Zinfadel Dejean

THEY/THEM
MILITIA COMMANDER

“C’mon, kiddos! Outnumbered two-to-one just means they have half as much chance of killing you!”

“Zinfandel DeJean” likely isn’t their birth name, but this is the Long Rim. Folks out here often come up with names in a split second based on what they can see, so people tend to assume they either had a fun night in someone else’s cabin or got asked their name in a store that sold wine and trousers.
Tall and heavyset, with their dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail, Zinfandel cuts an imposing figure to those who first meet them. However, this impression quickly melts away in the face of their boisterous attitude and crude but good-natured sense of humor. They have a whimsical outlook on life, and are prone to pithy, blunt observations; many of these “DeJeanisms” have dug themselves into the local culture of Hell’s Gate.
Zinfandel inherited command of the local militia from Jerry when he became acting director. By all accounts they’re better at leadership and establishing rapport with the troops than he was, but they have yet to match his piloting skill. Their favored mech is an IPS-N Drake named Now Where Did I Leave That.
Zinfandel doesn’t talk about it very much, but they were born on Cradle sometime in the 2800s (they don’t remember the exact date), and did several shifts with Union Science Bureau far-field teams, racking up decades of realtime debt. After returning home to discover SecComm’s fascist regime in place of the old government, they left again, spending the next two millennia in and out of nearlight and cryosleep.
When Zinfandel says they’ve seen a lot of things out there, they’re not kidding.