Allie

The Loshad 108 is a hard-working Martian-made favorite found in service across many industries throughout the Sol system. Like most Martian hardware, the Loshad 108 is designed not to be indestructible, but to be easy to maintain and repair, extending its lifespan by accepting the inevitable and preparing to resolve it when breakdown arises. A fleet of Loshads can remain operational without the need for proprietary knowledge or contracted mechanics; businesses who invest in Loshad trucks can keep them running under their own power with their own tools and ready access to common replacement parts. Thanks to this mechanical autonomy and its reliable performance, the 100-series of Loshad trucks have earned a reputation for getting a job done, making it back home and returning to service as easily as possible. It might not sound like much but working guys love these things. It respects their time.

The Loshad 100-series is a line of trucks designed to transport things, and the marks within the series denote different sizes or configurations. A Loshad 102 is a small, light open-back pickup truck, for example, where a Loshad 130 is an extremely large truck designed to transport very large cargo. The Loshad 108 is a mid-sized van that is large enough to carry a variety of man-portable but cumbersome things while also being small and agile enough to navigate the backroads and intake lots found throughout a crowded space colony. Because it's built to transport a wide variety of stuff, the two major festures of the 108's design are smoothness and stability. Loshad incorporates Accra Labs gravity suspension technology in place of wheels so that the 108 can be loaded and unloaded easily, thanks to the low clearance provided by its four resting studs, and then move from point A to point B without suffering the bumps of uneven terrain by simply hovering over it, ensuring its cargo doesn't get jostled or damaged in transport. These four repulsor arrays can be pivoted in a number of directions, making parallel or lateral movement as easy as moving forward or turning, which is a big help in the dense urban space of Titan Garden. Climate control is also an important quality in maintaining stability, ensuring the cabin and cargo areas can be tailored to various levels of comfort or necessity- temperatures can be elevated for jobs that require warmth- like moving food or plants- or lowered when refrigeration is needed. In addition to serving as cargo delivery, 108s can be modified to serve as HVAC service professional vehicles, and it is a favorite model of local plumbers. A number of 108s have been modified to serve as food trucks. The Loshad 110 has a slightly longer body which is commonly used as a shell for an ambulance- if you've ever taken a ride in one, yes: that's the same make as the trucks that deliver your packages.

Timberwolf's linguist Clayton spent a lot of time riding in a 108 when he was employed by Baxler's Distribution Co. As the primary liaison between Baxler and Timberwolf, Clayton knows the ins and outs of a Loshad and has a lot of novel ideas on where and how to hide unlawful wares being smuggled into Titan via the Ermine. Because they're easy to take apart and repair, it's easy to know which panels are more or less obvious to hide small or flat things inside or behind. He knows how Titan security tend to stick their heads in the back door, scanning a suspicious truck for something out of the ordinary; he also knows that a major distribution company like Baxler entertains security intrusions but doesn't tolerate invasive inspections unprompted, so there is an incentive for a nosy security officer to find what they're looking for or let the truck go. There's a good amount of sleight-of-hand an intrepid smuggler can do with box arrangements and viewpoint angles, and Clayton's shared this ample wisdom with the rest of the Timberwolf team. Baxler is a powerful business partner, but they expect a certain degree of professionalism from their clients- they maintain a large fleet of Loshad trucks, so having a working knowledge of the hardware helps everyone run a smooth operation. We're not here to waste each other's time.

There's a lot you can do with a Loshad, and whatever you're up to you can bet your 108 will pull its weight. The 100-series is as easy to repair as it is to modify to any specialized purpose. An honest workhorse for dishonest workers; when it comes to moving from point A to point B, nothing gets you there and back as smoothly and securely as a Loshad.

Built on Mars by the Hong Sha Motor Company, the Type 251 is a rugged and dependable motorcycle that can be found resting against the walls of many starship cargo holds, ready to deploy when a ship lands moonside at its destination. The Type 251 has knobby tires, springy shocks, a lot of torque and a high clearance, making it ideal for traversing the rough and unaccommodating terrain of the Sol system's many untamed moons. A popular sight around the backstreets of Titan Garden, the characteristics that make the Type 251 an ideal off-road workhorse also make it well-suited to negotiating the curbs and stairways of a dense lunar colony. If you're looking for a solid no-frills performance at an affordable price, a Hong Sha may be right for you.

A prime example of Martian engineering, the Type 251 has a number of features that make it ideal for traveling places where convenience isn't an expected feature of your journey. Its drive chain is built into its rear suspension housing, protecting it from damage from large debris kicked up by repeated jumps and slides. This drive chain is powered by Hong Sha's innovative two-cycle 220cc engine, able to deliver clean and consistent power on inclines and against resistant or stubborn terrain. The 251's two-cycle engine is powered by a high-capacity solid state Venusian crystal battery- its baseline efficiency gives the Type 251 an extended range and operational time, which is further enhanced by a clever set of power-friendly design features. Its battery tank sports an easy-to-read charge capacity meter along its upper facets, as well as a pair of contacts on its left side, allowing it to be easily recharged from external power sources that take all manner of fuel, from starship power generators to portable emergency hand cranks. The tank's reserves are further supplemented by a pair of haptic power generators, seen as a pair of coils wired to the front end of the bike's frame; haptic generators create a small bit of power from the jostle of a vibrating bike, the rumble of the engine, the bounce of a landing or other sudden, jarring movements characteristic of a motorcycle of this type. It's a small amount of power but every little bit adds up, and on an extended ride it can make all the difference in seeing you safely back home again.

Type 251s are popular around Titan Garden, particularly around the dense backroutes of the Dockyards and the A-District, and one of their biggest fans is Red Raven's own captain-mechanic, Amy. She's made a few customizations to her own 251, adding a Neptunian integridometer to the front fender and wiring it to a display screen mounted to the bike's crossbars- since she favors the 251 for its ease of negotiating tight corners and ramping off balconies, an integridometer is a useful bit of kit to see in advance if a bit of urban terrain can support the weight of a bike landing on it in dramatic fashion, and her grappling hook has saved her the few times she failed to notice this warning sufficiently in advance. Amy has also installed a set of Hong Sha Yue Tu front shocks to her personal 251, giving the bike's front end a bit more spring to make riding up a stairwell a bit more comfortable. Like many 251 owners she opted to strap a zip-shut carrying case to her bike's rear fender, making it easy to transport takeout cartons from far-away restaurants back to Red Raven's front office lounge. Many restaurants offer delivery drones, but sometimes its fun to volunteer to "make a food run" for the crew, especially when it's a good excuse to take the bike out for a ride.

Whether you're exploring the wild frontier of Saturn's hundred moons, ripping through a dockyard joyride or making a daring back-alley escape from a heist gone sideways, you can always trust the 251 to carry you through the day. Their ubiquitous popularity give a thieving starfarer plausable deniability in saying no, detective, that wasn't my bike leaving the scene of the crime, but I hope you find the guy who did it. Easy to fix and able to handle any terrain, whatever you're up to you'll be glad to have a Hong Sha beneath your feet.

Gutt Funker is a Martian performance artist and the host of the Gutt Funker S.L.U.D.G.E. Network, a two-hour radio show broadcasting every Wednesday night across the relay satellites on TCCC 106.9FM. Gutt Funker is a towering man with a mellow temper, he's generally soft-spoken in regular company but when he's in front of a mic he'll dial up his energy and put on his stage persona, coming across as way more forceful and aggressive than he actually is. He loves to smoke Ganymedean tobacco. He has two tattoos of the same woman; he believes she is a Mercurian Firewalker who sneaks into his room at night to pin him to his bed and he's really into that, but she is in fact simply his sleep paralysis demon. He is Puke Commander's ex-lover.

The Gutt Funker S.L.U.D.G.E. Network is a weekly radio program dedicated to surfacing new and underground talent from around the Sol system, primarily focusing on scenes and genres of music that don't see a lot of widespread support. Scuzcore, ratfunk, skrizz, rust metal, toilet noise, dockstep and void fusion are some of the many wells Gutt Funker draws from to feature on his show, often choosing to promote a certain genre in the first hour of the program before segueing into a regular medley of things in the second. Blocks of music will be punctuated by bits from Gutt Funker himself, sometimes telling stories from when he knew a band in his touring years, other times taking callers and razzing them over whatever they have to say, and then playing their requests anyways. It's all part of the show, and the volume and intensity of Gutt Funker's stage persona are a big part of why people tune into the S.L.U.D.G.E. Network in the first place.

Back in the day, back home on Mars, Gutt Funker was the guitarist and co-vocalist for a band called The Skidmarks, sharing microphone duties with his then-boyfriend, Puke Commander. The Skidmarks gained a bit of fame within the scuzcore scene and soon they were playing shows offworld, on abandoned satellites and backwater moons, eventually finding their way to Titan Garden. The band was approaching its zenith when a rift tore the group asunder: Gutt Funker wanted to pursue wider acceptance of scuzcore, he wanted The Skidmarks to find a bigger audience and find comfort through commercial success, believing if more people were exposed to The Skidmarks then more people would get onboard with the scene. Puke Commander vehemently opposed the idea, believing that the power of their work was in presenting an alternative to curated media, to show that there is always more to life than what we're served up and that those who needed them would find them organically. Half of the rest of the Skidmarks agreed with each opposing viewpoint, and their differences would prove to be irreconcilable, splitting the group in half. Gutt Funker's half would go on to form Gutt Funker & The Screaming Shits, while Puke Commander's half would become The Pukes. The Screaming Shits were successful in bringing broader awareness- if not widespread acceptance- of scuzcore to the wider Sol system, while The Pukes forged deeper roots within the underground community of Titan Garden. Gutt Funker and Puke Commander haven't spoken to each other since.

Today, Gutt Funker is retired from the performing life. He enjoys a modest but comfortable living on Titan, broadcasting once a week out of the E-District's studio block across the Outer Belt's satellite relay network. More than a few starfarers look forward to The S.L.U.D.G.E. Network program on long flights through space, and have begun looking for cartridges of music by featured acts when they land in port cities throughout the Sol system. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but then what is? Gutt Funker loves to play up his stage persona when he's on the air, speaking big and brash, but every now and then, once every few months, Gutt Funker will close out his show with a song dedicated to "Pea Sea", wherever he is out there, if he happens to be listening in to the program. Once every few months, Gutt Funker will close out his show with a song by a little band from Mars called "The Skidmarks".

Andrea is the Martian owner of Planet of the Tapes, Titan Garden's leading media rental outlet. An artful woman, Andrea is fond of a good story, and has been known to write a poem or a novella in her spare time. She's a pretty grounded personality as well, her writer's soul bearing the distinct patina of someone who's done her share of menial work. This duality makes her a pretty effective video store owner, allowing her to appeal to the discerning tastes of the Outer Belt's on-the-go film snobs while also being a fair and empathetic boss to her staff.

Planet of the Tapes, as you might expect, is an outfit specializing in long-term media rental agreements. Movies, music albums, games, audiobooks and more are available for the people of Titan to rent, enjoy and return at their earliest convenience. A variety of modern formats are offered to meet the needs of starfarers from all corners of Sol, whether that's disc-based, tape-based or cartridge-based, with the latter being the most common format available for their rugged durability. If you want something to keep you entertained for a variable length of time, but you don't want to clutter your limited living space with an expensive media library collection, stop by Planet of the Tapes and rent something you've never seen before. Andrea and her staff are happy to provide recommendations that will fit your tastes.

One of the big secrets to the success of Planet of the Tapes is its media library. Andrea seeks out and curates a rich library of rare, out of print or otherwise-inaccessible films from any world that produces them, maintaining a vibrant archive of classics. It'd be foolish to rent out the originals, you'd never see them again, so what Planet of the Tapes does is it flashes a few copies of these rarities and rents those out instead. She'll keep modern films in stock as well as her games and music offering- it's just good business, after all- but her interest isn't in shilling the latest big-budget spectacle from Terra. The heart of Planet of the Tapes is the good stuff, the pulpy stuff, the cult classics and the weird. If you know, you know, and if you know, Andrea's got you covered. If you don't know? The staff are happy to show you.

In a lifetime before she became a tape store owner, Andrea worked as a deep space shipbreaker and salvage hand- she keeps a very old and well-used boarding axe on the wall behind the desk in her office, which most people dismiss as a nerdy prop, but which tells a story of its own to shiphands in the know. She knows the kind of idle boredom that can sour a stint on an orbital rig or a long-term job on a starship, and she's worked hard to build Planet of the Tapes to serve the needs of people who are going to be far from home for a little while. She keeps a stock of blank cartridges to flash for long-term rentals, if a starfarer is going to be away for a long time they can opt to rent some movies, have them flashed to carts, take them up into space and then return them at their next call to port- this practice allows a customer to enjoy movies up in space without worrying about incurring late fees, and Andrea doesn't need to worry about film stock if a copy of a particular film is up on a space rig for a few months. Also, as a former salvager herself, Andrea understands there's a possible third outcome that could result in her never seeing her tapes again. It's tragic, but that's why we flash the long-term rentals to blanks.

Andrea is a good friend of the Red Raven crew. After she closes up for the night she likes to pop by the office to hang out, chit-chat or watch TV with the gang, often having the foresight to bring a box of pizza and a few cans of Fruit Nice! to share. Amy, Haley and their crew will keep an eye out for videos when they're salvaging old shipwrecks- they've found a few very rare films aboard an old smuggler's ship, shepherded to their resting place in the ship's lounge by a silent ghost with holes for eyes who, to the team's best assumption, didn't want their collection to become lost or destroyed forever. It's a fun story to tell, but those films and others the crew have found now reside in the central library at Planet of the Tapes. Andrea's business has been doing well- she's looking to open up franchises at other star ports, in fact, so starfarers can drop off their long-term rentals at ports other than Titan's- but she still has that old shipbreaker's fire in her. She'll occasionally hire on as a part of the Red Raven crew for a particularly big job, and when she's away from the shop the boarding axe will be missing from the wall behind her desk.