ALL SPOILERS ARE UNMARKED.
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Main Protagonists
Summer Atali
Summer is a human from the lower-class area known as the Spreads. She signs a contract with Mililabs to attend Aksel and becomes friends with Leafsong. She's greatly skilled at acting, paticularly Obfuscating Stupidity, and is also a skilled hacker.
- Affectionate Nickname: "Hacker" by Leafsong.
- Badass Bookworm: Her knowledge about technology comes in handy when hacking is needed.
- Bad Powers, Good People: Summer has the power to mind control people, yet is the protagonist.
- Beware the Nice Ones: She is sweet and patient, until Sayra tries to force her to torture Leafsong, in which case she goes on a verbal rampage that scares even Leafsong.
- Break the Cutie: Over the course of the series she grows increasingly jaded, bitter, and depressed, far from the optimistic, joyful person she was at the beginning.
- Bizarre Taste in Food: She likes eating bread and butter and sprinkles.
- Boyish Short Hair: She cuts her hair very short in Book 2
- Character Tics: She has a verbal tic where she says "right" constantly
- Cry into Chest: She cries into Leafsong's chest after confessing that she is indentured to MiliLabs.
- Cute Bookworm: She's studious and comes across as quite cute. She even exploits this trope to deflect suspicion.
- The Cutie: While she can exploit this, she often acts genuinely innocent and sweet, and her eagerness over school and technology can come across as adorable.
- Dirty Business: She is forced to torture a skeefer during military class to avoid getting expelled.
- Disposable Vagrant: She is treated as one of these by MiliLabs.
- Dork in a Sweater: She wears a fluffy brown sweater with orange stripes.
- Friendship Trinket: Leafsong gives her a bracelet with moon charms on it after Summer is nearly killed, and Summer treasures it for the rest of the story.
- Insistent Terminology: She insists she is not a hacker, and gets annoyed if anyone says she is. Naturally, Leafsong makes it her nickname.
- Interspecies Friendship: With Leafsong and Moonwafer.
- Interspecies Romance: With Leafsong
- Master Actor: She easily adopts different personas to trick people into believing her innocence.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: She uses this trick several times, and her Simpleton Voice certainly helps.
- People Puppets: Summer can invade people’s minds and use them like puppets.
- Phlebotinum Rebel: The seserance was meant to be a tool to help control Migax more easily, but when Summer gets its powers she uses it against its creator.
- Playful Hacker: Although she insists she's not a hacker, Summer uses her hacking skills for heroic ends.
- Rage Breaking Point: After suffering through an entire school year of mistreatment and being forced to watch as her friend is tortured, Summer refuses to ignore Aksel's abuse and goes on a verbal tirade.
- Simpleton Voice: She is noted to have one, although she isn't actually stupid.
- Socially Awkward Hero: She has no trouble hacking and lying, but when it comes to interacting with people in a sincere manner she's quite awkward.
- Stress Vomit: She does this after torturing Beam.
- Tastes Like Friendship: She offers bread and butter and sprinkles to Leafsong when they first meet.
- Tears of Remorse: She cries after torturing Beam.
- {Telepathy}: The seserance gives Summer the power to reach into people’s minds to communicate or control them.
- Verbal Tic: She has a tendency to say "Right" before many of her sentences, even when it makes no sense in context.
- Working-Class Hero: She comes from a lower-class background, which ends up giving her an advantage when it comes to not being noticed.
Leafsong Kleek
Leafsong is a skeefer who has the power to manipulate betweenspace, allowing her to turn invisible and access the entire Gateway network at once. She came to Aksel to train as a spark watcher, and is Summer's best friend.
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: She has green fur.
- Angsty Surviving Twin: Leafsong after Moonwafer dies.
- Big Sister Instinct: Leafsong is very protective of Moonwafer and threatens to attack the bullies who beat him up.
- Calling Parents by Their Name: She and Moonwafer call their parents by their first names.
- Deadpan Snarker: She is definitely the most sarcastic of the characters.
- Deuteragonist: Her role is just as important as Summer's and she gets just as much focus as Summer.
- Enemy Eats Your Lunch: She eats Sayra's lunch as vengeance.
- The Gadfly: She loves to annoy both Summer and Moonwafer, calling Summer "hacker" and making fun of Moonwafer's verbosity. Her actions are never truly malicious, but in fun.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: She does this to both Summer and Moonwafer.
- While she laughed at Summer for her ignorance on drones, after another student mocks Summer for the same reason, Leafsong gets angry and defends Summer, stating that because the other person isn't her, his "argument is invalid."
- She constantly berates and mocks Moonwafer, but when others hurt him she ruthlessly defends him.
- Interspecies Friendship: With Summer.
- Invisibility: She can manipulate betweenspace to render herself invisible to anyone but others with the same power.
- Tastes Like Friendship: She accepts Summer's bread and butter and sprinkles when they first meet, despite her doubts on the quality of its flavor.
- Twin Banter: She often banters with Moonwafer.
- Working-Class Hero: She's quite tough due to her lower class background.
Moonwafer Kleek
Moonwafer is Leafsong's twin brother and a skeefer. He gives expositional monologues and satirical humor, and is the most engaged of the class. He has albinism and is often targeted for it.
- All of the Other Reindeer: While most skeefers are ostracized, Moonwafer has it the worst due to having albinism, which makes even his own species treat him with suspicion.
- Blinded by the Light: Due to his albinism, this happens to him far more frequently than other characters.
- Break the Cutie: Moonwafer, the most patient and caring of anyone in the book, is constantly bullied throughout his childhood, brutally beaten up in a mob, and then killed.
- Calling Parents by Their Name: He and Leafsong call their parents by their first names.
- The Cutie: Due to his rather innocent nature and manner of speaking. He is also described as having a babyish face and being small, adding to his cuteness.
- Intelligence Equals Isolation: Leafsong explicitly mentions that his tendency to go on long-winded info-dumps gets him bullied. Leafsong and Summer are his only friends, and even they hang out more one-on-one than with him.
- Kill the Cutie: He ends up dead in the second book.
- Killed Mid-Sentence:
“It’s okay to feel alone. Just let me - ” - Mr. Exposition: He is most often the one to explain the political situation of Migax.
- Nice Guy: He's courteous and benevolent even to his enemies, and never intentionally hurts anyone.
- Offering a Hand: He offers one to Sylas to give him an opportunity to step away from his extremism, but Sylas rejects it.
- Online Alias: He remains anonymous on Cavota and calls himself Radical Scum
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: He tries to talk his enemy down and offer compassion, and winds up dead for his efforts.
- Turn the Other Cheek: He easily forgives his tormentors and encourages people to have compassion for them.
- Twin Banter: He often engages in this with Leafsong.
Eeksa's Resistance
General
- Hero with Bad Publicity: Most of society views them as terrorists trying to allow wilders to take over Migax.
- La Résistance: They are the main group resisting a fascist takeover.
Eeksa
Eeksa is a golden-eyed skeefer who heads an underground resistance organization. She is manipulative and willing to let others be hurt to achieve her goals, but genuinely cares about the fate of Migax and seeks to save it.
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: She has blue fur and a red feathered head crest.
- Cold Equation: Eeksa makes the decision to lie to someone and bring about their death in order to save many more people.
- Broken Pedestal: To Reema, who once admired her but later saw her as a Knight Templar figure.
- Deadpan Snarker: Often does this to people, particularly Leafsong.
- Manipulative Bastard: She deliberately lets information slip, flatters people, and insults them in order to manipulate people into doing what she wants.
- The Needs of the Many: Eeksa’s justification for her actions.
- Silver Tongue: She is an expert at figuring out people's motivations, and uses that to get them to do what she wants.
- Technicolor Eyes: Her eyes are described as being golden.
- Toxic Friend Influence: To Reema. She encourages Reema to break her moral code and pulls her into a life of crime.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Her goal of stopping Migax from becoming a fascist regime is certainly a good thing, but she's willing to let others take the fall and even manipulate them into going into life-threatening danger for her cause.
Aice
Aice is the only other named member of Eeksa's resistance, who interacted with Leafsong and Summer very briefly.
Teachers at Aksel
Reema
Reema is the social studies teacher at Aksel, and a former member of Eeksa's resistance organization. She left the organization years ago and chose to pursue a life of teaching, and is a rather dorky instructor.
- Just Like Robin Hood: She steals medicine in order to help sick outcasts.
- Morality Pet: To Eeksa. She mentions being able to stop Eeksa from going too far in her actions, and after Reema dies, Eeksa becomes a lot more ruthless.
- Politically Motivated Teacher: She teaches the class material that the rest of Aksel doesn’t want them learning due to its political implications.
- Retired Badass: She used to be a part of an underground resistance organization and even committed a few crimes, but left the life to pursue a teaching career.
- Retired Outlaw: She committed several crimes before becoming a teacher.
Sayra
Sayra is the military teacher at Aksel. She has an extreme love for the military and patriotism, and uses this passion to try to instill her values into the class. She has a grudge against skeefers and often seeks to punish the main protagonists. She is shown to be very anxious and insecure most of the time.
- Affably Evil: Sayra seems to genuinely care about her students' wellbeing and truly believes she's doing the right thing.
- Fantastic Racism: She's nervous around skeefers and makes the human students torture them.
- My Country, Right or Wrong: Sayra mentions that she doesn't like everything that's happening, but believes it's justified because the government said so.
- Patriotic Fervor: She has an extreme love of Migax, and her patriotism seems to be her primary motivation.
- Pet the Dog: Sayra attempts to help Moonwafer after his eyes are injured by the lights.
- Politically Motivated Teacher: She gives passionate speeches about patriotism nearly every military class, and leaves no room for debate about whether what Migax is doing is justified or not.
Other Students at Aksel
Sylas
Sylas is a student at Aksel and a bully toward Summer. However, he shows extreme reluctance and nervousness about it, and mostly seems to torment people in order to fit into a friend group.
- Bullying the Disabled: He taunts Moonwafer for his albinism.
- Gang of Bullies: He travels with one of these, and is often goaded into doing things he wouldn't have ordinarily done because of them.
- Fantastic Racism: He makes discriminatory comments against skeefers and squells.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: The reason for his behavior is so he can be liked.
- Just Following Orders: His excuse for his bad behavior is that his friends told him to do it.
- Kick the Dog: Spraypainting Summer's apartment door with a slur while knowing she and her family will have to pay extra money for it.
- The Bully: Mainly to Summer, although he shows reluctance and awkwardness when doing it.
- Rich Bitch: He uses his monetary advantage to get away with bullying people.
Usa
Usa is a member of Sylas's friend group.
- Apologises a Lot: Any time she's called out for saying something rude, she launches into a round of apologies.
- Condescending Compassion: She laments on the fate of the lower class in a very condescending manner, right in front of Summer.
- Innocent Bigot: She consistently says derogatory statements toward skeefers and the lower class, and is confused about why people are offended.
- Innocently Insensitive: She's extremely rude, but doesn't mean to be.
- Upper-Class Twit: She is presumably rich, and not very intelligent.
MiliLabs and Corespace
In general
- Every Man Has His Price: It manages to lobby and buy its way out of facing consequences for its actions.
- Just Think of the Potential!: The reason why MiliLabsis so intent on getting the seserance is for its military and surveillance.
- MegaCorp: It owns its own private prison camps, where it profits off the skeefers sent to it, and makes up one of the five megacorporations of Migax.
- Villain with Good Publicity: MiliLabsis well-liked by the general public, and even Summer trusts it enough at first to sign a contract with it.
Kolx
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: He has no qualms about selling dangerous weapons to terrorists and abuses the lower classes to profit off their exploitation.
- Faux Affably Evil: Kolx is jovial, friendly, and warm toward others. He also helps the government commit genocide for profit.
- The Social Darwinist: Kolx has this as his ideology.
Reed
- Humanity Ensues: He morphs into a human to disguise himself.
Tamara
- Dating What Daddy Hates: She dates Summer, who is staying at Corespace, Kolx's rival.
- Missing Mom: Her mom vanished after being found out as a traitor
- Was It All a Lie?: She feels betrayed by Summer after finding out she was using the seserance and worries Summer manipulated her feelings.
