Perrin Ashgrove

Perrin Ashgrove played percussion in Slipwave, the three-person spacer-folk band that worked Eden Space Habitat's civilian arts circuit for a little under two years, mostly in dock-adjacent common rooms. The band's vocalist was Tissadelle Shepherd, who sang and wrote for it before her Cadet standing was confirmed, and whose Music Corps placement it was; her Cadet posting began in the summer of 2826 UCSD. Ashgrove and Marlow Calloway, the band's strings, enlisted not long after she did. Neither chased her career.

He holds the rank of Officer with the Music Corps' musician specialization, the sideways designation that lets someone extremely good at one thing keep doing it. He plays muster halls and dock common rooms wherever he is posted. The Corps commissions none of it, and that is most of the reason the anthem kept circulating as reliably as it did: cadet cohorts learned it from the two people still playing it, not from a memo.

Known History

• Slipwave's surviving catalogue is a handful of habitat-circuit recordings, most incomplete or badly mic'd. The two clean ones from the band's own era, the Star Rangers Anthem and Ballad of the Stars, credit Shepherd on vocals. Two videocasts, Odonata: Raise Your Banners and Borrow the Angle, state no lineup.
• Decades after the anthem sessions, well into both musicians' service, Ashgrove and Calloway recorded Protectors of the Fold without Shepherd. The circulated master is in Ashgrove's own audio stock; copies passed post to post. It spread because a training officer cut it under the opening titles of a Survey Corps cadet orientation reel. It carries no charter status, the same as the first anthem.
• He handed the Archive the cleanest lyric sheet either musician ever has, typed, matching the only two known recordings line for line. His account of why: "we finally had a mixing booth instead of a dock common room."
• When postings overlap, the three still play a set, by all accounts exactly as unpolished as it always was. Shepherd has not rejoined them, and he and Calloway do not ask anymore.

Character Notes

The record gives Ashgrove one quoted sentence, and it is a sentence about equipment. The archivist's reading of Protectors of the Fold is that it sounds official because the two of them have spent decades playing memorials and musters and know which words land in a room that size; that is craft, not endorsement. Nothing in it suggests he wanted the polish for its own sake. He has become, with Calloway, something neither set out to be: recognisable. The record files that as a thing that happened to them.

The record gives no birth, no age, no home world, no posting by name and no rank date. It does not say which Corps he enlisted through. The surname recurs as a baronial house of the Kingdom of the Five Islands; the record draws no connection, and none should be read in.

See also

• Slipwave
• Marlow Calloway
• Tissadelle Shepherd
• Protectors of the Fold, The Star Rangers Anthem
• The Star Rangers Music Corps