An explosion of human-animal hybrids during the years 2170 and 2171 (known as the Uwupocalypse) occurred when unscrupulous traveling Cas9 vendors claimed to have perfected a hybridization process that wore off in 6-12 months, prompting hundreds of thousands to add wolf or crab or slime mold DNA to their genome on what they thought was a trial basis. It is the largest example of a relatively new breed of scam, the "ephemeral tattoo scam", whose namesake claimed 20,000 victims in 2022 and 2023. Once they had everyone's money, the proprietors vanished, leaving their customers irreversibly modified.

Opal is not one of these unwitting, credulous former humans that got rooked into swapping out her DNA in the 2070s. She was custom-built, embryo-up, by one of the ancient biotech orders, the Con Aggrilliantus. When their compond was raided and burned by Nonjiemo soldiers, she escaped and ended up a 4th seat passenger with a trio of Vestals making a Cannonball Run. She went home with them and was adopted by the Reverend Motor of their temple and has been a Vestal ever since.

Opal's superior eyesight (especially in darkness) and fast reaction times allow her to lay out the car at 200+ km per hour, even in urban areas, and comfortably make her way around any obstacles she may encounter. She frequently underestimates challenges, preferring to correct mistakes on-the-fly than learn any lessons her endangerment might teach a more prudent Vestal. Everyone who gets to know her well knows her intuition is frequently wrong and take any advice she gives with a grain of salt.

Her catlike nature expresses itself from time to time: predatory urges, playulness, willingness to destroy small things for smaller reasons, a desire to be appreciated while having adverse reactions to every single form this appreciation might take. Like many one-of-a-kind biotech experiments, her relationship to her future is fraught. Any desire she has to procreate, produce offspring, is probably a pipe dream, but some part of her still seeks a mate that probably doesn't exist. She uses her conventional attractiveness to get her way in the human world, but each time she does, it's a small reminder that her 'species', as it were, dies with her.

The youngest member of the famed McDrift family of formula racers, she has been trained from birth to race cars in the toughest conditions and is confident her skills stack up against anyone, even the posthuman Deep Enders. She has had to watch as every one of her half-dozen older brothers gave up the family tradition, dropping out of society entirely as Buzzheads, acquiring Deep wetware, or, to her deepest shame, her fraternal twin, Martin, who has joined the Thin Blues and leverages his status as a "reformed" McDrift to curry favor in their upper ranks. She has a strong desire to carry on the family tradition, both in appreciation of her father's legacy and because she strongly feels her family's connection to the open road. She understands the pressures of inheriting that legacy were too much for her brothers and she's determined that they will not be too much for her, but finds she crumbles emotionally wherever her siblings are involved. This is especially true of Martin, who openly resents her for her achievements and for being the only recipient of their father's approval.

This escalated earlier in the year, when Martin, egged on by his Thin Blue influencers, sabotaged the ventilation in their father's garage, resulting in his death. Grieving her father, in denial about Martin's involvement, lately she never stops driving for the Vestals, letting the roads (and her sisters) be her support system.

A global celebrity whose identity must remain a secret even to her fellow drivers. She acquired the driving bug while learning her own stunts for the extremely popular telenovela La Corida Veloz, a fictionalized, sensationalized account of Vestal life. She now frequently joins the writers room and feeds them inside baseball about the inner workings of Vestal temples and garages. If her sisters knew she was the mole feeding their secrets to the outside world, they would be devastated and there is no telling what the consequences would be. So she does everything she can to make sure her contacts with her old agent and her old life are kept under wraps.

Her secret eats at her, and the effort of maintaining the emotional distance from her sister Vestals leaves her frequently exhausted and unable to enjoy her favorite activity - the drive itself.

A Deep Ender, ex-military, ex-LEO, she chooses to use her cyborg technology to guide Vestals safely from coast to coast. She belongs to a Deep Ender clan called the Rolling F**k, a wheeled city built atop Bagger 293 (Excavator 293), a former mining rig and the largest wheeled vehicle ever built. When the cyborg-enhanced 24/7 hedonism of her clan started to wear thin for her, she met a conservative boy online who was planning to join the LEO academy. She eloped with him a year later and joined the forces of the LEO.

Regular humans find their fight-or-flight response triggered by the mere presence of Deep Enders with military mods, as the unnatural movement of their muscles and flat demeanor trigger uncanny valley feelings. She tries to overcompensate with charm, but is often stymied by people's tendency to judge by appearance, which makes her more defensive and combative, and so on. Long story short, she was not great with the public and left the LEO to support her husband full-time. He was killed in the line of duty a month later.

Lucida is desperate to be accepted and find companionship among her sisters, to be their shield and protector. Luckily among the oddballs that join the Vestal ranks, she is hardly the oddest, and fits in just fine. She does not necessarily want to return home, but wishes she knew more about how things were going there.

Lucida periodically has flashbacks to a time she should not remember: the balkanization of the US into the various rump states, banana republics, and isolated communities of today. She was a member of the wetware-enhanced strike team that rendered the former states of Washington, Montana and Oregon uninhabitable, a memory is so deeply suppressed that it makes recalling any of her past an exercise in collecting shattered fragments of events, people, and places that no longer fit into a coherent narrative.

Another biotech experiment that joined the Vestals as a form of protection from the public rather than from any particular love of automobiles, Ari is a bee-human hybrid that was part of the Hivemind, a hidden collective sharing a single consciousness with tens of millions of members. She decided to leave the Hivemind and think for herself, a decision she does not regret, but which left her ignorant to the workings of the surface world as well as often mystifying herself with her own decisions and observations. She has, like many human hybrids, the ability to "talk" to and sense danger from biotech experiments different to herself.

Ari is jumpy by nature, with small changes in the environment setting her off; certain environmental cues like smells or vibrations will give her the ick. This feeling will continue until the stimulus in question is removed, which makes it sometimes difficult to participate in these long-haul journeys. Luckily, her sisters are understanding, and are able to help her deal with sensitivity issues as they come.

The mysteries of the Hivemind fascinate many people, and while she is full to bursting with stories of her time within the Hive, their context often baffles people, so most curious folks get answers they find difficult to digest, leaving them more confused than before. She's learned to keep her answers short and bereft of details; enough encounters with humans has taught her that short and simple is best. Among the Vestals she has learned to open up more, and over time her sisters have gathered enough context to appreciate the triumphs, tragedies and dramas of her former life.

A Precog created by the Red Tribe to see 10 seconds into the future at all times. The Red Tribe are a dangerous paramilitary organization with wordwide influence; few will even say their name. Priviu remembers very little about her past under their employ. She appears quite young but does not know her age or have any memories of her past before the Tribe. She was ultimately discarded by the organization due to inconsistencies in her Precog ability - sometimes seeing the preferred ten seconds, sometimes years, sometimes viewing past or present events. Her ability to see into the future and alert drivers to changes before they happen is hugely valuable, but her inability to distinguish between the future and present has driven her slightly mad, making it difficult to make full use of her potential.

Priviu shares traits with a lot of adults who, as children, were introduced to and required to thrive in an adult world - emotionally blunted, somewhat awkward, seeking protection and validation from her fellow Vestals. She also has an extremely powerful enemy in the Red Tribe, something which could end up playing a role in any event where she is temporary isolated from her fellows. She refers to 'Precog', the agglomeration of incalculable factors that allow her to cast her mind into the future, as though it were a voice inside her head. This is not strictly true, but the reality is hard to explain so she doesn't correct people's assumptions.

Priviu not only gains periodic, usually unhelpful, insights about events much further into the future than the 10 seconds she usually sees, but also very occasionally can remote view events as they actually occur as well as dredge up observations of past events, allowing her to occasionally see deep into someone's past and secrets and deliver a devastating psychological blow. She usually keeps these to herself, and knows many secrets about her sisters (including her traveling companions), but would rather have their friendship and companionship than air their dirty laundry. However, should someone outside the sisterhood step to, she will absolutely take them down.

Born 1952, a member of the Push community who just celebrated her 225th birthday. She was over 100 years old when Push technology became available, and the procedure was only able to reverse her aging back to 70 or so. Like a lot of folks born in the 50s, she has an overinflated sense of her own role in her success. She was a trucker in her old life and became used to the feeling of being on the road, becoming the oldest woman to drive solo nonstop across the country in 2051 at the age of 99. She re-set that record numerous times while the "times were still good" but "things have moved on" since then.

The cross-country journey is one Carmen has made so many times that the roads are old friends to her. She is more circumspect and conservative than Push-nans who were able to reverse their aging much further, but still bawdy and world-aware. She is unashamed of who she is, what she's done, and what she's doing. Out and proud, she was married to Diane Caliva, a potter and glassblower, for over 160 years when an accident left Diane without access to her Push medication for 12 hours, during which she entered a comatose state from which she has yet to wake.

Grieving her longtime partner, but knowing that life goes on, Carmen drives with the Vestals to seek solace while continuously seeking new medical advances that might reunite her with her beloved.

A biotech plant experiment on Brassica oleracea combining it with human DNA. She is a relative of broccoli, kale, and brussels sprouts, but fully humanoid in shape; an aloof and sensual green-skinned woman that has taken refuge with the Vestals as the general public are terrified of biotech experiments on plants, as the majority of them see humans as a food source. Juno is able to communicate with a great many plants, biotech hybrids, and other nonverbal entities through mechanisms not yet understood by science. She eats sunlight, which makes her a good neighbor in the resource-starved year 2177, but the stigma of her origin is too strong for her to live a normal live among civilians. She is not a particularly fast driver, her reaction times are a bit slower than a trained human Vestal, but as long as she has sufficient water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide from her fellow Vestals, she can drive for days.

Sporting the characteristic fishlike features and hard purple shell exterior of the X, Tivva was a very early immigrant from Hommme back before such travel became commonplace, and long before people resented the presence of X refugees. While Hommme is, probably, a parallel Earth, the differences between the two worlds are so vast and their biology so different that the arrival of X was heralded as a first contact moment and celebrated the world over. She was, however briefly, beloved by people and became integrated into human society, so she is far more street-savvy and traveled than most of her kind. Fewer things surprise her and she makes fewer gaffes, but the world is vast and she is learning new concepts every day, especially things related to the local fauna on earth, none of which share any commonality with the ecosystems of Homme. She understands the plight that is leading her people to flee from Hommme, but like all X, claims to find it impossible to articulate the threat they face in human speech.

Tivva's family back on Hommme includes a sister, her husband and children. She would do anything, even give up her Vestal life, to get them safely through the portal and into a stable life on Earth. Unfortunately, with her brother-in-law missing, their paperwork has stalled.