Edward

Thirteen and rail-thin, Edward has a coppery complexion crowned by messy bursts of vivid red hair, her cheeks marked with painted dashes that play up how young she is. She dresses in a loose, sleeveless white top that leaves her stomach bare, wears dark compression shorts, and refuses shoes entirely; a single try at socks during Mushroom Samba sent her toppling over, a hint that she may never have worn footwear at all. A pair of big green goggles rides on her head or hangs at her neck, wired to her computer so she can dive into the net. Her boyish looks frequently get her taken for a boy.

Ed is a giggly, restless oddball, brilliant and endlessly curious, forever wandering off mid-thought into invented songs, nursery rhymes, and strings of cheerful nonsense. She usually talks about herself in the third person, parrots back the last thing anyone says, and drops into sudden trances that seem to carry her out of the room. Much of her behavior is almost feline: she bites, travels on all fours or on her palms, and puts her feet to work in place of her hands. Loving open air and animal company, she sleeps half the day away and eats constantly thanks to a runaway metabolism. Beneath the goofiness sits a staggering intellect, sharp enough that she once had Chessmaster Hex a single move from defeat and chose to stretch the match out rather than finish him.

Earth is where Edward's story begins, on New Year's Day of 2058. Her father, a cartographer so scattered he could focus on nothing but his own work, abandons her at a daycare in 2064 and never comes back. Two years of being passed among strangers follow before she turns up at an orphanage in 2066, where Sister Clara welcomes her and a computer-mad boy called Tomato becomes her dearest friend; she later names her own machine after him. Having raised herself, she invents the grand title Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivruski the Fourth, and in 2068 she vanishes from the orphanage, chasing either her missing father or simply her own freedom. Out in the wider world she grows into an outernet legend under the tag Radical Edward, dogged by tall tales that she is an alien, an athlete, or a small child. Fixated on the Bebop, she follows the ship across the network and even builds a cardboard replica of it. When the vessel swings toward Earth she cracks its systems, works out that the hacker the crew hunts is really a self-aware satellite she dubs MPU, and barters her skills for a berth aboard. The bounty pays nothing, since the police will not reward capturing something that was never alive, so Ed simply hijacks the ship to force the crew to keep her. On board she digs up leads and breaks open any system the group needs, growing close to Jet like a daughter, warming to Faye, and alone understanding Ein. Her stay ends when her father resurfaces: she posts a misleadingly fat bounty on him to bait Spike and Jet into tracking him down, drives the Bebop to the reunion, and finally chooses to head off at his side, with Ein bounding after her.