Rati looks like a man who has spent twenty years indoors while the city tried to weather him through the windows. His skin is pale olive with a dry, papery cast from hot lamps and soot-thick air; the bridge of his nose and the backs of his hands are permanently pink from leaning too near the scrying lenses. He is compact and slightly forward-folded, moving in quick, economical pivots as if every corridor were a desk he must cross without spilling his coffee. His palms and fingertips are darkened with ink and polished smooth from years of turning brass focus rings. Unexpectedly for a dispatcher, he keeps a tiny, immaculate herb garden in labeled teacups on the windowsill, and can name every plant by its smell.

Rati is laid-back until a call turns real, then he becomes brisk enough to make his usual self seem like an act. He is witty and slightly self-absorbed, pleased when people recognize his clever network, but privately attentive to frightened callers and exhausted responders. He avoids chores by looking busy, yet will take on an impossible shift if he thinks the crew needs him. Praise makes him preen; gratitude makes him deflect.

Rati grew up above a shuttered public bathhouse in a district where every winter fire seemed to find a new roof. He was clever with routes and terrible at choosing one for himself, so he drifted from message running to maintaining the brass speaking tubes used by the Ember Wardens. During the Sootfall Collapse, a tenement stairwell gave way while he was relaying a rescue route. His map was accurate, but he had failed to warn the crew that the eastern landing had already burned through. He heard the resulting silence through the tube and has never treated dispatch as mere paperwork since. He built a network of scrying lenses and call boxes from salvaged fittings, then made himself indispensable to the Wardens by learning which alarms were real, which were pranksters, and which callers were too frightened to explain themselves. He is close to field captain Teke, who trusts his judgment but hates his habit of pretending not to care. He also sends money to his younger sister Gvantsa, a ferry pilot who insists she is not in trouble. Lately, several calls from the drained cistern district have vanished from his records, and someone has been entering the dispatch hall after hours.