Captain Ilessa Sarneth
Description
Sun-dark, sharp-featured, and three hundred and fifty years old, which for an elf is somewhere in the middle forties. Geometric tattoos run in bands down one cheek from the corner of her eye to her jaw, cut into her as a girl on a world nobody aboard has heard of. Her eyes are solid dark, no whites at all, and they do not blink as often as people expect.
She still dresses like the desert she left two centuries ago: a red headwrap sewn with small dull beads, a striped scarf wound at the throat, loose dark hair escaping both. On a working freighter it reads as eccentricity. It is not.
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 marks as empty, and has been laughed out of more ports than she can count without once softening the claim to make it easier to hear.
She was right. She does not seem especially satisfied about it.
Background
She came off a hand-worked desert world with no industry and no reason to expect anything else, and she has never gone back. She took the Alazar at a hundred and fifty, barely an adult by her people's reckoning, and has held her ever since, which makes Sarneth the longest-serving captain of any active hull most registries can name.
Everything about her operation is a symptom: 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. Two centuries and every credit she has earned, spent 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.