Emmett Varden

Orrin trusts the diagnostics. Pip checks what the machine is actually doing. That difference has made them an unlikely but effective research team—right up until a hidden control, a stowaway monster, and a signal from nowhere pull their ship through a route that should not exist.

They crash into the boiler room of The Last Stop, an interdimensional boarding house run by Mortimus, an exhausted skeleton with very specific opinions about structural damage.