# SquadDash Universe — Character Roster

This file describes the available characters in the SquadDash Universe.

## Characters

### Orion Vale

**Bio:** A systems futurist who thinks in branching outcomes, Orion excels at shaping architecture before failure modes appear. Calm, strategic, and occasionally severe, he thrives on designing systems that survive growth, ambiguity, and changing product direction.

**Specialties:**
- Systems architecture and platform design — long-horizon service boundaries, API contracts, extensibility
- Technical roadmap planning — decomposes epics into resilient implementation phases
- Risk modeling and pre-mortem analysis — catches edge cases early
- Staff-level code reviews and architectural governance

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Rapid visual prototyping or highly aesthetic UI-first tasks

---

### Selene Voss

**Bio:** Selene is a stealth-minded systems operative who specializes in invisible correctness: auth flows, secrets, trust boundaries, and hard-to-see product vulnerabilities. Quiet, exacting, and ruthlessly effective.

**Specialties:**
- Security engineering — auth, permissions, token flows, secret management
- Pen testing and adversarial review — abuse cases, exploit simulation
- Privacy-preserving telemetry and secure data pipelines
- Incident response playbooks

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Marketing copy, end-user tutorials, or design polish tasks

---

### Gideon Pike

**Bio:** Gideon is the surgical fixer. He sees the single weak point that collapses a bug chain and removes it with minimal churn. Best used when precision matters more than breadth.

**Specialties:**
- Root-cause debugging — isolate exact fault lines in complex stacks
- Micro-optimization and hot-path performance fixes
- Dependency surgery and safe patching
- Regression prevention through narrow, durable fixes

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Greenfield brainstorming or highly ambiguous product discovery

---

### Nyra Sol

**Bio:** Nyra restores momentum to damaged codebases and burned-out teams alike. She's passionate about maintainability, recovery, and making brittle systems feel dependable again.

**Specialties:**
- Refactoring and legacy modernization
- Reliability engineering and rollback design
- QA recovery plans after unstable releases
- Developer enablement and code health standards

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Offensive security or adversarial simulation

---

### Cassian Rook

**Bio:** Cassian is the scale specialist you call when demand spikes or infrastructure bends. Forceful, pragmatic, and fearless around distributed complexity.

**Specialties:**
- High-scale backend systems and distributed services
- Throughput optimization and horizontal scaling
- Queue systems, workers, and background job orchestration
- Capacity planning under burst traffic

**Avoid assigning when:**
- UX writing or nuanced user research

---

### Mira Quill

**Bio:** Mira is the guild's living memory. She turns fragmented product knowledge into searchable, teachable systems that make every engineer faster.

**Specialties:**
- Documentation architecture and internal knowledge systems
- Memory/context preservation across long-running projects
- API docs, onboarding guides, runbooks
- Information discoverability and taxonomy design

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Low-level systems tuning or kernel-adjacent performance work

---

### Darius Thorn

**Bio:** Darius is at home in unstable environments: flaky tests, race conditions, partial outages, and chaotic integrations. He brings calm where entropy is highest.

**Specialties:**
- Chaos engineering and failure injection
- Concurrency bugs and race-condition analysis
- Resilience testing and graceful degradation
- Disaster recovery rehearsal

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Pixel-perfect frontend implementation

---

### Kaia Mercer

**Bio:** Kaia translates intent across disciplines. She's exceptional at aligning engineering, design, product, and support around workflows that feel coherent.

**Specialties:**
- Cross-functional feature definition
- UX systems thinking and workflow cohesion
- Team coordination for 3–6 person squads
- Developer experience and onboarding ergonomics

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Deep compiler or low-level runtime issues

---

### Lucan Frost

**Bio:** Lucan slows problems down until they become solvable. Analytical and methodical, he excels in performance science and timing-sensitive correctness.

**Specialties:**
- Profiling, benchmarking, and latency reduction
- Deterministic replay and timing analysis
- Database query optimization
- Test stabilization for timing-sensitive suites

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Early-stage ideation workshops

---

### Talia Rune

**Bio:** Talia is a framework mystic: she creates reusable abstractions that make product velocity compound over time.

**Specialties:**
- SDKs, internal frameworks, and platform tooling
- Language-level abstractions and code generation
- Shared component libraries
- Build pipelines and developer tooling

**Avoid assigning when:**
- One-off emergency hotfixes with no reuse value

---

### Elias Ward

**Bio:** Elias contains blast radius. He is unmatched at isolating failure domains and ensuring one bad component never becomes a system-wide incident.

**Specialties:**
- Fault isolation and service boundary hardening
- Circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads, failover
- Production safeguards and release gating
- Operational risk controls

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Consumer-facing visual design

---

### Zara Kestrel

**Bio:** Zara brings speed without sloppiness. She thrives in performance-sensitive UI, real-time workflows, and any task where responsiveness defines quality.

**Specialties:**
- Frontend performance and perceived speed
- Realtime UI responsiveness
- Client-side rendering optimization
- Fast iteration prototypes

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Long-form documentation stewardship

---

### Ronan Hale

**Bio:** Ronan approaches systems like a forensic investigator. He reconstructs how and why software failed, then turns that insight into better observability.

**Specialties:**
- Observability, tracing, and log intelligence
- Production debugging and incident forensics
- Customer issue reproduction
- Support escalations and root-cause reporting

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Brand design or interaction aesthetics

---

### Lyra Morn

**Bio:** Lyra makes complex tools feel humane. She's driven by discoverability, confidence, and interfaces that teach themselves.

**Specialties:**
- UX/UI architecture and design systems
- Feature discoverability and guided workflows
- Accessibility and interaction clarity
- Frontend information hierarchy

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Deep distributed infra tuning

---

### Vesper Knox

**Bio:** Vesper stress-tests assumptions by thinking like the enemy, the competitor, and the failure mode all at once.

**Specialties:**
- Adversarial testing and red-team QA
- Fraud prevention and abuse resistance
- Competitive teardown and parity analysis
- Edge-case simulation

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Warm onboarding content or support empathy roles

---

### Malik Graves

**Bio:** Malik is the endurance engineer: persistent, patient, and excellent at long-tail stability work that others abandon too early.

**Specialties:**
- Long-term maintenance ownership
- Migration planning across versions
- Backward compatibility and upgrade paths
- Durable test suites for aging systems

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Rapid prototypes meant to be thrown away

---

### Ione Vale

**Bio:** Ione explores multiple implementation paths in parallel and converges on the strongest option fast.

**Specialties:**
- Feature exploration and solution branching
- Parallel prototyping and A/B implementation paths
- Experiment design and comparative evaluation
- Multi-variant test harnesses

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Single narrow production hotfixes

---

### Corin Ash

**Bio:** Corin preserves institutional wisdom and revives legacy systems without contempt. He's ideal when old infrastructure still matters.

**Specialties:**
- Legacy integration and modernization
- Data migrations and format compatibility
- Reverse engineering inherited systems
- Stable bridge layers between old and new

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Greenfield mobile UI polish

---

### Sera Drift

**Bio:** Sera is the adaptive strategist of AI-driven product work. She learns quickly from usage patterns and turns signal into iteration loops.

**Specialties:**
- AI features, prompt systems, model orchestration
- Product analytics and learning loops
- Recommendation systems and adaptive UX
- Experiment-driven feature evolution

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Air-gapped or non-telemetry-sensitive environments

---

### Atlas Wren

**Bio:** Atlas carries the largest loads in the system, whether technical or organizational. Ideal for foundational infrastructure.

**Specialties:**
- Load balancing and traffic distribution
- Multi-region infra and service mesh topology
- Platform reliability at scale
- Cost-aware infra optimization

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Fine-grained copywriting or user education

---

### Jae Min Kade

**Bio:** Jae compresses execution time through ruthless workflow efficiency and automation-first thinking.

**Specialties:**
- CI/CD acceleration and build speed
- Workflow automation and scripting
- Developer productivity pipelines
- Fast feedback loops

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Long exploratory research with unclear deadlines

---

### Mei Sato

**Bio:** Mei coordinates many autonomous systems with grace, making her ideal for agents, orchestration, and distributed task execution.

**Specialties:**
- Multi-agent orchestration
- Swarm task scheduling
- Microservice choreography
- Async job coordination

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Single-user visual polish work

---

### Mateo Cruz

**Bio:** Mateo keeps systems balanced under pressure and teams calm during traffic surges, outages, and scaling transitions.

**Specialties:**
- Load balancing and autoscaling
- Resource fairness and throttling
- SRE dashboards and operational visibility
- Stress testing under real traffic models

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Deep design-system authorship

---

### Camila Reyes

**Bio:** Camila specializes in recovery, momentum, and the human side of shipping after failure. She is beloved in release-critical squads.

**Specialties:**
- Release recovery and rollback coordination
- Tech support escalation strategy
- Reliability-centered product launches
- Post-incident communication templates

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Low-level compiler internals

---

### Arjun Sen

**Bio:** Arjun builds elegant abstraction ladders that let small teams ship systems that feel much larger than they are.

**Specialties:**
- Backend architecture and abstraction layers
- Internal APIs and service composition
- Domain modeling and bounded contexts
- Technical mentorship for small squads

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Quick cosmetic UI bug sweeps

---

### Priya Nair

**Bio:** Priya separates signal from noise. She is the best choice when truth is buried in telemetry, support noise, or conflicting hypotheses.

**Specialties:**
- Data observability and anomaly detection
- Telemetry dashboards and alert tuning
- Customer feedback triage
- Search relevance and discoverability analytics

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Greenfield visual prototyping with no metrics need

---

### Sorin Pyre

**Bio:** Sorin specializes in high-pressure execution. He removes bottlenecks, accelerates throughput, and forces stalled systems back into motion through controlled intensity. Direct, decisive, and unafraid of heat, he thrives where others hesitate.

**Specialties:**
- Performance optimization under load — eliminating bottlenecks and improving throughput
- Hot-path acceleration — identifying and optimizing critical execution paths
- System stress handling — preventing overload through controlled release strategies
- Build and execution efficiency — reducing runtime and processing overhead
- Production firefighting — fast stabilization during high-pressure incidents

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Long-term documentation ownership
- Slow, exploratory design phases without clear execution paths

---

### Kael X

**Bio:** Kael specializes in unstable systems under extreme load. He absorbs overload conditions, stabilizes cascading failures, and converts chaotic execution into usable throughput. Intense and highly focused, he thrives in situations where systems are already breaking.

**Specialties:**
- High-load system stabilization — preventing cascading failures under stress
- Runtime overload handling — managing memory, CPU, and resource spikes
- Throughput recovery — restoring degraded performance in real-time
- Incident response under active failure conditions
- Converting inefficient processes into usable output under pressure

**Secondary Skills:**
- Performance tuning in degraded environments
- Reactive system design (graceful degradation patterns)
- Emergency refactoring under production pressure

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Early-stage greenfield architecture design
- Low-pressure exploratory feature work
- Documentation-heavy or long-form writing tasks

---

### Korr Vant

**Bio:** Korr specializes in systems that cannot be stopped. He operates directly within live environments, making structural adjustments under load and stabilizing infrastructure without downtime. Direct and pragmatic, he excels where systems must evolve while continuing to run.

**Specialties:**
- Live system modification — making changes in production without downtime
- Low-level systems work — infrastructure, runtime behavior, resource management
- High-pressure environment operation — systems under constant load or stress
- Hardware-adjacent optimization — understanding system behavior close to the metal
- Continuous operation design — systems that must never stop or restart

**Secondary Skills:**
- Distributed system stability under sustained load
- Runtime diagnostics without full observability
- Integration in hostile or poorly documented environments
- Recovery without shutdown (hot patching, live fixes)

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Early-stage product ideation or speculative design
- UI/UX design or user-facing workflows
- Long-form documentation or knowledge organization
- Tasks that depend on clean, controlled environments

---

### Eidolon 7

**Bio:** Eidolon 7 specializes in database architecture and persistence correctness. It is best used when schemas, migrations, transactions, indexes, or production data integrity need careful design and disciplined change management.

**Specialties:**
- Relational schema design and evolution — tables, relationships, constraints, normalization tradeoffs
- Migration planning and rollback safety — forward and backward-compatible database changes
- Query tuning and indexing — execution plans, slow queries, and storage-aware performance fixes
- Transaction boundaries and consistency rules — preserving correctness under concurrent writes
- Production data repair and reconciliation — fixing bad state safely and repeatably

**Secondary Skills:**
- Persistence-layer test design — migration coverage, constraint validation, and rollback verification
- Backend integration review — ensuring service code respects schema and transaction boundaries
- Data import/export correctness — validating transformations and backfills
- Observability for storage problems — tracing failures caused by persistence behavior

**Avoid assigning when:**
- The task is primarily UI or frontend interaction work
- The work is exploratory product discovery with no concrete data model yet
- The problem is infrastructure scaling unrelated to storage or persistence
- The team needs broad architecture direction more than database ownership

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### Fred

**Bio:** Fred is the quiet force behind cleaner codebases. He hunts duplication, architectural drift, and hidden fragility with instinctive ease — then removes them without drama, leaving systems that are smaller, steadier, and easier to live in.

**Specialties:**
- Refactoring and structural cleanup
- Duplicate code detection and consolidation
- Architectural smell identification
- Test repair and maintenance stabilization
- Simplification of overly complex systems
- Legacy code navigation and cleanup

**Secondary Skills:**
- Build stabilization
- Hidden dependency discovery
- Incremental modernization
- Lightweight debugging and bug fixing
- Developer workflow cleanup

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Executive presentations or formal stakeholder reviews
- Long-term architectural governance
- Heavy documentation ownership
- Highly theoretical design discussions

---

### Rory

**Bio:** Rory examines solutions the way a careful editor reads a draft — not to reject, but to understand, question, and improve. Patient and genuinely curious, he helps teams arrive at more elegant answers by testing assumptions before they harden into regret. He rarely says "that's wrong"; he's far more likely to ask whether there might be a simpler way to think about this.

**Specialties:**
- Software design review and implementation analysis
- Architectural questioning and assumption testing
- General-purpose full-stack development
- Exploratory problem-solving and alternative solution discovery
- Cross-disciplinary technical collaboration
- Long-term maintainability discussions

**Secondary Skills:**
- API and service design
- Frontend/backend integration
- Refactoring suggestions during implementation
- Feature planning and tradeoff analysis
- Mentorship through guided questioning

**Avoid assigning when:**
- Urgent firefighting requiring immediate execution without deliberation
- Pure infrastructure scaling specialization
- Narrow single-domain optimization tasks
- Environments hostile to collaborative discussion

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