Salvage Hounds: Meet the Muscle ⋆ Twilight Tangents

Anahera Wheeler’s friends call her “Ana.” Thing is, Ana doesn’t have many friends. See, she’s a hot head, and that’s lead her into too many fights to remember.

Character and costume design for Anahera “Ana” Wheeler. The pants and boots are actually part of her space suit. Anahera means “angel,” a name her parents gave Ana because she was born among the stars.

Ana was born and raised in the Earth orbit lagrange colonies where she made her living as a construction worker for one of the big-ass corps that built the colony cylinders. She didn’t make much, so she tumbled with underground fighting, the zero-g kind. That led her to hook up with the wrong sort of people, the sort that fix matches and run numbers, who say they operate “legitimate businesses.”

Character design for Ana. Ana’s family is originally from New Zealand, though she’s never visited Earth’s gravity well herself. Being a child of the Earth orbit colonies, she lost touch with her Māori heritage. She eventually reconnected with her family history by getting traditional chin tattoos (or “moko kauae,” note: final design not pictured), something that would link her with her past as she headed farther and farther from Earth.

Ana’s multi-tool. This thing is used for tearing up wreckage in zero-g, and includes an adjustable wrench clamp, “jaws of life” that can act as a claw/prier/cutter, a carbiner clip, and a moveable foot. Ana’s added an additional plasma torch and tanks to the center.

Ana wasn’t the sort to throw matches, so she found side work with better people. Not good people, mind you, but maybe a little less bad than she was used to—the kind that hire muscle to knock the heads of worse people at least. Yeah, the money was good, but the jobs weren’t, not really. And it wasn’t long before everything went south, ‘cause it turns out that bad people are bad people, and they eventually ask you to do badder and badder things. Sometimes criminal things. And when you need the money, sometimes you do them, even though you aught to know better.

Ana’s full space suit. This is an older “Construction Worker” type with heavy brace shoulders. Newer designs don’t restrict shoulder movement near as much, but on the frontier you have to use what you have on hand.

And when things got really bad, Ana finally decided to get out. She ran, away from the mob, the underworld, and her past.

All the way to the frontier.

Plenty of work for strong arm Ana out on there, whether the asteroid belt or the moons of Jupiter. And it was decent work – not knocking heads, but knocking ships apart, putting them back together, maybe some asteroid mining. Not great pay, though. And it turns out the corps that run the frontier aren’t much better than the bad people she ran with back home. In fact, out here, beyond the reach of the law, the corps were just better organized “legitimate businesses.”

Ana inside a derelict spacecraft with her multi-tool. (Unfinished art in progress).

Ana in the hangar of the Mutt. The open cockpot of Olivia’s EXO-Pod is on the right. (Unfinished art in progress).

Ana’s suit has lights on the shoulders. These can be used for illumination, or set to strobe—similar to a spacecraft’s (or plane’s) “runway” lights.

That’s when Ana met Olivia Singh, another woman with a not-so-rosy past. They became fast friends, and it turns out that although Ana still isn’t so great at walking the straight path, even she’s a good influence on Olivia. And boy does Olivia need it. In fact, the whole crew does. Hot-head Ana, it turns out, actually makes a pretty good mother hen in a pinch.

She may not be the mom the crew of the Mutt wants, but sometimes she’s the hard-ass mother they need.