“Ceph came from the worldbuilding. From thinking about her position in her world—deep, deep in coral cities where all evidence in her immediate environment has reinforced an idea that she’s part of a superior race of beings. Her character was built from the assumptions she would have about life and how that distorts her conception of how she fits into the wider world. Her scientific curiosity launches her up into that wider world, and even if she spends a lot of that time flailing and pouting, she does an amazing job doing the hard work of reassessing her relationship and responsibility to that “newly discovered” world.

Rae Mariz