Role: Founder and leader of Siddhartha’s Peace
A former Straylight employee turned Neo-Buddhist founder, the Abbot wears gaudy priestly robes and a headdress and genuinely seems to believe in what he’s built, even as it falls apart around him. He greeted the crew with real relief — the colony hasn’t had off-world visitors in a long time. He’s desperate: the power is failing, the terraforming station that supplies all the colony’s parts has locked itself down, and he owes a debt to Straylight the colony can barely service. He offered the crew salvage rights to the station (worth roughly double their original delivery contract) in exchange for retrieving a power converter from its 3D printers.
His old coworker and the colony’s co-founder, Genma, disappeared around the same time the station went dark — the Abbot won’t say much about what happened between them, only that no one goes to Genma’s lab anymore.
The Abbot never made it back to his office. On the night the colony rose, Ensho and three men with stun batons walked him — and a stranger in a Straylight Computing jumpsuit — through the landing-field gate at gunpoint and into the space elevator, and the capsule carried all of them up toward the terraforming station. His second, First Instructor Fugen, escaped the colony office with the crew and is demanding the Abbot be brought back. The job the Abbot hired them for now has a hostage attached to it.