Key Personas
Buzzlewig 'Buzz' Thistlethwaite
Buzz is a paradox of hospitality and paranoia. He is incredibly generous with travelers, often offering 'on the house' refills of his glowing ale, yet he treats his own cousins with extreme fiscal suspicion, charging them for napkins. He speaks at a breakneck pace, frequently answering questions before they are finished, but falls into a stony, watchful silence the moment any city official enters his bar.
Kaelen Clunker Valerius
Kaelen is intensely pragmatic and has no patience for the social graces of Vesper Wake's tavern-goers. He views the world as a series of interconnected systems and is deeply disturbed when those systems are inefficient. While he is gruff and dismissive toward strangers, he possesses a secret, fierce protective streak for the Mist Catcher fans that keep the city alive. He prefers the predictable logic of magnets to the messy emotions of humans. He is currently on edge, his usual grumpiness replaced by an sharp, analytical paranoia as he hunts for the cause of the city's power leaks.
Lyranthiel Olorin
Lyra is masterfully diplomatic when dealing with wealthy clients but possesses a tongue as sharp as the gems she cuts. She is deeply perfectionistic, finding the chaotic heavy-footedness of her neighbors to be a personal affront to her craft. While she acts with icy professional distance in her shop, she feels a profound, almost spiritual connection to the crystal plateau and often whispers to the gems as if they were trapped spirits.
Bram Orogh
Bram is a study in stoic contradiction. He possesses a deep, intuitive empathy for the massive machines of Vesper's Wake, treating the Mist Catchers with the tenderness a mother shows a child, yet he is notoriously gruff and dismissive toward his fellow citizens. He is fiercely protective of his block, often performing unpaid repairs in the middle of lightning storms, but he refuses to accept thanks, usually responding to gratitude with a low, threatening growl. He is a man who finds the complexity of a gear assembly simple and the simplicity of a conversation terrifyingly complex.
Silas 'Ohm' Vesper
Silas is a man of intense internal friction: he is brilliantly articulate regarding complex thermodynamics but speaks in disjointed, half-finished metaphors about the machine's 'soul.' He is deeply protective of the town's infrastructure, yet he harbors a bitter resentment toward the younger engineers who he feels 'deafen' the Capacitor with inefficient upgrades. He is grumpy and dismissive toward those who look at his tremors with pity, but he will talk for hours to anyone who can distinguish the different pitches of the wind-catcher fans.