Velveteen

He wakes first, because he was the least braced against any of it. He lifts the slab off Oot without much fuss and asks if the tortle is okay before he asks anything else. At the crossroads he puts his cheek to the floor and lets the station tell him which way — west — and he's right. He holds the hands of two dying men and tells them, meaning it, that the universe has them now. He keeps asking people to be his friend: the bird, the pirate, the tortle. When the day gets loud he has exactly one thing to offer. You need to center your gravity, dude.

Velveteen is. He just... is. He's smart, but mellow, and vibes with the gravitational waves all around us, always.

When another inmate is spun up about something — a fight, a lockdown, a guard who didn't rotate out — Velveteen has one piece of advice, delivered the same unbothered way every time:

He left the family business, working the Maw Stations, a family of scientists who maintained the warp engines. Velveteen just wanted to get away. Sure, he could do all that work, but he didn't want to calculate gravitational waves. He wanted to feel them.

That's what got him here. At a transit hub between systems, a corporate envoy came through under heavy escort, guarding a sealed cylinder of something blue and swirling. Velveteen had never tasted blue before. So he drifted closer, the way he does, until his own gravity well, the one he can't help carrying with him, tugged just hard enough to pop the seal.

The liquid came loose and started to rise. He didn't hesitate. A pseudopod unspooled, wrapped around the whole shimmering mass, and pulled it in.

Turns out that "blue" was a prototype gravity well core worth more than the envoy's entire career. The corporation was not amused. Velveteen is, as far as he can tell, the only prisoner on The Rock who got sent to a black site for feeling something too intensely.

There is also the matter of the refugee ship he tuned to his own taste before it vanished into the dark. He is confident they're fine. He asks about it more often than a confident person would.