Zayne is the second love interest you encounter in Love and Deepspace, the middleman of the original trio that have been in the game since launch. He’s also the LI with the strongest tendency to check in with you during another character’s storyline, thanks to his presence as the heroine’s doctor making him a generally useful ally anytime she finds herself chasing down some shady research organisation and has a science question – which, if you’ve played LaDS to any extent, you’ve probably realised happens all the time.
If you’ve taken a shine to Zayne then you’ve probably noticed by now that this man has quite a few different histories, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to keep up with which version of him you’re encountering in any given Memory. So to help you keep track of him, below we’ve assembled an overview of everything we know about Zayne’s lore and backstory in Love and Deepspace.
On this page:
Who is Zayne in Love and Deepspace?
Zayne is the second love interest introduced in Love and Deepspace, and has been available since the game’s launch, joining the companion roster during the game’s first chapter. He’s the protagonist’s childhood friend with whom she lost contact for several years, but who is now back in her life as her primary care physician at Akso Hospital, where he works as a cardiac surgeon specialising in the rare heart condition the heroine suffers from.
Zayne is well-respected by his peers, strikes a mixture of awe and fear into his students, and is openly adored by his patients. He seems to work impossibly long hours – spurred on in part by the fact that he suffers severely from insomnia and nightmares – but always seems to find time for the heroine without neglecting his other patients.
While Zayne might initially appear cold-hearted and indifferent, it quickly becomes apparent that his detached demeanour, while not by any means an act, is not at odds with him being a deeply caring and loyal person. He may have chosen his career path in the hopes of saving his childhood friend, but he extends that protectiveness towards all the patients in his care, and is shown to be particularly attentive to both very young and very elderly patients who might otherwise have their pastoral care overlooked.
It’s noted multiple times that Zayne has scars covering his hands and forearms (which are actually visible on his character model if you look closely, although they appear much fewer and fainter than the narration implies them to be). Their cause hasn’t been explicitly revealed in the story and Zayne claims to have no memory of how he got them, but later chapters show that overusing his Ice Evol can have severe physical side effects of a kind not necessarily experienced by other Evolvers, which hints at one possible explanation.
Outside of his work, many of his interactions with the heroine show that he tends to be equally solicitous of her wellbeing under circumstances not directly related to her health, and he’s shown to be the person she reaches out to for help when she runs into the more ordinary troubles of daily life. Somewhat at odds with his high level of professionalism in most areas of his life is the fact that he loves to eat sweets and dislikes healthier food, particularly carrots, which the heroine observes is a trait he carries over from childhood.
Zayne is also one of the few love interests to explicitly know one of the others, since as the heroine’s childhood friend he’s naturally acquainted with Caleb as well. But while some of Caleb’s dialogues hint that he dislikes Zayne, Zayne seems to take no particular issue with Caleb, although when discussing the heroine’s upbringing he will usually gloss over Caleb’s presence in her life in favour of reminiscing about her grandmother instead.
How to unlock Zayne in Love and Deepspace
As one of the original trio of love interests in LaDS, you can start romancing Zayne not long after you start playing. He unlocks after you complete Chapter 1-8 of Under Deepspace, the game’s opening chapter.
However, if you somehow manage to obtain some of Zayne’s Memories before this point – which is possible if you start playing around with the gacha straight away – then you will have him unlocked as a battle companion even earlier still. Admittedly there aren’t many freeplay battles in the game at that point, but it’s feasible.
Zayne’s lore and backstory explained (SPOILERS!)
Of all the LIs in Love and Deepspace, Zayne is perhaps the one with the fewest secrets he’s keeping from the heroine, although he is still reluctant to discuss what exactly he’s looking into during his frequent research trips to the Arctic. However, that’s not to say that Zayne doesn’t have at least as much going on as everyone else – more that, like the heroine herself, he can’t consciously recall most of it.
We learn early on that Zayne is plagued by insomnia and nightmares, but the cause behind his troubles turns out to have many sources. On the surface, his trauma stems from an incident in their childhood when he lost control of his Evol and accidentally harmed the heroine, and more recently, witnessing the horrifying death by Wanderer infection of his closest friend and colleague during one of their research trips. But these turn out to be just some of the many memories that disturb his rest.
Dawnbreaker
Zayne, like the heroine, exists in different incarnations across multiple timelines; but while she’s completely unable to recall her other lives, Zayne is regularly drawn into his counterparts’ experiences in his dreams. This includes his opposite number in an alternate version of Linkon City where the Chronorift Catastrophe ended much worse.
Zayne never knew the heroine in this world, and thus was never driven to become a doctor to save her. Instead, he uses his Evol in the vigilante pursuit of humans who are about to turn into Wanderers, dispatching them as mercifully as possible before they can harm others. This secretive pursuit has caused the other Zayne to be branded a serial killer known to the authorities as the Dawnbreaker, and he leads an extremely solitary life to avoid detection.
This other Zayne has never met the heroine, but due to sharing some consciousness with other versions of himself who have, he is aware of her absence. He obsessively watches medical dramas, and is hinted to be leveraging such connections with his alternate self in order to briefly assume control or at least see through the eyes of main universe Zayne even while the latter is awake – something that the heroine eventually notices happening on at least one occasion.
Foreseer
There are also at least two other Zayne counterparts living in very different worlds, as revealed in his Myth stories. The first – known as the Foreseer – is a prophet of Astra, the God of Disaster, who resides alone in a tower and is forced to remain frozen on his throne for a century at a time. Mirroring their main universe counterparts, an incarnation of the heroine frees the Farseer from his stasis when she comes to steal a cure she believes he holds to her fatal heart condition. After briefly imprisoning her for her attempted theft, the Foreseer strikes a deal with the heroine in which she can earn her freedom by keeping his beloved jasmine plants alive, no small feat in the permafrost that surrounds the castle.
Over time, both the heroine and the Foreseer come to understand the true significance of the jasmines. During his long periods being restrained on his throne, this version of Zayne retreats to a world within his book, which contains an endless field of jasmine flowers. Working together, they eventually uncover the truth: that every flower in the vast field represents a version of the heroine who Zayne has known and who has been killed by Astra, who then destroys Zayne’s memories and returns him to his imprisonment. Breaking free of his God’s control, Foreseer Zayne destroys both himself and Astra by bestowing the heroine with the Creatio Protocore that sustains them, curing her heart condition in doing so.
Master of Fate
Zayne’s second Myth counterpart is the Master of Fate, a solitary monk-like figure who takes in a version of the heroine who has been ostracised from her community due to her unstable Evol powers. Despite the true purpose of his training being to kill the heroine to protect the world from the danger her powers pose, the Master of Fate instead teaches her to better control her Evol. Instead of killing her, he finally uses his own ice Evol to place her in an unnatural sleep to protect her from harm. She awakes an unknown – but implicitly impossibly long – amount of time later to find him gone, and sets out to reunite with him.
Main-universe Zayne doesn’t seem to share memories with his Myth counterparts – at least, not nearly to the same degree as with his Dawnbreaker alternate self. But – though this hasn’t been acknowledged in canon yet – you can see that his scars in the main timeline seem to match the places where Zayne is habitually restrained by Astra’s thorns in his Farseer incarnation, hinting at a more literal connection between his disparate counterparts than has otherwise been suggested.