Mitch Soriano
Overview
Mitch Soriano is one of two co-protagonists in Fannec Records, operating out of the lower levels of the Float — a sprawling alien space station known as the Rust Ring. He bills himself as a “human consultant,” one half of a boutique advisory firm that caters to alien clients seeking insight into the galaxy’s most mythologized species. The consulting business is, in large part, a bluff. What keeps it running is Mitch’s genuine and considerable talent for reading a room.
Behind the performance is a sharp observer who has spent a lifetime noticing things before he consciously processes them — body language, micro-expressions, the postural tells of species he’s encountered in only a handful of meetings. Mitch has also developed real cross-species fluency, learning to read Keth color-shifts, Dhek postural cues, and Hovvi gas-bladder tension with precision that his clients interpret as something far more mysterious. He frames all of it as showmanship. It is not only showmanship.
Background
Mitch grew up working-class and Filipino-American on Earth, and the skills that define him now — reading people, talking his way through doors, finding the angle before anyone else sees it — were survival tools long before they became professional ones. He and Dennis Yoon have been best friends since childhood, and their partnership predates the Float by years.
Their arrival on the station was not planned. Mitch’s scheme to sneak aboard what he believed was a private luxury vessel went badly wrong when the ship turned out to be an alien diplomatic craft on a covert Earth visit. When station security at the Float moved to space them as stowaways, Mitch improvised: he claimed they were human consultants, there on business. The security officer, steeped in galactic mythology about humanity, believed him. The lie saved their lives and immediately locked them into it. From that moment, Mitch began building — mapping the legends, escalating the performance, and growing the bluff into a functioning, if precarious, enterprise.
Physical Description
The source material does not specify Mitch’s height, build, or particular features in detail. What comes through clearly is a physical presence shaped by intention: he occupies space when he wants to and knows how to make himself unassuming when the situation calls for it. His working-class background left no softness on him. He is someone whose face and hands tend to be in motion when he is working — which is most of the time — and he has refined appearing approachable into a professional instrument.
Personality
Mitch’s charm is real, but it is the surface expression of something more useful underneath. His actual talent is observation: he tracks rooms with a precision that runs faster than his mouth, which is saying something. He notices things — a shift in someone’s expression, a physical tell, a new piece of data midway through a sentence — and adjusts in real time without flagging the adjustment. The pattern recognition is accumulated and fast enough to look like intuition. It is not intuition.
He talks to control the frame. As long as he is talking, he is setting the terms; as long as he is setting the terms, no one else is asking the questions he would prefer to avoid. This is effective and structurally exhausting in equal measure. His verbal speed is genuine rather than performed, but it serves a secondary function: it fills the silence that would otherwise invite scrutiny. Despite the volume of risks Mitch takes, he is not reckless by nature — he is a calculated gambler who is genuinely good at reading odds, and who gets things wrong primarily in proportion to his overconfidence, not his disregard for consequence.
He is infuriating in specific ways. He tends to be right by routes that feel wrong — improvised, under-supported, skipping steps others would have needed. He commits to gambits without full consultation. He takes credit in ways that can obscure how collaborative the work actually is. He is also, occasionally, badly wrong, and he moves past the acknowledgment faster than it can land. Loyalty, for Mitch, is expressed in practice rather than words — in the work he puts into keeping both of them alive, in covering for Dennis in the field, in the sideways angles through which gratitude or apology occasionally surface. He would not describe himself as loyal. He would absolutely act like it.
Relationships
Dennis Yoon is Mitch’s childhood best friend, business partner, and the structural counterweight to everything Mitch does. Their dynamic is foundational to how the consulting operation works: Mitch pitches, Dennis catches — or, frequently, is left holding the wreckage. Dennis feeds additional observational data through a concealed earpiece during consultations, which Mitch frames as intuitively perceived knowledge. They have developed a field language of looks, pauses, and tonal shifts that the aliens around them cannot decode. Dennis is the one person in Mitch’s life who is permitted to be openly exasperated, which Mitch reads as evidence of investment rather than complaint. The friendship is the realest thing in his life, and he shows it primarily by making sure it survives.
The Brothers Timpani are Mitch’s professional rivals on the Float — alien consultants with minor genuine psychic abilities they are notably bad at deploying, consumed by jealousy of the humans’ supposedly superior powers. For Mitch, this is less a threat than a resource. Jealous rivals are readable rivals. He manages them through escalation, feeding the mythology they are already half-convinced of, which keeps them occupied recalibrating their threat assessment rather than acting on it. He finds them genuinely funny and does not bother concealing it, which does not help matters. The rivalry functions as a recurring comic throughline, running in a kind of productive equilibrium that suits Mitch fine.
Speech Pattern
Mitch speaks in forward momentum. His sentences accelerate toward their point rather than building to it deliberately — he starts moving before he knows exactly where he is going and adjusts in transit. Commas do more work than periods. He uses trailing-off as a communicative gesture rather than an admission of incompleteness, and he rarely pauses before answering; his processing happens in the output, not before it.
His default register is casual-to-medium, shifting upward when a client situation demands it, but the shift is perceptible as a mode he is consciously deploying. Off-mode, he sounds like someone who grew up speaking plainly in rooms where plainspoken mattered. Alien vocabulary — species names, station geography, mythology terminology — sits alongside working-class colloquialisms without irony or self-consciousness.
He uses rhetorical questions as pivots rather than actual questions — Right? Okay. So. — functioning as verbal punctuation that also asserts agreement he has not actually verified. He answers questions with questions when he is buying time, but the buying-time is invisible to most listeners because the question sounds like a natural next step. He returns to earlier conversational material in callbacks that demonstrate he has been tracking everything, and he redirects mid-sentence when he catches something in the room — a listener’s expression shifting, a new piece of data arriving — without flagging the redirect. The sentence ends differently than it began. Most people do not notice.
Framing gestures appear frequently: Here’s the thing. The point is. The thing about that is. These give him a half-beat to determine what the thing actually is. His humor is fast, targeted, and tends toward escalating — if something lands, he will push it one beat further than is comfortable, usually one beat further than Dennis is prepared to cover for. He does not explain the joke. He will wait for it.