Drifters

Officially defined as "A human that resides on an interstellar station without explicit permission or qualifications." Drifter is a blanket term for the lost and lonely in the Solar System, these people roam the starlanes shunning the traditional ways of life. With the growing lifespan of humanity, many people find themselves aimless or depressed at some point in their lives. The more extreme cases of this depression pack up and ship out for distant stars, joining the millions that board spaceliners every day, beginning twenty or even fifty year journeys towards the Sun's distant neighbors. Many of these stop halfway, either saved by the crew of a R.U.N.G.S when their ship was disabled, or using the last of their funds to pay for deceleration inside a lifeboat. The R.U.N.G.S serve two types of ships: the fast, 'twenty percent lightspeed' spaceliners and the small regional transport designed only to move between one station and the next. These will move no faster than .2% of lightspeed, and a standard journey between R.U.N.G.S will take no more than a week. But with hundreds of thousands of waypoints between stars, there are millions of Drifters crawling slowly from R.U.N.G.S to R.U.N.G.S, scraping money together by completing dangerous hydrogen runs or illegal comet mining, slowly inching back towards civilization. There are an estimated twenty million official Drifters at any given time, and their names are kept in a registry maintained by the R.U.N.G.S crew.

Culture

Culture and cultural heritage

Travis O'Connor is often referred to as 'the first drifter' although the class didn't officially exist until years after his death. The Drifters are subjects of a myriad of pop culture books, movies, and shows, often represented as handsome, rougish, and happy-go-lucky by the media. This is innacurate, but most Drifter's enjoy the generalization anyway.

Shared customary codes and values

Drifters are deep space travelers, and by rule isolated from most humans. As such they value trust and honesty very highly, and consider friendships a luxury of sedentary folk. Drifters will almost never marry, get a job, or tie themselves to any permanent commitment. Drifters are by rule unattached, meandering through the starlanes.

Common Etiquette rules

It is traditional for the owner of a station, habitat, or ship to gift a towel to nomads that come aboard, and the reason is lost to time. Likewise when leaving an especially hospitable station, a drifter will tell the station's keeper "so long and thanks for all the fish". Despite there being no record of served fish on the interstellar R.U.N.G.S, this tradition continues.

Parent ethnicities

• Spacers