Mortal Engines part 1 - designing my character

As part of our character project we were told to read the book "Mortal Engines" which paints a picture of a world where cities move across land and sea and constantly battle eachother with the victor effectively eating the loser. I have to admit I dont often read childrens books, the closest I came to was probably the Harry Potter series (though lucky for me they came packaged with "adult covers"). But I found the story refreshing and the world Philip Reeve painted to be fascinating.I could tell there was a steampunk aesthetic to the characters, so I decided to pursue this idea by collecting enough reference material to begin to form ideas.