Allie

Viola is Timberwolf's second Venusian crewmember, serving as the company's business front. A well-connected woman, Viola maintains a collection of professional facades, switching between them as she moves from one aspect of Timberwolf's business to the next. In one moment she could be pressing a prospective salvage buyer with the hard sell, and the next moment she's holding a glass of Venusian fruitwine while she spins a yarn for a circle of listeners at an industry party, and in the next moment after that she's meeting private contacts off-comms to work out the terms of a smuggling job. Whether she's aggressive or engaging or stone-faced about her work, Viola always carries herself as a professional, which can be an important presence on a rowdy crew like Timberwolf's, or Red Raven's for that matter. Viola knows what people want to see- customers want to see they're getting a deal before anyone else snaps it up, industry peers want to see someone isn't just a transactional ladder-climber and smugglers need to know their transport partner is discrete and mature enough not to attract unwanted attention- and she can adjust her presentation to be that person in that moment.

Like Red Raven, their rival salvage company, Timberwolf maintains their business through multiple revenue streams, most legitimate but some not so much. As a demolition and reclamation company you're not going to get Joe-Average clients dialing in with hundred-year-old space stations they need dismantled, oh no. The people who have the big things that need to be decommissioned and dismantled are corporations and world governments, and so you need someone who can navigate the niceties of their particular social climate, to give a memorable performance and be the first name that comes to mind when someone's boss tells them the higher-ups need to get rid of a giant money sink floating in valuable orbital space. Unlike a tow truck company Timberwolf needs a different approach to land these bigger, rarer clients, and Viola is the one to bait the hook.

Viola had actually met her chief rival and counterpart Scarlet when the two were much younger, dressing up nice to sneak into invite-only parties and work the crowds. Scarlet would have her funny little friend in tow but Viola was relatively unencumbered and so got to hone her craft on a high-fallutin' test audience, making up fake businesses she represented to help her fit into a crowd. With Scarlet it always seemed so effortless, like she somehow just knew what buttons to push with people, so when a young Viola was working the same cons she would watch the Mercurian and try to figure out what she was doing right. The sort of people who were invited to these circles seemed to value confidence, a good story seemed to imply a broad and active work life, and the specifics of which company you represented seemed to be secondary to how enjoyable you were to talk with. The Sol system is big enough that Viola could make up little fake upstart companies and no one would question why they hadn't heard of them, and when she met the same people at new parties she had "moved up" to another new company- a line she'd seen Scarlet use to positive reception- and over time the young Venusian had moved up from a sociable imposter to a welcome guest at these industry events. And then, one day, her stories caught up with her.

It was over fruitwine with the head of logistics for a Martian astroengineering firm; Viola had mentioned she'd recently taken on a role with a reclamations company when the Martian mentioned, hey, we've got an old research station orbiting Saturn and we'd like to put something more modern and efficient in that orbital real estate, the company would pay well to decommission the old rig. Viola exchanged information and assured her new friend she'd be in touch once she consulted with scheduling and logistics. After the party she was in a bit of a panic- she could see why Scarlet would just have her fun and leave, but now Viola had found real money on the table and needed a plan on how to collect it. Bringing up the holonet she'd search Saturnian space for a demolitions company she could two-time into completing this job. Timberwolf Reclamation & Demolition was a Venusian-owned outfit so she thought she'd be able to work that angle to cash out her scam, but when she landed on Titan Garden and arrived at the Timberwolf office she found a motley crew unloading a cargo hold full of valuables with a big robotic arm, its captain tipping back a big pull of beer. Bryce looked over his shoulder, cleared a belch and asked, are you the lady with the big job? Viola had initially hoped to use this outfit to wring that paycheck out of the Martian, but what she was finding here on Titan instead was a group of people who required no performance and no facade. She relaxed, smiled and answered yeah, she is, but she's gonna need a team to pull it off. And so here she is, many big jobs later, with a gold pin on her jacket, soliciting contracts and marketing salvage for her industry partners, the Timberwolf Reclamation & Demolition Company.

Clayton is a Terran linguist and Timberwolf's communications specialist. Language experts are crucial on interplanetary starship voyages, since translation technology doesn't handle the quirks and idioms of natural speech as well as a practiced interpreter. Clayton speaks the Sol system's major planetary languages but he specializes in Inner Belt variants, able to speak many Mercurian, Venusian, Terran and Martian languages beyond their common tongue. His Jovian mastery is a bit rusty, but he knows enough to make good use of the mentioned interpretation technology, which takes the form of a display screen attached to his comms unit controllable from a thumb device attached to his belt. Clayton's got a very mirthful personality, having a deep love for a good joke and a fun story- he often likes to riff off of Bryce's quips and spin them into jokes of his own.

In addition to being the ship's interpreter, Clayton pulls double-duty as the crew's cook, as having to do both jobs at the same time is quite rare. He has a prosthetic right forearm and likes to refer to it as the Stern Hand he rules his kitchen with- since it's so good at stirrin' a pot of dinner, ha ha! But seriously. Clayton's jovial nature sharply turns if the crew start meddling with his things while he's preparing dinner, snapping back to his joyful standard as soon as order is restored. He mostly knows a lot of Terran recipes but he's been trying his hand at some extra-spicy Mercurian dishes and the always-popular Ganymedean style meat roll-ups. His cooking is always a big hit with the crew.

Clayton picked up a lot of his Outer Belt linguistic knowledge working for Baxler Distribution Company, Titan Garden's primary company moving perishable goods from the import docks to the various businesses throughout the station who depend on keeping those items in stock. Wheeling shipments into a variety of kitchens, Clayton got a taste of many Outer Belt languages, studying up and practicing between shipments, checking with his translator lens and getting friendly corrections from his friends in the kitchen.

When Clayton was confident enough in his Outer Belt mastery he had designs on a career move, since he didn't want to work the lorry on refrigerated trucks forever. On the way back to the docks following a completed shipment route he overheard a Neptunian tunneler arguing with some sort of salvage company. The little lagomorphic starfarer was shouting about a section of hull visible in the company's hangar clearly having Neptunian markings on it identifying it as her ship, but the green-haired Venusian man could only raise his hands and shout "what?" and "I don't know what you're saying" in response. Clayton gestured to his buddy, hopped off the truck and stepped over to intervene, eager for an opportunity to practice his own Neptunian. He'd conveyed to the Venusian that the little lady was saying his salvage was her property, and he passed on to the Neptunian that the Venusian was saying he has lawful salvage rights to the abandoned shipwreck. He offered on his own that salvage rights could be disputed at Titan Garden's central office. When the Neptunian had stormed off, Clayton reached in his coverall's pocket and pulled out his Baxler Distribution business card; he handed it to the green-haired man and said there was more where that came from if he's interested, hopped back on his truck and closed out the rest of his shift. A day or so later he'd get a call from Timberwolf Reclamation & Demolition, and the day after that he'd put in his two weeks with Baxler.

Kollori is a Callistan programmer, working as Timberwolf's computer security professional. She is Clover's counterpart in the rival company, ensuring decommissioned satellites are fully offline & inert before they are dismantled and interacting with computer systems in shipwrecks the crew encounters, where she will recover data logs and attempt to access door and climate controls to make a salvage job that much easier. Kollori has a very can-do personality, and while she might stumble with words to get her thoughts out in speech, when she's typing on the Holonet she is fully in her element. Thanks to the anonymity of their posting handles, Kollori and Lydia don't realize they post on a lot of the same forums and have gotten into a fair few arguments with each other about bad taste and television shows.

Many people in the Sol system would not assume Callistans's large three-clawed hands would be a good match for the rigors of computer-touching, but the truth is they are extremely adept coders and typists. By flexing the sharp quills in their forearms they can strike the keys inside sets of specially-made arm bands to type with remarkable speed and precision. Their thick claws are used for holoscreen manipulation, their thumbs serving as typeset modifiers, and so a dedicated professional like Kollori can juggle multiple holoscreens and computer interfaces with ease. Her Callistan typing gauntlets connect to portable computers on her belt, and when she's not wearing them she can attach the gauntlets to the sides of her belt like cowboy holsters, pulling her hands out or stuffing them back in when it's time to get busy.

Having a decryption AI like Clover on a crew is a powerful asset, but there are advantages to staffing an organic computer expert in contrast to an android. When salvaging data files from computer systems a computer expert like Kollori can think illogically to more easily track down hidden data files masked behind obfuscating system structures, where androids like Clover take a more linear, albeit lightspeed, approach to system analysis. With her quill-powered typing gauntlets Kollori can try all sorts of abstract, weirdo solutions to the computer puzzles of deep space demolition and salvage jobs at a blistering pace, giving her and her peers an edge in a discipline shared by living computers.

Timberwolf came to meet Kollori in a fairly normal fashion. With their business expanding, Bryce landed a contract to decommission and old Terran orbital defense satellite and so he needed someone to make sure that its brains were all-the-way switched off before they start taking it apart. Instead of meeting people in bars or on some adventure, Mahnoor suggested putting a job posting up on the Holonet and seeing what kind of computer techs respond. They received a fair few responses basically instantly- Alan assessed that they were automated responses and advised disregarding them for the time being. A day or so later the job listing received an earnest but somewhat-unprofessionaly written response from Callisto, the applicant claiming that she could "basically do anything, really". Mahnoor wanted to wait but Bryce liked her moxy, so he decided to give her a shot and see what she could do. When the Timberwolf team shipped out and arrived at the defense satellite, Kollori set right to work; she accessed the ship's computer through an old radio antenna and rerouted its sensor arrays to loop into themselves, tying the satellite's external triggers in a knot. Then, intuiting that it might have a backup battery or power source available in case of a power-cutoff attack, decided to remove all power limiters and route the whole battery power into the central computer, burning it out to avoid a failsafe trigger. With a spark and a flash the lights on the satellite all went out, and the job was now safe for the Timberwolf crew to begin dismantling and collecting the old relic. Impressed with her work, Bryce offered Kollori a full-time position as Timberwolf's computer expert, and she's been flying with the team ever since.

Jack comes from the zesty little planet of Mercury to work as Timberwolf's gunnery expert, operating the heavy equipment on their ship, the Ermine. His primary role on a demolition job is debris containment, ensuring that whether blasting asteroids or cutting old bulkheads, stray scraps of debris are contained and do not drift away to make a mess of the job site. For a demolitions professional he has a cocky and somewhat carefree personality, happy to make an impressive show of any job in case someone happens to be watching. On the job Jack can often be found in one of the domed control stations on either side of the Ermine, maneuvering the ship's large robot arm to grab a piece of decommissioned hardware and slice it clean with the accompanying laser cutter. He'll often give these scrap carvings a nimble twirl and a catch with the robot arm before depositing them into the Ermine's cargo hold. He's got a bit of a thing for Red Raven's business face, Scarlet, so when they're at the Titan Garden docks and he thinks she's watching he'll put an extra bit of flourish on top of his normal routine. Work's only work if you don't have a little fun, right?

Being a Mercurian, Jack's innate talents naturally play heavily into his duties on the crew. Where Amy perceives mechanical interconnectivity and Scarlet comprehends the threads of value and valuables, Jack's ember eyes can read trajectory and velocity as if they were mapped out in front of him. On outer space demolition jobs this talent is incredibly useful since it allows him to sight-read debris scatter patterns before detonation and set up forcefield containment barriers efficiently and lets him snap up pieces of scrap drifting awkwardly in space with the cumbersome robot arm of the Ermine. This particular gift crossed with this particular trade increases on-site safety and efficiency tenfold, as there is no misassumption where something is going to go or what it's going to bang into if you can see it in advance just by looking at it. Jack has used the ship's robot arm to catch his fellow workers who have drifted outside the Ermine's gravity meshes, nimbly placing them back on solid footing. The safety guarantee is worth the price of admission to the rest of The Jack Show.

When he is in the main gunnery deck during dangerous transit periods Jack can make the most of the Ermine's humble defenses to keep the ship safe, using the ship's front autocannons to redirect asteroids onto safer trajectories or tracking a steady beam from its laser cutters onto evasive ships looking for an easy score- he's even able to track the route of a swooping ship behind his line of vision. Fully maximizing the Ermine's defenses, Jack will sometimes grab the wing of an attacking ship with the ship's robot arms, which is an effective enough trick that it often scares off would-be bandits without further harm. Naturally, with a showboating personality and an innate gift for angles, Jack is an avid pool shark, running tables and ducking the subsequent blaster shots at any port the Ermine docks in.

It was actually at one of these pool halls where Bryce happened to add Jack to his crew. Bryce had been enjoying a drink with Emily when he first caught the spectacle of Jack working a table, running the classic trick of losing a game or two and then begging for a double-or-nothing, one last game, to earn his credits back before turning on the Mercurian juice and cleaning the table himself. Jack had run this scam many times before, and today he was pressing his luck with a group of surly Callistan shipbuilders. Bryce knows a thing or two about dealing with Mercurians, so while he was impressed by the show of skill the quill-bristling Callistans were much less so, and out came the blasters. As Jack can read trajectories he's usually pretty good at slip-and-sliding his way around blaster fire, but today he didn't have to, as Bryce stepped in front of him and took a shot to the midsection for him, grabbing the Callistan's weapon. While Emily cold-cocked the larger Callistans Bryce turned to ask if Jack was alright; Jack pointedly mentioned he should be asking that question, where the Venusian assured him he'll be fine, he just needs a bit of time to walk it off. He and his crewmate had just been having a drink at the bar when they couldn't help but noticed such a display of skill and control, Bryce would say, turning on his charms. He runs a demolition and salvage company, bouncing around the Sol system having all kinds of fun, and he was wondering if Jack would care to join them at the bar and talk a while? The drinks are on Timberwolf. No one's actually taken a blaster shot like that for Jack before, so after looking over to see his Callistan assailants knocked out cold, he cracked a smile, snapped his fingers and said sure thing! He pocketed his pool winnings, took a seat in between the two starfarers, and the rest, as they say, was history.