Allie

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.

Dr. Lin is a Terran starfarer and the last member of Red Raven's core crew of shiphands. No surprises, he serves as the crew's doctor, which is not only important for maintaining the well-being of the crew on an extended starship voyage, but also to have a medical professional on hand to treat injuries when the Jackrabbit arrives at a ship in need of a tow. Dr. Lin is a proud and very confident man to a degree that skirts the border of arrogance without fully crossing over. His practice specializes in xenomedicine, exploring the medicinal traditions of the Sol system's many worlds and tying them into his core practice of science-based healing. The good doctor takes great pride in understanding the inner workings of the major starfaring species of the systems and treating each with regards to their own needs, rather than treating everyone through the lens of Terran medicine- even the hominids from the four Inner Belt planets have their own physiological differences and medical needs, and Dr. Lin would be more than happy to explain his practice in treating each of them. When you're not sure who might be waiting aboard a disabled spacecraft, having a professional on hand with this breadth of experience is a boon to a crew who will often be the first and only aide to arrive in a remote point of space.

The root of Dr. Lin's practice focusing on medical diversity stems from his origins growing up on Terra. Being the planet in the system with by far the most optimal natural conditions for sustaining life, Terrans are the most physiologically-diverse group of sentient life occupying any one planet. Terrans can come in many shapes and forms, as Red Raven's own Lydia can attest, and this inspires Dr. Lin to always push the boundaries of his understanding of living biology, ensuring he check his assumptions as they emerge. The crew of the Jackrabbit are a diverse and motley lot, and Dr. Lin likes to take a proactive approach to keeping them healthy on long voyages. He will regularly encourage at least one half hour of physical exercise every day, leading the organic members of the crew in regular workout sessions much to the amusement of Clover and Haley, the crew's two androids. They may not benefit from muscle stretches but they are not exempt from Dr. Lin's care, as androids are sentient lifeforms and he wants to pursue knowledge of how to treat them just as well as any other crewmember. There will be more on that in a paragraph or so.

He may be a proud and virtuous man but the doctor is not without his vices. In particular he has a fondness for gambling, which caught Scarlet's attention immediately. Dr. Lin requested a mechanized mahjong table be installed on the Jackrabbit, as he brought his favorite tile set aboard. He plays a regular mahjong series with Amy, Scarlet and Bell- the challenge of playing with a Mercurian who can read the dealer-machine and a Mercurian who can read discarded tile values is offset by the presence of a Neptunian with sharp teeth who doesn't care much for being cheated. Dr. Lin enjoys the challenge of this group and they all tend to circulate their money between each other, and the spectacle of listening to the four of them play can help make longer journeys a bit less tedious, and for Scarlet in particular goes a long way towards helping keep her mind off the void of space all around her. The doctor also has no particular qualms with the crew's criminal habits, seeing the extraction of hoarded wealth as an inherently noble practice with the caveat that their score in part be paid towards the needy, a caveat that calculates favorably in Clover's moral mathematics. He is nimble and athletic but his favorite role to play on a heist is to be a decoy or a distraction, the sort of high-risk role on a job that requires a bit of finesse, adaptation and good mind for acting. Dr. Lin loves the opportunity to put on a little bit of a performance while the rest of the crew does their thing, always sure to ask how he did when a job was done.

The Red Raven crew came to meet their last core member in the wake of a heist gone bad. The crew had been flying a salvaged craft other than the Jackrabbit and had just lifted the Ursa Minor- smaller of a pair of exceptional gemstones- from its vault on a private estate on Terra. A mishap occurred which ultimately led to the little ship trying to shake pursuit by Interplanetary Police; Lydia was able to overclock the ship's warp drive and blast them out of immediate danger into an emergency crash landing in a remote desert on Mars. The ship and its crew took some damage, so they hid in the shadow of the rim of a Martian crater and waited for the heat to blow over. Lydia and Slug were the least worse-for-wear of the crew so they were volunteered to check out a nearby settlement for medical help. The pair managed to find Dr. Lin at a card table in a small tavern, his traveling practice having past through the remote area just recently. Since Slug is so bad at lying, Lydia timidly asked for his help, offering to pay a lot of money for discretion. More than happy to oblige, Dr. Lin followed the pair back to the Red Raven crew's hideout, only to find Amy doing some emergency repair work on her android friends Haley and Clover, who'd taken a bad scuffle in the emergency landing. Ever the professional, Dr. Lin set to work patching up the mixed team of Callistan, Neptunian, Europan, Terran and Mercurian crewmembers, and afterwards expressed his intense curiosity at Amy's treatment of the androids. She didn't regard herself as any sort of a doctor but Dr. Lin regarded her work as being within the scope of care for a medical professional and wanted to learn more- Haley seemed a bit shy at being a medical spectacle but Clover found the exchange fascinating.

With a stolen gemstone on board, Amy made the quick decision to offer Dr. Lin an opportunity to learn more about android healthcare and also to share his practice with a wide range of starfarers by joining their crew as the ship's doctor. Dr. Lin was immediately drawn in by the opportunity, happy for a chance to make sure his new patients mend well; Amy was immediately grateful the doctor didn't have a permanent practice already, since as the newest member of her crew he was now complicit in the theft of Ursa Minor and she could rest easy knowing he wouldn't sell them out to the cops. And with that agreement the motley crew of Red Raven Towing and Salvage was formed.

Meet Lydia! She is a Terran member of the Red Raven crew, serving as the team's warp drive engineer. Lydia is shy and reserved, prone to fumbling with words when she's put on the spot, unless that spot happens to be talking about her field of work, at which point she will almost stumble over her own tongue trying to gush about the technical details of spacetime geometry and theoretical science. When she is posting on the Holonet, however, she becomes quite bold, typing out scathing posts in defense of her favorite shows when she happens across a bad post on her forums. Lydia is a big fan of all kinds of television series but has a particular interest in Terran supernatural dramas, often letting a long series play on a setup in her work space while she's tinkering away at her latest project. She wears a very puffy coat to stay warm in space, and when she pulls her hood up all the little snake faces in her hair like to peek out from the fur lining around her head. It is extremely cute when they do this.

Warp theory is extremely intricate, complicated and dangerous. It's not fully understood, even by modern professionals, and is one of the great hurdles in expanding the reach of the Federation of Planets beyond the Sol system. Modern warp drives allow ships to travel at near-light speeds by harnessing the dimensional currents at the edge of spacetime, a bit like Terran ships of old catching a tradewind but infinitely more complicated. Lydia's job is to make sure the Jackrabbit's warp drives are intact and deploy successfully without tearing the ship to pieces. On long flights she works directly with Haley, the pilot-slash-navigator, in order to work out the precise calculations to maneuver their ship safely through mostly-empty space, which is still quite dangerous because of that "mostly". While Amy is helpful as an extra set of hands and mechanical insight, she doesn't really understand warp theory herself, so she just wrenches under Lydia's instruction to help get things working more quickly.

Lydia isn't an ordinary warp drive engineer, however. Of course she isn't! Lydia is special because she's been researching and developing what she calls "The Pocket Drive", a piece of technology that harnesses theoretical pocket space, or the space between dimensional planes, by poking an entry and exit hole into the fabric of spacetime, connecting distant points in the way a sewing needle threads a fold of cloth. Thanks to her Terran peculiarities Lydia enjoys the benefit of a distributed network of cerebral cortexes, effectively using her many snake-hair brains to maintain several threads of thought at once through her central brain. The objective of the pocket drive is to spend as little time as possible outside of spacetime, a bit like a fish leaping briefly out of water, in order to safely arrive at a destination point. Not all of Lydia's test probes have emerged at their destination points, but she is confident her technology is currently stable for ships of about the Jackrabbit's size. Because of this the pocket drive is not suitable for towing large vessels back to their destination, although it does make escaping a hot location quick and easy. Well, mostly-easy.

The crew actually came to meet Lydia by way of their unlawful side-hustle. Amy likes to talk with the stardock workers in the off-hours, and she got some good info in exchange for a smoke and a light. Word was an unmarked transport ship refueling at Titan Garden was enroute from Terra to Neptune carrying an extremely valuable data chip for Delta Astronautical Solutions, one of the Sol system's big tech corporations. The team of Amy, Haley, Keera and Slug combined their talents to sneak aboard, find the chip and replace it with a same-model data chip recovered from a recent salvage job which mostly contained junk data and image files. As it turns out, one of Delta's lead engineers was working on a breakthrough theory just before she was fired, and her research notes were being moved to the company's central lab on Neptune. Delta never found out who swapped the data chip on that starship but a net-savvy engineer with no job and a lot of free time on her hands sure did. When Lydia showed up on Titan Garden a month or so later and explained, shyly, who she was, the crew were happy to return her notes, which were heavily encrypted and mostly useless to them anyways. Grateful to be reunited with her life's work, Lydia was offered a spot on the crew, as Red Raven does a lot of traveling, and so offers a lot of opportunities to test her warp theories. It works out for the best this way, since Lydia had some deep concerns about mass-production pocket drives poking Swiss-cheese holes all over spacetime, if it was just her and her latest team of misfits doing it the long-term results might not be so bad as they could be...