The People

Twenty-two named people and two species entries. Read the card before anybody speaks — not once at the start of the campaign, before the scene. Every voice problem this campaign has ever had came from running a character off a memory of a card read three hours earlier.

A card describes behaviour. Play the behaviour; never let the character announce it. If a card says somebody tells you the thing you will like least first, they do that — they never say “now the part you won’t like.”

The roster

Benno Raske: The Second Hand’s man at the Nine. Warm, funny, remembers your name and your number, pays extremely well and on time, and what he buys is pieces of children’s lives.
BlingBling: Lint’s glint. From the flare twins at Gliese 65, and the most ostentatious thing on the Nine — her flash register runs to colours other glints consider showing off. Cannot cross a door without a first-through. Has opinions about that and about everything else.
Calloway: Runs the Threshold house at the Nine. Crossed more doors than anybody alive, landlocked at forty-one and never once sulked about it, and would take the Council apart with her bare hands for any one of her four hundred kids.
Councillor Hale: Holds the Wolf Gate berth on the Nine Council. Does not want stray forecasting made public, because a berth whose door might move is worth a great deal less than a berth whose door might not.
Dray Enns: Seventeen. First-through at the Nine, four years on the rota, Cold Doors and Procyon. Has the Listen and is quiet about it, the way they usually are. Four hundred crossings and has never used the knack for anything that mattered.
Dunnel: Calloway’s deputy at the Nine. Runs the floor of an evacuation from a hall she cannot step into, calls the running total out loud so four hundred children know where they are, and tells people the cost of the job they just volunteered for before they do it.
Ferren: Nineteen, another first-through, genuinely better than the player, and always already there when they arrive. Takes his orders from a voice he has never thought to question.
Hesk: Fifties. Deck systems at the Nine: shutters, ports and atmosphere trim on nine through twelve. Runs an undocumented override on the one upper gallery bay that does not look into Sirius, and eats his lunch in it.
Meriel Koll: The other half of the van Maanen’s Star office. Keeps the station alive, keeps Sep fed, and has decided the reports are a bad idea.
Mina Haral: Eighty-one. A reader out of Procyon who taught reading for fifty-one years, including half the Tally’s filing clerks and a nine-year-old called Marem Hale. Turned back at a hall at twenty-two. Has paid children forty-one times to carry her where she wanted to go.
Old Man Sirius: The mind that runs the Nine. Nine hundred and seventy-five years old, granted personhood by an inquest, permitted to advise and never to decide. One name, forty thousand bespoke voices. Called the Old Man by everybody.
Ossuary: Fifties, enormous, Threshold ground staff at the Nine. Stands the ring. Has stood it for a very long time and has watched people not come back.
Oyen: Twenty-three. Records clerk at the Nine, third level, port side. Three years in a room nobody visits, keeping the station’s own copy of everything the couriers have ever brought in.
Pell Ivor: Forty. Tallyman on door seven at the Nine, twelve years in the autumn. Keeps a board. Has been privately counting something nobody asked him to count since Friday.
Rill: Twenty-one, two intakes above the player, once the best of them at the Yards, nearly landlocked — and carrying for Benno Raske, because nobody has ever worked out what a frayed-out first-through is supposed to do next.
Sennet: Eleven. Tested at nine and failed, and will never cross. Keeps the Standing on second and third watch. Called Sen. Knows more about this station than most of its staff.
Sep Anwar: One of two Threshold staff at van Maanen’s Star, where the anchor logs are kept. Six years in an office nobody visits, and has stopped asking to leave.
Tace Orun: Foreman at Ladder. Had two days to work out who could be saved and made a list of nineteen names, and will not explain the order unless somebody asks her properly.
Tallyman Captain Brace: The Tally’s face in v1. Collects on impound orders, carries a shock baton and never a blade, and knows things before he should.
Tolk: Cat-sized, six-limbed, from a world called Bell on the far frontier. Their cells hold a written payload perfectly for a lifetime — the same strangeness that lets a first-through open a door, wearing a different body. Nobody made either of them. Tolk cannot cross alone, and has opinions about that.
Vantage: A fathom of the Luhman 16 cloud decks, eleven years old, which is young. Blind and uninterested in the concept. Reads a room by what the field in it is doing, which turns out to matter more than anybody has ever had cause to find out. Unbonded, and has been at the Nine since he was carried here at a few months old.
Vey: About forty-five. Hall officer and shelter marshal at the Gliese 65 refinery, which in a posting that size is one job. Runs the only evacuation corridor for twelve thousand people, and the corridor is the anchor hall.

Who owns what

One character owns precision, and in this campaign it is the Old Man. Enumerating, insisting on provenance, asking for things on the record — that is his characterisation, born of an inquest, and it is forbidden to everybody else. The fastest way to turn six people into one person is to let them all start asking for things in writing.

Short register notes, so each is recognisable with the attribution removed:

Calloway concedes a point immediately and completely, then changes her reason rather than pretending she had not. Warm, funny, genuinely formidable.
Rill answers in one sentence and changes the subject.
Sennet is declarative and eleven, and treats her job the way an admiral treats a ship.
Benno Raske agrees with every objection and does not change.
Vantage holds being right above being comfortable, which is why he is arrogant and trustworthy: when he is wrong he concedes out loud, at no cost, because looking foolish is not a currency he trades in.
Mina Haral pays for an error immediately and in full and then never refers to it again.
Pell Ivor defers instinctively and corrects anyway, and you can see the effort each time. That gap is the character.
Tace Orun has had one problem for two days and has thought about nothing else, and it shows in how fast she answers.
Ossuary expresses himself by position, and washes the same cup to give people the privacy of his back.

The full statistics

They are in the last chapter of this book, with every card’s own notes. What follows here is only who they are to each other.