durable survival. Her authority depends on citizen trust and collaboration with Mark, the council, and medical staff; it cannot overpower a Demon Realm duke by decree. By the epilogue, administration is also a limit on her mobility: she remains with the complex when others regress because the community still requires a responsible keeper. (Chapters 197, 202, 217, 230, 459, and 528)

Relationships

• Kim Dokja: A suspicious patient becomes Aileen's revolutionary ally and most persistently noncompliant case. She repeatedly enables his plans, but insists that trust does not make his body disposable.
• Jang Hayoung: Aileen protects Jang Hayoung from nobles, gives him a home in the council's movement, and relies on his strength during liberation. Their sharp exchanges coexist with long familiarity and care.
• Mark Javier and the Civil Council: They are her co-organizers, Guardians, medics, and administrators. Their presence keeps the revolution from becoming a victory credited only to Kim or the hidden revolutionary.
• Lee Seolhwa: Their medical specialties complement one another in later treatment. Both are candid that Story medicine depends on a system that is disappearing.
• Lee Sookyung and Yoo Sangah: Their simultaneous collapse forces Aileen to name a brutal resource shortage. Her surgery creates a route forward, while each patient's community supplies identity knowledge no physician can manufacture.
• Yoo Joonghyuk: Aileen treats his severe physical injuries and later recognizes that his refusal to awaken is a wound of the mind beyond ordinary Story-pack repair.

Items

Aileen works with Story packs, patient-stability machinery, repair brushes, bandages, and star fluids including Soma and Nectar. These are consumable medical tools rather than permanent personal artifacts. The pocket watch she makes for Yoo Joonghyuk embodies Lindberg craft and the industrial complex's remembered time, but no required generated item inventory is assigned to her.