Timi (A to Z Challenge)

Timi is the third of the friends Roi (Snowy) manages to keep together as a dancing group. He is black. Not African or looking like it, but from a starship-based, inbred civilization, the Clan. His hair and skin are true black, not dark brown. His eyes, however, are reddish amber, with a protective reflecting layer below the amber pigment. His hair is curly, but only loosely. His culture uses dance as a method of challenge, but it is dance in free fall, with randomly changing artificial gravity fields. He appears in Homecoming, Tourist Trap and Horse Power.

Timi was older than Amber when enslaved in a pirate raid, remembers more of freedom, and fiercely resents being a slave. He had also had considerably more education than Amber and was able to teach what he had learned to the others, to some extent getting around the custom that slaves were not taught to read or to understand numbers. Here he is speaking from before the beginning of Homecoming

Should I go along? I like Amber and I’d like to stay with her, but she’s freebred, a captive like me. That Snowy’s slavebred, and every slavebred I’ve met is pretty stupid.

I don’t think Snowy is, though.

Amber said he’d learned to read faster than anyone she knew just from her reading a few things to him, and was just as quick on what she could remember of arithmetic. And that idea of his: keeping us all together as a dancing group, that we’d be worth enough that way to get decent treatment …. I’ve seen enough to know how slaves can be mistreated. Makes me want to scream, but they’ll just activate the control collar if I do.

And I’d like to be friends with him.

That’s the dangerous kind.

I’m doing my A to Z blogs from my books, both characters and background information. For characters I’ll introduce them quickly, say what point of time they’re talking from since their situations change drastically through the books, and let them talk. The format of background information will vary according to what I’m talking about. Bold type indicates that more information has been or will be available in another A to Z post. All of these blogs will be scheduled to go live just after midnight Alaska time.