Vestenya Ruo

The following content contains plot or ending spoilers. Read with caution!

> "*You always say it's luck. Even at the firing range. You don't get aim that good with luck.*"
> ― Vestenya Ruo
>
>

**Vestenya Ruo** was a Shuos cadet in the heptarchate. The first friend and lover of Garach Jedao Shkan during their first year at Shuos Academy, he appears in Ninefox Gambit and the flashfic Black Squirrels, and is mentioned in Revenant Gun and Glass Cannon.

## Appearance and Personality

Ruo had dark brown skin, blunt, steady fingers, a tenor voice, an unexpected liking for fruit candies, and always broke left when startled. His features were finely made and he kept his masses of hair in a ponytail. Competitive and impulsive, he was a better shot than Jedao and intended to keep it that way, but envied Jedao's reflexes and situational awareness. He customarily greeted Jedao with a kiss on top of the head. He came up with terrific pranks and thought nothing of picking random fights for amusement. With a talent for making risks sound fun, he frequently led Jedao into trouble.

## History

Ruo entered Shuos Academy in 826. He picked a fight with Jedao at a party and the two began to hang out shortly afterwards, becoming best friends. They developed a theory that their heptarch had picked the cadet uniform colors to make them easier to assassinate from a distance, and shared a rivalry over marksmanship scores and a private belief in the rumor that the Academy carp were fitted with surveillance cameras. On one occasion, after a night of mutually enjoyable hallucinations brought on by a drinking game with unlabeled bottles from the Academy's contraband stash, Ruo and Jedao went squirrel-fishing by the carp pond, attempting to lure squirrels closer with nuts tied to fishing lines. Another prank thought up by Ruo involved color-coded squirrels. After Jedao mentioned that his mother liked to tell him "Don't scare the geese," Ruo found many opportunities to repeat the line to his friend.

Ruo was on the Academy's assassin track and periodically tried to get Jedao to declare for it with him, but Jedao remained undecided.

Jedao nursed a long crush on Ruo, eventually consummated in a tryst in the Academy gardens. Jedao's first and

During the yearly game competition, Ruo designed and entered a shooter. He discussed it with Jedao while coding the game, though Jedao declined to help by playtesting it. The game averaged high middle for its category. Despite Ruo's efforts, along with those of Jedao's current girlfriend Lirov Yeren, he couldn't get Jedao to admit having entered a game at all, much less what it might be. He was therefore unaware that Jedao had indeed entered anonymously, with a game designed to score points by manipulating others into small heresies. Rather than using the anonymous game to manipulate a fellow student, Ruo attempted to frame a visiting Rahal magistrate, was caught, and committed suicide by gunshot to the side of his head rather than face being tortured to death for the infraction.

A third-year cadet, Chenoi Tiana, claimed credit for the game before Jedao heard about Ruo's death, and was praised by her instructors.

Though Jedao affected coldness at news of the suicide and never revealed his involvement, his best friend's death due to his anonymous game opened his eyes to the human cost of the faction system and set him on his eventual path toward the goal of bringing down the heptarchate, switching to the Shuos Infantry track, the assassin track which Ruo had taken, as a first step. Jedao's creation of the game was eventually discovered, though he was never privy to that fact, and all information about Ruo's death was deeply classified.

Several hundred years later, most of Jedao's memories of Ruo passed to Ajewen Cheris. Jedao remembered only his initial friendship with Ruo, including such incidents as wrestling, squirrel-fishing, and playing video games, but nothing about Ruo's other family, other details about him, their later intimacy, or his fate. Waking up in a strange place, he initially believed that Ruo had played a trick on him, but realized quickly that such a comprehensive prank would not have been possible. The mothgrid of the *Revenant* had no information about Ruo. When he asked Cheris about Ruo's fate, she claimed to know little other than that he had died young. Jedao learned Ruo's true fate two years later.

## Trivia

* Cheris recalled some of Jedao and Ruo's adventures, including their "enhanced liquor" drinking game, Ruo suggesting targets for Jedao in the common cadet prank of befouling other cadets' uniforms, and Ruo being cared for by Jedao during a nauseous hangover, while at Avros Base.
* Like Jedao, Ruo enjoyed wine-of-roses.

## References

1. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Black Squirrels
2. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22
3. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon
4. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22
5. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Black Squirrels
6. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon
7. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22
8. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon
9. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Black Squirrels
10. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22
11. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 22
12. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon, p.219-220
13. ↑ Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 21
14. ↑ Revenant Gun, Chapter 1
15. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon
16. ↑ Revenant Gun, Chapter 1,9
17. ↑ Revenant Gun, Chapter 35
18. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon