Allie

A group shot of some of the Sol system's lawmen, peacekeepers, fortune seekers and corporate enforcers. They take many forms, have many motives and they can be sure to pop up anywhere starfaring rogues and scoundrels might leave their footprints.

Kamal is a field agent working for Delta Astronautics, Terra's largest starship technologies corporation. While not exactly a bounty hunter himself, Kamal's job is to venture out into the Sol system to investigate infractions of and enforce corporate law. Having a skeptical nature, Kamal doesn't tend to take things at face value- he wants to understand how the dominos fell to bring about an event and lift the fingerprint off the first domino to topple so he is certain he's not wasting his time. Being thorough and rigorously verifying your intel is always worth the time and effort, because when he has a lock on a lead he is free to act on enforcement without hesitation.

While he handles many different kinds of jobs for Delta, Kamal tends to work in debt collection and resolution. The advent of public starfaring is the right of every sentient being, but it is expensive and difficult to learn how to run a starship and navigate space so most people fly commercial starliners to hop from planet to planet, like the ones Timberwolf's Mahnoor used to pilot. For those who know how to fly a ship, Delta computers are at the heart of most Inner Belt starships, and if you need a part to get your ship working so you can work and afford the part, Delta offers payment plans, with interest, so you can get your rig back amongst the stars. Some young starfarers will get the idea that, well, space is a big place, if I want to fly out to, let's say Titan Garden, and work out there, what's a Terran corporation gonna do to make me pay my Delta debts? Send a guy out to get me? Kamal's one of the guys Delta employs to correct these misassumptions.

In order to make his job easier, Kamal has a series of cybernetic enhancements made to his body. His right arm is prosthetic, housing top-of-the-line stabilization gyros and a small personal computer and holoscreen projection panel; and his right eye and ear have been replaced with audio and video recording hardware, allowing him to record and play back incidents and discoveries in the course of his investigations. Kamal prefers to keep a low profile in his investigations so he opted for a set of lightweight, natural-style cybernetics, although they can still be spotted by the small seams on his body. They're very handy, though, as Kamal's current case is a difficult one: he's tasked with tracking down an Android with outstanding debts and compounded interest.

The file reads like this: a Delta Astronautics Human-Astronav Liaison mk. 3 unit, female variant, received extensive computer hardware upgrades and a personal defense module installation to improve performance and personal security in anticipation of dangerous work in space. These enhancements include an upgraded CPU chip with extra cores, central hardware protective cladding, Faraday cranial mesh and DA-384 "Fingerguns" cutting-beam emitters in her left hand fingertips. The HAL-4 line was not yet ready for rollout at the time of installation so it was a considerable suite of improvements over the base HAL-3 model, and not an uncommon set of parts for a Delta droid to opt for if they anticipate a difficult line of work. The HAL-3 unit in question was registered as crewmember aboard a ship called the Reef Shark, a small freelance transport vessel working a contract for Delta's Neptunian counterpart, Quasar Galactic. The Reef Shark's last known coordinates were just behind Caelus's orbit. The HAL-3 unit was not found among the dead, and is presumed still alive. Her debts have not been paid for several years and the interest has compounded substantially. Kamal's job is to track down the HAL-3 droid and either extract payment or repossess the upgraded parts. He is capable of meeting all these obligations.

Some years ago a young Mercurian woman with two working arms and a Martian girlfriend had just left a job working a long-haul cargo ship, purchased a tow truck and set out to start a salvage business for herself. One of her earliest finds was the wreck of a small transport vessel adrift outside of Caelus. Its doors struggled to open, even with her mechanical knack, as chainsaw marks had warped the frame of some entryways. She found no signs of life until she arrived at the bridge, where she discovered the body of the ship's pilot wearing a Holonet headset wired into the ship's astronav computer, which in turn was wired into a HAL-3 Astronav droid and the ship's main power line. Bodies don't really decay in space, the young woman learned, but the ship's logs indicated they had been adrift out here for a while by this point. As she set about dismantling computer panels for salvage she noticed the HAL-3 unit was still alive, and in critical low-power mode. The Mercurian woman unhooked her from the rat's nest of wires and quickly carried her back aboard her own ship, intent on replacing her battery and restoring the HAL-3 unit to a safe and functional state.

Today, Kamal arrives on Titan Garden. He's at the Grizzly Bear Scrapyard, picking through a pile of old parts with a handheld scanner. Deep beneath a mess of junk he found what he was looking for: a small Delta model tracking chip rests beneath a pile of outdated spaceship parts. The serial number on the chip matches his mark, and the numbers on the pile of parts match components belonging to the Reef Shark. Kamal ashed his cigarette- he was going to have to do this one the old-fashioned way. He has a meeting set up with a Quasar agent- a Neptunian named Fish- at a small pub in the A-District, a place called the Ox & Carriage. Home office says she'd been to the Reef Shark, looking for the pilot. Here's hoping she has something useful she's willing to share, or else this is going to be a long job.

Sam is a Mercurian fixer who operates out of Titan Garden. One of the relatively small percentage of bounty hunters who actually holds a license, Sam does not hunt outlaws for some idea of justice or glory or revenge or fame or what have you. Sam is actually an agent of the android S41NT, who uses the bounty system as a way to discretely dispatch problematic villains who would cause larger problems for S41NT's employers. She stays out of trouble herself, remaining in good standing with the law and not involving herself in any kind of smoke; she just happens to chase the specific bounties who fall outside the favor of S41NT's employers. Sam has a bit of a standoffish personality but she really opens up to people if they share her interest in Terran television media, particularly the 久しぶり！僕は斬鉄日向です！ (Hisashiburi! Boku wa Zantetsu Hinata Desu!) franchise. You'll get her attention if you recognize the charm on her rifle, but you can really impress her by revealing you're up to date on the Hinata manga.

Being a Mercurian means Sam naturally has some innate talent which plays into her chosen career. Sam's Gift of Sol is the purview of Guilt- she can see the weight of sleight and misdeed like a corona of color around a person who knows they've brought harm to another. Everyone carries a little guilt with them, and Sam can infer a lot about a person's conscience by the color and intensity of their corona, figuring what sort of thing they know they did to someone else and how much sleep they lose over it; most people dwell upon some minor slight which has been long forgotten, for example, and this reads as a bright color with a thick intensity around that person's silhouette. The people Sam tends to carry dark colors about them, having brought severe harm to someone else. These dark colors often appear thin or thick in their intensity depending on whether they feel justified in their actions or if they know they crossed a line, respectively. In her Firewalker form Sam can manipulate these feelings of guilt, temporarily alleviating them from someone or intensifying them to a debilitating degree. If a target of hers has an exceedingly thick and dark aura about them, like they did wrong and have tremendous regrets, she might grant them the mercy of an unburdened soul before shepherding them along their way. For a target whose guilt is heinous and their conscience is clear, she might intensify that weight upon their conscience and let the problem resolve itself.

Most bounty contracts are listed as "Dead or Alive", and S41NT's employers often send along their wishes as to how they'd like to see a given problem resolved. Sometimes an associate needs a time-out in Terran custody, bring them in alive please. On rare occasions an associate's actions are severe enough that they risk exposing S41NT's employers to harm, and those problems are better off not creeping back up when they're eventually released from the brig. To reflect this dichotomy of orders Sam prefers to use an adjustable magrifle in her trade, an electric rifle with a sliding toggle bolt which can be set to fire light debilitating shots, medium-intensity knock-out shots or, if the bolt is fully pulled back, high-intensity lethal shots. Working from long range and the cover of stealth helps keep Sam out of trouble, since her usefulness to her contractors depends on her keeping her nose clean and working the bounty system by the books, to the letter. One clean shot crackles out from nowhere, her target falls down and she collects the target to bring to the marshal's office, no drama and no chase scenes and ideally, no retribution from the target's friends. Her beloved Zantetsu Hinata dangles from her rifle's barrel- it doesn't do anything special, it just makes Sam feel better while on a job.

The whole point of Sam working for S41NT is that her contracts are discreet, no one knows she is hunting these specific bounties for the specific purpose of lawfully removing problematic villains at the behest of a larger organization of villains. She's a licensed agent of the Terran court and it just seems like she's cleaning up a couple bad eggs, so occasionally she gets other bounty hunters seeking her out and asking to team up and she will have to decide whether to take advantage of them or decline their offers without breaking kayfabe. Ace Lightstorm presented himself as one such hunter, inviting Sam to join him and his party- the steadfast Professor Gloob and the enchanting Talia- on their quest to claim the bounty on the legendary Devil's Fang. Before she could decline them offhand her attention was caught by Talia's aura of guilt. Here was a woman who had hunted Sam's people specifically, hunting Mercurian bounties out of some deeper jealousy for their innate magical talents. She, like any Mercurian, has heard the legends of the Devil's Fang and the stories about their captain and the crew behind her, so she has an idea about the fate this group, and Talia in particular, may soon encounter.

"Thank you for the offer, but I have other obligations", she would reply with a friendly smile. "Good luck, though. I'm sure you'll make the system a slightly better place for all of us".

Talia is an unusual bounty hunter. Hailing from Terra, Talia draws from the deep wellspring of arcane energy native to her homeworld, wielding it as her primary weapon in pursuit of outlaws and her next paycheck. She's a smug little bug, known to jeer at or taunt her targets before slinging spells at them- she knows full-well she has a rare talent and she loves to leverage that over the magically-inert people of the Sol system. Fed by this sorcerial smugness, Talia has a tendency to chase Mercurian outlaws in particular, believing her Terran sorcery is more than a match for the many Gifts of Sol her Mercurian neighbors effortlessly wield. She's developed a battle plan for facing an outlaw Firewalker and, to her credit, she is still alive to ply her trade so that plan must have some merit to it.

People are often surprised to hear about it but there is, in fact, magic in space. Believed by some to be a contributing factor to Terra's verdant bounty, deep within the heart of Terra's iron core is a wellspring of arcane energy, pulsing like the beating heart of a great stag. Terrans from all corners have a long history of sorcerers, spellcasters, weavers of the ars arcanum; people who have learned to extrude this energy, shaping it into expressions of their will. The arcane arts take many forms and each requires rigorous discipline, so practitioners are a rarity in an age ruled by technological wizardry. The advent of public space travel, incidentally, has turned Terra's many schools of arcana completely on their heads.

There is a problem with magic in space that has demanded solutions from its practitioners. You see, on Terran soil a practitioner could draw from the infinite wellspring of arcane energy beneath their feet, and for generations this element of sorcery was taken for granted. Magic of all disciplines from all corners of Terra is, ultimately, a shaping of this energy in some form or another, so when a sorcerous starfarer leaves Terra for the cold depths of space, they are in fact leaving the arcane wellspring behind, and while they may have knowledge of their art and how to weave their spells, when they are far from home they simply don't have the raw material to express their will and their magic fails. A deep-space spellcaster must add a material component to their spells- some way to bottle and carry Terran essence with them on their journey beyond the clouds. Talia has devised a solution to this problem, and is thus able to bring her craft into the broader Solar melting pot.

Talia is a vitamancer, specializing in the study of living energy. She has learned to use the Terran arcana to shape, swell, draw out or redirect the many forms of living energy in organic life, her coven using this knowledge to help plants grow and wildlife thrive. Talia thought being a gardener was boring so she took her knowledge and applied it to bounty hunting, healing herself and her allies when they are injured and- as a favorite trick of hers- sapping the energy from her bounty targets so they become winded and tired and thus easier to catch. This is a key part of how she hunts Mercurians, knowing if they are hungry or fatigued they can't sustain the Firewalker form which allows them to project their will onto their surroundings in that enviously weird way they seem able to, so effortless and free.

Talia's solution to the space problem is to become a literal spell-slinger: she wears a hemispherical crystal on a gloved hand, and from this crystal she draws out motes of stored Terran energy, shaping it into a plasmid sphere containing a whisper of her will. When she places this sphere of energy into a simple cloth sling she's able to lob it considerable distances, the energy landing on and seeping into whoever she hits. This could be a wounded teammate, her spell weaving their flesh back to wholeness or filling them with vigor; or this could be her bounty target, sapping them of their stamina or taking the wind from their sails. Long-range spellcasting is difficult outside of Terra itself and requires immense mastery or incredible reserves of arcane energy to achieve in space, neither of which are at Talia's disposal, so her solution is one born of efficiency and necessity. She needs to return home to Terra to re-imbue her crystal with energy between jobs, but so long as she carries that energy with her she can sling her spells at will.

The bounty hunter Ace Lightstorm has heard rumors of a spellcasting do-gooder, and has tracked Talia down all the way to Terra, meeting up with her at her coven's garden home. He explained his plans to Talia, that he was gathering a party to take on the Devil's Fang, and that their crew numbered several Mercurians, and rumors were the captain herself was a Mercurian woman, and how Talia's special talents would ensure his party's success. One of Talia's elders overheard the conversation and warned against pursuing the Devil's Fang, that they were born of a calling to protect their own planets' unique environments from terraforming, that they were in spirit not unalike their own coven. Her cocky nature getting the better of her, Talia wouldn't let any Mercurians scare her off a job. She believed the pirates would not expect to see magic in space and thus she was the one to finally claim their bounty- they'd never see her coming!

She agreed to join Ace Lightstorm's party. He smiled and shook her hand. Her elder lit a candle in her name, so her soul might find its way home through the freezing gloom of space.