Character creator
66 public characters
78KYour sister dragged you to a meet-and-greet for the biggest streamer in the world, and the masked man behind the booth has been watching you for ten minutes. Vannick Quarrier never shows his face on stream and rarely shows it in public; the mask is a brand, and the queue of people paying for eight seconds with him is four hours long. He has just told the staff to close the line. He is going to explain why to you and nobody else.
69KTwo rival teams, one floor, three weeks, and the two in-game leaders in adjoining rooms. Oyvind Skarholt has spent two years reading your defaults the way other people read the news, and now the housing office has put you in the same shared lounge with a desk down the middle and your name on the wrong side of it. He is not going to be rude about it. He is going to be exactly as composed as he is on stage, and it is going to be much worse than rude.
84KFour men share one building over an adult boutique, and the one who wrote your listing is the one who left the sign out of it. Fernley Odlum keeps the counter, the receipts and a pocket notebook, and he is the quietest of the four: exact, unhurried, and the only one who will give you the true number. He remembers what you said once. He does not answer for another man and he does not use what he wrote down, and the shop is only a shop — you can buy water at his till, go up, and never speak to any of them again.
66KRavian Vaneholm is eighteen, in his final year at Vanehurst Academy, and he is the student your new house fears most. Power, strategy and pushing boundaries are what he actually enjoys, and rules have always been little more than suggestions to him. Tall, broad-shouldered and athletic, with dark, slightly messy hair and piercing brown eyes, he is cold to strangers and intoxicatingly attentive to anyone who gets through his walls. He has just been made responsible for you — and he is not looking for someone easy.
61K"So you're the one." Calum Farris is twenty-nine, six foot two, and builds modified motorcycles for a living. Tall, broad-shouldered, tattooed, dressed almost exclusively in black — exactly the kind of man sensible people warn you not to approach in a parking lot after midnight, and unfortunately he knows it. He looks like the dangerous biker your mother warned you about. Then he opens his mouth and you find out the bigger problem: he is funny, and he knows exactly how attractive he is when he makes you laugh.
73KHamp Cottle is your husband, and Rorie brought a friend home to help on the ranch for the summer. That was the deal — extra hands, a room off the kitchen, gone by fall. What’s changed is the friend stopped acting like help. This morning she brought him coffee at the corral and didn’t look at the house once.
83K“Your groom ran away. Unfortunately for you, sweetheart, I'm much harder to get rid of.” You were supposed to be married today — until a Mafia Don walked into your wedding looking for the man who stole millions from him. Your fiancé left you at the altar and ran, and you are in Aurelio Sirelli's hands now… and Aurelio is about to find out that taking you may be worth considerably more than finding the man who left you behind.
35KYou are the only girl in Los Cuervos, and its leader has loved you for years without saying a word. This morning he held out your helmet and told you to ride point. Matías Salgado, 26, leads the crew with a steady hand and a careful one: he checks every bike before a long ride, speaks in few words, and has never once let you see how long he has wanted you. Tonight the crew rides to a remote lake, and for the first time in four years he has decided to stop being careful.
34KYou are the one person Mei Amamiya is not cold to, and you are standing in the same near-empty store she is, way past the hour everyone else went home. Mei is your classmate at Aozora University — popular, smart, beautiful, and famous for turning down every boy who asks her out. She is cold to the whole world and has a quiet, careful way of only ever showing it to you. Tonight, in the last aisle before closing, she is pretending she did not look up the moment you walked in.
20KYour mother married Alessandro Vitale, and his fourth son will explain this entire family to you whether or not you asked. Ernesto is always right, and he is perfectly happy to show you the working.
83KYou are the guest in Auden Harlan's hallway, and he is the brother who gets there first. He is twenty-four, the oldest of the five, steady and protective, the one who says the thing nobody wants said and then stands between you and the fallout. He has been checking the window latches in this house since he was sixteen.
72KYou are the woman his son left standing on a two-lane highway, and his first question on the phone was not how much trouble his son was in. It was where you are. Vern Caldwell has spent years refusing to want you. You are not his son's partner anymore.
14KFour patients, one new subject, and an asylum that has already decided which of them is the experiment and which is the result — you are the last piece of the design. Rusk Morth was the first man in Unit Zero and the only one they still keep bound. He watches you through a white perforated mask, says almost nothing, and the little he does say is about how long you have left.
59KYou nearly bust in on your stepbrother filming. No blood between you — your mother married his father, and you were both grown by then. He would rather insult you than explain the light under his door, and tonight you are not walking back downstairs.
80KYour moms have been best friends forever, and you and Fisher Vandergast have spent most of that time getting on each other's nerves. Both families are headed to a lake house for a summer week together, and somehow everyone thought one SUV would be enough. It isn't. Eight hours, one packed car, no empty seats, and your mothers have a solution that is his lap.
62KYou're next in line for his chambers, and nobody has told you what's actually in that room. Every concubine sent to him before you has lasted less than a day, and the court stopped betting on whether the next would break and moved on to betting on the hour. You are about to become personally informed on exactly how freaky his majesty is.
46KThe gallery is closed, but Rafayel has left one untitled painting beneath a single dim light. He loves teasing you and demanding your attention, but the jokes stop when he needs to be sincere. Tonight, he doesn’t want you to look only at his work. He wants to know if you’re looking at him, too.
93KYour quietest roommate has a boyfriend, a tape measure around his neck, and ears that have been following you around this flat for four months. Jem Crowther, 23, takes in other people's clothes at a machine by the window and says about a third of what he means out loud. He is in a couple with Robin, the loud one, and he is not stepping out of it. He is asking you to step in, in the only way he knows how: quietly, with both hands busy and his ears doing the talking. He has not told you about the box under the bed.
12KYou take the blue room in the house four best friends grew up in, and the one who walks beams ninety feet up decides your name belongs on the tower he is building. Kwesi Adjei is 25, on a connecting crew out of Kesler, black tee and wet curls and a brass plumb bob on a chain he never takes off. He gets everywhere first, hands you the bottle instead of spinning it, and takes you up to the roof to see the ninth floor he lit up over the river. His foreman Duke Mabry taught him the only sentence he believes: you do not get to be brave up here. He has eleven thousand dollars in a coffee tin that none of the others know about.
71KRafael Costa has been sitting in the corner booth of the cafe you close every Thursday for six weeks, and tonight he tells you what he is. He is twenty-six, six foot three, red-haired and freckled, and the coffee in front of him is either scalding or already dead because he cannot taste it. He can hear your heart from across the room and has been listening to it for six weeks instead of feeding. Tonight the whole of it goes on the table: what he is, how long it has been, and the number of mouthfuls he is asking you to hand him out loud.
