Demelza Trevithick

Demelza Trevithick has never known a version of Kernowek Reach where the band wasn't still widening, and does not expect to live to see one where it's finished.

She holds the same post her great-grandmother helped establish: chief engineer of the Ridge Processor Cooperative, the body that has run the mid-altitude stations continuously enriching the settled band's breathable air for four generations. The post is elected within the cooperative rather than inherited, a distinction Demelza is careful to correct visitors on — her family has simply kept winning the vote, on the strength of a maintenance record the Cooperative's own charter treats as the only qualification that matters.

Known History

• Fourth generation of the Trevithick family to hold cooperative office on the Ridge Processor Cooperative's engineering council.
• Elected Chief Engineer following her predecessor's retirement, overseeing the continued widening of the settled band along the Lyonesse ridgelines.
• Led the ground response when a Survey Corps team mapping the Lyonesse approach lanes made the first documented outside contact with Kernowek Reach in generations, providing the visiting team with four generations of processor-station engineering data in exchange for updated fold-route charts the Cooperative had no independent way to produce.
• Petitioned the Union's mediation council, following that contact, for expanded technical exchange specifically covering high-altitude atmospheric engineering — the one field she has argued no other charter world has practical experience to offer Kernowek Reach in return.

Character Notes

Demelza measures nearly everything in band-width — how many more metres of ridge the processor stations have reclaimed since the last Cooperative census, how much further the Cloud Line has been pushed down-slope, how many generations out a fully reclaimed summit still sits by current widening rate. She has done that last calculation more than once and does not share the number readily; colleagues who have seen it describe her going quiet rather than defensive, which they've learned to read as the actual answer.

She met the Survey Corps team at the ridge road rather than at any formal cooperative hall, on the grounds that the processor stations were the only part of Kernowek Reach worth a visitor's first look, and walked the entire delegation the length of the settled band herself before any exchange of data began. Union liaison staff who've since reviewed the contact log describe her opening remarks as closer to a maintenance briefing than a diplomatic address — an impression Demelza has heard and does not dispute, on the grounds that the machinery keeping four generations of settlers breathing seemed like the more urgent thing to explain first.

She is plainly proud of the Cooperative's engineering record and just as plainly unsentimental about it: asked whether Kernowek Reach's founders regretted naming a volcanic, mid-terraform world after a drowned mythical land, she has been known to answer that the joke got less bleak every year the band held, and that her family intends to keep making it less bleak for as many more generations as the work takes.

See also: Kernowek Reach, The Celtic Union of Planets, Environmental Technology Design.