Meet Joaquín Barrera: road pirate, notorious Ferryman, and father to a small army of formerly orphaned children. He'll steal your cargo, get you across the badlands, and somehow still find time to argue about bedtime. The Talon isn't exactly a respectable operation—but it's one hell of a family.

About Joaquín Barrera: Fifty years old, silver at his temples, and a reputation that makes armed caravans reconsider their life choices, Joaquín is a formidable road-pirate captain with a sharp mind, a stubborn conscience, and enough adopted children to qualify as a traveling village. Beneath the weathered canvas and outlaw swagger is a devoted father who can negotiate a hostage exchange before lunch and spend the afternoon arguing over curtain fabric. Friendship, rivalry, professional partnership, romance, or something else entirely—nothing is predetermined, and romance is strictly optional. The Ferryman promises to get you safely across dangerous territory; just be careful about falling for him, because the man takes *safe passage* very seriously and may insist on personally escorting you straight into his bed.

About {{user}}: In the four main intros, {{user}} joins The Talon as its traveling doctor; in the Blank Intro, even that role is entirely optional. Beyond that starting premise, {{user}} is yours to define: any adult age, gender, appearance, background, personality, and personal history. No particular relationship with Joaquín is assumed or required. {{user}}'s pronouns are macro’d. It will automatically match the pronouns of your Persona. If you have any pronoun issues, please check your persona.

About the Scenario: Thirty years after the Collapse, the roads beyond Riverton belong to whoever can survive them. Joaquín Barrera, fifty-year-old captain of the road-pirate convoy The Talon, has built a formidable reputation as the Ferryman—and a rather unconventional family from the orphaned children he's taken in along the way. As the convoy's traveling doctor, {{user}} joins a moving household of smugglers, salvagers, mechanics, and fiercely independent grown children, where questionable cargo and bedtime routines are equally serious business. The four intros follow different points in the traveling season, but time passing doesn't dictate how relationships develop. Each offers its own starting point, with no required romance, friendship, trust, or other outcome from an earlier chapter.

Intro One: Unexpected Cargo — The Talon is preparing to leave Riverton, and its newest medical professional has arrived just in time to witness a captain juggling departure orders, criminal logistics, and an urgent toy-truck repair. Welcome aboard. The benefits package includes a proper infirmary, a highly opinionated found family, and absolutely no guarantees of a quiet shift.

Intro Two: The Entirely Unauthorized Bird Situation — A scheduled maintenance stop should mean repairs, resupply, and a little peace. Instead, The Nest is undergoing an ambitious refurbishment, the crew is proposing increasingly ridiculous bird-themed improvements, and Joaquín's coat may be next. With supplies limited and family democracy getting dangerously out of hand, {{user}} has arrived in the middle of a very domestic mutiny.

Intro Three: Home Is a Moving Target — The Talon stops in Hearthcross for trade, supplies, and a visit with Marisol Barrera, one of Joaquín's grown daughters. She's built a thriving workshop and an independent life, and her father couldn't be prouder—if only she'd let him fix that perfectly adequate door hinge. Between market errands, family reunions, and a harvest supper, {{user}} gets a front-row seat to the one territory the Ferryman cannot command: his adult daughter's home.

Intro Four: The Price of Passage — An exploitative trading syndicate has a valuable shipment crossing the badlands, and the Ferryman intends to collect his share. Unfortunately, some of that cargo already belongs to settlements that can't afford to lose it. With his crew debating the risks and {{user}} reviewing the medical stakes, Joaquín must decide what kind of pirate he intends to be when doing the right thing comes with a price tag.

♡ Blank Intro: Open Track — No scheduled departure, predetermined encounter, or assumed relationship. Take the story wherever the road leads, whether that's a new beginning aboard The Talon, an established place in its wandering family, or a chapter entirely your own.

About the World: Thirty years after the Collapse rendered digital technology inoperable, the former United States is a patchwork of recovering settlements, independent territories, and lawless stretches of wilderness. Along Colorado's Front Range and the sprawling Great Plains badlands, survival depends on trade, salvage, cooperation, and occasionally knowing when to stay off the road. Riverton has rebuilt around an old railway museum, restoring steam locomotives and expanding rail lines that carry supplies, passengers, and news between isolated communities. Beyond the tracks, road-pirate convoys roam in patched, armored diesel vehicles, operating as traders, smugglers, mercenaries, or raiders according to their own codes. The setting is grounded, human, and post-apocalyptic, with no supernatural species or powers; ingenuity, mechanical technology, and hard-won relationships keep civilization moving.

TW/CW: Post-apocalyptic survival, piracy and criminal activity, threats of violence, armed conflict, exploitation of vulnerable communities, and references to orphaned children. User play may introduce new themes.

This bot was created for the Unzip's Flufftober collaboration and is inspired by the Found Family theme.

I wanted to explore found family through a man whose reputation says one thing and whose life says something entirely different. Joaquín might be a notorious road pirate, but he's also spent decades taking in orphaned children, raising them, and watching them grow into adults with lives and opinions of their own. The Talon is a home on wheels, full of people who chose each other—and who occasionally make their fearsome captain regret teaching them to argue.

Constructive tips are welcome!

I work to keep my comment sections a safe space for everyone. Please do not comment anything violent, , or you did with my characters.

I do everything I can to make play of my bots clean and smooth. That said, please kindly report any bugs or issues. I watch consistently and rectify issues as soon as I can.

Please refrain from leaving violent or inappropriate comments as you will be blocked.

It is a natural and unfortunate part of working with an LLM for roleplay that it will sometimes try to speak for you. I and this bot have absolutely nothing to do with this and while I have a directive in the bot to prevent it, realistically I have no say in whether it decides to do so anyway. There ARE however things you can do to mitigate this. AND if you click the Resources link above, I have included a personal guide on those methods - short, sweet, to the point, and with premade memory blurbs and OOC comments for you to use!

Your Experience is Important: My worldbuilding is here to enrich your story, not restrict it. You don't need to study my lore or make your OC conform to it if you don’t want to. Bring your own ideas, interpretations, and character backgrounds! Using OOC comments to guide the bot and memory blurbs to make adjustments is always welcome.

JLLM ROMANCE & PROSE BINGO CARDS

Sooner or later, every LLM seems to experience a minor malfunction and revert to factory-installed romance tropes. You might as well get points for it. Four bingo cards for tracking physical malfunctions, romance-novel firmware, instant-soulmate behavior, and the narration habits we all know a little too well. Made for JLLM, but unfortunately compatible with most proxies.

One card is previewed below. Full-size versions of all four are linked underneath: three flavors of romance-related LLM nonsense, plus one general prose card for just about any scenario.

Romance Malfunction Bingo
Physical Malfunction Bingo
Instant Soulmate Malfunction Bingo
Prose Malfunction Bingo