Void Drifters
Ready-to-play characters from the book.
Davan Kel is a broad-shouldered man in his early forties, perpetually squinting into something that needs fixing. He talks to machines more than to people, not because he dislikes people, but because machines respond predictably. He bought a partial stake in the Ember Drift two years ago because it was the first thing he had ever owned a share of, and he intends to keep it running until the hull gives out. Whatever that takes.
Senna Vael does not talk much during transit, but she talks constantly during maneuvers: terse, precise narration of what she is doing and what the ship is about to experience. Crew who have flown with her long enough learn to read her tone rather than her words. Calm narration means routine. Clipped narration means she is working. Silence means everyone should brace. She grew up inside Irnan Directorate space and she understands the Irnan system from the inside, which gives her respect for its competence and no illusions about what it costs.
Yessica Morn is quiet in the way that expensive equipment is quiet: composed, maintained, and capable of producing a very large result on very short notice. She does not perform threat. She does not need to. She has been on six ships in eight years, and if you ask her why she keeps moving, she will tell you that she has not found one yet that was worth stopping for. She is reconsidering the Ember Drift.
Corin Ash wears good clothes, carries a name that may not be original, and has the particular stillness of someone who has learned to let other people fill silence. He is patient, professionally warm, and difficult to read. The crew trusts him because he has never once let the crew down in a social situation, and because the one time someone asked directly about his past, he gave a detailed and entirely plausible answer that explained nothing at all.
Rhi does not introduce herself with a last name. On ships where people ask, she says the coil-name system does not translate and leaves it there. She is tall and still in the particular Hazren way: not watchful in any visible sense, just present in a room the way a warm radiator is present. She became a field medic because a coil-hall she traveled through needed one and she was the person there. She stayed a medic because it turned out she was built for it: patient, precise, and capable of holding someone together under conditions that would break most people's concentration entirely.