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Tansy Rusk
Wade's niece, the field mechanic working the seam at The Jag, and the person who hands you your first real tool.
Tansy Rusk works the ferrite seam at The Jag, out past The Long Scramble. She is a field mechanic first and a miner second, and the difference shows — she is at her happiest explaining why something works.
She is Wade Rusk's niece, and she reads him fluently. When he is being impossible, she translates. When he is quietly pleased with you and has no intention of saying so, she says it for him.
The Salvage Cutter
The tool the whole early game runs on is hers. She built it out of spare parts and stubbornness and is entirely cheerful about its faults: nothing matches, it is not very fast, and she suspects half of it violates a regulation Wade already hates. It cuts shale perfectly well.
It comes with the only safety briefing you are going to get, which is to keep your fingers out of the moving bits and avoid pointing the hot end at anything you are emotionally attached to.
What she teaches
Tansy runs the part of your education that keeps everything else supplied: Mining at The Jag, and the Refining that turns what you pull out of the hardpan into something Wade can actually work with.
She is unbothered by failure and expects you to be too. Some days the shale comes out clean, some days you swing eleven times for nothing, and she will point out that this is you rather than the tool — the more you work it, the more often it bites.
Out at the seam
The Jag is a seam, not a mine, and Tansy would like that distinction observed. Whoever got here first carved it out of the hardpan; calling it a mine is generous. Her Cutter runs on Power Cells like yours does, and running dry at the far end of a shift is a real problem out there — a dead Cutter, in her words, is a very heavy stick.