Player: Ron
Full Name: Janus “Jon” Stravinsky
Role: Captain
Origins
Jon is a gentle giant — tall and broad at around 6’5”, but tentative and anxious enough that he tends to stand with his head bowed and shoulders hunched, whether from a lifetime of trying to look less imposing or from years of squeezing through maintenance shafts. He’s always preferred the company of books and old movies to people.
His parents were tramp-freighter operators who got stranded on the station after a bad job Jon’s father insisted on took the last of their funds. After three months of missed mortgage payments, the company repossessed their ship, the Humbugger, and the family took work at the station’s shipyards servicing ships for the company instead.
Around twelve or thirteen, Jon and a group of friends — Nick, Todd, and Derrick among them — went looking for copies of a legendarily unreleased video game, Grand Theft Space 6000, exploring the ruins of Superstar Games, the studio that made it, buried in the Choke. They found animatronics fashioned to look like game characters, a group of kids and adults who’d been trapped down there for years hiding from something, and small, clawed, single-eyed creatures that tore through gaps between realities trying to pull people — or pieces of them — through. They escaped with bags of stolen game copies, which they sold for a modest amount. In the aftermath, Jon became convinced the creatures he’d seen were literal demons — or at least the inspiration for the idea of them — and developed a lasting academic interest in theology.
When Jon was 15, his mother was crippled in an accident caused by the shipyard’s negligent bay foreman rushing production; she suffered respiratory damage from chemical exposure and lost the use of her legs to a spinal injury. The company denied her any assistance, backed by falsified reports blaming her for the accident. Jon, already working after-school shifts as a cargo loader, stopped attending school to work full time, teaching himself off the clock from service manuals for whatever industrial equipment or ship systems he could get his hands on. He rose quickly from laborer to machine maintenance to full repair and maintenance work in the shipyards. His father was proud of him, and quietly blamed himself for how much Jon had to give up to grow up that fast.
In the years since, Jon has been quietly building a case against the bay foreman — not just worker injuries, but material waste and the knock-on effects of faulty maintenance across the corporate fleet and freelancers alike. It’s meant clandestine work with sympathetic station staff and residents over the years, trading favors for information: falsely denied injury claims, evidence of intentional under-servicing tied to the loss of four ships with all hands, and under-the-table sales of shipyard inventory on a large scale. The more evidence he collects, the more convinced he becomes that even overwhelming proof of malfeasance will change nothing except bring retaliation down on him. He’s considered letting it go. He hasn’t been able to.
He refuses to let the crews he works with be bullied the way his mother was, and it shows in the work they turn out — a sticking point with some shipyard managers, though the crew’s reputation among corporate and freelance captains alike has kept him out of serious trouble so far.
Off the clock, Jon reads — particularly his pirated copies of the pulp adventure series Tales of the Galactic Frontier — and repairs things for people in his neighborhood, from toys to appliances to air cars, usually only charging the ones he knows can afford it. Nearly every credit he doesn’t spend supporting his mother goes into savings, toward buying a share in a freighter of his own — the kind his parents once held — convinced that’s the only real way out from under the corporations and clear of his family’s debt. That conviction is what’s pulled him rimward, toward the “land rush” into the Arcadian Reach. By the time the campaign begins, Jon’s father had finally landed a job on the passenger liner New Horizon; Jon has continued sending his mother money and hired a nurse droid to look after her.
The Price of Air
Jon serves as captain of the crew’s ship, The Second Chance (formerly considered under several other candidate names) — a step toward the freighter share, and the escape from corporate debt, he’s been saving for his whole working life. Old enough to be a young captain — the crew are guessed to be in their mid-to-late twenties or thirties.
During the crew’s dealings on Prospero’s Dream, they spotted the wrecked New Horizon itself being towed into dry dock, confirmed by a hacked registry check — and briefly believed Jon’s father dead, until they found him alive (if badly shaken) being thrown out of a teahouse on the Farm for scaring customers with talk of what he’d survived. He told them the full story later at Auntie May’s Noodles: he’d hidden in the New Horizon’s engineering tunnels while Martin Rayne pirates harvested organs and dragged captives onto their boarding shuttles, and stowed away on the salvage ship that eventually found the wreck.
Jon keeps a small collection of actual printed books on a shelf above his cot, secured against drift in case the ship loses gravity. His quarters and station are otherwise meticulously organized and sparse.
During the uprising at Siddhartha’s Peace, Jon led the crew through the back alleys to the besieged colony office and worked the street with his SMG while the rest of them dealt with the sentry gun and the barricades. He caught Arnold’s botched landing-gear weld before it could cost them control of the shuttle on takeoff, and got roughly twenty refugees off the colony roof. When pirates off the Iron Cross ambushed the crew in their own shuttle bay — Captain Vane “Rusty” Kross putting a barrel to the back of his head — he gave up the cargo bay access code rather than start a fight he couldn’t win. Then he spent the counterattack shepherding the refugees toward the Hot ‘n Ready, and gave the order to execute Kross once Jackal had him pinned to the deck.
Jon fought the rest of that night outside his own ship, in a utility pod, cutting into the Iron Cross dropship’s viewport with a torch — and was still at it when the device welded to the dropship’s flank went off and killed every system he had. He beat the pod back to life around a battery buried deep enough in the shielding to survive, caught the second EVA pirate’s torch arm in a grabber and drove him into the hull until the claw went through him, then matched the tumble of Tanya and Dixie Doss when they were blown out of the workshop and tore Dixie free one-handed while the cyborg spun away into the dark. With Carl still unconscious there was nobody else to fly, so he took the helm himself on the grounds that he had watched Carl do it often enough, and set The Second Chance into the station’s docking arms. Somewhere between the dead pod and the clamps closing, Jon decided this run is his last — he means to see it finished and then never go out again.
Jon’s last voyage took him into the terraforming station at the head of a salvage party rather than at the point of the spear. When First Instructor Fugen would not ask his people to risk themselves, Jon asked them himself — banging the flat of his hand on the cargo-hold bulkhead until the refugees went quiet, and telling them that if they were all going to get through this, they had to pull together. Sasha, Franco’s wife, handed her baby to her husband and volunteered, and Jon led her and a handful of colonists out onto the docking ring after air filters and the rest of the ship’s list, with the wounded Tenka riding the hover dolly and Carl’s body camera clipped to Jon’s chest so the others could check on him. Inside, the crew learned that the docking clamps can only be released by someone staying behind at a console in the station’s security office to hold them open.
Attendance Log
- Session 0: The Choke (date not specified in the source log)
- Session 1: The Baobun Incident July 26, 2026
- Session 2: Welcome to Siddhartha’s Peace August 16, 2026
- Session 3: The Night of the Prophet August 29, 2026
- Session 4: The Air We Have Left September 20, 2026
- Session 5: Welcome, Traveler October 4, 2026