Name: January Stirling
Door: doorpass

Canon: The Mars House
Canon Point: Just before the epilogue

Age: 34
Appearance:one, two

History:
January's story begins with extreme climate disasters on Earth that lead him to seek asylum in Tharsis: a colony on Mars. Being born on Earth and fleeing to Mars makes January an Earthstronger - which means that he's a lot stronger than people who were born on Mars who have evolved under 1/3 of the gravity and are therefore more delicate - and somewhat of a second-class citizen. It is dangerous for him to be around "Natural" people (people born on Mars) and he has to wear a metal cage that simulates the difficulty of moving under Earth's gravity at any time in which he might be around a Natural person. The other option is to naturalize: to allow his body to acclimatize to Mar's gravity and render him safe to be around (which unfortunately is guaranteed to be accompanied by some fairly severe side-effects, up to and including needing artificial organs).

Aubrey Gale is a Natural politician who is running for Consul (a President-like position) and mostly pushing an agenda to outlaw the use of cages and make naturalization mandatory for all Earthstrongers. (It is also important to note that Gale recently had part of their leg ripped off by an Earthstronger in the course of a protest against forced naturalization.) When Gale stops for a tour of the power plant that January is working at, he is pulled in to a televised chat with Gale which goes very wrong when January snaps at them and says something that gets him fired from his job and given a (short) prison sentence for hate speech. However, this also goes slightly wrong for Gale, who at least was not the one to press charges and was blindsided in a Consular debate with January's situation. To try and salvage their own political fortunes, Gale proposes that January marry them, more or less as a publicity stunt and as a job for January. January, who is facing either the prospect of homelessness or having to naturalize just to have a place to live and something to eat in the wake of his prison sentence, accepts. Multiple people (including the current Consul, who wants January to sort of be a spy for them while married to Gale) then warn him about Gale, revealing that some years prior Gale's previous consort apparently vanished along with Gale's sibling, River. The story is that they ran off together but no one seems to believe that...and January isn't sure what to believe. Oh, and while all this is going on: there's a terrible dust storm approaching Tharsis that threatens to cut off the colony's ability to collect solar power and might just mean that hundreds and hundreds of people are going to die. Given that Gale's family is the one who owns the solar fields, it's up to them (and January) to figure out how to avoid this disaster. This also is not a naturally occurring storm: someone is trying to target Gale specifically.

Very early on in their marriage - pretty much the first day - someone attempts to kill Gale...or at least frame January for trying to kill Gale. It doesn't work, and the two begin to build a slightly uneasy relationship while Gale's people try and race against the clock to build something that will keep the power on in Tharsis. January starts actually liking Gale even while he still doesn't know if he can trust them or if they're safe. A variety of complications ensue for the race to build new power structures. Then January finds the dead body of Gale's former consort. Or...really, he's told where to find it by a person he can't see. He calls the Consul and sets in motion the reveal of what's been going on the whole time: "Aubrey" Gale is actually River Gale, who has been pretending to be their sibling ever since the real Aubrey sort-of accidentally killed their consort and the two switched identities to try and prevent Aubrey from going to jail. The plan was to switch back eventually, but River decided to assume the identity of Aubrey permanently (but only because they thought it was the best thing for everyone, really) which obviously made Aubrey very unhappy. The real Aubrey Gale has been working with the Consul to try and make River switch back (with the understanding that this will put House Gale back under the thumb of the Consul and their family). Luckily, (River) Gale and January manage to thwart this plan for a happy ending. (Relatively. January does semi-accidentally kill Aubrey Gale in the course of preventing THEM from killing River.)

Personality:
Positive Trait:
Honorable
Even though he can be kind of catty in his own head, January does have really strong feelings about how people should treat each other; and that, generally, that should be "well". Even though he dislikes Gale from the very beginning, he's sensitive to their feelings (for example, blocking a bunch of teenagers from taking a photo of Gale without their consent because "however rich and annoying you were, you deserved to sit and have a cup of coffee in peace, and Gale looked brittle this morning"). He also cares so much about whether or not the people around him are scared of him and tries to do what he can to mitigate that. This is possibly a reaction to his spending two years being told he's dangerous just for living the way he is, but we also get a great quote early on that suggests that it's something he's always cared about: "Thirteen-year-old girls were, of course, terrifying monsters, and he always wanted to hide in a cupboard until they were gone; but all that aside he was six foot two and very strong and a man all at the same time and they -- were not. The sole duty of anyone like him during those school trips was to be kind and clearly harmless, because to be anything else would be foul." In his eyes, this is just part of being an honorable person (which he says explicitly later, along with: "I think any kind of strength means you have to be careful around people who don't have it.")


Negative Trait:
Tractable
Sometimes January has very strong beliefs and feelings and sticks to them but...he's also can be very easily swayed into believing he's wrong and that other people are right. He especially is actually fairly easily swayed by Gale. Despite them having absolutely different views on what should be done with Earthstrongers, January does seem to end up conceding to Gale's points, even if it's only in his own head. He also thinks (though not actually about Gale) that "he would fall in love with anyone who was older than him and nice to him at the same time" and also that he might be "so useless that you'll end up loyal to a murder literally because they were nice to you". He also does this very strange thing where he gets annoyed at Natural people being scared of him just for being (comparatively) as strong as a polar bear and then thinks he's being "piggy and stupid" because - for example - "if a polar bear had been sitting behind the yellow line, he wouldn't have been feeling too confident about the yellow line either" (the context here being that January is in a room with a bunch of Natural people but behind a line that separates him from all of them). The difference, of course, is that January is a rational human being and not a wild animal so it's a little strange that he lets people off the hook of being scared of him as if he was one.

Negative Trait:
judgemental
For the most part, January is a pretty nice person when it comes to the way he treats people outwardly...but he does have the habit of not always thinking the nicest things about people. For example, within the first couple pages of the book we meet Terry (one of the other dancers in January's company) and are treated to January thinking about how he is a "not-insubstantial kid" and "an enormous walrus-person" (who he considers throwing out a window into the water because he's annoyed with him). Later, when another Earthstronger seems pleased and flustered by Gale's attention, January has to try not to hope that she'll "immediately be hit by a bus" and also is "aware that he [is] broadcasting skepticism about the other rigger's sanity" when it's his turn to talk. (This isn't jealousy, since it takes place at a point where January is also extremely judgemental about Gale too.) Again, this rarely actually translates to the way January acts around the people he's judging but it still isn't exactly kind. (And it's notable that Terry apparently is very aware of January's feelings, since he calls him a "right prick" and that he'd fat-shamed him for eating too much cake. So he's not always perfect about keeping it internal.)

Negative Trait:
impulsive
Not often, but he definitely lands himself in the position he's in - married to Gale and all that - because during his televised chat he gets really angry at the way Gale is behaving and snaps at them, sarcastically saying (in response to Gale pointing out that they don't let polar bears into shops): "Oh, you've got me, I'll definitely murder you if you let me in the shop." Considering that Gale almost was murdered by an Earthstronger some months before that, it certainly wasn't the smartest thing to say even if January didn't mean it in the least. At another point, he's doing another set of interviews as Gale's consort and decides suddenly to go off-script after someone asks him about Gale's politics re:naturalization because he just feels too grubby and insincere about lying the way he had been in previous interviews. This time it surprisingly goes pretty well, probably because it's not coming from a place of anger. But it's still an on-the-fly decision that could have been very bad for him.

Powers and Abilities: No super-human abilities or powers, but January was previously in extremely good physical condition - an athlete, essentially - and able to jump 5 feet in the air/lift more than his own weight over his head. He's not currently at peak physical condition due to two years of not being able to exercise or eat in a way that supports that kind of athleticism, but he definitely could return to that in Duplicity if he trains! (Which he probably will.)
Inventory:
Resistance cage (a whole-body metal harness)
Ballet shoes
(Antique) cellphone (which is fine if it doesn't/can't connect to the internet, it's a family heirloom)