DEAD or ALIVE
C146,000,000,000 REWARD
Notify THE GRAND ADMIRAL of the TERRAN STAR NAVY
Hailing from the distant star Antares, Whisper the Silent Flame is a member of the Solzari species and one of the rare few to make a home in the Sol system. Standing just north of eight feet tall, Whisper is by far the tallest and most imposing figure amongst the Devil's Fang Pirates. Despite his outward appearance and his profession as a legendary pirate, Whisper is an anxious and apprehensive soul, reluctant to try and bridge physical or emotional barriers between himself and those around him despite valuing the bonds he can successfully form with other people. He holds the quiet dignity of all life in high regard, and believes strongly in the value of the little things that make life beautiful, though in his own moments of anxiety he can sometimes deny himself the simple beauty of reaching out to potential new friends. To kinda help him work through these feelings Anibelle and June have set Whisper up as a go-to point of contact for crewmates aboard the Coelacanth, acting as a social coordinator to help connect crewmembers with the people or resources they're looking for aboard the enormous starship. He's been with the crew a long time and he knows a lot about ship operations, so if the crew bridge the gap and talk to him their towering friend has an easier time opening up and sharing his wealth of knowledge and forging new bonds. He really is a big sweetheart, you know.
It's fair to say most people in the Sol system have never seen a Solzari before. Appearing as a mote of flame, Solzari are a plasmid species who live on the surface of stars, able to withstand degrees of heat that would cook a Mercurian Firewalker in their boots. They are a very technologically-advanced people, taking advantage of every resource at their disposal for the comfort and betterment of their own society. They have developed a way to achieve faster-than-light travel and use it to move from star to star, mining minerals from planetary systems and building what we call "Dyson spheres" around other stars to feed more power back into their home star. Not unlike Europans, Solzari make use of an exo-skeletal body suit when they navigate away from their native environment and venture out into the cold reaches of space. These suits are made of solid metals; the heat that radiates from a Solzari is an extension of their self, and when that heat spreads into a conductive frame the Solzari is able to express their will and move that frame, even in the absence of hinged joints or other structural breakpoints- they are the heat so when they infuse into their mineral outer bodies they can move those bodies as naturally as if they were their own. That heat does end up making their metal frames hot, though, but that's not normally a concern for the Solzari themselves, as long as they still interact with the world around them and help build their technological comforts. Whisper, as one might imagine, does not share this casual lack of concern. He values a kind of physical contact he is afraid to pursue so he carries a pair of big oven mitts on his belt, so if he wants to embrace another crewmember his big silly mitts and his heat-resistant clothing will keep them from being burned by his hot metal skeleton body.
As one of the earliest members of the Devil's Fang, Whisper enjoys the trust of the new crewmembers to follow him. Many mistake him for a kind of Android at first, but Whisper's anxious and gentle nature has a disarming effect on first encounters, and crew often recognize that he needs them as much as they need him. Some new crewmembers might chastise the towering metal man for not being as tough and ruthless as they imagine, but these crewmen quickly learn the Dread Hunter doesn't have patience for that sort of bullying cruelty, and after she's straightened out their misconceptions about her operation those crewmen are more in tune with the rest of the choir. This isn't to say that Whisper doesn't participate in the business of the Devil's Fang, far from it. His place in the thick of action has evolved with the crew itself, but as the Silent Flame he's always been a crucial and active member of the crew, and he's always looked out for his crewmates.
Whisper is pretty squeamish about blood for a guy who doesn't have any. There's something about these little, clay? people? When they open up and they spread out all over and they don't get up again, the sight of it is upsetting to Whisper. Seeing a flame extinguished like that, seeing the lights just go out. He'd prefer to avoid it wherever he can, but he'd prefer not to see his new friends' flames go out in that way either. When Whisper fights it is as a last resort, and when he does fight it is a ferocious spectacle. Anibelle and June have equipped him with a large scythe they made for him out of scrap metal and pieces of construction equipment liberated from Venusian terraforming efforts, allowing him to appear menacing but also sweep through the little clay people who want to hurt his friends. He has an Antarian keepsake dangling from a hook on its back facet- a mote of starfire which infuses the scythe's blade with sizzling heat. It is important to note that Whisper is anxious, not a coward. In contemporary times Whisper stays aboard the Coelacanth while his friends file into huge bullets and shoot themselves onto other starships, so he doesn't have to seek out the chopping and the spreading out of all that red clay, but if an opportunistic intruder with ill intent finds their way onto his ship to hurt his friends they will find themselves confronted by the searing blade of the Silent Flame. The few who manage to escape intact will tell tales of this towering man of iron and fire unlike any they'd ever seen, immune to all weapons and carving through plate armor and forcefield alike- tales so tall they could only be lies.
It's not known how long a Solzari lives for, as the Devil's Fang really only know the one and have known him for about thirty years, but Whisper tells stories about the Solzari visiting other systems and what becomes of them when they're done. The star Antares is an extremely large celestial body, and while the Solzari have developed the technology to construct a Dyson sphere- or a full-encompassing array of solar panels to harness the power generated by a star- their own star is too large to bother. Instead the Solzari seek out smaller stars with planetary systems, send a team and mine out the planets for the minerals to build a power-collecting containment sphere around the smaller star and use that to fuel the technologies that allow the Solzari to expand beyond Antares itself, blanketing what remains of the star's planetary system in freezing darkness. Whisper arrived in the Sol system as part of a survey team, sent to gauge the mineral wealth of their next potential battery star.
When a Solzari survey ship approaches a star one of the first things they do to prepare for their operation is to listen for radio signals emanating from that star's collection of worlds. This serves two major purposes: number one, it alerts the Solzari to the presence of sentient, language-speaking lifeforms capable of creating broadcast signals, and number two, it allows the Solzari to build a comprehensive understanding of that system's languages. Solzari are motes of flame so they don't have physical limitations to their speech, they're able to imprint on patterns of sound quickly and use their technology to divine meaning from the order of sounds, making a Solzari crewmember a very adaptive linguist. As the survey ship approached Sol they found themselves overwhelmed with radio signals- this was a system writhing with intelligent life. That wasn't going to halt the Solzari's plans, but it would impact how clandestinely they needed to conduct their survey.
Whisper does not subscribe to the Solzari belief that the stars were theirs to have, that if another species wanted to lay claim to a star or the resources it produces they can come and meet a Solzari on its surface and talk it out. He believes in the quiet dignity of all life and for a century or so he watched helplessly as his people entombed star after star in energy-harvesting spheres, and it wasn't until the middle of his second century of starlight that he worked up the courage to do something about it: he'd join the Solzari department of energy as a surveyor and lie about other stars! If he could get aboard a ship heading to another system and falsify survey data he could make an inhabited system appear undesirable and discourage large-scale mineral extraction operations. It was a scary gambit but he couldn't keep doing nothing. His conscience wouldn't allow it.
In the Sol system, a maintenance worker and an engineer are responsible for the untimely death of a Terran project overseer, his contorted and frozen body adrift in the void of space. Understanding what they'd done, the maintenance worker- a Mercurian woman- asked of her fellow workers, "who else is here to build a blue Venus?" Many of the people of Res Ship One were apprehensive- they didn't join the project explicitly to terraform another world, they were their for a job, and now that some ill fate had befallen their overseer there was going to be intense review and they feared for their jobs. A few of them recognized what the Venusian engineer had gotten worked up about, what the Mercurian mechanic stuffed a manager into an airlock for, that something bad was coming and they didn't want to just let it happen. This latter few group took responsibility for the overseer, sabotaged construction equipment and left Res Ship One in a small starship- they would go on to become the Devil's Fang, but in this moment they were malcontents of the United Robotics Corporation responsible for murder and sabotage and, after a brief stop on Mercury, were now on their own in the Inner Belt of Sol.
Their plan was simple: there were more Res Ships on their way to Venus, and they knew the course Res Ship One took, so they'd use their still-active URC credentials to board those ships and prevent them from deploying the Inner World Terraforming Project's machinations on Venus. That one overseer was an unfortunate circumstance but they could achieve their ends without mulching up every project manager they encountered, they thought. The main thing was they weren't there to hurt their fellow workers, just to stop them from being made to work on this particular project. At first this involved simple mechanical sabotage, but it escalated to corrupting engineering schematics and theft of raw materials. With each raid they'd find a few more workers who saw the project how they did, and slowly the band of malcontents grew. There were always people who feared for their jobs, and a fair few of them cooperated with Terran Star Navy inquiries, describing the culprits and what they were doing. Things were working out alright for the little crew's attempts to sabotage the terraforming project until they were given clearance to board Res Ship Seven, and were greeted by a squad of Star Patrollers, their rifles waiting on board for their arrival.
Elsewhere in the Sol system, a small survey team had landed on the dwarf planet Ceres, hidden in a belt of asteroids. Initial surveys revealed this to be a quiet and plentiful place to mine for the resources to commence large-scale extraction on the system's other rocky worlds. The Solzari team were uncovering many useful minerals, but their scribe, Whisper, had quietly been entering them as unhelpful things: sand, loam, sandy loam, clay loam, sandy clay. Whisper's records painted a dire picture for construction in the Sol system and things were going great for his own plans of sabotage until a team member happened to notice an open data entry record by chance- the scribe has been falsifying his reports! He told the others and they were furious. Whatever an uh-oh sounds like in native Solzari, Whisper let out a quiet uh-oh upon learning he'd been found out.
The raid on Res Ship Seven was a disaster. A lot of their little crew had been cut down by Star Patrol rifle fire, some had been taken alive, but a small band of malcontents managed to escape the ship's hangar with little to show for their efforts but a smoking hull, a couple crates of self-sealing stem bolts and a lot of friends to mourn. The crew were heated- June's carapace was burned and cracked, Anibelle looked every bit a devil with her blue skin, spade-tipped tail and sharp spiky horns, her Firewalker form burning calories to try and keep the crew's ship in one piece long enough to escape. It was a big fat L and a huge setback for the newly-minted band of pirates. They were all fired up, bloody and riding a wave of adrenaline. Fortunately they had a place to hide out, calm down and regroup, heading past Mars and into the Asteroid Belt, their ship holding together long enough to make it to Ceres.
Aboard the Coelacanth, Whisper is sitting with his friends. June was tapping her fingers through a couple floating holoscreens. "Why am I only worth ninety-five billion credits? Why are you worth ninety-eight? What's the extra three for??" He reflected on how he met these two spicy little clay critters. "It's because you're short. I'm taller so I'm worth more", Anibelle replied matter-of-factly. He never knew just why they intervened on his behalf all those years ago, confronted by his survey team, but he liked to reflect on the journey they'd taken together and how safe he feels around them- for as scary as it was, he felt like he was doing some good. He found a way to preserve the quiet dignity of a whole lot of people alongside these two violent weirdos. He was suddenly yanked out of this thought- Anibelle put an arm around his searing-hot shoulders and pulled him closer to her, jabbing him with her index finger. "That's why ol' Whiz here is worth so much. That's a big boy bounty! Right, Whiz?"
Whisper squirmed a bit under Anibelle's arm. "O-- oh. Uhhh.. is that bad? I didn't, uhh.. I'm not in trouble, am I?" June laughed. The Coelacanth hummed along on its journey around their tiny, gentle little star.