Pherus hails from SugarPine 9, a world that blends lush, Pandora-like jungles with quaint, storybook towns straight out of a Hallmark holiday film. The year on SugarPine 9 lasts roughly 16 weeks, with a new holiday celebrated every other week. Tourists flock there for vacations to experience these charming, whimsical celebrations and live out their own personal "storybook endings"—though all visitors must leave as soon as their holiday ends.

Pherus, like many of her people, evolved from jungle insects. Her lineage is tied to a mantis, giving her an elegant, elongated frame. Standing 6 feet tall, she appears even taller due to her slender build. Her skin is a dark blue at her feet, gradually shading upward into turquoise, with a sleek, carapace-like texture. She has glowing gold eyes that softly light up in dim settings. Long, delicate wings are often mistaken for part of her clothing.

A lover of hand-knitted creations, Pherus is rarely seen without her signature scarves, which she gives away freely but somehow never runs out of. Her knitting bag is a constant companion.

At her core, Pherus is an eternal optimist. She believes wholeheartedly that kindness is the key to navigating life’s challenges—and lives every day with that philosophy in her heart.

Eloise comes from a world that survives by pretending.

Pompyros is a shard where mutation is a fact of life. Bodies shift, adapt, and change in response to forces both environmental and emotional. Long ago, those differences led to devastating conflict. Peace was eventually achieved, but only through suppression. Emotion became taboo. Expression became dangerous. Stability was maintained by everyone agreeing, silently, to feel less.

Most people learned to live that way.

Eloise did not.

Her mother named her “healthy” in the hope that she would escape the worst of their bloodline. Instead, Eloise developed a rare and dangerous trait. Her mutations are directly tied to her emotions. Where others flatten themselves into calm, she reacts. When she feels, her body answers.

She is everything her world tried to eliminate.

Her mother died when her body changed in a way it could not survive. It was quiet, like most tragedies on Pompyros. Unspoken. Contained.

Her father was the opposite.

He was a wanderer, restless in a culture built on stillness. He traveled constantly, documenting his journeys in a journal filled with maps, coded notes, and names. So many names. At first they seemed like contacts or curiosities. Over time, Eloise realized the truth.

They were family.

Her father did not just leave. He scattered them. Whether that was intentional, necessary, or something darker is still unclear. The journal never gives a full answer. Entries cut off abruptly. Locations are marked but never explained. Some names are circled. Others are crossed out.

And then the journal simply stops.

No record of what happened to him. No confirmation of his fate.

Just absence.

Now that journal is everything to her. It is a map, a record, and a warning all at once. Every name is a lead. Every gap is a question. And every page raises the same possibility.

Her father might still be out there.

Or he might be the reason her family is broken in the first place.

Her younger half sister, Pherus, is the only one she has found for certain. Protecting her is not negotiable. It is the one piece of her life that feels solid.

Everything else is uncertain.

Eloise presents herself as controlled and refined. In her normal state, sometimes called Orchid, she is composed, proper, and deliberate in everything she does. She speaks carefully. She carries herself like someone who belongs in a polite society. It is a performance, but also a shield.

It does not always hold.

When her emotions break through, especially anger, her body transforms. Bone, muscle, and structure shift into something larger and more dangerous. This form, sometimes called Midnight, is not just stronger. It is honest in a way her culture never allowed. At first she feared it. Now she is learning to use it.

Not gracefully, but effectively.

She came to the Crypt Market on Zol because it offers something Pompyros never could. Movement. Information. Access to systems that track people as cargo. If her family was taken, sold, or displaced, then someone kept records.

And records can be found.

Her goals are direct even if the path is not.

She wants to find her siblings and understand what happened to them

She wants to protect Pherus at all costs

She wants to expose and dismantle the systems trafficking people across shards

She wants to uncover the truth about her father and what role he played in all of this

Beneath all of that is a quieter truth she rarely admits.

She does not just want to find her family.

She wants them whole again. Even the ones who are gone.

Eloise is stalwart. Once she commits to something, she does not turn away. She carries responsibility heavily and willingly. Loyalty defines her choices, even when it costs her.

She is also, despite everything, deeply human in small and inconvenient ways.

She is afraid of small creatures. Not monsters or violence, but tiny, skittering things that catch her off guard.

It is one of the few things that can break her composure instantly.

Eloise is a contradiction that refuses to resolve.

A polite voice hiding something volatile

A protector shaped by instability

A daughter chasing answers she may not be ready to hear

And somewhere out there, at the center of it all, is the question she cannot let go of.

What was her father really doing?

He says he is from the Vapors. He says he ran with smuggling crews for years. He says the nickname Silver is just about the suit, a signature magnetite sand number whose particles never fully settle, always catching light in a way that makes him look like he belongs somewhere much more expensive than wherever he currently is. He says a lot of things, cycling through accents and voices mid-sentence, and it takes a few conversations to notice that none of it has actually been an answer.

He is blue. Aquarium-blue, the kind where you are not entirely sure if what you are seeing through him is a trick of the light or something actually moving in there, and if you look long enough you will conclude it is the latter. He is always touching something, a lighter, a card, your watch if you are not paying attention, and he studies faces the way other people read maps: carefully, thoroughly, and with obvious intent to use the information later. There is a lightning lamprey named Jupita living in his chest. He talks to her constantly and does not appear to find this unusual. She does not appear to mind.

What is clear is that he is not just a street-level con. He is seasoned, he is sharp, and he needs this crew to work in a way that goes beyond the current job. He mentioned freeing someone once, briefly, and then moved the conversation somewhere else before it could land. Whatever fractured the last crew, he is not ready to let it happen again. Whether that makes him more reliable or more dangerous probably depends on the day.

Built as a toy. Stolen as a tool. Promoted to Chief Gearhead of a plantation, then secret agent for the Synthetic underground, then wanted fugitive on Zol. Bungee's career trajectory has been, to put it mildly, unplanned.

Stripped from a toy store on Brassisca Dominus and put to work by Farmer raiders, he adapted the way he does everything: cheerfully and with a wrench in hand. He fixed Synths, then improved them past their original specs, then quietly siphoned funds from the Awakened elite to keep the resistance running. He also raised the plantation owner's son, because someone had to. His real gift, though, has always been invention. Give Bungee a tennis racket, some silly putty, and five minutes, and he will hand you back a working deflector shield. He does not always know what he is going to build until the situation demands it, which is, honestly, his preferred working condition.

Eventually he was commissioned by the Synthetic underground to do something no one had done before: leave the Shard, go on an adventure, and write a novel about it. A Synth authoring original creative work would be hard proof that Synths are not just programmed machines. He shipped out to Zol, snuck into the soul-forgers' facility to learn the secrets of consciousness and fix his pre-programmed speech, got caught, and spent 207 days in prison. Then a tall, smiley man with a mechanical arm offered him an adventure, and Bungee said yes before he finished the sentence.

Bungee wants three things, in rough order of how often he talks about them: to jump off the tallest structure in the known universe, to bring home a finished novel that changes everything for his people, and to find out if a being like him can ever become something more than very good hardware. He has already proven he has a soul. He has witnesses. He will absolutely challenge you to a game while explaining the implications.

He has a brain missing screws and a heart that won't fail. One day the whole world will read about him. Just wait and see.