Io

• Thingies on his head, back and tail are a mix between fins and crest. (Harder than fins but softer than crest if it makes sense?) They're shaped funny and some are disconnected from each other but they're not feathers/fur/whatever else.
• The rest of his body is covered in scales (more fish than reptile-like scales) He's not slimey like a fish tho
• Upper (dark) arms are meant for swimming (big finger webbing) and lower set of arms (white) are for grabbing things (minimal finger webbing + long fingers). He has only 3 fingers and a thumb in each hand
• Orange 'spike' thingies on the back of his head, sides of the tail and back of the arms are crests, like on a lizard.
• Blue and orange blend can shift a little or go a bit dimmer/more saturated depending on how he feels but most of the time he's vibing

Io is accompanying Cass and her crew to gather parts needed to fix a vehicle that will let them move from their city to the city that they assume is less damaged and not anarchic. He doesn't really care about the end result, he's mostly there just for the journey and friends made on the way (and enemies made on the way. Actually mostly enemies made on the way.)

He lives on a planet with two major human cities seperated by a rocky, volcanic area - [BLUE], mostly made out of science facilities and populated by their employees and AI, and [ORANGE], a residential place for regular people. Both cities were struggling with pest that came from the volcanic region, called ruby locust, a well adjusted and hard to kill species of bugs that seemed to constantly grow in numbers and function like a hivemind. [BLUE] tried to control their population by creating an artaficial "natural" enemy for them in the form of fully self-sustainable drones. The plan backfired though, and it turned out that the bugs ended up merging with the drones and were not only still multiplying, but also got upgraded by the tech, making the problem even more urgent as they started to heavily damage the cities, ecpecially [ORANGE] since it wasn't as heavily protected and pretty much depended on [BLUE]'s tech. The scientists of [BLUE] were able to create a weapon that would deactivate the synthetic part of the upgraded bugs and hopefully at least revert them back to their original form, but that would also affect the robots from [BLUE], essentially killing them. The robots weren't so keen on dying and humans didn't want to accept their counter-suggestion of exterminating organic life instead. A conflict broke out and most humans from [BLUE] either got killed or kicked out to live in [ORANGE], which was now in ruins due to the damage caused bu ruby locust. [BLUE] cut contact with [ORANGE] leaving it in anarchy, while they focused on protecting themselves from the pest rather than fighting it, and became arguably he safest place on the planet.

Io's species are native to the planet that the story takes place on. They are intelligent, but they were not really advanced technology wise before the humans came to colonize the planet (I think the farthest they went is like, metal tools). They didn't feel the need to go further than that though, and they tried to just live like nature intended to. They usually had small villages on bogs or near lakes, but there were also a lot of nomads that wandered where they wanted to. They are not emotionally attached to their families, their parents just leave the eggs on the ground to hatch and natural selection does the rest. They usually don't know who exactly their parents are nor how old are they because no one feels the need to keep track of it. They get to pick their own names, and even though they could come up with something crazy they usually just pick short one or two syllable names or simple sounds that they like. Io hatched when humans have already colonized the planet, but he was living in some bog village for the first few years of his life. Later on he started to wonder about human tech and culture, so he moved to the city where he learned a lot of both useful and useless knowledge from the internet.