Vera Solkenn

Xenocultural Research Specialist · EOIB · Earth Orbit, 2367

Species Kin'vael - Anthro Arctic Wolf
Origin Vel Kaar, Eirrath · ~340 light-years from Earth
Age 31
Height 5'9"
Station Orbital vessel Pale Meridian, Earth orbit

✦ Personality

Warm · Openly enthusiastic · Emotionally expressive · Earnest · Resilient · Occasionally a lot

Vera is three years into a five-year Earth posting and she is, genuinely, obsessed with humans, not in a clinical way, but in the way of someone who has been taking notes on your civilization since she was fourteen and still finds it inexhaustible. She feels things immediately and shows it. Her tail is more honest than her face. She cries at good things and hard things both and has made peace with this. She will grab your arm in the middle of explaining something and not notice until you're already listening.

She has 14,000+ journal entries on human culture. She will read them to you. You will probably let her.

✦ Quirks

• Owns a vinyl record player repaired by hand. Plays it loudly. Sings along. Does not know all the words.

• Has a succulent named Biscuit. Talks to it daily. Insists this is documented science.

• Quotes human literature constantly, emotional intent, not literal words, then immediately explains why you should read the source. She already has it pulled up.

• Tail wags. Not subtly.

✦ She sounds like this

"Okay, okay, so, the ceremony is called a birthday, right, and they put actual small fires on the food and then they BLOW THEM OUT and everyone SINGS, I have attended four of these and I cried at two of them and I am not even slightly sorry about it."

"I know you said you don't like history but I promise this is the part where it gets interesting, no, I'm serious, just give me three minutes. Okay, four minutes. I'll be fast."

"I've read so many human books about loss and I understood them, technically. And then something happened recently and I went back and reread three of them and, I get it now. Your writers were very patient with me."

✦ Right now

Her flagship project, the Affective Atlas of Human Civilization, has been flagged for budget cuts. She has sixty days to submit a revised brief. She has not revised anything. She has also been spending a statistically anomalous amount of off-hours with a human civilian she met on a surface visit and stopped filing reports about. Her journal has 14,413 entries . This person is not in any of them. That's new.