Glossary of characters
These are notes for the different characters.
vic-taf [Arthur]
Arthur is the point of view protagonist.
Employment
They are a programmer at large (the official term is "self-directed maintenance programmer", but everyone calls them programmers at large). This means that the ship employs them to mostly work on whatever they want, with the understanding that:
- It will mostly be "maintenance" work dedicated to keeping things running smoothly.
- The majority of it should be useful in some way. Individual actions aren't monitored for utility, but there are occasional reviews to ensure that the programmer at large is more of a net positive contribution than they would be in another area.
Arthur is generally considered to be pretty good at their role, and is in no real danger of being removed from their role.
Most programmers at large, including Arthur, tend to grow a speciality area over time. It's not enforced, it's just that there is so much to know about the ship that it's hard to make progress without some degree of specialization.
Arthur's speciality is plumbing.
Arthur would be the first to tell you (which if you were Crew they wouldn't need to), plumbing is important. It's also complicated. The ship is a giant mess of pipes, pumps, heat pumps, recycling units, reservoirs, etc.
It also has a large number of responsibilities - shielding, provisioning of water, heat redistribution, etc.
Any of these items could be broken. Generally replumbing your ship while in transit is considered a bad idea, so the ship is designed to survive up to about 30% loss or damage while still maintaining full functionality, and can maintain sufficient functionality to keep a skeleton crew active for most realistic damage profiles up to total.
All of this is controlled by a bewilderingly complex mess of overlapping and redundant software, from many different origins and many different suppliers. Very little is ever removed from the plumbing system, but new checks and redundancies are added almost constantly.
Although plumbing is important, it's also fairly unglamorous. It mostly works well enough that people who should know better can forget about it entirely, and when it breaks it's more annoying than anything else. People know in the abstract that it's vital, and respect people who work on it, but they're quite happy to let someone else do it. As a result although there are at least a dozen people whose primary employed responsibility is maintaining the plumbing software, but Arthur is the only programmer at large who specializes it.
Personality
Still somewhat undefined but here's what I know so far:
- Arthur is very detail oriented.
- We would probably consider Arthur to be at least somewhat on the autism spectrum (though the crew does not have any concept that maps directly onto that)
- Arthur is not notably creative or brilliant - they're maybe in the upper third of crew intelligence wise, but they're definitely not in the top 10%. However the Crew are notably intelligent to what we could consider baseline, so this does easily put them in the top 10% for us, probably even the top 5%. Nevertheless they're no genius.
- Arthur has fairly bad social anxiety, which is a significant problem for them in the tightly knit communal culture of the crew.
- Arthur has a somewhat acerbic sense of humour when they relax enough to show it.
Appearance
Arthur has fairly typical crew appearance - small, straight black hair that they wear quite short, brownish skin, slightly curvy in form but in good physical shape without much in the way of fat. We would parse Arthur as female presenting - somewhat more than we would most Crew but not that much.
If pressed to put Arthur into an Earth-compatible category based only on an image we would probably pigeonhole Arthur as a moderately attractive middle eastern woman in her early 20s. (Most of these are wrong - Arthur is in their late 30s in Earth years, is agender like essentially all of the rest of the crew, has no specific ethnic background other than "Crew" which is a blend of basically everything, and all of the crew would parse as moderately attractive thanks to many generations of selective breeding, a semi-enforced physical fitness regime, and excellent and enforced healthcare).
zod-bim [Ghost Walker 5000, Sam]
Sam is one of Arthur's closer friends. In large part because Arthur can trust Sam to just say so if they accidentally piss them off.
Employment
Sam is a primarily a programmer at arms (Subspeciality: Tactics. Programmers at arms are responsible for the combat software for the ship. Sam tends to be one of the ones called on to improvise things on the fly during actual combat, though they do their share of maintenance too). They're also a weapons specialist and sometimes consult on asteroid mining operations where a less delicate approach is required (this is not something the ship has to do often - they prefer to rely on local cultures for resource acquisition).
Sam also acts as a Krav Maga instructor and general physical fitness trainer.
(note: Shipboard Krav Maga doesn't actually have much resemblance to 21st century Krav Maga and is instead a blend of a lot of different historical martial arts and modern variations. It's called Krav Maga because the authors of Lesbian Space Pirates thought that sounded cool)
Personality
- Slightly scary levels of aesthetic appreciation for blowing things up.
- Probably rather brilliant in areas of speciality, but doesn't like showing it off.
- Likes terrible VR shows a bit too much.
- Tends to tease.
- Very enthusiastic.
- Extremely self-confident, but mostly in a way that they don't think about it very much.
Appearance
Sam is slightly taller and more muscular than is typical for crew, but still short by our standards. Parses as slightly more androgynous than is typical for crew. Naturally has "frizzy" hair which it annoys them to deal with, so has a depilated scalp (this is a permanent but trivially reversible procedure).
In Earth terms parses as a black person of indeterminate gender, probably in their mid thirties (similar caveats to above apply. Sam is actually early 50s).