Alina Grace Rocha
Alina Grace Rocha was born on 14 June 2024 at the Royal Bixbus Hospital, the only child of Earth-born woodworker Jenna Rocha (née Drake) and Dunwich-born stonemason Elias Rocha. Named in part for the grandmother she never knew, she spent her first two years between her parents' workshop by the river, her grandfather Boyd's afternoon walks, and her grandparents' rockfruit terraces in Dunwich.
A Workshop Child
Alina Grace Rocha was born at the Royal Bixbus Hospital at 05:52 on 14 June 2024, after a long first labour, weighing 3.28 kilograms. She was the first child of Jenna Elise Rocha (née Drake), a woodworker born in Seattle, Washington, and Elias Tobias Rocha, a stonemason born in Dunwich, Clivilius. Her middle name was chosen by her mother for Grace Elise Drake (née Lawson), the grandmother who had died in Seattle four and a half years before she was born.
She belonged from the start to both of the worlds that had made Bixbus. Her mother's family had come through the portal from Earth; her father's had lived on the plains near Xylora for generations and had never seen it. On her mother's side her grandfather was Boyd Joseph Drake, a retired finish carpenter, and her uncle was Ethan Joseph Drake. On her father's side her grandparents were Tobias Rocha, who ran the family quarry on the Dunwich cliffs, and Mira Rocha (née Vale), and her uncles were Daniel and Matteo Rocha.
Her first months were not easy ones for her mother, who found the arrival of a daughter sharpened her grief for her own mother in ways she had not foreseen. Alina knew nothing of this. She spent most of her first year in a basket on the bench in her parents' workshop by the river, asleep through the sound of saws and chisels, as her mother had once slept in her own father's garage in Seattle. Her father rearranged his work to be at home with her in the mornings, an arrangement his own father in Dunwich thought eccentric.
Afternoons by the River
From the autumn of 2024 her grandfather Boyd began to call most afternoons and take her for walks along the river in a pram he had rebuilt himself from salvaged parts. The walks gave her mother a few hours' work and gave Boyd something he had not had with his own children, and the two of them became, in the family's estimation, inseparable. Her first word, a few weeks before her first birthday, was the name she had settled on for him, which no one else could pronounce.
Her cousin, Leo, the son of Ethan Drake and Naomi Evers, was born in 2025, and the two children were raised a few streets apart and in and out of each other's homes. Alina, the elder by a year, took charge of him from the first.
Two Places
Her father took her to Dunwich for the first time in the spring of 2025, on the rail line through the Caves of Xylora, and she went several times a year after that. Her Dunwich grandparents' house stood at the edge of the old Vale rockfruit terraces, and by the age of two she knew the way to them on her own and had to be stopped from eating the fruit before it was ripe. Mira Rocha kept a small stool by the terrace wall for her.
By the end of 2026 Alina was two, talkative, stubborn, and fearless around tools in a way that alarmed visitors more than it alarmed her parents. She had a set of wooden blocks her mother had made and a smooth piece of cliffstone her father had shaped for her to hold, and she carried one or the other everywhere. She was one of the first generation of Bixbus children to grow up with family on both sides of the portal and in both halves of Clivilius, and she did not yet know that this was anything unusual.
