Edward is a Mercurian physician, he's worked a number of roles within the Beltway Quarantine Collective but he's currently serving as an agent of the collective's Rogue Vector Containment Division, or the RVCD for short. He is tall and stocky, very strong but also athletic and agile, a balance he has cultivated through a strict diet and fitness regimen. His fellow agents have described him as being like a kind of large dog, well-trained and uncompromising in his work, but having a bit of difficulty picking up new things outside of his established spheres of experience. He prefers comfortable, predictable habits and doesn't have a lot of motivation to push through learning something unfamiliar, so he settles into his ways unless his friends drag him by the arm into trying something fresh with them. When Edward is working a case his hyperfocus can be hard for his fellow agents to keep up with, but in their downtime, when those same agents invite him along to karaoke or trivia night at a favorite bar, he'll need a bit of a push to actually participate in the group activity. He's quiet and reserved, he's not spontaneous outside of his specific specialties, and he might be hesitant to try to take the lead on a casual conversation, but his presence is a big warmth to those whose trust he's earned, and it's always nice to have him come along with the group. When he's in his element, though? He'll pull you right along with him if you're not ready for it.
Referred to by some as "sprint docs," the Rogue Vector Containment Division is a branch of the Beltway Quarantine Collective tasked with locating and containing known disease vector risks attempting to move between worlds. The Sol system is still relatively early in its interconnected space age, and the impact any world's diseases can have on any other isn't fully understood, but the general consensus is that the outcome of introducing a new, uncontained pathogen into an alien environment is generally "not good." As part of a broader baseline practice of disease containment, any organic person who intends to travel by starship- as its pilot, as its crew or even just as a passenger- must receive a full schedule of vaccinations against their own world's most common and infectious illnesses before they're allowed on board a licensed starship. The vast majority of people never leave their homeworlds, it's a relative minority who have business among the stars, but they're not allowed to just hop on a rocket and haul the wet bag of microbes they inhabit into someone else's backyard, they need to receive vaccinations before they can become a starfarer. Given that this is a hard rule, every world has produced its skeptics, its oppositional and defiant denizens whose business in space should not be impeded by the needless intervention of meddlesome authorities. There is no shortage of people from all worlds who want to hop the barricade and take their wet cough with them into the tight quarters of a starship, the contained atmosphere of a space station or the boundless horizons of a foreign world. Agents like Edward and the rest of the Rogue Vector Containment Division receive notice of these cases as soon as they're identified, track them down and either enforce compliance or terminate the threat of infection, handled on a case-by-case basis.
Being a Mercurian, Edward's Gift of Sol is the purview of Friction. He has an innate ability to see the slip-or-grip potential between surfaces and objects, describing it as a kind of heat map beneath the world around him. In practical terms, Edward is able to intuit how climbable a wall is, how slippery a slope might be, how much heat a surface might generate if it's struck with a given material and know whether or not that strike can throw a spark and start a fire. Edward finds himself in a lot of foot chases when he and his team close in on a case subject, and knowing what's slippery and what's not can help close a split-second gap between pursuer and pursued. Beyond just his passive vision, Edward's Firewalker Form affords him a powerful option should a rogue vector choose escalation over compliance with containment protocol. There's a few ways he can control friction to prevent a vector from running towards crowded places: on the gentlest end, Edward is able to reduce the friction on a target's shoes, which often causes a target to slip and fall, allowing an RVCD team to swiftly catch up to and secure them. At the extreme end, he can increase the friction produced by the targets themselves, causing them to burn or lascerate against the very air around them the harder they attempt to run, which serves a similar sentence with a much firmer punctuation mark at the end of it. He takes his duties seriously, and while he'd prefer a target receive their vaccinations and reduce their risk to the broader Solar community, if they're adamant about resisting he'll use every tool at his disposal to make sure they don't invite their homegrown diseases to a foreign world.
While vaccine enforcement is the policy of every starfaring civilization, none take the weight of that need more than the people of Mercury. It's known that Mercurians are highy resistant to infectious diseases from worlds with cooler climates, as their internal body temperatures exceed the native fever responses of the worlds those diseases come from- they literally cook to death inside a Mercurian before they have a chance to spread or cause any harm. The inverse of this situation is that Mercury's own homegrown illnesses have adapted to a much warmer people, and should they spread outside of Mercury then no living organic starfarer can survive the fever temperatures needed to ward it off. Mercury recognizes that their diseases are uniquely dangerous, and so they mandate a rigid annual vaccine schedule for all of their starfaring people, where noncompliance is not accepted and the noncompliant are offered little chance at becoming repeat offenders- the risk to other worlds is too great for leniency. Mercurians on Titan will often schedule time off from work to go "get their shots," expecting the cocktail of antiviral boosters to knock them flat out for a week or so. For example, at Red Raven Towing and Salvage, Amy and Scarlet will often schedule their boosters at the same time, so when the crew's captain, chief mechanic, the purser and the head of sales are all out of commission it's just one week where the shop's closed up while they recover. Mercurians can be reckless with their Gifts, but they're brought up to respect the danger their immunity presents to those who aren't so blessed by Sol- you can do real harm to people if you're not serious about your vaccines. As the second species in the system to achieve starfaring technology, they've had a few generations to ingrain this practice in their children and maintain it as a cultural standard. They take it pretty seriously.
Mercurian disease mitigation and prevention is not something to play around with, as a single reported case of Mercurian Flu can cause a sector-wide lockdown to occur immediately in any space station, anywhere, without warning. The majority of people who leave Mercury understand this, but like any other world, some Mercurians don't think any of this should be their problem, and find their way to space all the same. These starfarers don't feel the need to avoid public spaces, and so they occasionally blip on the radar of starports, stations or colonies like Titan Garden, and if they're confirmed as being unprotected against disease vectors, a warning is forwarded to the Beltway Quarantine Collective coinciding with Mercury's own dispatch of enforcement agents. Vaccine-avoidant Mercurians who are luckier than average often find themselves getting to know Agent Edward of the Rogue Vector Containment Division, and his persuasive arguments will often make believers out of them. Those Mercurians who aren't so lucky often never realize they're being pursued in the first place- in coordination with the Beltway Quarantine Collective, Mercury's Chief Health & Transportation Clerics recommend swift and decisive intervention strategies when confronting a vaccine-avoidant Mercurian with an unknown Gift under their hat. "Do what you gotta do," one spokesperson for the Chief Cleric's Office is reported as advising. "We won't make a big deal about it." A carrier for heat-resistant viruses who refuses their shots is a ticking time bomb and a danger to any place outside their home planet they feel compelled to go, and agents like Edward and his team are never far behind them.
Needless to say, wherever you come from, be conscious of what you're bringing with you into the shared void of space. Take appropriate measures, stay up-to-date, try not to wipe out a local ecosystem in your travels. Every world has dealt with this problem internally, they've all agreed to prevent it from happening externally, by any means necessary. It's much nicer to meet a man like Edward at karaoke night in an A-District bar on Titan, awkwardly reading along the lyrics to a song he swears he likes. It's much, much less preferable that he has to meet you in a professional capacity as a sprint doc. He has good stamina, and he can maintain a sprint for a very long time.