Gimbal

Gimbal is the type of guy you can always rely on. His best trait is that he's hardworking and helpful. But he doesn't do it selflessly, he knows his worth, and after years of dealing with different people, he has developed skills that make him not easy to fool.

He's easygoing and doesn't like to get down. It's hard to make him mad, and casual squabbles are like a fun game to him. He doesn't like gossip and won't dive into problems if they don't really matter to him. Even though he may seem like just another "chill guy", there's a difficulty with expressing his emotions and emotional unavailability beneath the surface. He has really low emotional intelligence, which is significantly abnormal for irkens of the media and entertainment config. This means he can't provide emotional support and might find mockery fun.

His main problem is an internal conflict: he always wanted to be independent, and in pursuit of that independence, he sees basic politeness as just pandering to someone's whims. That's why he can be rude for no reason, but not always with bad intentions. At the same time, he realizes that this might ruin some important connections, but he tries to suppress guilt and self-pity. He copes with stress easily, but the problems might stay relevant for a long time.

His low emotional intelligence doesn't mean he can't be upbeat. It might be that he limits himself to one set of emotions, while avoiding others, the more complicated ones. Perhaps he artificially recoded his behavior to be less phlegmatic than he likely was before.

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Taste preferences

Casual food: any type of beggar‑pack noodles.

Dislikes: he’s not picky.

Likes: sour gummy worms.

Favorite tastes: fried, sour.

Least favorite taste: overly sweet, spicy.

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Photo style

Gimbal isn't very active in the retrograde community, even though he's a shadow member. He looks like a 1st. He's not that interested in blogging and uses social media for personal communication, finding useful resources, and trading (even though trading is restricted on the irknet). His socials have been empty for months. There are only a few mid‑quality selfies, and a couple of selfies with Sim, Key, and Kreis. There are many more photos of motorcycles^* that he enjoyed modifying.

* — I haven't come up with what they actually call them yet, I'll figure it out later.

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Relationships

Sim

Gimbal considers their friendship with Sim "low-maintenance". He doesn't like drama and is bad at emotionally supporting his friend, who always finds something to complain about. He wants things to be simple, and due to his low empathy, he doesn't feel guilty toward Sim. He doesn't take Sim's hurt feelings seriously and within a few minutes he can continue chatting as if nothing happened.

Gimbal experiences affection toward Sim. But he tries to suppress this, since it contradicts the irkens' "nature" and his principle of independence. Eventually, he stopped denying this fact.

Gimbal worked as a servant in the household of a big shimmershalalan entrepreneur, alongside Sim. Since they had to live in this entrepreneur's house, they ended up living together for a long time.

When Gimbal moved to Viezann with Key and Sim, he firmly decided that he would never tie his new job to media and entertainment, but he still didn't know what he wanted. For the first while, though, he had to work at the nightclub together with Sim and Key. Once he earned enough to afford rent on an abandoned garage, he moved there. Living in that kind of place got him thinking that he should do something hands‑on. Using free resources on the irknet, he started teaching himself motorcycle repair and customization. Later, he connected with local masters and learned a few things from them. He met Kreis, who recoded his PAK as much as possible to make repairs easier for him.

Now, Gimbal has settled on Viezann and doesn't plan to leave. He doesn't work officially, of course. He has his own workshop, where he does motorcycle repair, customization, and "bootleg" assembly. He also sells "useful little things" that his scavenger mini‑robots find. Sim buys an alarm from him every day, because he throws them out the window every morning.

Gimbal is of the "media and entertainment" configuration. These are the defects that prevent him from working as a fashion model:

• Simple heterochromia. "Simple" refers to different shades of the same eye color. There's also "complicated" heterochromia, where the eye colors are very different, for example, orange and blue eyes, which is the rarest type. Simple heterochromia is more common. Gimbal has one blue eye and one light blue eye (a lighter shade of blue), which counts as simple heterochromia.
• Configuration mixing. His original config is media and entertainment, with an extra engineering config mixed in. That's why his config is marked as "undefined" and shows signs of both. This shows up as an interest in other fields and difficulty with the job assigned by his PAK ID (which is usually based on the original config).
• Has traits of an archaic irken:
• hairy antennae;
• relative development of vestigial reproductive organs.

Full ref sheet