Rock Hopper

Gnome-sized and owlish, a rock hopper has short white fur along its back and the outsides of its limbs, a stiff crest of hair over its crown, and a small pointed nose sheathed in beak-like shell. It dresses for work in a leather kilt, stiff vest, bracers, and sandals or low boots, and carries a bag of tools plus a knife or short sword.

Rock hoppers know most void travelers outclass them and act on it without shame. They leave strangers alone unless clearly threatened, and given any way out, they take it.

These nomads seldom settle; when they do, they dig rooms and a hangar into an asteroid. A band is nearly always beside its skiff, repairing it, camping, or scouting the rocks nearby. The skiffs carry no starhelm and no magic. Crews sit on benches like oarsmen and pump pedals that drive a crank, a geared shaft, and one or two stern propellers churning the skiff's air envelope. Sages who examined the system declare it impossible, and answer the fact that it works by insisting it has no reason to. With too little air for long trips, the hoppers travel rock to rock, raising bright awnings against the sun at each stop.

They follow free-roaming herds of void scavengers their ancestors may once have kept, harpooning gray and night scavengers for meat, brown ones for poison, and void scavengers for sport and safety. Each skiff holds a small cask of brown scavenger poison, saved mostly for void whales; the hoppers never seek these giants out but have run them down over days or weeks. Sages think some unknown power planted the race among the asteroids, and suspect its stubborn refusal to trade with the void merchants hides the answer.