Characters / Aurora Cycle

The Squad

• Broken Ace: Outside of Tyler (who is just an Ace), they are all technically capable in their respective fields, but have terrible personality issues that lead to squads avoiding them like the plague.
• Fatal Flaw: They each have a flaw they have to get over throughout the story.
  • Tyler struggles wtih To Be Lawful or Good. This causes problems early on.
  • Scarlett must learn to apply herself.
  • Aurora carries feelings of sadness and regret over being separated permanently from her family.
  • Finn is full of bitterness and insecurities revolving around his disability.
  • Zila is afraid to let herself feel.
  • Kal has trouble opening up about his family.

Tyler

Tyler Jones

Squad 312's Alpha, and Scarlett's twin brother. The series starts with him going out on a flight to clear his head, only to find Aurora's ship.

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• The Ace: He graduated at the top of his class.
• Amazon Chaser: He has 2 love interests. One is Cat, the Ace Pilot who is more likely to start throwing hands than apply diplomacy. The other is Kal's sister, Saedii, who treats killing people like getting a bite to eat. Tyler describes the Syldrathi warrior as such..
  "She's beautiful. Fierce. Brilliant. Ruthless. This girl is like no one i've ever known."
• Battle Couple: With Saedii.
• The Captain: He is the Alpha of his squad.
• Eye Scream: Loses an eye nearing the end of book 3. He also loses it in the alternate timeline.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Syldrathi on his mother's side.
• Has a Type: He tends to go for the more violent females.
• The Leader: The members of the Aurora Academy's Alpha stream are trained to be this. Tyler was the top-scoring graduate in his year.
• Mr. Fanservice: It's mentioned over and over that he's really handsome and a hunk. It's probably because his mom was Syldrathi.
• To Be Lawful or Good: His dilemma in the first book. He eventually chooses the latter.

Scarlett

Scarlett Jones

Squad 312's Face, and Tyler's twin sister.

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• Beta Couple: With Fin. They're the second-most prominent pair after Auri and Kal.
• Big-Breast Pride: Scarlett has magnificent breasts, and is very fond of them.
• Birds of a Feather: Will do anything for her family and is highly empathetic, so off course she would end up with the guy who is all about family and has a Hidden Heart of Gold.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Her instructors used to write down that she would be something truly special "if she applied herself". Once the squad is separated from Aurora Academy and they're forced to get over their issues and get things done, Scarlett shows her true brilliance.
• The Face: She is the Face of her squad, acting as a diplomat.
• Good Bad Girl: Enjoys having sex, deliberately uses her attractiveness to manipulate people, is described as having slept with most of her Astrography class, and is also one of the kindest characters in the series, caring for her entire squad like they're family.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Syldrathi on her mother's side.
• Lady Killer In Love: Gender-flipped version. She's had plenty of boyfriends, but considered them unimportant and boring. Fin falls for her in book 1, she ends up getting feelings for Fin in book 2 and by book 3 she acknowledges that she has found true love with him.
• Meaningful Name: Her name matches her hair.
• Omniglot: She speaks four languages.
• Really Gets Around: Has had at least fifty different boyfriends. None of those relationships lasted longer than seven weeks. Until she falls for Fin. In the epilogue, set a year after the main events of the trilogy, they are still together.
• Show Some Leg: Deliberately uses sex appeal to distract people several times. One example is during the bank infiltration on Emerald City where she wears skin-tight red PVC and a corset and pretends to be a dominatrix, seriously flustering both the bank manager and Kal, her extremely reluctant and equally scantily-clad "pet".
• The Social Expert: What makes her such an excellent Face. She knows people inside and out, even if she's just met them. Something she inherited from her Waywalker Syldrathi mother.
• Statuesque Stunner: She is six foot tall and considered exceptionally attractive, fitting for somebody who's half Syldrathi.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: Sometimes stores useful items in her bra, including money and the key to a spaceship.

Zero

Catherine "Cat" Brannok

Squad 312's Ace. She was the best in the academy, but refused any other Alpha when Tyler was late for the Draft.

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• Ace Pilot: The role of the Aces in Aurora Legion squads. Cat's nickname is "Zero" for the number of targets she missed in training.
• Boyish Short Hair: She has her hair cut in a fauxhawk.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Is a factor in her lengthy delay in accepting Auri's mission.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Cat Brannock isn't called "Catherine" very often, if at all.
• Vasquez Always Dies: The most aggressive woman on the team and also the only one who doesn't survive the first book.

Auri

Aurora Jie-Lin O'Malley

One of the original colonists for Octavia, an early attempt at human exploration. Her ship was lost in the Fold for over two hundred years before Tyler found her.

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• Alternate Identity Amnesia: Routinely does not remember what happens during her superpowered state, though she progressively gets better.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Aurora spent 220 years in suspended animation aboard the Hadfield when it was lost in the Fold before Tyler rescued her.
• Official Couple: With Kal. She ends up taking his secrecy about his father the absolute hardest.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Spends about 6 months with Kal in a different dimension. In the otherworld less than a day has passed.

Fin

Finian de Karran de Seel

Squad 312's Gearhead. He would have been top of his class, except for his abrasive personality and tendency to break protocol to "improve" systems.

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• Can't Act Perverted Toward a Love Interest: Nearing the end of book 1 he realizes he's genuinely falling for Scarlett and he drops the perverted attitude when it comes to her.
• Deadpan Snarker: Every other sentence he says is sarcastic.
• Disabled Snarker: Has nerve damage, muscle weakness and impaired mobility, and wears an exosuit to help with movement. And again, is incredibly snarky. His sarcasm is designed to hide his insecurities.
• The Engineer: Fin is Squad 312's Gearhead, which serves as this. He is also a Gadgeteer Genius and Techno Wizard.
• Extreme Omnisexual Fin expresses attraction to individuals of multiple genders and species.
• Fictional Disability: Has muscle weakness and nerve damage leading to impaired mobility, due to surviving the fictional Lysergia Plague.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: It's buried under mountains of snark and insecurities, but he is probably the most empathetic and kind team member outside of Scarlett. It ends up winning the latter's heart.
• Non-Action Guy: Fin has mobility impairments due to an illness in his childhood and has to wear an exosuit that helps him handle regular gravity, so he usually stays out of the front-line fighting. He does, however, happen to be a pretty good shot regardless. The more he starts to fall for Scarlett, the more he takes action.

Kal

Kaliis Idraban Gilwraeth

Squad 312's Tank. As a Syldrathi Warbreed, he has many problems with absolutely everyone around him.

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• The Big Guy: As a Tank, Kal serves as this for his squad. As a member of the Syldrathi Warbreed Cabal, he's good at what he does.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Calls Caersen out for all of his terrible parenting, closed-mindedness, selfish and idiotic behaviour, while pointing to the madman's partially-Terran granddaughter, Lae. Caersen finally decides to do what is right and sacrifices himself so Auri and Kal can make it back to stop the Ra'haam.
• Enemy Within: Kal routinely refers to his bloodlust as such and seems to be in a constant struggle to control it.
• Idiot Ball: The majority of book 2's drama could have been avoided had he simply told the team about his father being the Starslayer. It was obviously difficult to say, but hardly impossible. The team might have mistrusted him for a while, but they wouldn't have tossed him out. Furthermore the team could have known about Saedii's hunt for him and the Starslayer's Trigger.
• Mystical White Hair: All male Syldrathi have this.
• Single-Target Sexuality: A Syldrathi trait where they imprint on an individual who normally becomes their soul mate. In his case: Auri.
• Space Elves: Syldrathi have pointy ears, silver hair and purple eyes, resulting in a rather elven appearance. Auri refers to him by multiple The Lord of the Rings characters.
• Warrior Prince: His father is in practice The Emperor of the Syldrathi, with all the political and military power that entails. Kal himself was born and bred to fight. Do the math.

Zila

Zila Madran

Squad 312's Brain. Easily the smartest person in the Legion, she is terrible with people, and known for performing experiments practically at random. Also, she really likes her disruptor pistol.

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• Big Good: The true founder of the Aurora Academy and the person responsible for putting the squad on the path to defeat the Ra'haam. Adams and de Stoy were following her plan.
• Black and Nerdy: She is described as having dark brown skin and is Squad 312's Science Officer.
• Broken Bird: So much so that she verges on Emotionless Girl.
• Child Prodigy: Completed her high-school equivalency at age six.
• Dark and Troubled Past: As a child, witnessed the murders of everybody on the spaceship she grew up on, including her parents, fully aware that they had only been killed because their murderers were searching for her.
• Drives Like Crazy: When asked to lose the people tailing them, Zila calmly asks the squad to secure their safety harnesses.
  The airvan screeches into Gamma Promenade in a spray of sparks, the turbines screaming like Rigellian opera singers. Choking black fumes are pouring out of the engine bay, several traffic cones are embedded in our ventilation intakes, and we’re trailing a large smoking banner that reads HAPPY 50TH LIFEDAY, FRUMPLE in Chellerian.
  Tyler: (muttered) Maker's breath, Zila.
  Kal: (respectfully) A formidable performance.
  Auri: (groaning) You should design roller coasters.
• Emotionless Girl: Due to severe childhood trauma, she believes she will be better off without emotions. She forces herself to feel nothing for twelve years.
  Zila: I am not... feeling nothing.
• For Science!: Zila got reprimands for things like locking two classmates in a lab to test a serum she developed for a virus, and shooting another classmate repeatedly with a stun-gun. This seems to be her primary motive for a lot of things. She conducts another experiment on Auri without warning.
• Founder of the Kingdom: Is the secret true founder of the Aurora Academy. She stayed 200 years in the past to make sure that her wife, Admiral Nari Kim, would build the academy alongside Battle Leader Karran. All the while guiding the process from the shadows. By the end of the series, she gets an enormous golden statue between the two known founders.
• Happily Married: While it's never outright stated if they married, she meets and falls in love with Nari when she's 18 and they're still together when she's in her 70s. It seems VERY likely they married.
• Harmful to Minors: She was six when she witnessed the murders of multiple people, including her parents.
• Has a Type: Likes women who aren't tall.
• Irony: Is the only full-blood, unaltered human on the team and she has never been to Earth. She eventually makes it to Earth...200 years in the past.
  • The cold, clinical Emotionless Girl ends up founding the Aurora Academy, the place that brings people from every part of the galaxy together.
• One-Paragraph Chapter: All but one of the chapters from Zila's POV in the first book, with the sole exception still only two pages. She gets a little more talkative from the second book onwards, but her chapters still tend to be shorter than everyone else's.
• The Quiet One: Zila doesn't talk much unless delivering information to her squadmates. This is extended into her POV chapters which are very abridged.
• Safety in Indifference: After the murders of everybody she grew up with, she believes for over a decade that she is better off without feelings.
• Teen Genius: Aged eighteen at the beginning of the story, and probably the most intelligent person in the entire Legion.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: While hiding in the Andarael's air vents, she has flashbacks to hiding in the air vents of the Janeway as a child and witnessing multiple murders from there.

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