The wild tempered, but ‘suave’ reigning king of the biggest bandit clan this side of the District. Records show that Hunter had troubled teenage years, getting drunk, committing petty crimes and hanging out with the Young Bandits of Silas-8, but his mother, then a respected surgeon, convinced him to get his head straight and to follow her steps into medicine.

By his mid-twenties, Hunter had graduated - top of hisclass from Archneuron Razmarix’s University of Cybernetic Medicine and Mechanical Healing, earning him a place at the Union of Galactic Species’ School of Robotic Surgical Practices on 311-Alpha. Hunter took a community service position on his grandfather’s home world: Earth. It didn’t take longfor Hunter to meet the love of his life and settle into family life with the birth of his daughter, Ruby.

Life was good!

But then his student loan debt and bills piled up; turns out the Union were pretty stiff on that 18 trillion percent interest rate. His only option was to take out a succession of black-market loans from his old bandit friends,now relocated to New Montana.

Eventually the bandits came looking for their money, with the weaponry to take it. When Hunter joked that he couldn’t pay up the full amount and that they should get real jobs, the bandits brutally cut away hisarm, took away his left eye, and made him watch as they executed his family.

Left for dead, Hunters wore revenge and used his skills to cybernetically augment his body, waging aone-man, booze-fueled war against the whole clan and anyone who’d help them. After three years, his ex-friends lay dead at his feet, and those that were left bent the knee to their new king: Hunter Cassidy.

The sharpest shot to ever sling suds. Lauren Reid was born on Mimas, a moon of Saturn, but her winner-take-all attitude, high-speed focus and ‘strong personality’ quickly put her on a one-way trip to the newly-established boarding school planet of Luyten b. Her gifts and rambunctious zeal far from nurtured by Luyten b’s educational system, Lauren dropped out of high school and took whatever job didn’t ask for a résumé.

From bussing tables at a Saturnian restaurant to working as a barista at the Waypoint Station, living paycheque to paycheque put Lauren in a daily cycle of misery and boredom with no foreseeable way out. But that all changed when Lauren tuned into an ad for New Montana. A planet of mayhem, lawlessness and treasure that guaranteed either an early death or a half decent nest egg for retirement? She was already on her way!

The minute she set foot on New Montana, Lauren found a new job working as a dancer and bartender at a saloon under the name Lacey Rose—funnily enough, it was the most satisfying job she’d ever had. With her first paycheque, she bought some guns and a buttload of ammo. On her first day off, Lacey Rose charged into the wilderness in search of untold riches or an awesome death—either would be better than working customer service.

Geartooth is the human equivalent of a bullet shaped like a fist, but with a heart of gold and a sweet soul to fall back on. In a period of great hostility on planet Earth, Gary Harris’s physical strength and combat prowess helped him lead a battalion of elite commandos to victory after victory. Taking more than a few near-misses to the head in the line of duty, Gary’s personality was permanently enlarged and his inhibitions were stifled, as was his ability to refer to himself in the first person.

When Earth joined the Union of Galactic Species, Gary’s military credentials put him on the front lines across the universe, where his lower jaw was blown off from catching an enemy grenade with his teeth. The Union stretched the budget of their military health insurance to fit Gary with an experimental robotic lower jaw as well as a few other cybernetic enhancements. Gary was reborn as Geartooth, the Union’s greatest soldier (with fewer than seven hands).

But when the Union’s military campaign paid off and brought a new age of peace the universe, Geartooth found himself at war with his own destiny. With no wars to fight in, Geartooth fell into his own kind of depression: hard drinking and a nasty habit of eating three fistfuls of bullets a day.

When news of a planet full of criminals, mercenaries and loot-hunters calling for more bodies to reap the benefits of violence and war, Geartooth hijacked the first shuttle to fly by his window and set off to quench his thirst for blood on the horizons of New Montana.

A cat in boxing gloves with an addiction to monstern hunting (yes, you read that right.) Willy’s existence is, in and of itself, acomplete head-scratcher. Is he the last in a long line of universally renowned beast-hunting cats? Is he the end result of some mad scientist’s experiments that escaped and embarked on a never-ending quest to rid the universe of monsters? Is he God itself? Nobody knows, and if you ever get close enough toask him, he’ll put out your lights before you get the chance.

Ah, yes, he gets a little angry, or a lot, way too easy, all too often.

Ok. He’s just a fight waiting to happen. Or explode.

The first concrete evidence of Willy Punch’s existence can be traced to a conspiracy website attempting to link the appearances of giant monsters across the universe to the Union of Galactic Species. In every reported incident, witnesses and photographic evidence pointed to the intervention of a small black creature in metallic gauntlets to the defeats of the monsters involved. Coronary reports and forensic evidence identified the DNA of a feline at every scene, as well as the causes of death being tied to blunt force trauma, as if the monsters were killed by incredibly powerfulpunches.

In recent years conspiracy theorists have rumored this creature—referred to only as Willy Punch—to be on New Montana, a planet famous for its violence, its treasures, and its abundance of giant monsters. But no matter who or what Willy Punch is, three things are clear: 1: He’s never far from a monster. 2: He packs a mean punch. And 3: He’s right at crotch height.

The greatest mind in the universe with the heart of a child and an endless hunger for knowledge. The Angel is an ancient entity created by an unknown force. Emerging from a cocoon in the heart of a dyingstar, this entity’s first deed to the universe was consuming the power of its own supernova—preventing the destruction of three civilized worlds as a bonus. With no memory of her own existence but a profound bank of knowledge and information, the entity sought out what it could only describe as its heart’s desire: life.

Wandering the universe for many cycles, the entity explored new worlds filled with organic beings, where her curiosity only became harder to ignore. A singular purpose calling out to her: life. Barely understanding her nature as a cyborg, the entity resolved to learn about the nature and beauty of life in all its forms. The entity adopted a name she found in various scriptures and temples: Angel. Angel roamed the cosmos seeking the true meaning of life, and never found her answers. But then Angel discovered something better.

Within five minutes of her arrival on Silas-8, she witnessed a man getting shot over a spilled beer, and her curiosity was captured by an entirely new phenomenon: brutal death. Stricken by this new epiphany, Angel thanked the killer for his demonstration… and proceeded to kill him, for firsthand data. Angel forged a path of fruitful murder and scientifically sound killing across the universe. She eventually landed on New Montana, a planet where wanton carnage wasn’t just socially acceptable, but where new test subjects practically lined themselves up at Angel’s door to volunteer for her experiments—whether they knew it or not.

The highest-rated, highest-priced assassin in theuniverse. For a short time before its acquisition by the UGS and resale to Tarvos Wayward, New Montana was the hiding place of the Order of the DarkLight, a fanatical sect that kidnapped special children in search for specific DNA markers, in order to manufacture the highly-efficient, lethally-dangerous biosynthetic warriors: the ODL Mechassassin. ODL planned to build an army of subjects from A-00 to Z-99 in the search for the holy grail killer.

Until they got to K.

Perhaps it was a glitch, or perhaps it was fate. The unit branded K-05 witnessed a vision of their true master: Not the ODL, but Death itself. Before K-05 had uttered their first word, they’d racked up a kill-count of 1,425: all 220 members of the Order, and all 1,205 of their fellow Mechassassins. Considering this experience a perfect systems calibration, they departed the order with blood on their feet.

K-05 spent the coming decades refining their technique across New Montana and surrounding planets, just as Tarvos Wayward began his campaign to turn the world into a planet of bandits, treasure hunters and killers. Now on a path to complete their true directive, to bring all life in the universe to Death, K-05 began a secondary career as a mercenary. As an emissary of Death, it was inevitable that everything would die before them. In the meantime, they might as well get paid for it.

Runaway child of the universe’s richest man and last of the Murderdogs. You’d think being the daughter of Tarvos Wayward would be easy; his first four had no complaints. But Orion was always a black dog in a family of silver spoon sheep. The constant surveillance by journalists, the hyper-constricted lifestyle of hardcore studies and pointless galas, and the expectation of eternal perfection from her own father filled Orion with an unfathomable rage for which she had no outlets. Given her father literally owned the planet beneath her feet, Orion felt there was no way to escape her life.

Then she found the Hyper-Derby circuit: an underground league of super violent derby squads from planets across the universe. Sneaking out in the dead of night, she tried out for her home team: The New Montana Murderdogs. Orion not only made the team, but soon became their star player. With a new family of take-no-prisoners sisters and hardcore derby wives, Orion’s finally got a taste of freedom as the Murderdogs’ lead jammer. Then one stalker paparazzi followed her to the track and caught a snap of her inuniform.

When the universe heard that the daughter of the man who owned half the galaxy was a prize player of an illegal sport circuit, the media had a field day. Tarvos Wayward, determined to save face, did the same thing any loving father would do: he bought the team, shut it down, and had all of its players dismembered.

Having lost the closest thing she ever had to a true family, Orion set fire to her Victorian home state on New Montana and ran away. She now roams around with three things on her list:

1: Keep the spirit of the Murderdogs alive.

2: Cleanse New Montana of the Wayward name in fire and blood.

3: Make her father watch the whole thing, and burn him alive at the end.

The biggest bucket of bolts that ever blew a hole in the hull of a hyper-cruiser. The pet project of Trish, a mechanic at the Waypoint Station, Trax’s body was assembled from the ‘unnecessary’ parts of various customers’ vehicles—with a couple heavy assault cannons thrown in for good measure. During the upload of his standard military AI, Trax’s defense protocols were prematurely activated when a group of angry mercenaries stopped by to ‘submit a complaint’ about their missing cannons.

With only half a functional personality and the mercenaries splattered across the workshop, Trish deemed her creation a complete success! Beholden to his ‘Mama Trish’s work and eager to help however he could, Trax quickly became a skilled mechanic and engineer in his own right, as well as a more-than-competent bodyguard when trouble comes-a-callin’. Butalways the career woman, Trish’s work calls her off-world more days than it doesn’t. When she’s away, Trax has free rein of the workshop.

But when work is slow, Trax’s social side gets the better of him and he finds himself taking part in all the fun activities New Montana has to offer—looting, guerrilla warfare, and wanton murder and mayhem! Ever the optimist and happy just to be involved, Trax will be friends with anyone living or dead! Turns out having cannons for hands leaves you pretty free of things to stress about. The only thing that can ever bum Trax out is making him sit still.