Orvo Plasz
Overview
Orvo Plasz is a retired ore-hauler engineer and one of the asteroid belt’s last living repositories of pre-corporate communications lore. Now in his late sixties, he serves as an informal mentor and surrogate uncle to the Kinnas family, a role he has filled since the death of his closest friend, Paxten Kinnas, decades earlier. From a cramped hab module on a derelict ore-processing platform near Pallas, he maintains a private, low-power tightbeam network—a web of abandoned relays, forgotten repeater buoys, and jury-rigged nodes he calls his “garden”—built out of a lifelong conviction that self-reliant, distributed communication is the only safety net the belt has ever had.
Orvo lives as he always has: surrounded by obsolete components, guided by an engineer’s pragmatism and a radical’s distrust of any system built after the 2140s. Though officially retired, he remains an active listener and, when the need arises, an unobtrusive facilitator of signals others have given up trying to send.
Background
Orvo was born in 2113 aboard the prospecting skiff Glass Bead, the only child of Earth émigrés who had signed extraction contracts and never returned planetside. His early years were spent in equipment lockers and access crawlways; by nine he could diagnose a failing bearing seal, and by fourteen he had discovered his true calling while watching a salvaged military tightbeam array at the new Phocaea Station docking ring. He apprenticed under station tech Destin Chamary, who taught him signal theory not through formal lessons but by handing him broken gear and refusing to explain it until Orvo could diagram the failure himself.
In his late teens, Orvo took an engine-room berth on an ore hauler and spent the next three decades moving between ships, listening to comms traffic through a wired headset, and building a mental map of every relay and tightbeam node between the inner belt and the Jovian trojans. A hand injury in 2143 cost him the tips of two fingers and nudged him from active engineering into full-time communications work—a trade he had already been practicing in secret for years. During a layover at Phocaea in 2147, he met deep-vein miner Paxten Kinnas, and a slow, pragmatic friendship took root.
When Paxten died in a blowout in ’56, Orvo became a quiet pillar for the Kinnas family. He helped Paxten’s widow Iska navigate the corporate death payout, found her a new berth, and began teaching the couple’s eight-year-old son, Tobias, how to patch a comm relay. Over the following decades, Orvo drifted in and out of the family’s periphery, always reachable, never imposing. By the time the blockade crushed official channels, he was sixty-seven, living on a decommissioned platform, and already listening on the frequencies he had never stopped maintaining.
Physical Description
Orvo is a small, slightly bowed man—only 1.62 meters tall, with a spine shaped into a permanent stoop by decades hunched over engine housings and relay cabinets in low gravity. His shoulder blades jut like vestigial wing joints, his arms seem slightly too long for his torso, and his sleeves never quite reach his knobby wrists.
His face is a map of deep furrows: horizontal lines from a lifetime of skeptical eyebrow-raising, crow’s-feet from squinting into unfiltered glare during EVA repairs, and vertical grooves around his mouth from a pipe habit he abandoned thirty years ago. His skin carries the gray-undertoned pallor of a belter who has never lived under natural sunlight, with a faint web of broken capillaries across the nose and cheeks—a relic of a coolant leak that gave him mild frostbite in 2155. Pale gray eyes sit deep under a prominent brow; they are perpetually narrowed, slow to blink, and quick to track movement at the periphery. A white fringe of hair rings the back of his skull, while the crown is bare liver-spotted skin he refuses to cover.
His hands are thick-knuckled and arthritis-gnarled, with permanent gray staining in the creases from conductive grease and graphite lubricant. The tips of the left index and middle fingers are missing, taken by a pressure hatch in 2143; Orvo uses the stumps to tap rhythms on consoles when he thinks. A faded circuit-diagram tattoo wraps his right forearm, the ink gone blue-green and blurry. He dresses in layers of decaying insulation—a thermal undershirt the color of weak tea, a patched wool-lined vest stuffed with hand-drawn schematics, cargo pants held up by a belt woven from decommissioned fiber-optic cable, and soft-soled ship slippers that went out of production in the 2160s. He owns one pair of mag-boots and refuses to wear them unless gravity fails completely.
Personality
Orvo is a sentimental pragmatist: he can lecture for hours on signal-to-noise ratios and attenuation curves, then admit he chose a relay’s location because it was where he once watched an unfiltered sunrise. He keeps obsolete parts not just for their utility but because they remind him of the people and ships that gave them to him. His loyalty, once earned, is absolute; he has never deleted a contact from his address book, dead or silent, because “you never know when someone might come back online.”
Politically, he is a fossilized radical. In his youth he took part in early, largely unsuccessful attempts to organize independent miners against corporate rate-fixing. The experience left him with a deep conviction that only small, decentralized networks are safe, a suspicion of large-scale organizing, and a reflexive distrust of Earth, Mars, the Jovians, and anyone under thirty who has never done an EVA repair in hard vacuum. He still talks about these positions as though they are fringe revelations, largely unaware that many in the belt have caught up with him.
As a mentor, Orvo teaches the way Destin Chamary taught him: by handing a student broken equipment and refusing to explain it until they have tried to fix it themselves. He then provides an exhaustive, loving breakdown of every mistake they made. He is proud of his protégés in a way he rarely verbalizes, preferring to express approval through technical observations—“That’s a good splice. Clean.” His hab module is a museum of dead technologies, full of components no longer manufactured, schematics for obsolete systems, and three generations of partially disassembled signal processors. “They don’t make these anymore” is his highest praise.
Relationships
Iska Kinnas – Orvo has known Iska for over three decades. Their relationship is one of mutual, slightly wary respect, built on their shared bond with Paxten and their decades-long commitment to watching over Tobias. They are the closest each has to a co-parent, though neither would claim the term. During the blockade’s early chaos, Iska is among the first people Orvo tries to reach, and her two-digit contact code comes through a relay he maintains himself.
Tobias Kinnas – The closest thing Orvo has to a son, student, and successor. Orvo taught him comms, vouched for his first job, and has watched him become one of the most talented signal techs in the belt. Their dialogue is conducted in frequencies, diagnostic codes, and equipment requests; beneath it runs a current of deep, unspoken affection. When Tobias reaches out, Orvo answers—not out of revolutionary zeal, but because Tobias asked.
Paxten Kinnas (deceased) – Orvo’s closest friend, dead thirty years. He wears a thin band of braided copper wire on his left wrist, a fragment of a cable Paxten gave him during their first job. The loss remains present in every choice Orvo makes regarding the Kinnas family.
Destin Chamary (deceased) – Orvo’s first mentor, who taught him signal theory and gifted him his first real comms rig. Destin died in the 2170s, but Orvo still uses his troubleshooting methods and occasionally quotes his sayings. Several nodes in the “garden” network run on infrastructure Destin originally installed.
Nils Chamary – Destin’s grandson, a young tech working in the outer belt. Orvo has never met him but follows his career with guarded interest, hopeful that the family talent has passed down and privately skeptical that anyone born after the 2160s truly understands the old networks.
Speech Pattern
Orvo speaks in short, declarative sentences punctuated by pauses where he is either thinking or waiting for others to catch up. His default mode is instructional; nearly every conversation can tip into a lecture, though he undercuts his own authority with dry asides and self-deprecating humor. He states problems before solutions, and compliments are always framed as technical observations: “That’s a good splice. Clean. You didn’t learn that from me. I would’ve told you to use more tape.”
He frequently opens sentences with “In the old days…” to introduce anything from genuine technical wisdom to personal nostalgia. “Doesn’t matter” is his way of dismissing tangents he himself has introduced—often moments before continuing them anyway. “You see the problem” is delivered not as a question but as a flat statement after explaining something he knows the listener has not fully grasped. He snorts sharply before contradicting someone, a reflex he no longer notices, and taps the stumps of his left fingers on surfaces when enumerating points.
His vocabulary is thick with archaic equipment names and obsolete frequency designations. Tightbeam systems are “needle-and-thread”; modern corporate comms arrays are simply “the noise.” Good signal clarity is “clean enough to eat off of,” and bad signal is “mud.” His curses are mechanical rather than religious: “rusted bearing,” “fused coupling,” “dead band,” and, when genuinely frustrated, “vacuum take it.” His strongest oath is “by the black,” used sparingly. When pleased—which is rare—he says “That’ll do” in a tone that makes clear it is the highest praise available. When displeased, he says nothing, which is infinitely worse.