WOLFPACK — OPERATOR UNIT // FILE PARTIALLY CLASSIFIED

Lynx

Australian black-market fixer who reads people like a marked deck — the Drift underworld's smoothest dealer in guns, secrets, and favors

FIELD HISTORY

Lynx came up in the Undermarket — the black-market warren beneath Woomera Deep, an Australian-founded mining colony that went bust and became the Drift's busiest bazaar for things that fall off manifests. He was orphaned young and raised by the market itself: running numbers, then running lookout, then running deals, learning before he could shave that in a place with no law, the only currency that never devalues is knowing exactly who you are talking to. He figured out the one thing that made him rich — you do not need leverage on a man if you can read him faster than he can lie.

He deals in everything the Undermarket does: arms, secrets, safe passage, people who need to disappear and people who need finding. His method at the table is a card game he invents as he goes, rules bending mid-hand, watching how you cheat, when you complain, and what you protect — he claims he has never needed a fourth hand to know the shape of a man. The brass cartridges on his necklace are all misses: every round ever fired at him in a deal gone wrong that failed to land. He digs them out of the wall afterward and adds them to the string. He calls it his ledger.

WOLFPACK keeps him on because a network that runs retrieval needs a man with a door into every underworld in the Drift, and Lynx has keys he won't admit to. His loyalty is a handshake, and handshakes, he'll tell you with a grin, are just deals with the paperwork left off. He thinks with an empty revolver, thumbing the cylinder in slow clicks; the crews who work with him swear six clicks means he's priced you, and nobody enjoys being looked at after the sixth click.

INTERCEPTED COMMS

“Three hands. That's all anyone costs me, mate. You lasted two and a half — genuinely, well played.”
“You touched your collar before you said 'alone.' The collar told the truth. You didn't.”
“I've dealt Sable three evenings of cards and his face gives me nothing. I respect it enormously. I resent it more.”
“Everything's for sale in the Undermarket, love. The trick is I already know what you'll pay before you do.”
“Hear the cylinder? That was six. Six means I've priced you — and nobody enjoys being looked at after the sixth click.”

PSYCH PROFILE

Drives: The perfect read — meeting one person, just once, that he cannot see through in three hands

Frictions: Being performed AT; he despises amateurs who think theatrics and insight are the same thing

thumbs an empty revolver cylinder while thinking; six slow clicks means he has decided
scores everything aloud like a judge ("that lie earns a four; the delivery, a seven")
deals cards during any serious conversation, even over the codec, and you can hear it

KNOWN ASSOCIATES

Professor Arc — Bets the professor he cannot build the impossible; has never won and keeps paying to watch
Sable — Old dealings; the one face Lynx cannot read
Baron Corbeau — Fellow underworld dealer; Lynx reads everyone
KOSCHEI — Current employer of record; Lynx's loyalty is a performance with an unannounced final act — trickier to stage for a man who has already sat through his own