Allie

The Sunfish is a small personal starship belonging to the Neptunian android, EV3R. It is a heavily-modified Martian gunship recovered and refurbished by the Red Raven Towing & Salvage Company. The Sunfish was originally built to be a short-range scouting craft deployed from larger starships to quickly survey areas with its front-mounted flood lights, maneuver around asteroids and break up space rocks with its pair of front-mounted magcasters. It draws energy from a magnetic centrifuge which feeds a set of three primary thrusters, making these starships nimble and very reliable.

EV3R's Sunfish was recovered from the wreck of a Martian warship found heavily-battered just outside the Asteroid Belt. It's been given The Amy Special, where its original design has been heavily modified to go faster and live louder than its base specs would allow. Red Raven's Amy has altered this particular gunship to remove ammunition reserves for its magcasters and replace them with two magnetic centrifuges, doubling the ship's power generation. The rear-central space where the centrifuge originally went has been replaced with a small, very cozy cabin area to make the craft habitable on long voyages. The gunship's outer two thrusters have been moved apart to make room for a pair of salvaged Mercurian "Skipping Imp" racing engines, built to amplify power output through a special reverb-feedback mechanism designed to get more bang out of an engine's buck. These engines are connected directly to the dual centrifuge power houses and route their amplified power to the ship's original thrusters, giving the craft an even burn as it rockets through space. A mid-sized forcefield generator has been mounted above the cabin, and its magcaster cannon array has been routed directly into the twin centrifuges. And to top it all off, the normally-dreary Martian hull has been repainted a bright teal, buffing out and covering up the nicks and scratches that accumulate on all active starships.

The cherry on top of the Sunfish's redesign is its dynamic power allocation system, controlled by a triangular touchscreen Amy installed in the pilot's cockpit. Since the gunship has twice the power generators, its engines, shields and guns have all been wired directly into those power sources, consolidating the ship's original engine-and-ammo reserves into one pool while adding the forcefield as a third route from this wellspring of energy. The three points on the triangular touchscreen represent 100% energy output into thrusters, shields or magcasters, and a simple touch can dynamically reallocate that energy to the three systems in different proportions- for example, dead-center on the touchpad gives the ship a balanced output; setting it close to the gun/shield axis lets it act as a potent fighter punching well above its weight; and placing the array just outside of the thruster corner along the shield axis will disable the cannons while giving the ship a light protective barrier from space debris as it cooks along on its bass-boosted engine array. Amy recommends keeping it in the latter setting by default for a real good time, and mentions that a shift into full-shields can let the Sunfish carry on its thruster momentum and act as a tumbling bowling ball in the event of a sudden debris field encounter. Maximum gunfire mode can be used as an emergency brake in a pinch, and when EV3R is planetside, the Sunfish is balanced to float on water.

There are many choices for discerning starfarers looking to purchase a personal-use starship, but Red Raven has built a reputation for offering unusual ships at affordable prices. By salvaging their parts, Red Raven keeps their overhead costs low and passes the savings on to You! There may be a very small number of ships in their yard at any time compared to traditional used ship dealers, but all Red Raven craft are one-of-a-kind Frankenships built to hot sauce standards- they may require more expert maintenance, but their prices are as hard to beat as their performance. Need a ride? Call Red Raven Towing & Salvage today!

The inseparable pair of Kotori and Fremble are Terran starfarers currently residing Titan Garden. Kotori is a humanoid with large corvid-like wings; her hair and eyes are bioluminous and she is able to produce a lantern-like glow from inside her chest, which illuminates the space around her through her vest. Kotori is a calm and kind woman, her luminescence giving her a very soothing presence. Fremble, on the other hand, is a small lepidopteric humanoid with delicate wings and large sensitive eyes. Fremble is a clever, intuitive person, drawing from the Kotori's calm strength, who in turn in turn is comforted by the presence of her thoughtful friend. In the dark lonesomeness of space Kotori and Fremble are a self-sufficient ecosystem, able to find peace in any corner of the Sol system.

Kotori and Fremble currently work as field claims adjusters for Arclight Insurance, based on Titan. Their unique talents combine to make them very effective at revealing the forensic history of an area, talents they currently lend to determining insurance liability. Kotori can control the intensity of her lamplight, either folding her wings forward to focus its glow in a specific area or pull her wings back to let her glow wash over a wide space. Fremble is very familiar with Kotori's light, her large eyes letting her see deeper into the ultraviolet spectrum than most Inner Belt hominids- she's super dialed in to Kotori's particular lamplight, and so when she sees the way it reflects off her environment she is able to see clues and details bathed in Kotoriness which other people might miss. By reading the light's soft glow Fremble can deduce a lot about a given area, the people who were there, the direction and force in which things moved or how they rested on a surface, new damage versus old wear, or even just the feint discoloration of having been in the vicinity of a warm body. In essence, Kotori illuminates and Fremble interprets, and that's how they earn their biscuits.

Being insurance company employees Kotori and Fremble naturally interact with Red Raven Towing & Salvage fairly often. When the crew tow a starship back to port it's usually Kotori and Fremble who are dispatched to the Red Raven garage to inspect the ship, determine the cause of the event that caused it to need towing, compare that data against Red Raven's repair estimates and then adjust for Arclight Insurance's liability accordingly. The pair are fairly honest, keeping Red Raven from dabbling in the honeypot of insurance fraud, but they aren't above dabbling in Red Raven's side businesses either. Since they're frequently working together, Kotori and Fremble are trusted friends of the crew; sometimes a Red Raven job needs a little extra information in order to pull off successfully, like knowing if new security features have just been installed, where a guard might like to patrol or in which order buttons on an unmarked keypad were pressed. These little details and more can easily be divined by reading the warm light of the lampfriend, and while Kotori and Fremble are happy to share what they see for a cut of a take as long as they don't need to put themselves at risk, since it's kinda hard finding good work when you're a professional lantern. Fortunately, Arclight Insurance covers a wide range of personal and business policies, so often times it's Arclight's field adjusters showing up to assess liability after a Red Raven heist, and if Kotori and Fremble happen to pick up an implicating detail or two that might get overlooked by other lampless means? Well, no one will be able to tell for sure if they just leave that bit off their report.

EV3R is a friend and affiliate of the Red Raven crew. She is a Neptunian android built by Quasar Galactic Systems Specialists, initially designed for safety inspection and worksite supervision. She is equipped with large sensitive audio receptors and a powerful risk assessment internal simulation computer, allowing her to collect data and quickly run models of a situation in order to determine the risk of the most probably outcomes. Upon being activated, however, she ran model simulations of her initial work proposal and determined it to be very boring. She opted instead to take a one-time payout from Quasar, as is every android's prerogative, and make her own way in the Sol system. EV3R is lackadaisical by android standards, her risk assessment model's calibration preventing her from committing to any task that doesn't have high potential to yield interesting data returns; or, in meatball terms, her computers can predict if something sucks and pre-emptively hit the bricks.

Being a risk assessment droid has its perks. EV3R's sensor array can be tuned to broad-range data collection or focused on minute audio or visual details, initially designed for safety inspection and analysis but ultimately very useful for overhearing gossip and pinpointing rumors in the din of a starport tavern. Since she likes to travel from port to port throughout the Sol system EV3R is an excellent source of leads on discrete shipments of valuables or rumors of lost shipwrecks in a dark sector of space behind a planet's orbit. The Red Raven crew are always glad to have a visit from EV3R, as it usually means she's got a lead on something interesting or lucrative to do; EV3R is glad to visit the Red Raven crew as well, as they will often let her accompany them on a job and use her sensor array to collect lots of very interesting data, as well as a fair cut of the score. A large payout factors highly into her risk assessment models of having to go back to Neptune for work and keeps her independent and mobile, so it is a win-win for both parties.

The crew came to meet EV3R shortly after her departure from Quasar Galactic on Neptune. She had found Titan Garden in her database and boarded a commercial flight to the Solar hub with intent to purchase a used starship. Risk assessment of shopping on Neptune yielded high possibility of being hassled, and the hub colony on Titan predicted much better values from more desperate vendors. Red Raven Towing & Salvage appeared promisingly desperate, so she headed to their main office, flush with credits. She arrived in time to find Amy, Haley and Lydia hard at work refurbishing a salvaged gunship called the Sunfish, a small Martian craft with a cabin built for one to two crewmembers. Her large audio sensors could pick up the rest of the crew chatting inside the office, recalling encounters with Interpol in a displeased tone and looking for fences on a space station; her internal model simulation ruled out the possibility of lawn disputes and determined instead that this group were likely receptive to receiving information as partial payment for a refurbished starship. When talking with Scarlet about purchasing the Sunfish she offered to share information she overheard on the journey from Neptune about a scrap diamond shipment- a recent sea-breaking operation has produced shreds of carbon as a byproduct and a band of work supervisors have hidden some significant chunks of diamond in the chaff to sell on Terran markets. Scarlet could see the value in knowing this and offered EV3R a 30% markdown on the Sunfish. They reached a deal and EV3R hung around Red Raven while the crew finished refurbishing her new gunship.

EV3R doesn't keep any permanent address and doesn't work for anyone but herself. She may bounce around the Sol system from port to port but she likes to visit Titan Garden often when she has some valuable information to trade. The risk assessment of a Red Raven job is often worth the experience of joining them on an adventure, and when the take is split and she receives her share it's time to bounce off to the next port to see what kind of rumors her sensor array can pick up next.