A Quick Death in Texas: Telin, The X Factor

Okay, I lied, one more character needed attention, one that was overdue.

Telin is not a sidekick, and I realized almost as soon as I had said "okay, yeah, now all I gotta do is work on the culture of Space Texas and I can get going on this for real" that I needed to give her a proper treatment. The worst thing in the world I could do is relegate a character who is meant to stand as personification of the common good of everyday people- that's who she is, I'll blatantly state that's what she represents -to being "the help." She needs a core of values, she needs a compass in life, and she needs both a story to bring her to that critical point where she enters herself into the story, and a plan for as to why she means to stay in it. This is what I came up with for her: that beyond competency and uncommon nerve, we've yet to see the full extent of her, but we will soon, and it's going to be bigger than what people were expecting. She's an X-Factor.

Telin - The X Factor

Telin Enara of Maniro is a character that sits with me as an interesting canvas. We don’t know much about her at this point, other than she’s got a perhaps impulsive degree of willingness to help others, an abiding respect and loyalty to the Sendra Clan as well as her own, and that she’s got a great deal of empathy, at least for people like Van. What do I know about her for sure? That at her core, she has the same capacity to wake up angry at the world’s problems as Van, and that she, like him, isn’t sure that she likes how angry it can make her; that she has a better handle on this than Van does, and she’s aware of this; and, and this is the real important part we haven’t gotten into in text, that she’s got her own bodycount in her past.

What I don’t know about her, and I look to find out: what uniforms were those bodies wearing and where did she lay them out? How’d she do it? What is the deeper cause for her drive and her more quiet, more restrained anger? What exactly is she fully capable of? And in what capacity did she learn this?

As of right now, what Telin represents in Van’s world is the best possible outcome of going all in against a problem that needs solving: you don’t just win an ally, you win an ally that’s inspired by your drive, and they in turn get that wonderful reassurance that they aren’t alone in the world and just crazy, that someone cares just as much as they do, and will not be contained in showing it. To Van, Telin is the impossibility of someone willing to genuinely help with a plan that could turn out disastrous, because it’s one thing to know what’s right, but it’s another thing altogether to have the level of nigh-self destructive courage to be willing to even stand nearby to a plan that rough, in order to make things right.

So what is she? Is she some would-be agitator that’s been stirred to action by the appearance of someone who takes so little shit, he enters a bar by kicking a sapient trafficker through a glass door? Is this as simple as her being starstruck by having a sensitive monster-man emerge from the urban wilderness and needing her help, and her being just so impulsive that she makes the macro-scale poor decision of “yes I will upend my life to help this armed and dangerous individual take on a crime syndicate?” I really think it’d be selling her short that it’d be fully either of these things, that if they are factors in her mind, they’re complimentary to the deeper reason.

What reads through to me about her, is that she’s taken it on herself to be a Patron Saint to those with Reckless Causes. I think through that descriptor, I can see the shape of her background. That at one time, the Closeup Sunrise might have had guns on it, or maybe she was flying something smaller and more agile that was armed, and she flew either as militia or as part a vigilante clique- space regulators, more or less. In that, she had someone important to her, someone that was with her through her formative years, a friend that was the active Yang strength to her more tempering Yin strength. The sort of strong bond that can develop between someone that’s a hothead and someone who has a cool temperament, that even though one will never go as hard as the other, that one will be there to hold the other up standing, when their strength is spent. She was the friend who would hold their hair when they threw up after a bender, is what I’m saying. Probably figuratively, but mostly literally.

That person isn’t with us any more. For obvious reasons. It wasn’t her fault, and she’s not the sort to make up a scenario in her head where it was, though she’s discovered that such maturity and grasp on reality hasn’t really salved the pain of the old wound- having a bloody stump that used to be an arm doesn’t suddenly not hurt if you just stop picking at it. She hasn’t forgotten that person that shaped who she is. She sends thoughts to them in the next world every day. She sometimes still wakes up in her coffin with the last lingering image of her dream being the single worst moment of her life.

From that moment forward, Telin, of calm mind, cool composure, as natural an Astro-Captain as you’ll find in any of the sapient species, made the masterful navigation choice to plot her life around ever having to feel that loss again. She would not be kept from the Blackest Sea, because it’s her home, a woman that would gladly have the last thing she sees before she dies be the kaleidoscope-fractal spacescape of a displacement jump. But she couldn’t fly combat any more. For as much fury for the fight she might have left in the tank, she got hurt too deeply, and she’s too much of a realist to know that a warrior fights from the ground up; that if she takes too deep a wound, her stance will simply collapse against any resistance.

So specialist shipping it’d be- small loads, special deliveries, the sort of thing that requires both a good pilot and a good displacement engineer that can move on short notice (the latter of which Keeda is to a crazy degree; I use her for comic relief but I will just flat out say here, Keeda’s the one with the galaxy-brain intellect when it comes for crunching spatial mathematics, while additional being conversational in Russian and Mandarin, with English being merely her weakest Terran language). That’s how she found her way and made a new place for herself in the galaxy. She’s not an aimless drifter, but rather someone who has come to the very healthy conclusion that people break, but they don’t stay broken; when you break, you make yourself again, into something different from the pieces you glue back together. She’s not the loner who doesn’t talk to anyone in the community, she’s one active member of a union of fellow captains and astronauts, a known and respected sister to her union siblings.

But then came Van crashing into her life, riding the bleeding wreckage of the worst kind of criminal through a glass window. In some ways, he was the exact opposite of her old friend- the most obvious being that he’s a bulky framed six-foot-two terran, and the average rhidling barely scrapes five-foot-one, is somewhat elfin in stature and has a prehensile tail. But in him, she could read the same vibe, as someone with a moral compass, containing a volcanic wrath, and just barely holding it together. The second he started talking, and she leashed her own fight-or-flight response to, well, All of What He Just Did, when he heard the combination of general distress and heated conviction in his voice, and saw the look in his eyes, she saw an echo of her friend at their most focused. Perhaps she might have even reached out for them in him, if only for a moment, as though they had inhabited him as a passenger spirit- transient, benevolent possession by those honored and gone-too-soon is a reasonably common belief in rhidling society, it ties into the very real phenomena of their potential for genetic memory.

Then she snapped to, and came to two conclusions: One, that nothing would dissuade her from honoring bonds forged with the Sendra, and she and Keeda would come to the aid of their heir; Two, that this awkward Terran who nonetheless knows an awful lot of rhidling clan courtesy and culture, who has an uncommon capacity for violence yet looks like he’s about to cry at any given moment, must be protected, because in her mind, he’s a chance to preserve a rare treasure of the galaxy: a warrior altruist, someone so gentle they can’t not rage at all the hate and pain in the world, a stay-golden idealist who would rather die trying than give up and back down. People like that are rare. Those that die of natural causes are virtually nonexistent.

So from these two decisions, she’s come to her current path: that this isn’t a fight she started, but it’s one she’s willing to help finish, because the cause is just, the threat impinges on her world, and this wouldn’t be her first go-round introducing bad people to hard vacuum if push came to shove. Plus, in this pursuit, she has a chance to try again, with someone who reminds her of a time when she was in a better place emotionally, to keep the second Fellow Traveller she’s known alive with what she’s learned since the first has been gone.

She isn’t here to be anyone’s sidekick, she’s the group’s line in space, she’s the way in and the way out, and the individual that understands how the working galaxy moves. Beyond those skills and experience, she’s maybe feeling a bit of a chip, that she didn’t quite feel was a chip until she caught a contact blood-high off Van. It’s an ache to remind the Fash, and to refresh in her own mind, a statement she’s told many in the wrong before, all of them now frozen and forever floating, screaming a last breath into negative atmosphere: 

That she doesn’t have to be the best for a minute, she just has to be smarter for a second. 

“Are you willing to bet you’re fully smarter than me?”

Because again, people break but they don’t stay broken. Sometimes, they become something new from the way they glue the pieces back together. Sometimes, they realize that despite being glued back together, you can find new ways to manifest old strength. That just because one bond gets broken in a way that can’t be pieced perfectly back together, one of a similar shape can’t bring back a similar structure, a similar strength, a similar inspiration.