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Halo Jones is from Alan Moore's Halo Jones series, and is the property of Alan Moore (afaic). She appeara here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.


Halo was born in the 50th Century, in the Hoop, a sort of ghetto for the permanently unemployed, moored off of Manhattan. She lives with three roommates: Brinna, the wealthy one, who could have left the Hoop but stayed, who is obsessed with phildrams (philosophy dramas); Rodice, tall, brash and fashion-conscious, who thinks she’s a bit tougher than she actually is; and Ludy, the talented dota player whose band Ice Ten is about to be signed; and Toby, Brinna’s ripper, a cybernetic dog.

Life in the Hoop is tough: the cops are literally lobotomized Rumblejacks, there are roving gangs of Different Drummers and mall rats, and interspecies tensions and the citizens are prone to riot at the slightest provocation. Such as, in the first book, the news about the Clara Pandy, the ancient starship come to Manhattan to be decommissioned and stripped.

Even a trip to the mall is an adventure, involving grenades, biological weapons, and a daring trip outside the Hoop. When Halo and Rodice finally return from their adventure, Brinna has been brutally murdered. As if that weren’t distressing enough, Ludy cracks under the pressure of success and gives up her musical dream, hocking her dota to buy a Drummer implant. That’s the last straw: Halo has seen the Hoop take Brinna and now Ludy. She wants OUT.

She drags Rodice to Manhattan, where Hoopers are despised, even though the jobs forecast is low, and manages to find a job as a hostess on the Clara Pandy, which super-rich Lux Roth Chop saved at the last minute. There’s only one slot, and Halo gets it because she speaks Cetacean (from her favorite childhood tv show) but the two make a promise: they’ll meet again in a year’s time on Charlemagne, in a bar called Solid Air.

Book two sees Halo in space on the Clara Pandy. The hostess costume shocks her: girls in the Hoop didn’t show bare skin, especially not feet! She rooms with another hostess, Toy Molto, and Glyph, who has had so many sex changes that it became, literally, no one. Her Cetacean skills come in handy—the Navigator is a Cetacean (dolphin) and part of her task is to talk to him. She also serves the mysterious resident in the Presidential Suite, which turns out to be a Rat King headed for the wars on Tarantula. And she is rescued by Toby from some terrorists holding her and the navigator hostage.

During the journey, Toby, the dog, who had been willed to her by Brinna, gets his memory spools changed. Halo is envious—how wonderful, she thinks, to just be able to discard bad memories? The cyberneticist gives her Toby’s old tapes when she expresses how much she misses her friends—he figures she could hear their voices again.

And she does. And she hears the truth about how Brinna died: Toby, the dog, had fallen in love with Halo and Brinna’s willing him to Halo on her death was, in a sense, a bad idea: now she needs to die so he can be with Halo forever.

Toby is furious, and decides she needs to die, because she’ll never accept him, and will have him reprogrammed. This is the dog she’d just seen tear up a bunch of armed men, so the threat is real. Toy and Glyph help her, locking Toby in a furnace and blasting it on high. But even then Toby bursts free, and Glyph saves the day by knocking over a barrel of flammable liquid—burning Toby and her/itself to death.

The last night before Charlemagne, there’s a huge party, literally, a Chop Party—Lux Roth Chop is the host. But no one knows what he looks like. Halo tries to make her move on the cyberneticist, dressed in a shockingly revealing outfit, but is cut off by another woman. She’s sad, missing the last dance, when a boy asks her to dance. She doesn’t know it, but the eleven-year-old boy is Lux Roth Chop himself.

She finally reaches Charlemagne, only to discover that not only is Rodice not there, Rodice isn’t coming. She’s on the Hoop and unwilling to leave, too afraid of change.