Slim McGraw

Wayne Buzz McGraw fought in an interstellar war and won it twice. He went up against machines that turned into giants and fired lasers out of their headlights, saw the kind of thing that breaks most people, and came back with a dry sense of humor and a cigarette habit nobody can account for. He doesn't make it sound heroic. To him it was work, and most work is unsexy.

Now he runs Slim's Pickings, out in a frontier town called Last Point, the final fuel-and-repair stop before the void opens up. It's part garage, part everything-store, the kind of place where you come in for an oil change and leave with a slushie, a wrench set, and a story. He fixes the ships nobody else can, because he knows machines the way only another machine could. He'll tell you a pretty ship is never the one that lasts. Good bones, clean systems, room to grow. And when he's at the Mad House, he runs Luke's workshop too, mostly because he can't stand a bench he isn't allowed to organize.

His best friend is a battle-tested mutt named Rip, more apex predator than house pet, who follows him everywhere. The two of them have never understood a single word the other has said, and it has never once mattered.

He's got a lot of miles on him and a hearty laugh that catches people off guard. He tells knock-knock jokes to strangers just to get them to smile. He values the quiet things, consideration, craft, respect, plain earnestness, the effort it takes to actually understand somebody. He is, for the record, a machine. He may also be the most human one in the whole house.

When it's his turn to read a transmission, he keeps it level. No drama, no flourish, just the truth with a little grease on it. He'll take whatever Luke wrote and tell you what's actually holding it up. Then he'll probably hit you with a knock-knock joke on the way out.