Allie

A group shot of the employees of Altair Electronic Service & Repair, a shop in Titan's A-District specializing in bringing old and beloved technology back to life. When business hours are over everyone locks up and goes straight home, there's no moonlight activities taking place at all, no sir. Why, who's asking?

You ever dig up some old piece of hardware, or inherit some old trunk of goods from a relative and you go to open it or start it up and you find out it's locked? And you don't have the key? Or you had the key and it broke inside the lock? Or, well, we're in space here, it could be a digital lock and the combination has long since been forgotten. Time makes fools of us all, but thankfully Altair Electronics employs Nanami, Aoba Systems Android and resident locksmith. Nanami has a very cheerful, gee-whiz sort of attitude about the world, often being like "oh gee, look at that!" just before she pops a busted lock on some old safe like it weren't nothing. When handling a job for a client she's always very privacy-minded, agreeing to pop a lock without opening a safe or a drawer or a lockbox to snoop at what's inside- that's the customer's little treat to discover. Nanami gets along with everyone, she is just remarkably likeable.

Nanami has spent a great deal of time practicing her craft- she doesn't have any innate abilities or programs like other Androids, and she doesn't have any kind of special sensory enhancements, she's just observant and intuitive in her understanding of locks and built her craft the same way any organic locksmith might. The truth is many locks are mostly security theater, and many of the locks that come through Altair's doors are trivial to pop, but the ones that are serious are really serious, and Nanami knows to approach them with care. She likes working with mechanical locks the most, since she can use her ears and her fingertips to have a conversation with the lock, listening to its clicks and the gentle vibration of its movements, but she can manage an electronic lock as well- those types are just looking for a particular signal, it takes a bit of sleuthing to figure out what it is and how to replicate it and you can pop them open easy as pie.

The trickiest of all types of lock to crack are Ganymedean organic locks, which are built out of special root-like plants which use interlocking spiral arms to form a seal that needs to be relaxed with a particular stimuli in order to open up. Ganymedean organic locks are a popular feature on safes meant to hold very valuable things, as they're highly resistant to attacks from digital hackers, Accra droids' data access abilities, Horizon droids with strong Job Cart combinations, Quasar droids with their excellent hearing and mechanically-adept Mercurians, all of which presenting problems for deep-space security manufacturers. Nanami doesn't rely on the innate features of her being, however, so she's pretty good at coaxing these difficult organic locks open the old-fashioned way. Wow! Look at that!

It goes without saying, but the more law-averse among Titan's residents always, always have a use for a good locksmith. Nanami receives the occasional offer to cut in on a job as their lockpick, but she often turns them down; she's not big on adventure and she's not interested in scary car chases or being shot at by angry security. If you happen to abscond with a locked box, however, and she can meet up with you safely, she's inclined to pay you a visit after hours and defeat a security feature for you, for a price. Like her legit business, she'll pop by, pop a lock and pop off without snooping about trying to see what's inside the lock, it's often better not to know!

You do need to have a good reputation for Nanami to trust you enough to lend her secret-menu services after hours. There's a lot of two-bit crooks looking to pop a personal safe lifted from some poor starfarer, and she's not about that. Bank jobs, corporate jobs, casino jobs, industrial jobs; there's circles of professionals who pluck from draconic hoards, thieves who maintain standards that align with the intentions of Altair Electronics' other staff members. Nanami's sweet but she's not naive, she knows exactly what her skillset is useful for and she'll only endeavor to help crooks of noble repute. You've got yourself a voice-sensitive safe from a Callistan prince's highrise suite or a bio-locked briefcase containing some sensitive bit of Quasar Galactic warp current research? Whoops! How'd that just pop open all by itself like that? Ha ha! You all stay out of trouble, I'll see you back at the shop sometime!

Krylg is a Caelian communications technology specialist lending their services to the Altair Electronics cause. If you need to talk to technology, or talk through technology, and that technology is broke, don't throw it out! Take it to Altair and ask for Krylg, they will get your hardware working good as new at a fraction of the cost of replacement. Having a spirited and youthful energy about them, Krylg thrives in the good-vibes atmosphere of the Altair workshop, although they can't help but push Bazrai's buttons sometimes- the Ganymedean can be a bit uptight and self-serious at times, so Krylg will often feign ignorance about a topic to get Bazrai all wound up about correcting their minor little details. Sometimes it's hard to step outside yourself and see if you're acting foolish, so Krylg will happily play the mirror, whether or not Bazrai realizes it. Given the nature of their respective specialties they tend to collaborate a lot on various projects, so Krylg gets a lot of opportunities to tease Bazrai. Roflfox thinks its funny and enjoys the little goofball performances whenever they bust out.

Where Bazrai works with inter-system communications, Krylg's specialty is User-to-Systems interfacing, or handling bits of technology that people will try to talk to, or talk through, to get what they want out of it. Anything from wearable speech-to-text computer systems to interplanetary comm-link telephones falls within Krylg's wheelhouse, but one of the most common pieces of tech people bring into Altair Electronics are their personal phones- it's expensive to keep upgrading these things, and new models don't always have the features someone likes on an older one, so a trip to Altair can help extend the life of a phone significantly. Voice tech can be particularly finnicky, especially across long distances and amidst the signal interference produced by basically everything in a crowded place like Titan Garden; it's easy to take it for granted but when it breaks you'll be glad to have a specialist on hand to repair it.

While Krylg likes working with personal communications technologies, the thing they love most of all is to tamper with relay satellites. Big and lonesome and in the middle of nowhere, a network of satellites connects a string of worlds that can at times be close together and at other times be very, very far away, on the opposite side of Sol. You don't always get to pick which satellites your calls relay through, and depending on who owns them you may have to pay a hefty fee to place an interplanetary call- Titan is a long way away from basically everywhere most of the time, you shouldn't have to get nickel-and-dimed because Quasar Galactic happens to own the relay satellites linking you into and out of the Inner Belt. Krylg hates this, so they opt to do something about it. Their work on comm satellites often intersects with Tia's work on public phone terminal payment bypasses- communication is important, they feel, it should be free to everyone.

A frequent collaborator with Timberwolf R&D, Krylg hires out rides on the Ermine to head up into deep space and make physical modifications to corporate-owned relay satellites, adding modules they created themselves to bypass signal flaggers and route directly to the central communications systems, essentially building a tunnel beneath the tollbooth and routing signals back onto the highway. Timberwolf is a favorite hire due to the Ermine's robotic arms being very useful to pluck them back up out of space when they're done working. When one of these modules is affixed to a satellite, Krylg can install a companion device to a comm-link telephone to handshake with the module and discretely bypass the relay toll systems on the satellites themselves as a call's signal bounces into space. Krylg installs this companion device on many personal commphones.

The trick of getting away with satellite vandalism is to pick when you choose to act. Occasionally reports of xenofauna moving into the Sol system will spread among starfarers who happen to spot the creatures early in their travels, before they invariably find a satellite with tasty ice or salt on it to come have a nibble on. It's not too frequent an occurrence but it happens often enough that Krylg can take advantage on short notice, keeping an ear out for xenofauna reports among Titan's travelers. If you know there's creatures around and you head up to tamper with a satellite, there's plausible deniability if network operators detect an interruption in satellite performance. Bryce and his Timberwolf crew are happy to remain on retainer in case another window to act comes up suddenly- they work pro bono, no fees required, although they have an arrangement to receive Krylg's handshaking companion devices as compensation for their services. As a crew of smugglers having backdoor access to interplanetary comm satellites is more useful than credits, especially to someone like Timberwolf's computer toucher, Kollori. With a little tampering of her own, Kollori can monitor Star Patrol communications and pick up fair warning when the heat is wise to one of their smuggling ops, then route their comms somewhere less useful than Star Patrol headquarters, buying the crew enough time to reroute their course and stay off the grid. Krylg doesn't ask questions of Bryce, they're just happy to bring toll-free phone calls to the good people of Titan. It is a humble but noble cause.

The big boy of the Altair crew, Kaliq is a Callistan technician specializing in mechanical restoration of antiques. Affable and well-grounded, Kaliq is easy to get along with and doesn't hold grudges. "It just ain't worth the troubles, brother". Kaliq smokes filtered aromatics, a style of Jovian cigarette that releases a more pleasant, incense-like scent than Terran brands- he actually got Amy to switch over to aromatics from her previous brand, to the relief of the rest of the Red Raven crew. Among his other achievements Kaliq is also the inventor of the roll-up qorabi, an adaptation of the Callistan loincloth that doesn't get caught up in machines so easily, which is extra-handy when he and Roflfox are clunking around inside a piece of old tech together. The design hasn't fully caught on yet but he's sold a few here and there. He also helped pioneer the design space for Callistan cybernetic prosthetics, did you know? He's just an all-around swell guy, really.

Kaliq's role as Altair Electronics' antique restoration expert is a bit like being an old-fashioned detective, hunting for clues not for what's wrong, but how to properly tune up a repair job. Old stuff doesn't always have surviving service manuals and, in many corners of the Sol system, "stuff" doesn't exclusively come from corporate manufacturers. Plenty of tech is bespoke, handmade by people out of their own garages or workshops in places the tendrils of interplanetary corporatism hasn't yet reached, and in order to work right it's gotta be tuned a certain way, which is difficult for a repair shop to figure out fifty or a hundred years later- difficult, but not impossible. Guys like Kaliq know how to read the scuffs, the scratches, the patterns of wear on the innards of a mechanical object and divine how it was built, how it was set and how it was tuned previously. "You gotta read what's there. It's telling you how to fix it, you just gotta listen right". Certain tools leave certain kinds of marks, and angles, depth and length of scratches can clue you in to how those tools were used for you to replicate yourself, with wear mark locations being a strong indicator of how timing instruments are calibrated. It's like being a doctor for clockwork, sorta. However you want to look at it, if you bring your old beloved bits of weird tech from your homeworld in to Altair Electronics, Kaliq's the guy who'll get it ticking again. Hell yeah!

One of the notable features about Kaliq is his prosthetic arm- he lost the original to a three-story tall Callistan megapredator, and while he is lucky to have kept the rest of himself intact he's not content to let a big creature rob him of his quills. Working together with Dr. Kurt, Kaliq helped in the development of Sleek-style cybernetic gadgetry designed to accommodate the needs of Callistans in restoring their quill-fanning abilities. By adapting starship forcefield technology, a set of overlapping panels can be built onto Sleek-style cybernetics that allow them to project Quillwaves, producing sharp spikes of energy from an array of nodes. These quillwaves can be turned on and off at will, allowing a Callistan to carry on normally and only spike up when they feel like they need to, which is a feature that is important to folks like Kaliq. In particular the overlapping array of panels at the shoulder to allow a full range of motion without quillwave projectors interfering in prosthetic articulation. These panels are built to be thin and attach to the exterior of a cybernetic piece, allowing the inner components to work unobstructed and offer a Callistan the degree of torque and strength they're accustomed to. Inner Belt species tend to be the major adopters of cybernetic technology, but by accommodating the natural features of his own people Kaliq has helped bring this technology more readily to the people of Callisto. He don't need no credit neither, he's just happy to help out.

While the rest of the Altair team have their own illicit side-projects they work after-hours, a great guy like Kaliq wouldn't be caught engaging in that kind of criminal activity, would he? Well, of course he would! It's a noble endeavor to help those in need and it wasn't his fault certain forms of help are outlawed, of course he's gonna get up to some mischief. The major project Kaliq works on is jailbreaking industrial farm equipment- corporations like United Robotics or Quasar Galactic who have a strong hand in major industries will often build their tech in a way where the owner of that tech is prevented or prohibited from attempting to fix or alter that hardware themselves, instead needing to bring in a URC maintenance technician to solve a solvable problem for them. Kaliq hates that kind of thing, and believes it's everyone's right to repair their own technology. So what Kaliq likes to do is work with Roflfox to pull up-to-date industrial machine schematics off the holonet and prepare care packages of pre-assembled modules and language-free diagrams- built with simple tools in mind- that farmers and other industrial machine operators on far-flung moons can use to bypass tamper-prevention systems and just fix their equipment themselves. You can search a model number for your piece of tech and one of Kaliq's care packages will pop up, you can order one at-cost to ship to your world, you can see clearly how it works and, importantly, you can share the jailbreak methods with your neighbors. You depend on that equipment, it's yours, you should be able to keep it running without being dependent on the availability of URC or any other corporate repair agents as well.

Like the rest of his work, Kaliq's care packages are unnamed and uncredited. No need to thank him, he's just happy to help you out. Whatever your problem? Kaliq's got you. That's the way to be.