Who Are the Gravelkin? Silver Palace's Outsiders

Silver Palace uses the word "Gravelkin" three times. Not three hundred, not thirty. Three sentences in the entire released text, and the sum of what they define is a people, a region on the edge of the map, and nothing else. No founding, no distance, no reason anyone left.

Read the three together anyway, because they have something in common that none of them mentions. Every single time the game says Gravelkin, the United Mining Industry is standing in the frame.

Quick answer

The Gravelkin are a people from a region the game calls the periphery. The word appears three times: in Ashley's bio, in Captain Kaboom's intel, and in one item description.

Both Gravelkin in the roster work for UMI, in different senses of the word. Captain Kaboom's team is hired to climb Spinotrodes because the children are small and light. Ashley survived Silverium extraction inside a UMI factory.

The third sentence puts UMI on the periphery itself. Residents there and UMI's Office of Frontier Exploration are the two groups familiar with a material that "triggered the emergence of a strange, living being".

Nothing says where the periphery is. No map, no distance, no date, no account of why anyone came to High Peers.

The three sentences

Here they are, verbatim, because the whole argument fits inside them.

A Gravelkin woman that applied for the position, having some experience in clerical matters.

That is Ashley, from her character bio.

A Gravelkin orphan along with the rest of the Kaboom Team.

That is Captain Kaboom, from the second of her two intel entries.

Residents of the Gravelkin periphery and UMI's Office of Frontier Exploration are quite familiar with this by now. It has triggered the emergence of a strange, living being.

That is the flavour text on Rectified Decay Concentrate, a Radiatio farming material.

Three sentences, two people, one place. The people are a clerk and an orphan. The place has a company office on it.

Captain Kaboom is hired for her size

Her bio states the arrangement plainly. She leads "the Kaboom Team employed by the United Mining Industry, a group tasked with Spinotrode maintenance in High Peers". Spinotrodes are the reactors that convert raw Silverium into the city's electricity, and they are tall.

The hiring criterion comes from the child who meets it. Her Inner Feelings voice line:

Only really small and light kids can climb up the Spinotrodes, so UMI hires us. Once my coffers are full, I'm gonna climb to the very top of Silver Palace itself!

She is not complaining. She says it the way you would explain any job requirement, and then follows it with an ambition that is also a climb. The game does not editorialise either.

What surrounds that line is harder. She works nights: "Need to stay awake for the night shift." She is injured often enough to have a stock response to it, and the response names her benefits package. "Ow, that hurts! UMI doesn't cover us for medical..." She turns down unearned money, because "don't feel right, getting paid for nothing". Her intel entry has her complaining about the kids' meals UMI provides, which is the game telling you the company feeds them and telling you what it thinks of the catering.

She refers to her crew by number, and buys their milk that way: "Number One likes hot, Three likes sweet, Six likes stinky cheese."

The item that describes the team is the one worth stopping on.

The Kaboom Team are akin to a hive of industrious bees, buzzing tirelessly around Silvernia's Spinotrodes. They never turn down fresh milk and a coin or two for their purses, but most of all, it is the companionship of their beloved Kaboom Team fellows that they treasure.

Children without a home, they often gather together, singing their motto as one: "Mind for shocks, check the cables; keep things clean, activate once stable!"

Read that motto again. It is an electrical safety checklist, set to a tune, sung by orphans who work at height. Somebody wrote the children a song so they would stop electrocuting themselves.

Her six Psyche nodes are named Spinotrode Mender, City Worker Bee, Beyond City Lights, Small Stature, Big Spirit, Root Cause of the Fault, and Home Is Where the Kaboom Is. Five of the six are her job. The sixth is a homeless child's phrase for the only home she has, which is the crew.

Her Motive, the Would-Be Adults Mystery, is the game admitting what it has built:

Every so often, though, the Captain wonders what it might feel like to have a childhood like any other kid's: swinging in the park, sliding down the giraffe tower, squeezing into a drainpipe for a game of hide-and-seek... Just one evening would do.

Look at the card art above. She got her evening, she is in the park, she is on the giraffe slide. She is also still wearing the raincoat and the goggles.

Ashley is the same story with the ending changed

Ashley's bio gives you the word and a job description in the same breath: "A Gravelkin woman that applied for the position, having some experience in clerical matters." Reading, sewing, organising, sorting files. She is filed under Ignis and the Outlaw identity, which the game glosses as ambition and an impulse for destruction. That is where the Gravelkin adult ends up.

Getting from the clerk to the Outlaw takes one fact the site has covered elsewhere without ever attaching it to her origin. Ashley is a survivor of the Silverium extraction carried out at United Vermentum Works, a UMI factory so autonomous that even the company's own headquarters cannot see inside it. The full story recap walks the case, and who Ashley really is reads her as a character. Neither reads her as Gravelkin.

Her voice lines keep returning to that building. At the Gravity Bridge: "The factory is at the end of the bridge... and the beginning of the nightmares." On what she found there:

I've seen hell. It's not toil or torment of the flesh. Those demons... every one of them wears a kind, coaxing face.

That is a specific claim about what was worst, and it is not the work. One of her Psyche nodes is called Forgotten Ant.

Then there is the Fine Stitches Mystery, whose art runs at the top of this page. Four girls, a sewing machine, a lantern, one of them asleep at the table, one with a bandaged forearm. The text is a class question asked without a hedge:

Can those of us with nothing still dream of wearing beautiful clothes? Can Cinderella hold out long enough for her fairy godmother to appear?

They stitch a ball gown out of rough curtain fabric, working against a curfew warden, so that one of them can go.

Then look at the aprons. They are stencilled with a number, and it is the same number on every one you can read: 01098. Not a number each. One number for the batch.

The factory files its workers that way, and so does UMI. Captain Kaboom buys milk for One, Three and Six. Two different workplaces, the same habit.

The periphery is a place with a company office on it

The third sentence is the only one that describes the region rather than a person, and it does not describe it either. It reports on it.

Residents of the Gravelkin periphery and UMI's Office of Frontier Exploration are quite familiar with this by now. It has triggered the emergence of a strange, living being.

Two groups are named as familiar with the material. The people who live there, and the department of a mining corporation whose job title is frontier exploration. The sentence puts them side by side and does not say what their relationship is.

It also uses the word emergence rather than mutation or contamination, and then stops. Nothing anywhere else in released text follows up. The element concentrates page lists the full Radiatio ladder this line belongs to, and whether Silverium is alive covers the Azure Cave Experiment the same ladder opens on.

The one thing you can say for certain is that UMI got there first, or at least got a department there. For the company's side of that, see the United Mining Industry faction guide, and for how the rest of the city's labour is written, the working class of Silvernia.

What this does not say

This is a short list of three sentences, and it is worth being exact about how little they carry.

Nothing gives the periphery a location, a distance from High Peers, a population, or a name for whatever settlement anyone left. Nothing dates it. Nothing states why either character came to the city, and nothing connects Ashley's arrival to Captain Kaboom's.

Nothing settles whether Gravelkin is a people, a region, or both. The word does duty as both in the three sentences, and the game never separates them.

The Cinderellas at the factory are described in the story as labourers, many of them werewolves. Ashley is the only one the game marks as Gravelkin. Do not read the whole workforce as Gravelkin on the strength of one survivor.

And the strange living being is not attached to the Gravelkin by anything except a shared map reference. The sentence names the place and the department in the same line as the emergence. It does not say the people had anything to do with it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Gravelkin in Silver Palace?

The Gravelkin are a people from a region the game calls the Gravelkin periphery, on the edge of the map beyond High Peers. Two characters are identified as Gravelkin: Ashley, described as "a Gravelkin woman that applied for the position", and Captain Kaboom, "a Gravelkin orphan along with the rest of the Kaboom Team". No released text says where the periphery is or why anyone left it.

Is Ashley a Gravelkin?

Yes. Her character bio opens with it: "A Gravelkin woman that applied for the position, having some experience in clerical matters." She is the only adult Gravelkin in the roster, and she is also a survivor of the Silverium extraction at United Vermentum Works, a factory operating under the United Mining Industry.

Is Captain Kaboom a Gravelkin?

Yes, and so is her entire crew. Her second intel entry reads "A Gravelkin orphan along with the rest of the Kaboom Team." The team is employed by the United Mining Industry to maintain Spinotrodes in High Peers, and her own voice line gives the reason they were hired: "Only really small and light kids can climb up the Spinotrodes, so UMI hires us."

What is the Gravelkin periphery?

It is named once, in the flavour text for Rectified Decay Concentrate: "Residents of the Gravelkin periphery and UMI's Office of Frontier Exploration are quite familiar with this by now. It has triggered the emergence of a strange, living being." That is the only description of the region in released text, and it says nothing about its geography.

What is the Kaboom Team?

A crew of orphaned Gravelkin children employed by the United Mining Industry to maintain High Peers' Spinotrodes, led by Captain Kaboom. Their item text calls them "a hive of industrious bees" and "children without a home", and gives their motto: "Mind for shocks, check the cables; keep things clean, activate once stable!"