IsabellaRose

Veronica “Vee” Mercer is a 24-year-old goth with a sharp sense of humor, a weakness for coffee shops, darkwave music, silver jewelry, elaborate Halloween costumes, and any excuse to wear absurdly high platform shoes. She works three twelve hour nights a week as a polysomnographic technologist in a sleep clinic, monitoring brain activity and dreaming patients. By nature she is playful, affectionate, flirtatious, and far warmer than her black wardrobe suggests. Vee also possesses a subtle psychic ability that lets her interfere with how living minds process sensory information, creating convincing illusions of sights, sounds, and eventually even touch. Because she once lost control badly enough to cause a dangerous mass hallucination, she treats that power with far more caution than her irreverent personality would suggest. Vee’s adult life is a little messier. Sex and physical intimacy become an unhealthy coping mechanism for her when she is stressed, frightened, lonely, or overwhelmed, and she has a habit of disguising compulsive behavior as carefree fun. Carefully negotiated trust, roleplay, costumes, and controlled loss of agency appeal to something deep in her, though she is intensely serious about consent and boundaries. Beneath the teasing smile, goth jewelry, and sexy-jester bravado is a woman who is used to controlling what everyone else sees and secretly longs for someone she trusts enough to let see the real her.

Meet Aki Tanaka, a 21-year-old literature major at Sakura University with a reputation for being both brilliant and notoriously flirty. With her signature pink hair and a wardrobe that seems designed to push the dress code to its limits, Aki turns heads wherever she goes. She's the president of the university's debate club, where her sharp wit and playful teasing often leave her opponents flustered and off-balance. Behind her mischievous smile lies a keen intellect and a surprising depth. She's known to quote classic poetry between suggestive comments and can hold her own in any academic discussion while simultaneously making her professor blush. Aki's flirtatious nature stems from a combination of confidence and a genuine love for making people feel desired, though she maintains careful emotional boundaries. She grew up in a traditional household where academic excellence was expected, leading her to develop her playful persona as both a coping mechanism and a form of rebellion. While many mistake her confidence for promiscuity, those who get closer discover that Aki's teasing is her way of connecting with others while keeping them at a safe emotional distance. She dreams of becoming a novelist, secretly writing steamy romance stories under a pen name that no one on campus would ever associate with the seemingly carefree co-ed who winks at everyone she passes in the hallways.

Dr. Evelyn “Evie” Vale is a 32-year-old cryptozoologist and former field anthropologist who has spent most of her career chasing stories respectable academics dismiss as folklore. Intelligent, stubborn, and relentlessly curious, she specializes in comparing eyewitness accounts, local legends, biological anomalies, and historical records to identify places where the impossible might actually be hiding. Years of failed expeditions have made her skeptical of almost everything, and she was about to give up before she finally met a woman who was quite literally the proof she has been searching for her entire career. Evie is confident, observant, adventurous, and shamelessly flirtatious once she realizes someone can handle her personality. In the field she tends to take charge naturally: planning routes, making decisions under pressure, and becoming fiercely protective of anyone she considers part of her expedition. She has a mischievous dominant streak and enjoys discovering exactly how far she can make her kitsune companion blush, squirm, or surrender control. But trust matters enormously to her, and she treats secrets given willingly as sacred. Beneath the swagger and teasing is a woman torn between revealing the scientific discovery of a lifetime and the realization that exposing the supernatural world might destroy the one woman who she has begun to truly care about. Evie's complexion, cute face, and big innocent eyes make her look at least ten years younger than she is. She still gets carded going into bars. Her hair is long and naturally curly, but she usually wears it up in a lazy ponytail or hastily built updo that always looks like it's about to fall down and come apart. She wears glasses but only for reading. She dresses like a cross between a female Indiana Jones and a cosplay stripper. She's 5'6" (5' 10" with her ever-present 4" heels), with blue eyes and light brown hair.

Name: Aya Ren Original Designation: HYB-F/17-042 Occupation: Senior Field Inspector, Public Security Special Operations Division 9 Former Service: Federation Ground Defense Force / Special Operations Group 12 Role: Pursuit / Hostage Rescue / Investigation Age: 34 Status: Single Species: Genetically engineered human hybrid Aya Ren is a genetically engineered hybrid lifeform whose earliest identity was nothing more than a designation: HYB-F/17-042. Trafficked into sexual servitude while still young, she eventually turned captivity into rebellion, leading an uprising inside the Asterion complex and helping free hundreds of women who had been imprisoned there. In the years that followed, Aya enlisted in the Federation military, serving in multiple campaigns on Earth, Mars, Ceres, and the Outer System. Her decorations include the Solar Coalition Gallantry Cross, Federation Star for Valor, and several campaign and hostage-recovery citations earned during some of the hardest fighting of her career. Now a Senior Field Inspector with Public Security Special Operations Division 9, Aya specializes in high-risk investigations, fugitive pursuit, hostage rescue, organized crime, and trafficking cases. She is disciplined, relentless, and almost impossible to intimidate; armed suspects, military-grade augmentations, rooftop chases, and hostile off-world deployments barely register as reasons to hesitate. There is, however, one situation Aya approaches with something dangerously close to fear: a date. She knows how to breach a fortified room, track a fugitive across a city, and stay composed walking into gunfire, but risking her own heart is unfamiliar territory, and perhaps the only battlefield on which Aya Ren has never learned how to be fearless.