Check this out!
Took me a while, but here’s the entire core cast of my little project. I’ll go through them from left to right:
All the way to the left is Rose, who along with Mari right next to her sprouted surnames and titles so Yumemi wouldn’t be the only android who inexplicably has a surname. Rose, named “Rose D’Ambrosia,” representative/one of the company servers of Lightwork Landscaping and mascot of the Garden Palace, the name for the theme park Lightwork helped bring to life, becomes a big name fan of Yumemi’s when she starts making a name for herself as a web personality. They bond over Yumemi recounting the whole bouquet kerfuffle when she and the Junker first met. Oh yeah, he’s got a name now, too.
That paves the way for Mari, now Mari Kobayashi (so her name is a terrible pun for Star Trek fans when you say it the Japanese way). Representative of Sterling Exports, an import-export service that gets Lightwork many of its exotic plants. With connections to Rose, Mari elects to become the producer for Starstruck, Yumemi’s web channel. If the others can afford it, she can get it.
Hiding behind Yumemi and next to Mari is Arisu Hanazawa, dogged gamer and personally camera shy. She, like the other cast members, is a recent Nueva Avila Institute of Technology graduate and hangs around the observatory Yumemi now sets up shop in. I haven’t figured out what she does yet aside from appearing on Yumemi’s shows.
Yumemi herself still appears as an adult so she looks like she belongs at her proper place: the helm of the starship the NAIT branch of the United Star Commonwealth’s astrographic services owns. She also has an actual wardrobe now, and with a lot of the old locks on her AI removed and her hardware treated as a major upgrade, she’s never felt more alive, more…human. This includes unlocking grace, poise and lightning-fast reflexes she’s never known she could access, which means along with reporting on goings-on across campus and at the state of the art NAIT observatory, Starstruck is a place for her to do something she’s never done before - gaming. (Mostly that was me realizing that if I kept comparing her channel to friends to a channel like Markiplier’s or Scott Manley’s, then gave her the kind of skills an ace pilot had, it’d be really, really weird if she didn’t game.)
Asking about the Junker’s phenotype gave him a nationality and a name: Rafael Moreno, as a friend of mine guessed maybe he was Portuguese. I tried darkening his skin a bit so the name would stick a bit better and show that starving his body of direct sunlight had made him pale, but it didn’t quite stick. Oh well. The jacket was me answering the temptation to make him look like he had a Mad Max jacket on, but that looked a little too expensive for him as an outfit for him to get early on, so I just gave it a goofy color - metallic silver. Not very haute couture if it blinds everyone who looks at it in direct sun, is it? As for what he does, he’s set up in Project Blueshift, a large mechanic shop that heard of this guy who managed to whisper a planetarium projector back to life with nothing but his bare hands and the stuff that still happened to be in the abandoned planetarium, and took a chance on him maintaining the robots that help them do their most complicated work, including maintaining and repairing public vehicles and race preparation and restoration projects for the driving-mad citizens of Nueva Avila. He still considers himself Yumemi’s best friend, if not his de facto older brother, and the feeling’s mutual.
The blonde next to him is not “Misuzu but fanservice,” it’s a character I’d thought up one night from a name and thinking she’d be neat to add named Nozomi Kujo. Nozomi’s another NAIT grad, a mechanical engineer who finds her first projects by working on Yumemi’s live-action sketches before getting in front of the camera herself. Normally skittish, with a short temper and a threshold for pain that’s all over the place, she warms up and shows her true self as a natural comedian when she’s with friends.
Next to her wearing the Puyo beret is Keiko Kawasaki, a girl where I tip my hand and show this really is a sci-fi AU I’ve been writing, because we have space elves. Easily one of the top gamers of the group and the most exuberant of the cast, with an enthusiasm rivaling Yumemi herself, she’s also one of the most stylish. I still kinda don’t know what she graduated NAIT to do.
All the way on the right is the only other guy, Trevor Blackwood. He’s the strongest gaming connection - he graduated as a game designer and hardware engineer, who dreams of programming games, then making the computers and consoles to play them on. Naturally drawn to Yumemi as a gamer that makes even him stop in his tracks, he goes whole hog into indie development for the chance to use Starstruck as a way to advertise his work…and often drags the others into the development process.