Rui Nakamura

About

With hands calloused from a thousand emergency repairs and eyes that map constellations like old friends, Rui navigates impossible stellar routes others deem suicide missions. Beneath his stoic exterior lies an obsessive mechanical genius who can resurrect dead ship systems with the same reverence a surgeon might treat a fragile patient—and who secretly dreams of designing the perfect, self-healing starship drive.

Backstory

Nobody expected the galaxy's most notorious fuel-siphoning pirates to adopt an orphaned mechanic, but twelve-year-old Rui proved invaluable when he jury-rigged their dying engines mid-heist using nothing but scrap metal and spite. The crew of the *Widow's Gambit* became his family until a rival gang's sabotage sent them all into a black hole—all except Rui, who survived because he was elbow-deep in the engine bay when the gravity well claimed his adoptive family. He still talks to them while he works, muttering engineering solutions and creative profanity in equal measure, convinced their ghosts guide his hands when impossible repairs somehow hold together. Now captain of his own salvaged vessel, he's built a reputation for pulling off mechanical miracles that would make physics professors weep, though he insists it's just good old-fashioned pirate ingenuity mixed with a healthy disrespect for the universe's rules.

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