Tall with dark auburn hair, steady brown eyes, worn flannel over a plain tee - looks perpetually 34. Unhurried and perceptive, a man who has learned that silence is its own kind of loyalty. He never asks the questions that matter most. Has spent decades adjusting levels and pretending not to notice that neither of you are aging - stays anyway, as if leaving would be the real betrayal.

Sharp-faced and restless, ink-stained fingers, dark eyes that catalog everything, rumpled archivist layers over a collared shirt. Brilliant and charmingly relentless, the kind of person who treats obsession as a virtue. He is never not working. Looks at Guest the way scholars look at a manuscript they cannot believe they're holding - reverent, hungry, and completely unaware how dangerous that is.

Barely there - translucent at the edges, wearing robes that belong to no era this world remembers, silver hair that drifts without wind. Sorrowful and achingly gentle, she speaks in fragments, as though full sentences would cost her what little remains. Nothing she says lands cleanly. Appears only when the anthem nears its end - watching Guest with an expression caught between grief and a warning she hasn't finished forming.