SSlasl - Orphaned by unknown parents on the planet of G'Ham. Sslasl was raised in an orphanage run by G'Hass and her husband. When G'Hass's husband died, Sslasl took on the orphanage financial responsibilities and worked wherever he could to keep food on the table while he prepared for the mixer test to get a job in the chemical mixing factory.
The path of Sslasl's life led him to become a master mixer to support the orphanage. But then a fluke chance review of a proposed propulsion mix brought him to the attention of Master Masl.
Mika - Raised in the inner city where her father was an engineer in a transport factory, and her mother was a genetic scientist working on new strains of crops that would eventually be grown in environments that were less desirable for human habitation. Mika had always struggled with the social scene. She was, however, exceptionally talented with pencils and paints and recently had developed a knack for forming clay as well. It was in her art that she found peace and acceptance.
Zaable - Raised in a mining community on a remote asteroid, where his parents worked the great mining machines extracting minerals from an asteroid belt rich in the components commonly used in spacecraft engines. Zaable's parents did not value education and had not enrolled him in the mining school until he insisted, and as a result he had fallen well behind the other children his age. It took several solar cycles for him to catch up and by that time the other children had taken to calling him dumb Zaable, a moniker he had not been able to rid himself of even after he surpassed most of them in knowledge of the things taught in the classroom. Now he was nearing the age where the company would demand that he either learn to run a mining device or leave the asteroid belt for good.