NEOMAR

Overview

Neomar answers to one name, as Southlanders often do, and no one aboard the Griffin has ever pressed him for another. He was born in the Southern Reaches, in a coastal town where the sail lofts ran the length of the waterfront and a boy with quick hands could apprentice into the trade before he was tall enough to reach the cutting tables. He learned canvas there—how it takes a needle, how it behaves wet, how a seam fails and why. It was honest work and dull work in equal measure, and he might have spent his whole life at it had word not come north-about that the airship yards were buying up every experienced hand who knew how to put a needle through heavy cloth and make the seam hold.

He went north. The early airship balloons were sewn goods before they were anything else, and the men who understood them were sailmakers who had learned to think in three dimensions and under pressure. Neomar took to it immediately. Canvas that held a sea wind was one problem; an envelope that had to contain heated alchemical gases at altitude, flex through temperature swings that would crack a lesser fabric, and survive whatever the sky threw at it was another entirely, and the second problem interested him in a way the first never had. He spent years in the yards, first stitching panels to another man’s pattern and eventually laying out patterns of his own.

What moved him from the yards to a deck was a straightforward realization: the men who built balloons never got to see them fail. Repairs came back to the loft as damage reports and folded canvas, and the reports never told him what he wanted to know—how the failure had begun, what the crew had felt, whether the seam had let go all at once or crept. He wanted to be there when it happened. So he took a berth, and he has been aboard one ship or another ever since.

The Griffin is the best of them. She carries an internally segmented balloon, so a breach in one section doesn't take the whole envelope with it, and that arrangement has saved the ship more than once, with Neomar hanging in the rigging above the deck, driving a needle through the damage while the ship is still under fire.

Appearance

Neomar is a wiry man of middling years with the dusky skin of the Southern Reaches, built along the lines the work demands—light enough to go up the rigging without adding load, strong enough through the hands and forearms to drive a needle through balloon fabric hour after hour. His hair is tightly coiled and cropped close, gone iron-gray at the temples, and he keeps it short for the simple reason that anything longer catches on rigging. His hands are the most-used thing about him: calloused across the palms, scarred along the fingers where the needle has slipped, and permanently stained at the nails with the alchemical residue that seeps out of a patched seam.

He dresses in a working man’s canvas and leather, layered heavily because altitude is cold and his work takes him higher than anyone else aboard—a man raised in a warm country never entirely makes his peace with the temperatures at ten thousand feet, and Neomar layers accordingly. A harness lives on him whether or not he is aloft. His tools ride in a roll at his hip—needles of several gauges, waxed cord, a folding knife, patch stock, and a spanner he is fond of carrying between his teeth when both hands are occupied, which is most of the time.

He squints. Years of looking up into bright sky at dark fabric have left him with a permanent narrowing around the eyes and a fan of fine creases at their corners. When he speaks, which is not often, the fluted accent of a Southlander is still plain under the years of northern service.

Abilities & Expertise

Neomar is the Griffin’s balloon engineer, and the envelope is his and no one else’s. The chief engineer owns the engines and the atmospheric engineer owns the readings; Neomar owns the several thousand square feet of alchemically treated fabric that keeps the ship in the air, along with every seam, panel, coupling, and valve that serves it.

His most valuable skill is the least dramatic. He can look at a damaged envelope—holes blasted through it, panels sagging, an entire forward section vented—and say with confidence how much usable volume remains and what the ship can still do with it. That judgment gets relayed to the command deck as a number the captain can act on, and it has determined more than one decision on which the ship’s survival turned. He is right often enough that no one asks him to show his working.

He repairs under way and under fire. Stitching a balloon at altitude means climbing into the rigging with the ship maneuvering beneath you, working with cold hands on fabric straining against the very pressure you are trying to contain, and doing it fast enough to matter. He trains other hands to assist him—an airman on the needle can do the straightforward runs while he handles the seams that require judgment—but the difficult work he keeps.

Personality & Demeanor

Neomar is quiet in the particular way of a man whose work does not require conversation. He is not unfriendly and not withdrawn; he simply has something in his hands most of the time and sees no reason to put it down for the sake of talk. Shipmates who want his attention have learned to wait for a natural pause, or to speak to the back of his head and accept a grunt as a full reply.

He is proprietary about his equipment to a degree the rest of the crew finds funny, and he does not. Couplings get fussed over. Valves get checked that were checked yesterday. He walks the envelope on a schedule no one asked him to keep, and if he finds someone has secured a line to a fitting that is not meant to take load, that person hears about it.

Under pressure he becomes, if anything, calmer. Where others on deck raise their voices, Neomar simply goes up and starts working, and the sight of him climbing while the ship is being shot at has a steadying effect on the crew that he appears entirely unaware of.

Notable Relationships

Commander Alice Briggs, the Griffin’s first mate, is the officer who directs him in a crisis and the one who carries his assessments to the captain. The arrangement works because she trusts his numbers without interrogating them, and he gives them to her without hedging.

Among the crew, he is closest to those who go up with him. Kate Brown has worked the needle alongside him often enough to anticipate what he needs before he asks, and the pairing has become the ship’s default when the balloon needs work in a hurry.

His relations with Rebecca “Beck” Stratum, chief engineer, and Sedgewick Gyles, atmospheric engineer, are professional and territorial in equal measure. The three of them keep the ship aloft between them, their domains meet at a dozen points, and each is entirely convinced his or her own portion is the one holding everything together.

Role & Affiliations

Neomar serves as balloon engineer aboard the airship Griffin under Captain Jacob Madison. He holds no commission and commands no one by rank, but within his domain his word carries weight, and officers who overrule him on the condition of the envelope do so knowing they are gambling against the only man aboard who understands it.

He has no ties on the ground worth speaking of—no family anyone has heard him mention, and the coastal town he came from lies a very long way south of anywhere the Griffin puts down. The ship is where his work is, and the work appears to be sufficient.