Characters in the Mortal Engines Quartet and the Fever Crumb series by Philip Reeve.
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Both Series
Shrike formerly Kit Solent
A very, very old stalker who adopted Hester.- The Ace: Downplayed. As the series goes on, Shrike's reprogramming and developing conscience result on him walking a more peaceful path. However, it's clear that when matched up against other Stalkers, Shrike's in a class of his own. He was constructed in a different more violent era and his strength and durability far outshine the new generation of Stalkers that Green Storm manufactures. Further when Dr. Zero upgrades him he tears through Stalker Fang and her guards with the former considered to be one of the toughest of the new generation of Stalkers.
- Call a Human a "Meatbag": Refers to most humans as 'once-borns' to differentiate them from stalkers.
- Death of Personality: His resurrection as a Stalker destroyed all memory of his former life and personality. Sort of. Shrike notes he has an inexplicable soft spot for children, which is very strongly implied to be a hold-over from his life as Kit Solent.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: His eyes are constantly glowing bright green. He's also a very, very dangerous individual to match.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Averted. His death and subsequent re-resurrection on the Black Isle rendered his memories damaged to the point even Dr. Zero couldn't unlock them, leaving him amnesiac for most of Infernal Devices. Then subverted, as it turns out she did shut down certain areas of his memory to make room for his Manchurian Agent programming.
- Last of His Kind: He's the last of the Lazarus Brigade and the Movement Nomad empire. By the time of A Darkling Plain's epilogue, he's also the last surviving character from the Traction Era.
- Made of Iron: Survives getting blasted with electrical weapons, shot in the face, over 1000 years of activity, being run over by 2 towns, being stabbed in the chest, a brutal stalker fight and falling out of an airship, and is ticking possibly millennia later.
- Manchurian Agent: In infernal Devices, he is repaired and gifted to Stalker Fang to serve her as a bodyguard. However, his handler secretly programmes him to assassinate Fang if he hears her speak the Trigger Phrase "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration."
- My God, What Have I Done?: When his memories return to him in Infernal Devices, he experiences extreme feelings of horror and guilt at the memories of all the terrible things he did. This is part of the reason he becomes a Technical Pacifist during A Darkling Plain, as he finds he can't contemplate killing others.
- Narrator All Along: The very last lines of A Darkling Plain are him recounting the first events of the series to a curious audience, as he settles into his role as a Remembering Machine.Young Girl': (eagerly sitting on his lap, curious about the Traction Era) "Tell us!"Shrike: IT WAS A DARK, BLUSTERY DAY IN SPRING, AND THE CITY OF LONDON WAS CHASING A SMALL MINING TOWN ACROSS THE DRIED-UP BED OF THE NORTH SEA...
- Ninja Zombie Pirate Robot: Well, he's an undead cyborg who is surprisingly stealthy and sometimes works as an Assassin, so it's 3 out of 4.
- Really 700 Years Old: He's five hundred and thirty years old by the time of Mortal Enginesnote . It's not entirely clear exactly how old he is by the time of A Darkling Plains epilogue, though it's implied he's centuries older at the very minimum."I AM OLDER THAN THE STORM. OLDER THAN MUNICIPAL DARWINISM. THE LAST OF THE LAZARUS BRIGADE."
- Team Dad: By the end of the fourth book he's the one shepherding the motley bunch of adventurer's around. He even develops the world-weary deadpan to go with it.
- Technical Pacifist: Becomes this in Infernal Devices, due to a combination of being reprogrammed by Oenone Zero and developing a natural conscience. Still has no problems disarming or pinning people for Hester to kill, or inflicting non-lethal injuries.
- Took a Level in Badass: An unusual case. Kit Solent was a kind, gentle archaeologist who killed Bagman Creech because of poor aim and was horrified afterwards; Shrike is a stone-cold killer capable of enduring ridiculous amounts of damage and dishing even more out in return.
- Wolverine Claws: Like all Stalkers, he has a set of claw-blades in his fingers.
- Would Not Hurt A Child: He feels a strange sense of empathy towards children which he can't explain (implied to be residual memories of him being a father when he was alive). It's what motivated him to adopt Hester after her mother's death, and kill one of his employers when he asked Shrike to murder the children of a political rival.
Mortal Engines Quartet
Tom Natsworthy
Along with Hester, the central character of the story. A rather naïve apprentice historian from London in the first book, who ends up stranded on the hunting ground after foiling an assassination attempt.- Anti-Hero: He's a classical type. He spends most of the action scenes utterly terrified.
- Action Survivor: In the first book, where he manages to temporarily kill Shrike, and shoots down the 13th Floor Elevator.
- Heart Trauma: After his near fatal gunshot wound he suffers from a weakened heart, something that ends up eventually killing him.
- Nice Guy: Probably the most moral character in the series.
- Non-Action Guy: in the later books.
- Opposites Attract: with Hester. Tom is handsome, well-educated, naïve and hates violence. Hester is horribly scarred, Book Dumb, cynical and borderline sociopathic.
- The Pollyanna: A rare male example, and done believably. Tom endures - and does - terrible things over the course of roughly twenty years, and a lot of it weighs on him. Yet none of it truly crushes him - while he enters slumps of depression (most notably at the end of the first book after London is destroyed), he never stops being a genuinely kindhearted, pleasantly bright fellow, and rarely crosses into Stepford Smiler territory to boot.
Hester Shaw
The other main character of the series. She was horribly disfigured by Thaddeus Valentine, and tries to kill him in the first book, setting off the series plot.- Anti-Hero: Starts out a pragmatic type, but gets progressively worse through the series, all the way down to turning into a nominal heroine.
- Dark Action Girl: Very good at killing people.
- Death Seeker: Wanted to kill Valentine and die.
- Deuteragonist
- Driven to Suicide: Kills herself by running a knife through her heart after Tom dies from heart failure.
- Facial Horror: Good God, yes. She's missing an eye, her nose is little more than a smashed stump, her mouth can barely emote beyond a sneer, and the scar is implied to be seriously deep.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: Massively disfigured, and goes steadily down the slippery slope as the series goes on.
- Green-Eyed Monster: A lot of what she did in Predator's Gold ultimately came down to being motivated by simple jealousy.
- Improvised Weapon: Kills a man with a typewriter.
- Morality Chain: Tends to tone down the violence in Tom's presence.
- Not Afraid to Die: Goes with being a Death Seeker. She rarely seems to care about her own life beyond either her revenge against Valentine or her relationship with Tom.
- Perpetual Frowner: The damage to her facial nerves and the scar tissue from the sword wound across her face has twisted her mouth into a permanent scowl.
- Raised by Robots: For much of her childhood she was raised by Shrike.
- Sociopathic Hero: Gets alarmingly close to this, although offset by occasional emotional outbursts and her love for Tom.
Wren Natsworthy:
Tom and Hester's daughter, born shortly after Predator's Gold.- Action Survivor: manages to hold off Kobold for about a minute, which is quite impressive considering he's a trained soldier with a proper sword against her lump of metal.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: In Infernal Devices; she grows out of it.
- Guile Hero: Unlike both her parents she learns to become an excellent liar.
- Nice Girl: Seems to take after Tom, although she's rather more worldly.
Theo Ngoni
A runaway from Zagwa, Africa, who originally joined the Anti-Tractionist fanatics of the Green Storm sometime before Infernal Devices.- Action Survivor: On a similar level to Wren Natsworthy, constantly making rash decisions and usually just scraping by by the skin of his teeth, and usually only with outside help. Unsurprising considering he's still a teenager. Also borders on being the butt-monkey.
- Despair Event Horizon: When Hester and Shrike walk by while Theo is Grandma Gravy's slave, he calls out to Hester - not because he thinks he'd be saved, but because he wants Wren to know why he never came back, and what happened to him.
- Made a Slave: Twice, and was nearly worked to death the second time. Three times, if you consider he was originally supposed to die in a suicide attack by piloting a bomb to its target for the Green Storm.
Nimrod Pennyroyal
A famed adventurer and author or so he says. Pennyroyal a con-man and overdramatic author whose fabricated stories about the old world have made him rich and famous.- Accidental Murder: When Tom catches Pennyroyal trying to escape, Pennyroyal pulls a pistol to threaten him but accidently shoots him in the heart. The wound causes severe health complications later in Tom's life and is ultimately what kills him.
- Adventurer Archaeologist: He portrays himself as one; a brave adventurer who's discovered life in the old lands. In reality he's a fiction writer and fraud; his books wouldn't sell nearly as well if they weren't marketed as real.
- Anti-Villain: Pennyroyal's a gloryhound and baffoon who's looking out for himself first and foremost. At the end of Predator's Gold he abandons everyone and shoots Tom. However, unlike most other villains he's characterized more through his lack of ethics and selfishness than any kind of calculated villainy. Even him shooting Tom was an accident that he chooses to flee from rather than help.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Pennyroyal survives mostly through luck, but there's a degree of cleverness and cunning in him. Notably he's ultimately the one who saves the day in the end, ambushing and killing Stalker Fang.
Fever Crumb Series
Fever Crumb:
The main character of the prequels. A former Apprentice Engineer who leaves the Guild to work with the archaeologist Kit Solent.- Aroused by Their Voice: Loves Cluny's Trrrilling Rrrs.
- Duality Motif: Her eyes are heterochromatic - one brown, and one grey. This foreshadows her ature as a Half-Human Hybrid.
- Character Development: She starts out as a Straw Vulcan focused almost exclusively on being "rational" to the exclusion of all else. Her character arc across the prequels involves slowly changing to a more tempered individual and reconnecting with her emotions.
- Diseased Name: Apparently there was a fashion for it when she she was born.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Visibly it's hard to tell the Scriven part as she doesn't have the dappled skin, just a similar bone structure and odd-coloured eyes.
- Last Of Her Kind: After her mother's death in Scrivener's Moon, she's the last of the Scriven (half or otherwise).
- Straw Vulcan: Has this attitude to start with thanks to her Engineer upbringing. Her experiences outside London temper her so she's a bit more normal.
- The Smurfette Principle: She's the only female Engineer until this point, more appear in London's future.
- Wrench Wench: Gifted with machines and all things tech.
Auric Godshawk:
Fever's grandfather, who was killed by the Skinners before the start of the series.- Ambiguous Situation: Fever wonders later on whether Godshawk was actually intending to Body Surf into her using his Body Backup Drive, or was just trying anything in a desperate attempt to save her. There's some evidence either way, and a concrete conclusive answer is never given.
- Body Backup Drive: Uploaded his mind (or, rather, parts of it) into Fever and Cluny.
- Evil Old Folks: He was considered old even by Scriven standards before the Skinner Riots, and was a thoroughly unpleasant person besides.
- Faux Affably Evil: Treated Dr. Crumb fairly well while he was in Godshawk's employ. Threatened to 'set the dogs on [him]' if he saw Crumb again after finding out his relationship with Wavey, and had twenty Londoners executed for daring to threaten her even if she came to no harm because of a Londoner standing up for her.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Came up with the idea of Traction Cities, even if he only intended London to move once. He was also a keen studier of Stalker-tech, to the point of gaining some insight into their workings and even how to preserve the Stalker's memories.
- Immortality Seeker: His research into Stalkers and their brains was part of his plans to live forever by copying his consciousness to advanced Stalker-brains, then transferring it into a new body when his old one began to fail.
- Killed Off for Real: Killed during the Skinners' Riots - Bagman notes he 'saw [Godshawk's] speckled hide with me own eyes'. Potentially double-subverted. Some of his memories survived via the Body Backup Drive mentioned above; he briefly takes control of Fever's body during the first chapter of Scrivener's Moon, but is otherwise reduced to a few stray thoughts floating around in Fever and possibly Cluny's heads.
- Mad Scientist: Kit Solent notes that he tried to invent a number of crazy things, such as devices for recording dreams and new colours. He was also responsible for carrying out experimentation on slaves and Skinner prisoners in the course of his researches.
- Posthumous Character: Long dead by the time the series begins. Sort of. He survived as a few fragmented memories floating around in Fever and Cluny's heads, even briefly emerging as a split personality of Fever's when she was wounded and delirious in Scrivener's Moon.
Cluny Morvish:
The daughter of an Arkhangelsk leader, who has visions of Traction Cities.- Ambiguously Bi: It's not clear what her relationship with Fever is at the end of Scrivener's Moon.
- Blind Seer: Played with. Her 'visions' aren't anything supernatural, and she only goes blind after a malfunctioning Tesla gun burns out her eyes.
- Closet Key: She's indirectly responsible for Fever realising her bisexuality.
- Deadpan Snarker: She starts to loosen up when away from her hated prophet duties, and has several good remarks in response to the odd things she comes across, including Fever's observations.
- Oblivious to Love: Pretty much the last person to know about Fever being in love with her.
- Trrrilling Rrrs: Which Fever adores.
Dr. Gideon Crumb
Fever Crumb's adoptive (and biological) father, and a member of the Guild of Engineers.- Brainy Brunette: He's brown-haired (though shaven) and one of the smartest of the Engineers, particularly with his core role in Scrivener's Moon.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: He's actually Fever Crumb's biological father.
- Straw Vulcan: Quadruple-subverted. When he initially joined the Engineers, he subscribed to Dr. Wormtimber's view that emotion and reason could coexist and even compliment each other; when the Skinners' Riots swept through London and Wavey seemingly died, he decided to "turn off his emotions" to avoid further heartbreak and subscribes to this mindset by the time of Fever Crumb. Wavey turning out to be alive starts causing him to defrost a bit, but her death in Scrivener's Moon causes him to return to his mindset harder than ever. By the end of the final book, he's gone so deep into this mindset that he sees few to no issues with abandoning Fever if she can't reign in her emotions despite all the trauma she's been through because she's become "irrational."
- Took a Level in Jerkass:
- After Wavey's apparent death in the Skinners' Riots, he went from a relatively kindly man to the embracing the Straw Vulcan attitude of the other Engineers.
- After Wavey's actual death and Fever's apparent one in Scrivener's Moon, he starts rapidly taking these. By the end of the book, he convinces Quercus to leave thousands of "useless" men, women, and children behind to die when London sets off for the first time, and even considers having Fever thrown out of the city if she can't or won't subscribe to his version of "rationality" again
