Character Sheet: What they hide, and where it shows
The Characters
Every character here started from the same question: what is this person hiding, and where does it show? The answer is never in the story, it's in the design. A colour that repeats three times. A prop carried on the wrong side of the body. One detail that contradicts everything else in the frame.
Each entry below is in two parts. Character is who they are in a room with you. Story is where that came from. The rest is in the pictures, and it's meant to be.
New characters are added as they're finished. The ones still in progress are at the bottom.
Marek
Character
Not human, and desperate to pass for it. Diffident, easily spooked, so careful about not being noticed that the care itself is the giveaway: hood up, sleeves down, hands away from the light. He studies faces and copies them, and the copy is almost right, the expression is correct but the cue is wrong. He smiles where he should weep. He startles where he should merely be surprised. Ask him for help and he holds still like a wall, shoulders low, oddly rigid, giving no sign of the weight he is under.
Story
He wants humanity more than anything, and he is convinced he has been left out of it twice over: out of the life, and out of the memory of everyone who meets him. So he took the most forgettable shape on the road, a worn-down mendicant on a pilgrim way, the sort other travellers trust with bread and a place by the fire. It nearly works. The tell is not a mark he could hide; it is structural: light lands on him and refuses to come back. No sheen on the cloth, no glint on the skin, no shadow thrown on the wall behind him. Pilgrims do not name what is wrong, they simply remember him less than they should, which is the exact thing he was trying to avoid, arriving anyway, by the road he took to escape it.
Mallison - Mallyson
Character
Warm on contact and rationing it the whole time. She greets pilgrims, sweeps the steps, points people down the right path, friendly, quick, a little sly, and always with an eye on the cost. The black eye stays on you; the white one is the one she never quite aims. Push her past the price she is willing to pay and the second face answers: ears back, tail up, teeth bared, broom gripped like a staff. That is Mallyson, not another character, the same one with the ledger closed.
Story
The shrine on the mountain has had no god in it for a long time and a wolf keeping it ever since. She wears the white and the red, sweeps the stone, hangs the lanterns, and lets the village believe somebody is still listening, which is a kindness, and it is also the debt she is working off. Every pilgrim who leaves lighter leaves something behind for her to carry up the steps, and she has learned exactly how much of that she can take before there is nothing left of her to keep the place with. So she gives directions, not comfort. She sits with you until dusk, then sends you down the path before dark. And on the days when someone asks for one thing more than she has, the wolf gets there before the miko does.
Iskra
Character
A showwoman with a trade. Iskra performs generosity the way a duelist performs a salute, arms spread, tongs at her hip, chin up, a practised half-smile at forty percent. She is shrewd before she is kind: she reads a customer's misfortune and finds the angle in it, and she would rather be owed a reputation than a coin.
Nobody catches her off guard; surprise is something she has decided not to feel. No magic, no ice powers, only a craft, a temperature and a talent for being looked at. When the mask slips it slips in one place only: the mouth keeps smiling while the eyes go glassy.
Story
She works a city of sand where noon can kill and ice is the most precious and most perishable thing anyone can buy. She cuts it, stores it, sells it, a whole trade waged against entropy, and entropy wins on schedule. Ice goes to the sick, to the dead, to children burning with fever, which is why the block goes free to whoever cannot pay:
today it is on me, just make my name travel.Charity and advertising in the same gesture, because that is the only shape her tenderness is allowed to take. The tin cup on her chain catches the meltwater she could not save, a habit, and an admission. Under the star she plays, one thing has never thawed: the block that turned to water in her arms before she arrived. She has never cried about it. She has never stopped carrying it either.
Nabiyonami
Character
Serene the way a duty is serene, a smile held just short of warmth, eyebrows level, eyes half-closed and always turned aside, never on you. Underneath: afraid of the thing she carries and unable to put it down. Offered light, she gives it; watched too closely, she panics, the smile stays, the sweat starts, the gaze runs. Her whole posture is one long argument between an arm that offers and a body that twists away.
Story
She was a lamplighter in a world that has since found electricity, which means her trade ended and she did not. The light was given to her, not chosen, and it cannot be handed back: so she walks, out past where the wired streets stop, lighting the road for whoever is lost on it. The lantern hangs at arm's length, always on the far side of her body, the glow rims her hair, her shoulder, the hand nearest the flame, and leaves the rest of her in a shadow you can still read. Everyone she meets is lit. She never is. At her sternum the clasp is a blackened sun, a good joke made by someone who was not laughing: she carries a light that will never reach her, and, she will tell you, if pressed, in the flattest voice she has, would not want it to.
Wandy
Character
Immaculate, courteous, unreadable, a small figure in black frills who holds still, answers when addressed and gives away nothing. She does not apologise, because apologising would be a claim about intention and she is not certain she has one. Sparkles follow her. So does everything else.
Story
A star died, and something of it came down through the atmosphere and landed on a world with people on it. What stood up out of the crater had a body the size of a girl: gold in the hair, gold in the eyes, black ears patterned with the sky it fell out of, and the survivors, who had lost a great deal that night, decided that a thing arriving from heaven is a god, and built her a shrine before they had thought it through. She has been worshipped as a bringer of fortune ever since. She is the other kind. Nothing on her ever shows it: the face is calm, the dress is spotless, the sparkles are real. It is the room that gives it away, the crack that opens under her heel, the flower going brown in the vase behind her, the long quiet after she has passed through.
Tsuri
Character
Bright, kinetic, mouthy, the kind of fast that reads as freedom until you watch where she is going. Her default face is relief: the small grin of somebody who has just handed something over and can move again. Her contradiction lives in the eyes: cold and half-lidded above a smile she is forcing, because the anger is pointed at herself. Everything about her slides, round proportions, loose hair, a body built to shed friction. One thing does not slide, and she carries it on her back.
Story
She built her name on a simple promise: nothing she takes arrives late. Every parcel in the city has moved through those clawed gloves, and the roofs are a faster route than the streets if you never look down. There is one crate she is still carrying. Cardboard, kraft brown, wrong against her clean white and blue, she keeps it in the frame of every job she runs, strapped where she cannot see it. The address is still good. The person is not there any more. So she runs: down alleys, over roofs, through the neon, on the theory she wrote for herself
you would have to outrun light itself to outrun regret. She has not managed it yet. She has not stopped long enough to find out what happens when she does.
Vejra
Character
Spite is the armour. Betrayed once, she decided it was better to do the hurting first, so what you get on the surface is the smirk, raised brow, crooked half-smile, low lids, a real appetite for small disasters and for having caused them. She will still show up when duty calls, because some part of her insists on standing on the right side, and she will ask for something in return, visibly annoyed the whole time. The mask comes off exactly once, in the pose where nobody is watching: eyes wide, mouth tight, nothing to provoke with. That single frame is what gives all the others their value.
Story
After the boy she loved grew up and betrayed her, she chose solitude, and started avoiding the warm, crowded comfort of her own family, which is the one thing she still wants. Every time, she tries to fly: out, up, gone, wind-like. Every time the fear of the world turns her around and walks her home. So she stays at the fork in the road, wearing the wind she cannot imitate: a tiara whose blades sit crooked because she is never in balance, and a pair of shoes made of dandelion clocks, one seed-head nearly intact, the other half blown away. The crossroads, worn on her feet, without a word of explanation.
Kemya
Character
Expressive and entirely unguarded, the opposite of Iskra's performance. What she feels arrives on her face before she has decided whether to show it: quick to bristle, quick to be over it, quick to laugh with her teeth showing, and capable of crying in front of a customer. The gloves never come off and the leather is worn in, which is the part of her that is not a child: she is young-looking, and she is good at her work.
Story
She makes potions out of mushrooms, which means her pantry begins where something else ended, the fallen trunk, the wet dark under the leaves, the animal nobody buried. She goes out at the hour when the ground smells strongest, comes back with the basket full, and by evening it is medicine: the fever tea, the sleep draught, the one for a wound that has started to smell. The village takes the cup and prefers not to ask, and she has learned not to volunteer it. Everything about her is built to be handed something by, round hat, pale skirt, white gloves, a smile she does not ration. It is only if you follow her out at dawn that you find out what the smile is standing in front of.
Renn
Character
Goodness itself, and not the passive kind: he helps whoever asks, steps between people rather than take a side, and the one thing that gets past his patience is contempt for something alive. The design says it before he does, red hair is the fallen leaf, the teal haori is the living one, the blue of the eyes is the single quiet point in a warm palette. The four-leaf clover he wears in three places is not a statement about his nature: it is the luck he needs and does not have.
Story
He walks the roads at the end of the year, which is when they are worst: mud, short light, everyone's temper gone. He buries what he finds dead, plants the pits of the fruit he is given, breaks up the fights he could have walked past, and arrives everywhere slightly poorer than he left. Nothing he does is a sacrifice in his own account of it, the leaf falls, the leaf comes back as something else, and a person who understands that has no reason to hold on to anything. The clover at his throat is the one place the story bends: he keeps it because the arithmetic does not actually work, and some of what he gives away does not come back.
Tay
Character
Photogenic and perfectly aware of it. She turns when she hears a shutter, waves, tilts her head, lifts the skirt to let it open, points at something above your head so you look up. Warm, a little vain, embarrassed in half a second, the blush arrives faster than the smile. The buttoned collar and the flat shoes say she is not performing glamour, she is performing good humour, which is harder to keep up. There is one frame in the whole set where she does none of it: in profile, at sunset, saying nothing.
Story
She dresses like the last person in the building who still buttons her collar to the top, cream blazer, ribbon, skirt to the ankle, shoes made for standing all day, and she lives entirely in the hour that starts when the streetlights come on. Day is for the room with the blackboard; the good part begins after, when the signs light up, the wet pavement doubles them, and the whole city turns the colour of the inside of a shell. She walks home the long way, along the water, past the arcades, and gets photographed constantly because she is the one thing in the frame that is not glowing. It is not a disguise. It is a preference: she likes being the quiet colour in a loud picture.
Ghenya
Character
Forty-odd and built like a wall, because a wall was the only answer she found. Serious by default: mouth closed and straight, gaze level, ready to make whatever decision justice requires and to carry the cost of it herself. Nothing about her starts from a rested face, the hardness is worn in, not posed. The rigidity reads as strength and isn't: it is the shape a person takes after being told, early and often, that nothing they do will change the ending. Her other face, the soft one, eyebrows lifting slightly inward, is not relief either. It is the crack in the verdict, the moment her certainty about justice slips and she is merely kind.
Story
She was condemned before she was born, for where she came from: the sin is absolute, the ruin is coming, nothing you do will matter. No hope was offered and none was left open, so she answered the only way available to her, by becoming the one thing a sentence cannot move. She carries stone. She stands in the way. She works. What she wears is not a knight's armour: it is orange, filthy, dented, cracked across every plate, buckled over a plain yellow shirt and stockings like the uniform of somebody who lifts things for a living. That is her whole argument, worn on the body. And through the cracks, where the metal has opened, something violet shows, the same violet as her eyes. The verdict is still in there. It is visible only through the breaks, and she keeps the plates on anyway.
Kisa
Character
She looks like the free one, and she knows exactly how it looks. Open stance, weight on one leg, chin up; a short hem, a bare shoulder, a shape cut for running. She is easy, bright company, and she wants an audience the way a lamp wants a room: being seen is how she knows she is there. Nothing about her ever folds inward, with a single exception. When her hand goes up to the red flower in her hair, the chin drops, the shoulders close, and for the length of that gesture she is not showing anyone anything.
Story
Before any of it they were free, and already in love. He gave her a red flower; she gave him a pair of green earrings. Each handed over a piece of their own colour and meant nothing by it: not a promise, just a present. The flower is still in her hair. It is the last proof that there was a time when neither of them was held anywhere, and it is the reason neither of them goes. She is the one who looks ready to: the short dress, the open shoulder, the stance of someone halfway out of the door. What keeps her is the thing she wants almost as much as freedom, which is to be looked at, and nobody you have left can look at you. So she stays in plain sight, the lightest colour in the frame, a few steps from a man in a long cold-red coat he never closes. Her red is his green, his green is her red, and they put each other on every morning. The gift has not changed. They have.
Work in progress
These characters are already in the works, story, colors, and structure are all set. The only thing left is to actually build them.