Scratch and Bexnyl are a pair of scientists employed by Syntek Propulsion Technology Labs, one of the system's leading innovators in starship propulsion and life-support systems technologies. Scratch is a Terran engineer who specializes in space-efficient mechanical design, getting the most out of the least amount of space possible. He's a shy little fella who loves to read romantic fiction, imagining a life like that for himself, for someone to come and sweep him off his little feet, but he hasn't worked up the nerve to overcome his apprehensions and seek a relationship like that for himself. Bexnyl is a Ganymedean microbiologist studying applications for modified bacteria in the starship industry. In their spare time they like to write fanfiction about some of their favorite media franchises, although they publish these works under a Terran pseudonym, preferring anonymity, simply writing for the joy of authorship. The two have worked together for many years and have made great contributions to Solar technology.

The primary focus of Scratch & Bexnyl's work is on biofuel, finding ways to grow fuel that is sustainable, ecologically-friendly and safe to handle. Years of experimentation have lead to the production of the fuel reserve brick- compact, dormant microbe colonies that can be stimulated to produce combustible fuel for one life cycle, intended for use with existing portable generators. They look like bricks of clay wrapped in wax paper, and when they're submerged in water and mixed with an included food source the colony of bacteria will feed, convert their food source into a useful chemical and then end their short life cycle naturally, leaving behind a source of fuel that is compatible with diesel engines and shelf-safe to store or carry on long expeditions. The big theory behind their work is, fuel sources are often messy and dangerous to keep in storage, with many types either requiring special radioactive containment, having risk of ignition from exposure to flame or being prone to chemical breakdown over time. Scratch & Bexynl attempt to solve these problems by engineering ways of storing organic bacterial colonies that themselves produce new fuels that are ready for use when the need arises, that can be safely carried and that maintain their usefulness over long periods of time. This technology has useful small-scale applications, but the team at Syntek has bigger ambitions than just keeping electric generators running.

Stranded starships have been a problem people have faced since the advent of the space age, and every world has run into this same limitation. Starship technology has seen tremendous fuel efficiency advancements over the centuries, but that fuel isn't infinite, and many a starfarer have underestimated the distance between one world and another. "I've got enough to make it", they'll think, and they might have been right when they first charted their course, but the rotation of the planets can alter those distances and when they're out in the middle of nowhere, well! It turns out you didn't have enough fuel to make it after all. Emergency satellite networks allow stranded travelers to put out distress calls from the middle of nowhere, and a tow service will come to rescue them and their ship, but there aren't always happy endings to these stories. If you just had a little more fuel it would have made all the difference- this is where Scratch & Bexnyl feel like they can provide a solution.

By adapting their small-scale emergency biofuel technologies to the needs of the modern starship, Scratch & Bexnyl believe they can retrofit emergency power sources to existing starships of all makes, providing shelf-stable opportunities for crew to recover from catastrophic loss of power or simply maintain life support and emergency communications systems until help arrives. In terms of engine propellants, there are a few limitations they're working to overcome:

• Starship fuel is a bit more complicated than diesel fuel. Starship fuel undergoes a conversion from a liquid state to a gaseous state before exposure to an engine core ionizes the gaseous fuel and creates propulsion. Bexnyl has been working on developing organic alternatives to the liquid form of this fuel, that their bacteria colonies might be made to produce it.
• Starship fuel storage and conversion systems are designed to be contained and isolated from habitable quarters on a starship, as both the fuel and the radioactive engine cores are generally unpleasant for starfarers to be around. In order for an emergency biofuel source to be useful it would have to be accessible to a ship's crew, which means connecting the fuel systems to the interior of the ship in a way that is safe for crew to open up and access. Scratch has been devising multi-chambered solutions to allow the emergency fuel kettles to be connected to the main fuel system without endangering the habitable space.
• Emergency microbial fuel colonies need to be prepared as shelf-stable bricks that can be neglected until they're needed, and the food-source reagent the microbial colony would eat to convert into biofuel needs to be stable and safe to handle as well. This is the case for their current diesel fuel colonies, but the needs of starship biofuel might make this point challenging to overcome.
• The system needs to be simple enough that it can be retrofitted to a wide range of starships. Most interplanetary ships have converted to the current standard starship fuel source, but ships from different worlds are likely to have different architectural layouts, and so a Syntek emergency biofuel kettle needs to be readily-fitted to a Mercurian musclecruiser as well as a Ganymedean cargo hauler or a Neptunian passenger shuttle. Making the system overly-complicated creates barriers for adoption.

The idea of starship biofuel is an exciting one, and emergency fuel kettles are just the first stage of a grander vision of the future. If Scratch & Bexnyl's microbe colonies can be self-sustaining, if they can keep the microbes from dying out after a generation, then biofuel colonies can provide fuel in extremely remote locations, allowing for fuel depots that don't require external restocking or, beyond that, self-sustaining fuel reserve colonies within starships themselves! You'd still need to feed the colonies something to convert into fuel, but it could be less expensive and less dangerous to handle than current liquid starship fuels. The Sol system has changed their primary fuel sources once, they can change it again. We can strive to be cleaner and more self-sustaining in supplying our energy needs- starship biofuel doesn't need to remain a work of fiction! From humble sources, we can bring about a better tomorrow.

Calbrix is a Ganymedean florist and Murb's primary collaborator on developing SABLE, the Saturn All-Boxers League. Where Murb is an outgoing and persistent hustler, Calbrix is very quiet and inventive, coming up with sneaky ways to make a big stack of credits for their crew. Calbrix doesn't like to draw attention to themselves and prefers to keep their head down and let their leaves listen in on what's going on around them, staying free to know the range of the radar so they can fly below it and avoid anyone disrupting their moneymaking game. Even outside of a business context Calbrix won't really assert themselves or speak forcefully, they always talk with a gentle tone and pipe down when someone else starts to speak over them. If you happen to earn their trust and let them speak, though, they've got some pretty neat ideas to share.

When setting up the SABLE event rules, Calbrix was instrumental in helping Murb hash out just the right balance of fairness and cheating to make for compelling matches. Android crew and Android coaches are permitted, but Android boxers aren't allowed to compete in SABLE matches- not so much because we don't want to see organic fighters punching men made of metal, but because Android health conditions tend to be too binary for good drama, swinging from Fully Functional to Critical Condition without the gradient of fatigue and wear you see in organic boxers. Similarly, Venusian Carapaces and Mercurian Firewalking is not permitted within a SABLE match, since it's too obvious when fighters from these worlds are swinging a match in their favor, it's not good drama; Venusian healing, venom and Mercurian sightreading are legal assets and fair game, however. Martian metabolism shifting is allowed since there's no outward sign that they're doing it, it's left to the viewer to "figure out" when a Martian boxer is leveraging their innate abilities. Terrans are too varied for a broad ruling and are treated on a case-by-case basis, with subtlety and good drama being key measures of allowance. Calllistan quills and Neptunian claws are not permissible for use in a SABLE match. Cybernetics are allowed.

The goal of a SABLE match is to put on a good show- there aren't scripted winners or losers, but the breadth of weird abilities fighters from across the Sol system have need to be balanced in a way that is safe for other boxers, as well as being good TV. With limits like this, Calbrix will point out, fights could conceivably go either way, without Firewalking leveraging a blowout victory or a faceful of quills knocking a good fighter out of commission for the rest of the season. And when fights are even, people are more comfortable placing big bets on either outcome, and when people are comfortable betting, well, that's where Calbrix comes in! The low-key element of mutual cheating serves to make a SABLE match exciting and gets its fans talking about which fighter's dirty tricks give them the edge over the other, but it also draws the ire of the Titan Garden Betting & Gambling Authority, an administrative body that ensures a level of fairness is maintained in Titan's gambling halls, E-District or otherwise. The BGA don't like bets placed on SABLE because they feel that the degree of allowed cheating allows too much room for match fixing, and while Murb and the SABLE crew insist their fights are honest, the BGA is unconvinced. So while ticket and merch sales alone are nice, what if you could make even more credits on a SABLE match? Enter the Fighting Chance Florist Shop.

Quietly tucked away in the back roads of the A-District, Calbrix runs the Fighting Chance Florist Shop, a little store billed as a place to help romantic starfarers win over potential lovers with beautiful floral arrangements, hence the name. People of all stripes pop into the Fighting Chance all the time to seek the Ganymedean's advice on the right colors, shapes and bouquet of scents to really impress another, and this provides Calbrix the perfect cover to assist the other types of people who show up to the Fighting Chance: boxing fans.

If you've watched a SABLE match at any pub, you've probably overheard people talking up the bets they've placed on the match in progress. You ask about betting on a SABLE match, they tell you to check out the Fighting Chance Florist- that's the unofficial official bookie for taking bets on SABLE. There's a display of flowers in the front window- the flowers cycle out week to week but the vases, the vases always stay the same. You want to bet on a SABLE fighter, you pop in the Fighting Chance and ask to place a Garden Order for the plants in the window. Fighters in SABLE wear specific glove colors, which you can see advertised in the lead-up to a fight. Calbrix will ask which ones caught your eye, you say the Blue vase or the Orange vase or the Purple vase, this is who you're betting on. Calbrix will ask how many you'd need for your garden order, this is how big your bet is, and inform you that there is a service fee for large orders. Once your order is placed and payment is received, Calbrix will quote you a delivery date that is, by pure chance, just after the next SABLE match concludes. If your fighter wins, a floral arrangement is delivered to your listed residence with an unmarked credit stick tucked away beneath its leaves. If you lose, you still receive a bouquet, although it is arranged with condolences in mind. People get to bet on SABLE fights, Calbrix gets to beautify Titan Garden with their flowers and the Betting & Gambling Authority are none the wiser. It really does pay to keep your head down and your ears open.

Bazrai is a Ganymedean who likes to imagine themselves as the computer linguistics expert on the Altair Electronics team. Specializing in inter-systems compatibility, Bazrai adapts modern firmware to work with older-model parts, allowing Altair to repair beloved-but-outdated technology with modern solutions. Bazrai is very knowledgeable but can come off as dismissive or haughty when they get into talking about a project of theirs, or the minutiae of how to get incompatible systems to talk to each other. They mean well, though, they just have that thing where they don't like to let something go if they believe they're being misunderstood and just want to be perfectly clear with everyone. The work they do is difficult and very useful to the team, so their friends tend to let them slide, but will sometimes push their buttons and misidentify a process just to get the expected reaction out of them.

Blessed with a useful and even set of four arms, Bazrai makes use of their appendages to tackle multiple tasks at once. This can mean working on both halves of a systems integration project, researching old help threads on the holonet for useful leads, lending their talents to another teammate's project or doing all three of these things at once. Bazrai's expertise is providing technological superglue, or the mortar between oddly-shaped bricks, able to fit new or available solutions to older-model problems whose answers might be discontinued, extremely rare or unsupported by firmware archives. There might have been a way to fix this bit of tech ten, twenty or fifty years ago, but the people who made those solutions have long since stopped making those parts, moving on to building the next generation of stuff, or no one bothered to save the drivers or the bits of code that tech needed to connect outside of its own little bubble- these are the kinds of problems Bazrai likes to tackle. In the end, they'll tell you, it's all just language barriers, and those barriers can be overcome with a bit of ingenuity and a lot of luck.

When the lights go out and Altair Electronics closes up for the night, Bazrai turns their ramrod attention to their other passion: stealing and cracking entertainment software. Movies, games, textbooks, proprietary media creation software- anything with a paywall and a gate of iron code around it, Bazrai will find it, pull the gate off its hinges and put that program up on the holonet for free. Encoded or paywalled media is just another piece of tech that isn't communicating agreeably with a given player or system, after all, and that's a problem that simply will not stand. Bazrai runs a host of proxy servers and seeds torrents on many popular digital piracy sites on the holonet, trying to stay ahead of the law, and when one of their host servers goes down they're quick to set up a new one.

One hiccup in Bazrai's little cracked media empire is their tendency to have to make new accounts after finding themselves banned from various platforms. Often their accounts are banned for hosting and distributing cracked software but just as often they find themselves getting banned for arguing endlessly on forums, particularly on media discussion forums. Remember earlier, they have that thing where they can't just let a petty argument go if they believe that someone is misinformed or that they're not being fully understood- this means they're never willing to let someone go without them having the last post. That's very annoying! They post under a lot of account names and a lot of pseudonyms but savvy posters can tell when Bazrai has latched onto an argument, even if they don't know who they are or where they work in real life, they know its That Poster Again. And yeah, they are always providing really good software cracks, but man will they just not let it go!

A fun quirk of Bazrai's posting tendencies and the secretive nature of their business is they have no idea who some of the posters who keep getting them banned actually are. Kollori Timberwolf and Lydia Redraven are two avid posters who have downloaded a lot of Bazrai's cracked media files, and while the two will have their own little posting spats they both hate it when Bazrai shows up to do their thing and latch onto some argument like a snapping turtle, and the two have frequently gotten Bazrai banned from their media discussion forums. None of these users know exactly who anyone else is, so Lydia or Kollori are frequently one degree away from Bazrai's actual workplace when Roflfox is collaborating with Red Raven or Timberwolf to help pull a job for him. Everyone's chill in meatspace, everyone's here to do a job professionally and chip away at the foundations of power or whatever, but on the holonet these collaborative friends are fierce adversaries, and they'll never know it. Or maybe one day they will.. that might be the funnier outcome, at least for their friends to watch unfold from the sidelines.

------------------ DEAD or ALIVE ------------------

------- Ȼ37,000 REWARD -------

----- Notify THE GRAND ADMIRAL of the TERRAN STAR NAVY -----

The littlest member of the Devil's Fang, Bad Seed Bixy is a Ganymedean horticulturalist serving as the crew's doctor. Bixy is about 300 years old and helped cultivate the "garden" part of Titan Garden, their expertise ensuring a rich array of plant life that would best serve the breathing needs of the Garden's various residents and visitors. They are a hopeful but somewhat jaded personality, having lived a long enough life to watch the machinations of the Sol system play out, but hopeful in that they feel like there is a real chance for bad things to improve. Bixy has been around the system in their years and has picked up a number of tasty recipes, and they enjoy working a side gig as the Coelacanth's cook. They'll often invite Whisper to help out with food prep and oven management- handy with those hot metal hands and at-the-ready oven mitts- and Whisper is just very oh-gosh for the opportunity to help feed the 999 pirates of the Devil's Fang.

The Coelacanth is built to be a self-sustaining metal ecosystem, and in the belly of that ecosystem is Bixy's hydroponics lab. Feeding a crew of pirates at scale in the depths of space means relying on a plant-based diet, and while a Ganymedean like Bixy- and much of the Inner Belt crew for that matter- would prefer something meaty to eat, you gotta work with what's on hand. Fortunately, as an accomplished and well-traveled professional Bixy has a collection of seeds from all over Sol and a few of those seeds grow into rich plants that almost satisfy a taste for the texture of meat. Callistan recipes are heavily plant-based and tend to favor searing-hot spices, which go a long way towards masking a vegetarian diet from a picky eater. Terran rice is also a staple ingredient, with a whole section of Bixy's lab dedicated to growing the grain. Occasionally an away team will head to an uninhabited world to catch some game to eat- on these occasions the captain herself likes to take on kitchen duty and cook up a big batch of fried rice and mystery meat seasoned with her secret Mercurian blend of spices. Bixy's hydroponics lab also includes herbal ingredients for teas, beers, meads and the pleasure of a good smoke. Overall morale among the crew remains high, and a full glass and a full belly goes a long way towards maintaining that trend- if you're a member of the Devil's Fang you have Bixy to thank for that.

In addition to their subsistence farming efforts, Bixy is a practitioner of Ganymedean herbal medicine, treating the crew's ailments with a host of plant-based solutions. Bixy's got a little apothecary station set up on the Coelacanth in a room near their hydroponics where they offer potable ground herbs as well as topical applications to treat internal and external conditions- it's not an uncommon sight to see a crewmember with a limb or a joint wrapped up in an ace bandage, keeping one of Bixy's herbal blends firmly applied to an external site. Terran and Neptunian crewmembers tend to be skeptical of Bixy's herbalism but for twenty-plus years they've been keeping the Devil's Fang stitched up and in working order. And really, this ship ain't making any pitstops at any general hospitals so you're gonna have to live with what's available to you, starfarer.

As a crew doctor Bad Seed Bixy joins their crewmates in boarding parties and raids on other ships to ensure the inevitable injuries are treated quickly and don't spiral into fatalities. Their primary piece of boarding equipment is a rideable medical station called the Funk Doc Express. Riding the Funk Doc Express off a boarding round allows Bixy to carry a wide array of herbal treatments, home-grown gauze pads and organic sutures curated to focus more on cuts, burns, punctures and other battle-related injuries likely to arise in the course of taking a starship by force. In order for crew to be able to locate Bixy in the chaotic heat of a confrontation the Funk Doc Express comes equipped with a bright headlight and a bumping sound system; playing music helps crewmates echolocate medical assistance, and the tempo of the music can also help carry the captain's orders in earshot, letting crew know whether she's holding a position, falling back or pushing forward. Bixy doesn't carry a weapon but they will use their lashing, stinging root vines to defend themselves or their patients if they need to.

It wasn't common for Outer Belt people to get drawn into a conflict between the Terran Star Navy and a band of ex-United workers, but a few managed to find themselves drawn into the pirates' cause. Bixy had been brought to Venus on a contract to help plan a Venusian Garden, a parallel to the Titan Garden project they'd worked on two hundred years ago. Bixy's clients learned they were still alive and so thought they were the foremost expert in assisting with their needs: they were looking to create some Terran and Venusian plant hybrids, plants that could scrub heavily-used air the way Titan's garden does but also have the waxy exterior coating to survive Venus's acid rain. Believing they were just working on another self-contained Garden dome project, Bixy shipped off to the Inner Belt to begin work hybridizing plants to find the right blend for their clients' stated needs.

The task proved difficult. The waxy features that allowed a plant to survive acid rain limited their carbon-recycling qualities, they asked if the protective characteristic was needed for a glass-domed environment, as dropping it would make their job much easier. Bixy's employers insisted the hybrids needed to survive exposure to Venusian elements- this wasn't a problem when Titan Garden was constructed, and the unwillingness of Terran employers to provide a straight answer to their questions started to raise suspicions. The project was presented as a Garden, a self-contained dome, and there was a working example of one orbiting Saturn right this minute. No one could or would explain what these odd contract requirements were for, until Res Ship Nine landed on Venus.

The ship's doors opened to a gruesome display: Star Patrollers lay strewn all around the main hangar, a line of red juices painting a path from the hangar bay towards the bridge. The first mate was in shambles, the captain was in pieces. Someone had to oversee putting the project overseer back together again. All medical professionals on staff were ordered to report to the landing site to tend to the injured, and Star Patrollers were assigned to clean up the dead. Bixy packed their medical bag and headed to the site to treat the wounded, trying like everyone else to understand what had happened to Res Ship Nine- it wasn't a hard puzzle to solve, however, as the wounded spoke with a grim frankness. They spoke of devils. The Devil had come and brought all of hell with her, they lamented. They came because of Venus, they came because of the terraforming project, because of their hubris. "Terraforming"... Bixy's hybridizing contract started to make a lot more sense. Their leafy sound receptors picked up quiet talk of these devils being spread amongst security personnel on Venus, that things had taken a turn and something had to be done before this thing spiraled out of control. Bixy brought ease and comfort to the wounded, and when the site was secure they boarded their own little ship and took off from Venus, plotting a course for Terra.

A cargo vessel full of supplies and soldiers was making its way around Sol. There were reports that a Terran Star Navy unit opened fire on a group of United Robotics workers who had taken to piracy, theft and sabotage, and a number of those workers survived and were retaliating against Terran starships in the area, so be mindful of who you allow to board your ship. Consult with your security agents. Keep your airlocks sealed. Identify all ships entering your vicinity. It was sound advice, but space is a dangerous place as it is, the crew of the cargo vessel couldn't imagine how someone could board a starship without permission, without someone opening the doors and letting them in. That was preposterous, right? That was about the time a blip came up on the ship's radar. A small starship was approaching their coordinates, and it was coming in fast.

Whisper's voice creaked like a nervous doorhinge as he hunched over behind the ship's pilot seat. "Oh, uhh.. Miss Anibelle. Shouldn't we, uhh.. I think we're going a little fast". There were a few Terrans and Martians in the crew behind them, but the bulk of the newly-minted pirates were Mercurian and Venusian. Some of the Venusians began to grow out their Carapace forms, holding onto what they could. The Mercurians began to flash into their own Firewalker forms, completing the crew's devilish appearance. "'Fraid the time for nice and slow is over, Whisper", June lowered her goggles and assumed her own carapace. Whisper's starlight form flickered more frantically as the craft barreled towards the Terran cargo vessel- it was big and they were approaching it from the long angle. There was plenty of buffer zone for them. "Trust me, this is gonna work.." Anibelle's blue-devil form flashed around her as she seized the quantum reins of every horrific outcome of their current course- she could see the Anibelles of other concurrent dimensions come through unscathed, she doesn't see the ripples of her own fate rebounding towards her. She was confident in putting her Mercurian curse to the test. "Hold on tight to something, boys, we're going in hot!" The crew hollered, some cheered. Whisper began to scream.

Bixy's little Ganymedean ship zipped along through space- it was designed for their own people's tiny bodies but it was meant to haul large plants from one world to another so it was built with a fairly large cargo hold. They were sorting through their own thoughts- terraforming another world, wiping out its ecosystem to make room for another, using the Garden project as a front to set the ball in motion and using Bixy's own horticultural knowledge to achieve these ends. They were mad, they felt betrayed, but they didn't know exactly who they were mad at yet. What they did know was someone else was mad too, and that those someones were picking a fight with a giant, and they could probably use some medical help of their own. They waffled on whether they should really link up with a bunch of bad seeds like this, having seen what they did to the soldiers of Res Ship Nine. They didn't have long to waffle, as the sight of a much larger cargo ship came into view. It was putting out a distress call.

Today is a quieter time than those early days. Bixy was in the Coelacanth's galley, brewing an experimental new blend of tea leaves they'd been growing in hydroponics. They held the mug with both hands and dipped one root tendril into the tea, drinking it up in proper Ganymedean fashion. One of the newer crewmembers- a hare-like Neptunian- was asking Whisper how the crew came up with the idea for boarding rounds. Wouldn't slamming into a ship like that just kill you? The ship's resource coordinator tapped his red-hot metal fingertips together. "Oh, uhh... well. that's a little bit of a story". Bixy approached the pair, offering the cup of soothing tea up to the much taller pirate. It was a peaceful moment, with naught but the hum of the engines to intrude upon the curious new blood. What better time share the tale of the night the Devil's Fang Pirates were born?