Nine, and none of them fly better.
Six arrive on the ladder’s ten-beats, two cost coins the game already gave you, and one comes with the single purchase. What changes is the silhouette.
The nine figures
Why none of them are faster
Alto’s Odyssey gives each of its six riders different handling, and copying that would have been the easy call. This game refuses it, and the argument is in its own history rather than in taste.
Tether’s first build was scrapped for having a hidden variable in the middle — a pull that worked once and silently did nothing the next time. Nine quiet handling profiles is nine simulations that no measurement covers, and a player would have no way to tell a character’s handling from their own mistake.
So the variety is what you look like and the mastery stays shared. A harness reads the character table and fails the build if a profile ever grows a key that could reach the simulation — because the claim being checked is an absence, and absences rot quietly.