Bios
Written by Jack and Jamie; still under construction
Who, pray tell, is this assemblage of inquisitive, intelligent, slightly quirky people who share this life together? Here is a selection of bios, long enough to give you a good idea, but brief enough to read individually in a short sitting. (We hope so, anyway.)
Here are a few notes:
- Many of us are from, or live in, alternate versions of recognisable places on Earth: England, Russia, Ireland, Germany. But many of us live in lands found only in our mindscape or in published fiction, such as the country of Biaritza (capital: Eimeiseidele, referred to several times here) or The Dreaming. All these are part of our vast inner world.
- Although we’re an extremely diverse system, we tend to have backgrounds that match our outworld ones: most of us are Black, Jewish or Celtic, or a combination thereof (like Yavari, who is all three).
- Some listed skills correspond to ones we have out here (e.g., learning foreign languages), but others don’t, mostly because we haven’t had the time to study every discipline we’d like.
- Pronouns can be inferred by how we’re referred to in our bios (for example “Jamie has declared that her archnemeses are the New York Mets,” though people who use multiple sets (e.g., Fiona and Em) have theirs listed explicitly.
Main frontrunners
Vova (Vladimir) Romanov
Vova, officially known as Vladimir Valerievich Romanov (Владимир Валерьевич Романов), is a forty-three-year-old Russian trans man who’s originally from Kiev, though he grew up in St Petersburg in the mid-1980s and 1990s. He’s round, with long black hair that’s partly shaved on the sides, with an asymmetric fringe (bangs) that’s purple down the middle. He’s primarily Russian, though his father is also of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, and his mother is also Crimean Tatar. Since March 2024, Vova has been the sole head of the system, after serving as co-leader from June 2023. A self-styled “deeply traumatised mad Russian,” Vova has had his share of run-ins with the psychiatric system, thanks to his bipolar mania and depression. (He says, “Never go mad in Russia.”) Despite his struggles, however, he’s managed to succeed at work: after all, Vova’s mental health is best when he’s doing a lot of intellectually stimulating things at once and following his doctors’ instructions about his medications, so he can serve his country the best he can. He has a low tolerance for boredom, tedium, and stupidity.
Vova is in charge of the education and intelligence agencies in his version of a de-Putinised Russia, since he’s a pro at juggling multiple responsibilities and seeing the underlying patterns in whatever he puts his mind to. Before becoming Russia’s spymaster and chief educationist, Vova worked with a cadre of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian leftists, liberals and socialists to overthrow their authoritarian governments and reestablish a democratic-socialist Kievan Rus, simply called Russia, though its capital is Kiev. He was also a science journalist for BBC Russia, asking physicists about the secrets of the known Universe. (Ask him about the time he had to work for a Russian propaganda organ after a psychiatric hospitalisation.) He speaks English fluently in his own life (though with the occasional dropped “the” or oddly phrased sentence), thanks to a language-specialised secondary school and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the London School of Economics.
Vova lives with Yavari and Zip, dividing his time between Kiev and Eimeiseidele. He married Yavari in March 2024.
Musical tastes: Likes nearly everything except for country and hip-hop, the latter he despises with a passion, with very few exceptions.
Yavari Romanov
Yavari is thirty-five years old, of a medium build, with ear-length naturally blue hair that slightly covers his eyes. Yavari grew up in a poor family in Teiribuze, Biaritza. Although their poverty was relative, he was still acutely aware of the difference between his life and those of his richer peers’. He was often bullied for his cheap clothes and school supplies. His poverty, as well as the systemic discrimination he saw growing up in Biaritza, led him to civil rights activism in his late teens, which is how he met and befriended Jack and Hess. Compared with Vova and Jamie, he’s relatively private about his internal life.
For the past year, Yavari has been the director of the oversight and transparency department at the University of Eimeiseidele’s Institute of Artificial Intelligence, where he advances legislation and regulations that make sure AI doesn’t get too out of hand. (His internal interests in AI policy are causing him to raise a few eyebrows at current problems regarding algorithms, AI, and their uses against systemically marginalised people.)
Yavari is a hard worker, willing to go the extra mile to make sure things are all right. But even he gets frustrated when he’s met with tedious, thankless tasks where he isn’t getting to solve problems or figure out new ways to do things. (His tolerance for boredom is greater than Vova’s, though.) He’s not too good in the cooking department, either, though he’s still competent.
He is married to Vova, and the two live together with Zip, dividing their time between Eimeiseidele and Kiev.
Musical tastes: likes electronic dance music, 80s pop music, some contemporary pop, some rock, trance, some R&B. Dislikes most hip-hop.
Jack Dawkins
Thirty-five years old, Jack Dawkins cuts a striking figure: he’s willowy thin, with flowing hair that is either pink or brown, depending on his mood and fancy. He talks with a cut-glass Received Pronunciation accent, a product of a childhood in the Forties and an expensive education. (Even after moving well into the future, he’s held on to his accent as a trademark.) His mother is Irish, his father English—and he sees himself as a pleasing combination of both. Wordy and witty, Jack enjoys himself most when he sets himself to the task of writing literary essays, poems, or stories, though his self-consciousness makes him hesitate to submit them to publishers.
Throughout his career, Jack has worn a number of hats, often simultaneously: diplomat, philologist, translator, cultural critic, essayist, digital artist, graphic designer, subeditor, typographer, chef, poet, would-be novelist. He used to be head of the system for several years, but he’s since handed over the reins to Vova, who’s proved himself a capable leader in 2023, in which we were recovering from the worst mental health crisis we’d had since 1989.
Jack is a man of three times: he grew up in Second World War Britain, moved to the distant future at thirteen, and has been at our front for about thirty-four years. The diversity of his temporal experiences has given him a distinct style of writing, dress, politics and aesthetics, all of which are additive, rather than subtractive—how many people have you met who can tell you about living simultaneously in three times and deriving meaning from all those times?
Nowadays, Jack is Biaritza’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Jack lives in the official ministerial residence alongside his wife, Jamie, and their two children, Katie and Florian.
Jamie Dawkins
Though she’s formally known as the rather grand Margaret Elizabeth Dawkins, this forty-four-year-old proud New Yorker is best known as Jamie. Jamie grew up in Greenwich Village before moving to Hampshire (the one in England, not to be confused with New Hampshire) in her early teens, after a few years trapped in a pocket universe. Married to Jack, she lives with him and their two children in Eimeiseidele’s city centre. Jamie is biracial; her mother is white English with aristocratic Welsh ancestry, and her father is a working-class Black Brit of Jamaican background. Because she’s a shapeshifter, though, she can appear either white or Black, depending on her mood. (Being a shapeshifter has helped her in other ways—she’s a trans woman who came to terms with her gender identity very recently.)
Jamie’s been a member of Plures House since 1989, when we developed dissociative amnesia after a particularly traumatic incident.
Jamie is obsessed by typography, grammar, and usage, and is a skilled editor who’s memorised multiple style manuals and usage books off by heart. Notably, she will kick up a fuss if you strike the Oxford comma from her writing, since she’s more of a literary than journalistic editor. Her typographic tastes run from the vernacular to the tony; she loves tacky logos for video games, amusement parks, and breakfast-cereal boxes, but she also has an admiration for the tender attention paid to kerning, spacing, and typeface choice in well-designed books.
Consistent with Jamie’s wide-ranging interests, she has a number of jobs, including English teacher, copyeditor, and spy. (Her forensic knowledge of grammar, usage, and typography helps her catch out wrongdoers.)
Compared with other Pluresians, Jamie is interested in sports and has her favourite teams: the New York Yankees and the New York Knicks in particular. She has an especial loathing for the Yankees’ cross-town rivals, the Mets, and has a collection of anti-Mets swag in her closet. (She’s also known to tease Zip about his preference for “Bawston” teams like the Red Sox and Celtics.)
Hess Sakal
The second one to join our system, the forty-one-year-old Hess is energetic, silly and a bit chaotic—though he’s no match for one Zip T. Wexler. (His full name is Hesperus Vasilievich Sakal, but nobody calls him Hesperus—unless Richard is joking around with him.)
Hess is the head of the Temporal Physics department at the University of Eimeiseidele, where he studies the mechanisms of time travel and how to go about it ethically, avoiding undue temporal paradoxes.
When he’s not working or hatching new schemes with Jack, Yavari, and Vova, Hess lives with his wife, Yumi, and their two children not far from Jack and Jamie’s family in Central Eimeiseidele. (Like Yavari, Hess is relatively private.)
Morpheus
One who is interested in stories. First among equals. Ageless, naturally.
Zip T. Wexler
Zip Wexler is an ageless Black hole (yes, with a capital “B”)—a quivering ball of chaos from Dorchester, Massachusetts, with a silly hybrid accent that combines “Bawston” with Queens. Zip frequently combines absurd echolalia with Borscht Belt humour and lines that wouldn’t sound out of place from a wisecracking Disney Renaissance sidekick. Although Zip is known for his zany commentary and constant repetition of random phrases, he’s surprisingly insightful and is an expert at talking sense into Jack, Vova, Hess, and the others when things are going a bit pear-shaped.
One of Zip’s pastimes is to drive Vova nuts by mispronouncing Cyrillic on purpose (e.g., reading Россия, Rossiya, as POCCNR). Not to mention, he’s the only Pluresian who calls himself an “alter.”
Secondary frontrunners
Richard Ghia-Wilberforce
Richard’s children include Yavari and Lilly, along with three children who do not front.
Lilly Ghia-Wilberforce
Lilly co-fronts with two of her relatives: her half-brother, Yavari, and her father, Richard.
Noël Dawkins
Noël is Jack’s adoptive sibling.
He lives with his four cats, Bouguereau, Orion, Cassiopeia, and Herakles, in a cosy flat in Eimeiseidele’s city centre, not far from Jamie, Jack, and their children.
Fiona Romanova
Fiona responds to either “she” or “they.”
Fiona describes her aesthetic as being a weird mish-mash of ’60s hippie, Alphonse Mucha, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Engelbreit, and Arthur Rackham, as well as British and Irish illuminated manuscripts (the latter is a passion she shared with Richard). She’s a talented letterer, using a style that’s influenced by the 1960s and Insular Uncial lettering (think the kind of lettering you see on Irish pubs).
She lives with Em and Hutch in a quirky, somewhat run-down apartment in Eimeiseidele.
Em Flynn
He uses both “he” and “they”; we use “he” here only for consistency’s sake.
Owen Hutchinson
Most people still call him “Owen,” but he’s trying to revive his college nickname, Hutch.
Hutch is a skilled artist (within our limits, that is), employing a sketchy, loose style using rough MS Paint–style brushes. He tends toward a macabre look, differing considerably from Jack and some of our other artists.