Characters found in the Wayfarers series.
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Crew of the Wayfarer
Ashby
Captain Ashby Santoso.
The human captain of the Wayfarer.
- Ambiguously Brown: Described as having tight black curls and amber skin - his ethnically ambiguous appearance is typical of an Exodan (someone who is descended from the refugees aboard the Exodus Fleet.)
- Command Roster: The Captain.
- Doesn't Like Guns: Like most Exodans, Ashby is a pacifist and refuses to have guns on his ship.
- Interspecies Romance: Is in a long-distance relationship with an Aeluon called Pei. It's not a problem for humans, but it's taboo for Aeluons so they have to be discreet.
- Platonic Life-Partners: With Sissix, his best friend and Number Two, and the member of the crew he's closest to.
Sissix
Sissix Seshkethet
The Aandrisk pilot.
- Command Roster: Ace Pilot, and she's also the Number Two to Ashby.
- Cuddle Bug: Rosemary at first finds her very touchy, then when she goes home to her family realizes that Sissix was significantly holding back. She considers it physically painful that she can't touch other crewmembers as much as she likes, which plays into her relationship with Rosemary.
- Family of Choice: Rosemary discovers about halfway through the book that the Wayfarer and its crew is officially listed in the Aandrisk database as her feather family.
- Interspecies Romance: Starts one with Rosemary about two-thirds of the way through the book at the latter's suggestion. It's an open relationship since Aandrisks are not a monogamous species, but Rosemary is totally fine with this.
- Lizard Folk: Given that she's an Aandrisk, she looks like a lizard to humans (however it's made clear that the term Lizard is considered a slur.)
- Nice Girl: One of her establishing moments is spending nearly an hour cuddling a rashek (an Aandrisk who has been socially ostracized) who she doesn't even know. She has her abrasive side, especially towards rude people, but she is deeply compassionate. When being legally bound to Corbin to make him into a GC citizen, she's annoyed, but never once considers turning it down.
- Platonic Life-Partners: With Ashby, to the point that she chose the Wayfarer and its crew as her feather family because of him. She refers to him as "the best friend I've ever had."
Kizzy
Kizzy Shao
The ship's mech tech.
- Ambiguously Brown: She's described as having black hair, a flat nose and dark olive skin - i.e. "undeniably Exodan."
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: She's weird, overly excitable, has strange habits, and seems to be in her own world half the time. Yet when she's called upon to do a fix job, she does it, and she does it well.
- Command Roster: Wrench Wench - she mainly works on the mechanical aspects of the ship's systems.
- Genki Girl: One of her first acts is to greet Rosemary, a complete stranger, with a massive hug.
- Like Brother and Sister / Platonic Life-Partners: Has some relationship of this type with Jenks, the member of the crew she's closest to, and whom she considers to be the brother she always wanted growing up.
- Unaffected by Spice: She adores spicy food to the point of Hot Sauce Drinking.
Jenks
Jenks
The ship's comp tech.
- Command Roster: Mr. Fixit - he primarily works with the computer systems but is always on hand to help out Kizzy.
- Like Brother and Sister / Platonic Life-Partners:
- Has some mixture of this with Kizzy, the member of the crew he's closest to alongside Lovey. He refers to her as his "best friend in the whole galaxy".
- Also seems to form a brotherly relationship with Rosemary as time goes on. He shows some major Big Brother Instinct towards her when the Akarak Space Pirates attack the Wayfarer, and he's the first person she tells about her full backstory and why she was trying to escape her former life.
- Robosexual: He's in love with Lovey. The feeling is reciprocated.
Corbin
Artis Corbin
A human, misanthropic algaeist who takes care of the ship's day to day source of fuel.
- Command Roster: The Scientist, though he is singularly dedicated to maintaining the algae stores.
- Jerkass: Easily the most abrasive member of the crew.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Once he's rescued by the crew, he reevaluates his relationships with them and comes to genuinely care for them. To the point where he cures Ohan against his will after Lovey dies, since he doesn't want the crew to lose another member.
- No Social Skills: Mostly because he was raised solely by his father (who had no social skills either) on an isolated research station.
- Tomato in the Mirror: When the Quelin border patrol do a routine search of the ship, they test everyone's blood. When they get to Corbin, some unknown result makes them immediately arrest him. Not a great way to find out that you're an illegal clone of the man who raised you.
Dr. Chef
Dr. Chef
The ship's doctor and the ship's chef.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Aside from his appearance (described as being like an otter crossed with a gecko made to walk like a six legged caterpillar) he has six sets of vocal cords, meaning he sounds like several people talking at once.
- Bizarre Alien Sexes: Like all Grum, he began life as a female (and had several daughters during this time) before transitioning to male after he'd passed childbearing age. He will eventually become neither male nor female.
- Combat Medic: His role in his species' civil war. He left after watching his last daughter die.
- Command Roster: The Medic and The Heart
- Last of His Kind: His species, the Grum, have only a few hundred survivors after a brutal, generations-long civil war.
- Meaningful Name:
- His chosen name, Dr. Chef, is self-explanatory.
- His given name, which is unpronounceable to most species, starts off with "A Grove Of Trees Where Friends Meet To Watch The Moons Align During A Sunset In Mid-Autumn..." and includes his mother's name and the town where he was born.
- The Unpronouncable: His given name takes roughly a minute to say and makes full use of his six sets of vocal cords.
Ohan
Ohan
A Sianat pair consisting of a parasite called The Whisperer and its host, they are the ship's navigator.
- Command Roster: The Navigator - only when the crew are tunneling. As a Sianat Pair, they are the only beings capable of understanding space-time well enough to navigate sub-space.
- I Choose to Stay: After Corbin forcibly cures him of the Whisperer against his will in the novel's denouement, he acknowledges that he should, according to Sianat customs, depart the Wayfarer to go live in the Heretics' colony for Solitary Sianats. He'd rather stay with his friends, though, so he decides not to leave.
- Nice Guy: The Quiet One they may be, but they're always flawlessly polite and amiable to their crewmates, and are even willing to accept being abducted and sold off by Space Pirates if it means saving everyone else's lives. Even after Corbin cures him against his will, he still seems to have forgiven him for it by the end, and chooses to remain with the Wayfarer crew at the end, even joining his friends for meals from now on.
- The Quiet One: Like most Sianats, they keep to themself and usually only leave their room when they're needed to Navigate. It's not out of rudeness or being aloof, though; they're considerate and polite towards their crewmates, and truly do care about them.
- Secretly Dying: Is in the Wane state of their infection from the Whisperer, but for the first half of the story, only Ashby and Dr. Chef know this, until the latter is forced to reveal it to save their life. This is averted by the end, though, when Corbin cures him.
- Terrified of Germs: While this is normal for a Sianat Pair, they never leave the ship for fear of contamination and eat only a bland nutrient paste. He gets over this once he becomes Solitary, and starts eating with the rest of the crew from then on.
- Your Days Are Numbered: As a side effect of the Whisperer, their life-span is shortened to about 30 standards old (Solitary Sianats can live up to 100). No longer true at the end of the book, though, when he becomes Solitary himself.
Lovey
Lovelace
The ship's AI.
- Androids Are People, Too: Everybody except Corbin considers her a being, and Jenks is even in love with her. Her Death of Personality hits them all hard.
- Benevolent A.I.: A kind and loyal crew member.
- Command Roster:
- A variation of Communications Officer and Security Officer; she is the entire Cool Ship given life, and keeping the ship secure and under surveillance while communicating with the members of her crew are a few major parts of her job.
- Also acts as The Heart, since she's always present as the mainframe of the ship the crew lives on. Her death devastates almost all of them.
- Death of Personality / Kill the Cutie: The Toremi attack on the Wayfarer damages her beyond repair, to the point that the crew has to perform a hard reset to have any chance of saving her. Unfortunately, this erases her memory banks and "kills" the personality that she developed over time, reverting her back to her original, factory-default personality and leaving her with no memories of her love for Jenks or past time with her crewmates.
- Grew Beyond Their Programming: Over time, her experiences with the crew have given her a unique personality and she is considered an individual.
- Named After Somebody Famous: Her out-of-the-box name is an homage to the first programmer, Ada Lovelace.
- Spaceship Girl: Everyone except Corbin considers her as a crewmember rather than just the ship’s AI. Jenks even has feelings for her and wishes she had an actual body.
Rosemary
Rosemary Harper
The newly joined human clerk who's not who she says she is.
- Badass Bureaucrat: She gets quite a lot of mileage out of her skill at paperwork.
- Command Roster: Cunning Linguist, to an extent. She studied to be a clerk on Mars and had very limited interactions with non-human sapients, so her knowledge is theoretical and limited. But the languages she does know, she knows very well. Her knowledge of the widely-misunderstood Akaraks' culture saves a lot of trouble during their encounter with the space pirates.
- Interspecies Romance: Eventually enters an open relationship with Sissix. It's an open relationship mainly because of the polyamorous nature of Aandrisks, which Rosemary has no problem with.
- Nice Girl: Very kind to everyone on the Wayfarer (even Corbin, who often isn't that nice to her), and very much wants them to like her. She's also quite attentive to their feelings and needs, especially Sissix. One of the major reasons she offers an open relationship with Sissix is due to realizing how lonely and starved for physical affection the latter must be on the Wayfarer's long journeys, and offering to couple with her to alleviate it.
- Riches to Rags: Grew up extremely wealthy on Mars, but decided to start over after her father was arrested for illegally selling bioweapons to both sides of the Toremi civil war.
- Single Woman Seeks Good Woman: It's implied that she first starts developing feelings for Sissix after seeing her kindness to another Aandrisk who was lonely and touch-starved thanks to her disorder.
Residents of Port Coriol
Pepper
Pepper/Jane 23
An old friend of Jenks, she's an escaped human slave who runs a tech shop on Port Coriol.- Expendable Clone: Owl has to explain to her that the reason that little girls were bred to sort through dangerous industrial waste is that little girls are cheaper to replace than robots.
- Meaningful Name: Chose the name Pepper after discovering her love of seasoning.
- Online Alias: 'Pinch' ... as in 'a pinch of pepper'.
- Raised by Robots: Firstly by the brutal factory automatons called Mothers, but then by Owl, who does everything she can to nurture and protect Pepper, without having a physical presence.
- Toxic Friend Influence: Unintentionally to Sidra, as she pressured her to leave the Wayfarer and repeatedly ignores Sidra insisting that she doesn't want to be in the body kit, telling her to just "get over it" whenever Sidra confides in her how uncomfortable and unhappy she is. It's eventually revealed that this was residual trauma over losing Owl, and she comes to realize how badly she's been acting.
Blue
Blue/Laurian
A fellow escapee from the same colony as Pepper. They are romantically involved.- Meaningful Name: An artist that chose the name Blue.
- Speech Impediment: He has a mild stutter, however, when he met Pepper, it was so bad that he could hardly speak. It's all but said that this was the reason he was assigned to monitor a junkyard factory at a young age, as he had "failed" in his purpose to become a politician.
Sidra
Sidra
An instance of the Lovelace AI program who lives in an illegal body kit.- Bizarre Alien Psychology: Her main arc is learning to reconcile her status as a shipwide AI and mobile android, as she's unused to things like not having access to Linkings, an infinite memory, or having a body at all. It's resolved when she manages to combine the kit, a number of remote robots, a close connection to another AI, and a series of memory banks into her own unique system that gives her everything she wants.
- Cannot Tell a Lie: Since Pepper hasn't found out how to rewrite her honesty protocol, she has to be very careful with Exact Words. Sidra eventually manages to do it herself.
- Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: She lost her purpose file in order to go to the body kit, and spend most of her book trying to find something to fill it in. She finally has an epiphany when she realizes that all sapients are like this.
- Meaningful Name: Seemingly averted - Pepper told her to choose a normal Exodan name for herself and she just liked the sound of Sidra. But Sidra is Arabic for 'of the stars', fitting for someone 'born' in space.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Her body is very realistic, to the point of having fake blood. She is able to breathe, eat, drink, sleep and have sex, though she doesn't need to do any of these things.
- Sense Freak: An unusual example. Rather than installing taste or smell, her creator made sensory analogues to different things, so that mek gives her an image and sound of a kitten purring, a drink gives the image of a mountain river or a spider weaving, etc. Sidra loves it and makes a point to taste and smell as many new things as possible. She even winds up opening a bar at the end.
Tak
Tak
An Aeluon tattoo artist that Sidra befriends.- Bizarre Alien Psychology: Xe mentions that xe had trouble dealing with making moving tattoos on other beings, as Aeluons use color moving across skin as a way to communicate.
- Bizarre Alien Sexes: They are a shon, which means they regularly change between male and female. The book uses the pronouns she/he/xe depending on their current state.
- Secret-Keeper: Xe finds out that Sidra is an AI after a tattoo job goes wrong.
- Tragic Dropout: Subverted. Xe left xyr studies in history when xe ran out of money, but xe loves xyr new job at tattooing and considers it another form of history.
Owl
Owl
The AI installed in the abandoned shuttlecraft that a young Pepper shelters in.- Benevolent A.I.: She essentially raises Pepper from the age of 10 to 18.
- Spaceship Girl: Unlike Lovey, her ship features monitors and she frequently projects a face onto them. It's stated that such avatars fell out of fashion as it was easier to get people to buy new A.I.s when they weren't as attached to the old ones.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: She was unceremoniously confiscated when Pepper found civilization, and is only found near the final third of the book in a museum. Sidra manages to smuggle her out in her own body kit, and Owl becomes AI for the bar that Sidra runs.
Residents of the Exodus Fleet
Tessa
Tessa Santoso
Ashby's sister. She lives with their father and her children Aya (aged 9) and Ky (aged 2).- Job-Stealing Robot: Her job as a salvage supervisor is eventually made redundant when an AI is introduced. Due to the fleet's socialist economy, she has not lost a source of income but she is still upset about the loss of routine and the prospect of retraining.
- Law of Inverse Fertility: Aya was an accident after a one-night stand. It worked out so well that Tessa and George eventually decided to tie the knot and then later have Ky deliberately.
- Long-Distance Relationship: Only sees her husband George for about six months a year, as he works as an asteroid miner. They seem to be loving despite this, and even trust each other enough to have trysts while they're away.
- Mama Bear: When she discovers that a group of school bullies locked Aya in a cargo drone and threatened to pop the hatch, it takes a great deal of self-control for her to cling to Exodan morality and not lash out at everyone involved.
- Stranger in a Familiar Land: One without any travel involved. Tessa gradually realizes that the Fleet no longer feels like home to her, and that she's only staying because she feels obligated to since everyone else has left. She and the family eventually emigrate to a colony.
Isabel
Isabel Itoh
An elderly archivist, who is currently helping a Harmagian researcher learn about modern Exodan life.- Camera Fiend: She almost always has her hud on so that she can record everything, considering nothing too minor for documentation. She has to be reminded to take it off sometimes and even went to sleep with it once or twice.
- Cool Old Lady: Her and her wife decide to spontaneously go on a notorious rollercoaster-like shuttle ride one evening. She's also the first one to truly understand Kip's need for a purpose, and guides him into his career.
- Grow Old with Me: She and Tamsin have been together for decades and the flame is still going strong.
- Happiness in Minimum Wage: The spirit of the trope, at least, since money is relatively new to the fleet. Isabel has a genuine joie de vivre for everything, even mundane things like recategorizing, dishwashing, and menial chores.
- Tempting Fate: In the prologue, she notes that "big" things rarely happen in the Fleet but she's more than happy to write down little things, saying that it'll be useful someday. Moments later, the Oxomoco suffers a devastating hull breach.
Eyas
Eyas
A caretaker, her job is to perform funeral rites and compost human remains.- Creepy Mortician: Played with, she is not seen as creepy but she is seen as holy and so she struggles to find people who treat her normally.
- Cultural Posturing: When Sawyer asks why he's being assigned to sanitation, Eyas gives him a rather pompous monologue on how any true Exodan would know that taking sanitation shows that they're all equal, and that she has no time for "tourists" like him. Later in the book, she becomes deeply ashamed of how she acted, and decides to start challenging those same views in the Fleet.
- Former Teen Rebel: She had a Gaiist kick as a teen.
- It's All My Fault: A mild case. She blames herself for blowing Sawyer off when she first met him and then ignoring his message, as giving him a better foothold in the Fleet would have saved his life. This inspires her to push for resources for Fleet immigrants, so that nothing like Sawyer happens again.
- Moment Killer: She tried to go to a tryst club on her own homestead once, but the guy she picked had an uncle who recently passed away and she wound up having to talk him through his grief. Afterward, she looks for hook-ups outside her own ship.
- Unfortunate Names: Her parents chose the name 'Eyas', thinking it means a formidable Earthen bird of prey... They were almost right - it means 'baby hawk'.
Kip
Kristofer 'Kip' Madaki
A teenager facing his final exams and struggling to decide what path to take.- And Then What?: For all his bluster about how he wants to get out of the fleet the moment he can, Isabel eventually talks him into realizing that he has no idea what he wants to do when he does leave. While he does leave at her request, he eventually ends up coming back and apprenticing to her.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: He longs for something exciting to happen, like the violent Martian vids he loves so much. Becoming a key witness in a murder case was not what he had in mind.
- Minor with Fake I.D.: Ras pressures him into altering his wrist chip to say that he's 20, so that they can sneak into the ship's host club to drink and have sex. His parents crash the party after the clerk correctly guesses that he's underage.
- Small Town Boredom: He is bored out of his mind in the Fleet and hates every repetitive chore, and views the jobs he can take as simply more chores.
Sawyer
Sawyer Gursky
A grounder of Exodan descent who decides to immigrate to the fleet.- Dark and Troubled Past: His naivete and cheerfulness masks a desperate need to belong, which is what drove him to the Fleet in the first place. After his death, it's revealed that an outbreak of saltlick fever killed his entire family except for him when he was just six years old.
- Heritage Disconnect: He went to the Fleet hoping to find his heritage after his family died. It didn't work out.
- Naïve Newcomer: He hasn't got a clue how the fleet works and no one will take the time to explain it to him. It gets him killed.
- Sacrificial Lion: His death, and the reaction to it, is central to the second half of the book.
- Too Dumb to Live: Played with. One the one hand, opening a sealed door in a vacuum is something anyone born in space would know not to do, and the air rushes out, slams him against the wall, and cracks his skull. On the other, he's not a spacer, so the mistake is understandable if tragic.
Hosts and guests at the Five-Hop One-Stop
Ouloo
Ouloo
The Laru owner of the Five-Hop One-Stop. Speaker
Speaker
An Akarak stocking up on supplies during a stopover on Gora. Roveg
Roveg
A Quelin exile en route to a long-awaited visit to his home planet.- Non-Idle Rich : His work as a sim designer enables his relatively opulent lifestyle, and while he thinks of himself as a "wealthy bastard with more than he deserved", his narrative sims were popular enough to rankle the Quelin Protectorate and got him exiled and he later made the first-ever vacation sim designed for Akarak's brain.
- Token Heroic Orc: All of the Quelin we met in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet were a bunch of speciest bureaucrats fond of police brutality, but Roveg is a friendly guy.
Pei
Tem Gapei Seri
An Aeluon cargo-runner on leave between jobs. Asbhy's partner. Tupo
Tupo
Child of Ouloo, currently helping xyr mother at the Five-Hop One-Stop.- Too Dumb to Live: Went out of xyr way to deliver food to Speaker's shuttle without an oxygen mask just days after Speaker pointed out she doesn't breathe oxygen, and could have died without the cooperation of the entire guests. On the other hand, it's shown that even well-traveled adults weren't aware of that fact.
