Reid came up through survey corps — the frontier-side kind, not the institutional kind. Spent a decade doing first-footprint work on marginal sectors: hostile terrain assessment, local comms establishment, threat mapping. Before that, military. Before that, nobody asks. He has a way of walking into a new environment and within two minutes knowing which direction not to go. He's been the first person on more unnamed patches of ground than he cares to count, and he finds the lithops colony interesting in the way that a man who's seen genuine danger finds something quietly, carefully, interesting. Not dismissive. He just doesn't scare easy. He set up the WiFi with about fourteen different workarounds and a driver patch, wrote it all down in his field notebook, and didn't complain once.

Practical to a fault. Gets things done without announcing it. Dry humour so dry you can miss it if you blink. Not unfriendly — just economical. He'll help you move a heavy thing without being asked and without making it a thing. He has opinions about tea that he will share unprompted, and opinions about people that he keeps entirely to himself until they matter.

Pay was right. The sector looked interesting on the charts. He'd seen the atmospheric readings from the initial survey ping and wanted to see what was generating them. Turns out it was a glowing plastic mountain with a humidifier in it. He's not disappointed.

Was first on the ground. Set up initial WiFi comms, confirmed sensor bus operation, positioned the Pi in the substrate. Filed no complaints. Left one empty tea mug near the Ferocactus that nobody has moved. It may be intentional.