Captain Ilessa Sarneth
Description
An elf, and not a young one. Two centuries behind the same wheel have left her spare and weathered in a way elves usually are not, with cropped grey-white hair and a stillness that people mistake for calm until they notice she is simply not blinking. She wears the same coat she has worn for longer than anyone aboard has been alive.
Personality
Direct to the point of rudeness, honest in a way that keeps costing her money, and completely unembarrassed about the thing she is obviously obsessed with. She has spent one hundred and sixty-seven years insisting there was a hidden world inside a blank patch of sky that every chart in the galaxy marks as empty. She has been laughed out of more ports than she can count, and she has never once modified the claim to make it easier to hear.
She was right. She does not seem especially satisfied about it.
Background
Master and owner of The Alazar since she was nearly new, which makes Sarneth the longest-serving captain of any active hull most registries can name. Everything about her operation is a symptom of the obsession: the lapsed registry, the junk survey contracts nobody else will take, the perpetually short crew, the fact that she has been one bad month from the creditors for most of a century. She has spent two hundred years and every credit she has ever earned staying near one specific stretch of nothing.
Three weeks after the sky over Brandyburrow changed, she was the first ship down.
What She Wants
To find the thing she has been chasing since 1600, and to stop it. She will say this out loud, in the first conversation, to anyone who asks.