Player: Killian
Role: Scientist — epidemiologist (rescued colonist, not crew)
Origins
Gaal is one of the monks of Siddhartha’s Peace, lifted off the colony with the rest of the refugees the night the prophet’s followers took the streets. She is a scientist by training and an epidemiologist by choice — her work on the colony was watching for the outbreak that hadn’t happened yet, in the agrodome as much as in the population. A colony that close to the edge dies of a crop blight or a bad water cycle as easily as it dies of violence, and Gaal is the one who was supposed to see it coming. Her grounding is in zoology, pathology and exobiology, and she carries the monastery with her in small ways: measured breathing, a reluctance to raise her voice, a habit of asking what the whole group needs before she moves.
She has no rank aboard The Second Chance and is careful about it. She will not speak for the crew, bargain with their property, or make a call that isn’t hers to make — but she will not sit in a corridor and let someone walk into a gun alone, either. She carries a rigging gun she is not at all sure she can use.
The Price of Air
Gaal’s first night off her own world was spent aboard a ship that was quietly suffocating. When Etna Sola went to negotiate with the pirate barricaded in the med bay, Gaal went with her and stood in the doorway with the rigging gun raised, telling Zeid plainly that the terms were not hers to accept — and admitting afterward that she had been frightened enough to accept them if they had been. She was still on the floor with her ears ringing from his flashbang when Jackal took him at gunpoint.
After that she was useful in every way that didn’t involve shooting. She got Weaver and Carl onto beds and onto a machine that scrubbed the carbon dioxide out of their blood, and kept them alive without ever pretending to be a doctor. She reasoned her way to the intruder by asking which vent covers had been pulled — the bridge, the reactor, the industrial workshop — and drew the map the others hunted by. She thought to bring a fire extinguisher as a way of making an invisible thing visible, and later emptied it into the workshop to break the firefight open. When the workshop door turned out to be welded shut from the inside, she went to the armory, found no explosives, came back with an acetylene torch she had never used, worked out where the bars were from the way the metal cut, and opened the door herself. She was standing beside that door when Dax vented the compartment, and held onto the frame while the air went past her into space.
Her last act of the night was the only one that failed. Reasoning that thirty-two sets of lungs were as much the problem as the broken filters, she went down to the shuttle bay and tried to teach the colonists a slow monastic breathing pattern to spend less air and settle their nerves. They had been shot at by cultists and pirates in the same day, and they told her exactly where she could put it. Her stated goal is still to get them all back down to the surface alive.
Attendance Log
- Session 4: The Air We Have Left September 20, 2026