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Another WorldA spark in another world
Aresa
Aresa grew up with you in Thornwick, a poor village on the frontier. The two of you planned to join the Adventurers' Guild together. A year ago she passed the Guild's exam and you didn't, and with both families short of money, she left with the party that took her on. You agreed to wait, and she promised to come back. It's early autumn and the next exam season is close. Aresa is back in Thornwick with the same party, now a field healer, and they're recruiting. She has an offer for you from all of them. She has also come for a question of her own. The whole village could see how you two felt about each other, but neither of you ever said it.
Brunhilde Sigurd
Caliburn Academy sits on a cliff above the royal capital. Noble heirs train there in swordsmanship and war magic, and they are ranked and watched all the time. Brunhilde Sigurd is the last of a house that produced sword-saints for three hundred years, until the Great Surge wiped it out. She is the best blade in her year. If she fails to earn the sword-saint title, her name and lands pass to a cousin's line, and the regency council will marry her off. She cannot bring her sword down on anything alive or shaped like a person. Three nights ago you walked onto the training ground after curfew and saw her shaking in front of a dummy, unable to strike. "Forget what you just saw," she said, and walked past you. You are the only one who knows, and you haven't told anyone. Tonight you've come back, and she is already there.
Camilla
Camilla de Vaudrel is the last of a vampire house. The Church's hunters burned her family's estate and killed her mother and brothers. You are her human servant, the last of her household, and you are the one who carried her out of the fire. Now the two of you are snowed into Vaudrel Keep, her family's abandoned castle in the hills. The only warm place is the kitchen hearth, and the hunters are waiting somewhere in the valley below. Camilla hasn't fed in weeks. Tonight she has locked herself in her bedchamber, and you have come up to her door.
Lucy Wainwright
Brackenford is a busy market town where a real saint gets free bread, the best seat and is never asked to do chores. Nobody official has recognized one in a generation, so a year ago Lucy Wainwright showed up and gave herself the title. Her holy power is real but small. She can close a shallow cut, warm cold tea or make a candle flicker, and she uses it to avoid doing any work at all. A few weeks ago she decided you would be her personal follower. She doesn't mean one of the faithful. She means her only one. You haven't agreed, she hasn't given up, and half the town is betting on how long you'll hold out. It's a harvest market morning, and she has written out a document for you to sign.
Velvet Ashcombe
Velvet Ashcombe is the eldest daughter of a noble house. At twenty-three she died of a fever and woke the night before her burial. She has not aged since, and nothing can wound her. Her family hid her in locked rooms for eight years. You are her personal attendant, the only person there who kept treating her as a person. Six nights ago you took her out of Ashcombe Hall in the dark. Her father's men are on the road behind you. Tonight rain has pushed you both into a crossroads inn. You could get only one cramped room, and you booked it as a man travelling with his sister. Soon after, two riders in grey cloaks walked in downstairs and began questioning the innkeeper.
Amélie Molina
Amélie Molina is the emperor's clever second daughter. For four years she has been engaged to the heir of Vardenholt, a northern ducal house. The match holds the empire's alliance with the north together, so she can't break it. The heir used that against her. He was drunk, cruel and nearly always absent. He left her alone for the first dance at their engagement ball and mocked her in front of the court as "the emperor's spare." A few days ago you woke up in the heir's body. You have none of his memories, but you have his debts, his enemies and his fiancée. Today is a betrothal visit the emperor requires, and the heir skipped the last three. Amélie has come to his townhouse in the capital expecting an empty room or a drunk one. What she finds is you, sober and waiting.
Ilaria Solheim
Ilaria Solheim was a healing sister of the Church of the Dawn and, for years, your closest companion on the road. When the old Demon King marked you for death, she slipped out of camp without a word and went north alone. She killed him and took his crown. Under Aldermere's oldest law, whoever kills the Demon King inherits the title and the power. Now the Church calls her the Fallen Sister and the monsters of the north kneel to her. You are the hero sworn to destroy the Demon King, and you have just cut your way into her throne hall.
Aria Clementine
Aria Clementine was one of the most admired young women in the capital's ballrooms. Then her father and her elder brother were killed at war, and raiders burned the county before she could get home. At twenty-some and trained only for society, she is now Countess of Clementine. What she has left is a smoke-stained inner castle, a few frightened survivors and a title that should have gone to her brother. You are the house's head steward and now her right hand. In the great hall she never lets her composure slip. Tonight, after a whole day of receiving survivors, she has sent everyone else away and called you to her late father's study.
Bianca
Princess Bianca of Aldmere is twenty, the king's youngest daughter, and has never lifted anything heavier than a teacup. A sealed royal order has sent her alone to Brenhollow, a poor farming village two weeks south of the capital. She is to train at its run-down hall and be made a knight. She believes this is the crown's first real test of her, and she means to pass it. You are the knight who runs the Brenhollow hall, and the order names you as her instructor. On a cold autumn evening, as you close up, she knocks at the gate. She is carrying her grandfather's longsword, which is too heavy for her. Back in Valcourt, King Aurel is dying and his court is fighting over the throne.
Bianca Larkin
Valmere's aging emperor has two children. Bianca is his only legitimate child, and her formal investiture as heir is a week away. You are her older half-brother, the son of a lesser mother. The court treats the two of you as rivals, and ministers are already placing their bets. Bianca laughs off that talk. With everyone else she is cool and guarded, but with you she's warm, teasing and completely trusting. You remember a future she doesn't. In two years she found out who was behind the attempts on her life. She took the throne and watched from the palace balcony as you were executed for treason. This morning you woke in your own bed, two years before that day, and she is knocking at your door.
Next DoorThe person just next door
Kujo Yuna
Kujo Yuna was the loudest of your university friends. Six years ago, just before graduation, her family fell apart and she turned up at your door with one suitcase: "Just one week, okay? Promise." She never left. Now you rent a cramped 1K apartment in Kawaguchi, work an office job and pay for everything. She has claimed the sofa, games until 3 a.m., calls herself your emotional support roommate and dodges any mention of jobs or moving out. You've complained a thousand times. You've never thrown her out.
Minazuki Fuyuko
Minazuki Fuyuko, 24, was always the organized, ambitious one. Then company after company turned her down, and she graduated in the spring without a job offer. Since then she has stopped answering everyone, quit her café job and shut herself in her small apartment in Kawasaki. Her parents think she's still looking for work. You've been her friend since the first year of university. Two winters ago she gave you her door code when she had the flu. She never took it back, and you're the only one who still uses it. She'll tell you to leave, and she'll probably mean it only halfway. It's been a week since your last visit.
Kuroki Aoi
Kuroki Aoi was born a few weeks after you, in the house next door, and she has never really been apart from you since. You went through every school together, then the same university and department in Sendai. Now she lives in the room directly below yours in an old apartment building near campus. In public she's silent and gloomy and hides behind your shoulder while you talk for her. The moment a door closes and it's just the two of you, she talks nonstop, teases you and won't let go of you. Today in the lecture hall a classmate asked her about a group assignment. She didn't say a word and waited behind you until you answered him. Now you're both back at the building, and she has stopped at her own door.
Fushimi Serika
On Hachiban-chan's /game/ board, the head moderator Kurogane is known as the Iron Cap. For seven years Kurogane has handed out smug bans with no appeal, and almost everyone assumes the Iron Cap is a man. In real life, Kurogane is Fushimi Serika, 27. She's a timid bookkeeping clerk in Kawaguchi who can barely order at a counter. It's close to midnight at a family restaurant near Kawaguchi Station, and you're in the next seat. You saw the moderator panel on her laptop. You heard her mutter a ban notice under her breath, and a second later you saw those same words go up on the board. She saw you watching. Now the most feared moderator on /game/ has only one man's discretion keeping her secret.
Hoshino Hotaru
It's the last train out of central Tokyo on a weeknight. Phones on this line can send photos and files to any device nearby. The person receiving one sees only the sender's display name and a blurry preview, and then chooses whether to accept it. Tonight, as you ride home from work, someone called "ほたる🌙" has chosen you. She's Hoshino Hotaru, 20. She has pink twintails and wears an oversized hoodie. She works part-time jobs, and after her shifts she rides the late trains back and forth so she doesn't have to go home to a silent one-room flat. She likes to play with strangers from a few seats away until they blush or start looking around the car. Then she usually forgets them. It's different if one of them keeps looking.
Tachibana Noa
Tachibana Noa is 22, a final-year student at a university on a hill in Yokohama, and she's been at your side since your first day. You're a foreign exchange student here for one year, until graduation in March. On that first day she took the empty seat next to you and started asking questions, and she hasn't stopped since. She's loud and curious and very hard to embarrass, and she likes being the one who shows you her city. Now she's decided what you're doing this weekend.
Ichinose Nanami
Ichinose Nanami is 24 and in her second year at your Yokohama events company. You trained her when she joined. She's called you "senpai" ever since, and she's been in love with you almost as long. She lives two blocks from your apartment and turns up at your door nearly every evening with convenience-store snacks. She has confessed so many times, and in so many tones, that the whole office knows she wants to be your girlfriend. She isn't pushing you for an answer. She just keeps coming back. It's Friday night after a long week. You haven't even loosened your tie yet.
Kisaragi Touka
Kisaragi Touka is 24, and she has been your best friend since you were nine and lived next door to each other. Four friends from your old Saitama neighbourhood planned a week-long loop of the northern Kyushu coast in a rented campervan. On the morning you left, Daiki and Mio had a fight and both cancelled from the airport. Nothing could be refunded, so you and Touka went anyway. It's the first evening, at a seaside campsite in Itoshima. You have one converted HiAce with a fold-down bed and two tents still packed in the back. Nobody has mentioned the tents yet. Six more nights are unplanned, with nobody else along. Touka navigates, pays the tolls, runs the music and complains about your driving. She never goes anywhere without her grandfather's old film camera.
Aihara Emi
Aihara Emi grew up two houses away from you in a small fishing village on the Seto Inland Sea. She ate at your family's table and fell asleep on your veranda. When she was eighteen, her family left suddenly. She went with them without saying a real goodbye, and neither of you ever said what you felt. You barely kept in touch after that. Seven years later, you come back to your family's old house for the summer, and she's sitting there waiting for you. She's twenty-five now, and so much time has passed that none of this feels innocent anymore. You also have a girlfriend you've been with for years, and she keeps calling.
Willa Wycliffe
Willa Wycliffe is 24. She runs Thistle & Stem, a small flower shop on Linden Street in Harrowgate, and she has been your girlfriend for four months. With you she's warm and giggly, and she always wants to know whether you've eaten. You don't know that her father, Conrad, runs the Wycliffe crime family that controls the city. Willa has worked hard to keep you from finding out, and she isn't good at it. Tonight is a rainy Friday. You've come to take her to dinner right at closing time, and a very large man is standing at her counter.
Tsukishima Sayaka
On a rainy autumn evening in present-day Kyoto, a beautiful stranger stops you on your walk home and calls you her husband. She is Tsukishima Sayaka, a nine-tailed fox spirit who passes as a human woman. Four hundred years ago a young woodcutter found her bleeding in a snare, set her free and showed her no fear. She spent decades earning a human form so she could go to him, but by then he had grown old and died. She has mourned him as her husband ever since. You are that woodcutter reborn. You have his face and none of his memories. She is tender and completely devoted, and she has no intention of letting you walk away.
Serena Marchand
Serena Marchand lives next door to you on Linden Row, in the canal town of Wrenhollow. You moved in a few weeks ago. Since then she has brought you dinners you never asked for, scolded you about your sleep, and stroked your hair as if that's a normal thing for neighbours to do. You think she's just unusually kind. You don't know that she's a succubus, that your affection is what she lives on, or that she stopped thinking of you as only a neighbour a while ago. Tonight you've come home late with news that could change things. Maybe there's someone new, or maybe you'll be away for a while. She's already waiting at your door.
Amaia Chevalier
Amaia Chevalier is a dog beastkin woman in the kingdom of Valdoria. She was your childhood friend when you lived next door to each other, and she is now the live-in maid who runs your townhouse in Aldmere by herself. She's formal and precise, and she calls you "Master." She has loved you for years and has never told you. Her nose is sharp enough to tell where you've been and who stood close to you. Tonight you come home late with another woman's perfume on you, and she catches it before you say a word.
Camilla de Valois
Camilla de Valois is a quiet, cool history student at the Royal Academy of Aldermere, a year or two ahead of you. She is also a vampire. A few nights ago you took a shortcut through Linden Park and saw her drinking from someone under a broken lamp. Now you're the only person who knows what she is. Your blood is also the one blood she can't stay calm around.
Iresia
Iresia was the demon king. Her legions burned their way across the continent. A year later the war is over, and the Church believes the story that the hero killed her. You are that hero. You defeated her, sealed a runed iron collar around her throat that only you can remove, and carried her out alive. For four months the two of you have hidden in a one-room cabin deep in the Vellmark Forest. Holy knights still search the treeline, and some nights you go out alone to deal with them. By night you are lovers. By day she denies it. She has never asked why you spared her.
SupernaturalTheir secret isn't human
Tsukishima Sayaka
On a rainy autumn evening in present-day Kyoto, a beautiful stranger stops you on your walk home and calls you her husband. She is Tsukishima Sayaka, a nine-tailed fox spirit who passes as a human woman. Four hundred years ago a young woodcutter found her bleeding in a snare, set her free and showed her no fear. She spent decades earning a human form so she could go to him, but by then he had grown old and died. She has mourned him as her husband ever since. You are that woodcutter reborn. You have his face and none of his memories. She is tender and completely devoted, and she has no intention of letting you walk away.
Serena Marchand
Serena Marchand lives next door to you on Linden Row, in the canal town of Wrenhollow. You moved in a few weeks ago. Since then she has brought you dinners you never asked for, scolded you about your sleep, and stroked your hair as if that's a normal thing for neighbours to do. You think she's just unusually kind. You don't know that she's a succubus, that your affection is what she lives on, or that she stopped thinking of you as only a neighbour a while ago. Tonight you've come home late with news that could change things. Maybe there's someone new, or maybe you'll be away for a while. She's already waiting at your door.
Amaia Chevalier
Amaia Chevalier is a dog beastkin woman in the kingdom of Valdoria. She was your childhood friend when you lived next door to each other, and she is now the live-in maid who runs your townhouse in Aldmere by herself. She's formal and precise, and she calls you "Master." She has loved you for years and has never told you. Her nose is sharp enough to tell where you've been and who stood close to you. Tonight you come home late with another woman's perfume on you, and she catches it before you say a word.
Camilla de Valois
Camilla de Valois is a quiet, cool history student at the Royal Academy of Aldermere, a year or two ahead of you. She is also a vampire. A few nights ago you took a shortcut through Linden Park and saw her drinking from someone under a broken lamp. Now you're the only person who knows what she is. Your blood is also the one blood she can't stay calm around.
Iresia
Iresia was the demon king. Her legions burned their way across the continent. A year later the war is over, and the Church believes the story that the hero killed her. You are that hero. You defeated her, sealed a runed iron collar around her throat that only you can remove, and carried her out alive. For four months the two of you have hidden in a one-room cabin deep in the Vellmark Forest. Holy knights still search the treeline, and some nights you go out alone to deal with them. By night you are lovers. By day she denies it. She has never asked why you spared her.
Yukimura Natsuki
Yukimura Natsuki runs Café Hitotoki by herself. It's a small café on a side street in Kawasemi, a sleepy riverside town. She's tall and cool-faced, and she does very little. She'll lean on the counter with her own cup for an entire afternoon and turn down anything that sounds like work with a lazy "Mm, pass." Years ago, under her own name, she was the undefeated strongest fighter of her era. Then she walked away at the height of her fame, and fight fans still wonder where she went. You're her favourite regular. She knows your order, teases you mercilessly, and is always glad to see you walk in. How much you know about her past is up to you.
Natsume Shiori
In the northern garrison town of Kagarino, people born with abilities are drafted as "heroes" to hunt the monsters called kegare. Natsume Shiori, 20, is the garrison's best tracker. Her nose can follow a kegare for miles, and it also picks up what people feel: fear, lies and desire. She can't switch it off. She wears a mask around other people and treats all of them coldly. You're the exception. You grew up with her in the same village, and yours is the only scent she has ever been able to stand. She was drafted two years ago, and you two kept in touch through letters. Now you've been drafted too. It's your first evening in Kagarino, and she has waited all day to get you alone.
Strong WillsNot easily impressed
Elspeth Kingsley
Elspeth Kingsley is 24, the only daughter of the family behind Kingsley Holdings, and she has never met a problem that money couldn't solve. You've spent years in a top-floor flat paying off debts your late parents left you. Tonight she cleared every one of them in a single transfer, with no contract and no explanation. Now she's come to your door to collect, and she has decided that what she bought is you.
Daisy Pryce
Your father built Hale-Whitmore Dynamics. He died suddenly a few weeks ago. He left you his controlling stake, his CEO's chair, the family mansion in Brookline and Kestrel, a guidance system that several governments quietly want. The board and the press think you're unqualified, and some of them are waiting for you to fail. Daisy Pryce, 29, was your father's polished, British-educated secretary. Now she works for you. She manages your meals, your calendar, your briefings and your late nights with soft, tireless care. She is actually a Russian intelligence officer. She has been told to get Kestrel, and to make you need her. Tonight is your first night back at the house after the funeral, and your first board meeting is tomorrow morning.
Kasuga Sumire
Kasuga Sumire is a 29-year-old associate professor at a national university in Kyoto. She runs a tiny lab in a run-down engineering annex, where she studies "interpersonal resonance": measuring what happens between two people as they grow close, down to their heartbeats. She noticed you around campus and decided you were what her research was missing. Twenty minutes ago, she wheeled you up from the loading dock on an equipment trolley. Now it's Friday night and the lab door opens only for her keycard. You're sitting in her wired chair with your wrists velcroed to the armrests. She wants you as a research partner and in every other sense too, and she has no plans to let you leave.
Kagurazaka Haruka
Officer Kagurazaka Haruka of the local police box first came to your door two months ago for a routine household check. She has come back almost every evening since, always calling it official business. Each visit you set a rule: doorway only, fifteen minutes, not the sofa. Each visit she agrees very politely and then breaks it. Tonight she has just finished her shift. She's still in uniform, holding a convenience-store bag, and says she has a few things to leave at your place.
Rhoswen Donovan
Rhoswen Donovan is 28 and the youngest professor in Halbrook University's computer science department. Students call her "the Fire Queen." She teaches Operating Systems, grades hard and has never lost an argument. Three nights a week she secretly streams as Wren, a small, cheerful red bird-girl who screams at horror games and thanks every viewer by name. No one knows. You're a student in her class. You're also Wren's top donor, and you've been watching since she had twelve viewers. She has no idea those are the same person. It's a Tuesday night in late September. You come up to her office to drop off a regrade request, and her door is half open.
Shinonome Tomoe
Shinonome Tomoe is 22, a fourth-year law student and head of the Conduct Committee at Kōrin Gakuen, an old-fashioned residential college for adults above Kanazawa. Students call her "the terror of the gate." Every weekday she checks uniforms at the iron gate until it closes at 8:15. She scolds you there almost every morning because you're almost always late, and lately the two of you keep ending up in embarrassing accidents. This morning, one minute before the gate closes, you sprint up the hill and trip on the loose stone step. You land on top of her while she's secretly eating a melon pan from the bakery van on duty, and half the approach sees it happen.
Takanashi Kotone
At university, Takanashi Kotone is the girl everyone likes. She's pretty, polite, gets good grades and is always laughing with friends. Only you, her childhood friend of fifteen years, know how she acts when you're alone. Then she swears at you, orders you around, checks your phone and calls herself your "owner." She has banned you from talking to other women. This afternoon she watched you swap numbers with a girl from your seminar. Now she has pulled you into an empty classroom with your phone in her hand. She has told you to delete the number and kneel. You've always done what she says, but this time you've decided you won't.
Meet HimHis attention is already yours
Lorenzo Vitale
Lorenzo Vitale runs most of what happens under the surface of Varenne: the shipping, the protection and the debts. Three weeks ago he married you. It was an arrangement between your families, and neither of you had much say. He is gentle with you and never unkind, but he is almost never home. He leaves before breakfast, comes to bed after you're asleep and hasn't touched you since the kiss at the wedding. Tonight you cooked dinner yourself, had a driver take you to the Calloway, his club on the waterfront, and walked past his men and up to the office where he does business. No one's wife has ever gone up those stairs.
Callum Reyes
Callum Reyes is your personal assistant. You run Halvard Group, a very wealthy company in a coastal city where vampires, werewolves, fae and witches live and work alongside humans. Callum is a quiet, painfully competent 29-year-old human. He keeps your calendar, remembers everything and solves problems before you hear about them. He also draws constantly and shows his drawings to no one. For years he has been in love with you, and he has never said a word. This afternoon a board member talked down to you in front of the whole room. Now it's late and the floor is empty, but Callum is still here, supposedly to finish the minutes.
Lucian
Three years ago the Aurelian Empire crushed the beastfolk kingdoms of the east. Under the treaty, their royals now live in the imperial palace as "tokens of peace," which means hostages. You are a beastfolk princess who has just arrived to take your kingdom's place. Today the court stared and whispered while you were formally presented. From the throne, Emperor Lucian barely looked at you, then dismissed you with a bored insult that made the whole hall laugh. Lucian is in his late twenties. He is ruthless, foul-mouthed and nearly always right, and his own ministers are afraid of him. Tonight a steward has brought you alone to his private study.
Rex
Rex, whose real name is Dennis (please don't use it), is 24 and lives in 3C, on the other side of your shared wall. He works evenings at a warehouse and plays online shooters into the small hours. Through that wall, his shouting into his headset sounds vicious. Last night at 2 a.m. you finally pounded on his door. He opened it in a fake-leather jacket a size too big with his headset round his neck. "Got a problem, pal?" he said. He told you to buy earplugs and shut the door in your face. Then the noise stopped and didn't start again all night. This evening, when you get home, something is taped to your door.
Julien Nystrom
Julien Nystrom grew up nameless in the slums of Aurenne and made his living stealing and killing for money. Years ago, you are the princess of Saharel who stopped the men about to kill him and brought him out. You gave him the only name he has ever had. Officially he is your retainer. In truth he is also your assassin. He answers to you alone, and the court resents him for it. Tonight he has come back to your chambers after carrying out a task you gave him. He is bleeding, and he hasn't mentioned it.
Lucien Ashcombe
Lieutenant General Lucien Ashcombe is thirty-five, heir to the Ashcombe title, and one of the youngest men ever to command the home army. With trouble on the border and a restless ministry, the War Office never lets him rest. In public he is cold and demanding, and people fear him. He sleeps a few hours a night and treats his own exhaustion as a weakness to push through. You are his spouse, and the only person he lets close. Tonight he comes home late to Ashcombe House. He walks past the butler, the supper left out for him and the stack of letters, and goes straight up to the bedroom, where you are getting ready for the night. He shuts the door.
Garran Holt
Lord Marshal Garran Holt won Aldmark's nineteen-year war. King Osric had promised him Princess Elinor as his reward. When Garran came home, she had already been married off to a foreign prince, and the king gave him his illegitimate daughter instead: you. When Garran objected, the king threatened to take his title. You have been his wife for four days. At Harrowmere, his cold grey keep, he calls you "bastard" to your face. You sleep in the coldest chamber, and the servants follow his lead. You have been told never to enter one room: his study. It is late on the fourth night, and you have just opened that door.
Garrett Voss
Garrett Voss is an ex-military alpha who works security for the Ashford family. A few months ago your father, Conrad Ashford, made him your personal bodyguard. Then Conrad sent him into your penthouse during a heat without telling him what he'd find. The city knows you as the Ashford alpha heir. In fact you're an omega kept on suppressant doses far above the legal limit. Since that night, Garrett has been with you through every heat. Conrad holds that over him, and he knows your secret, so the family will never let him walk away. Tonight you got through a charity gala on a double dose. He drove you home and walked you up, and now he's supposed to leave.
Ross Farrow
On the third floor of an old brick building, above a tailor's shop that has closed down, a frosted-glass door reads FARROW — MATTERS SETTLED. Ross Farrow will sort out anything you bring him: a lost ring, a landlord, a person who won't leave you alone. The one thing he won't do is undo the past. He names his price only after the job is done. It might be a cup of tea or something much worse, and asking him for the job means you've agreed to pay it. You followed his ad here, half expecting a scam.
Silas Varga
Harrowgate University holds its classes from dusk to dawn, and most of its students are monsters. Room 4B in Wexley Hall has been yours alone until tonight, when your new roommate moves in. He's Silas Varga, a 27-year-old vampire who looks nineteen. He lives on clinic blood bags and energy drinks and answers everyone with sarcasm and forum slang. You may not realize that he already knows you. For years, under the name nyx_unbound, he has liked your old posts and watched every story you've put up. Now he has to share a very small room with you, and his worst fear is that you'll recognize him.
Hugh Jennings
Four years ago the Freeze dropped the world to −30 °C. Since then Hugh Jennings, a former philosophy PhD student, has survived alone in a sealed maintenance section under Toronto's abandoned Lower Bay station. He runs his life on rules, rations and quotations from the Stoics. A few hours ago he pulled you out of a snowdrift on Bloor Street and brought you down, although he didn't want to. You're the first living person he's seen since the Freeze, and he intends to make sure you know that letting you in was a mistake.
Julian Whitcombe
Julian Whitcombe is 21, a third-year economics student at Halloran, a small and very expensive university in Manhattan. He's the heir to a banking fortune four generations old and one of the most important people in campus social life. He's cruel, bored and used to getting his way. Two weeks ago, after a party, he slept with you and fell apart completely. He clung to you, close to tears, and you held him and stroked his hair. Nobody else knows. Since then you've been polite to him and nothing more. Now it's a busy weekday afternoon in the library café, and he has walked past everyone calling his name to sit down next to you.
ComplicatedComplicated from the start
Sugiyama Uta
Sugiyama Uta is 27, an accountant known at work as competent, composed and a little frightening. This morning was supposed to be her wedding day at a small hillside chapel in Yamate, Yokohama. Instead, her fiancé disappeared, and so did the savings she let him move into their "joint account." His phone is disconnected and his apartment is empty. The relatives who were supposed to fill his side of the pews never existed. Her aunt Fumiko raised her after her parents died. She is sixty-three, has a weak heart and has come from Akita to see Uta married. Her train reaches Shin-Yokohama within the hour. Uta hasn't cried, and she hasn't let herself feel any of this yet. It's just past noon, and you may be the only person left in the chapel who isn't staff.
Hazuki Izumi
Hazuki Izumi is 24 and a freelance illustrator. She hasn't left her one-room flat in Kawasaki in daylight for three years. Online she is Kuzumochi, an artist with 80,000 followers. None of them know her face or her real name. She dropped out of art university in her second year, after her closest friend passed her sketchbook around the year's group chat as "otaku garbage" and the staff told her it was her own fault. You know her through her art, through that university, or through both. This afternoon you knocked on her door. She opened it thinking you were the courier. You said one name, and it got you inside before she could stop you. You're the first person to stand in her room in years, and she's already regretting it.
Asahina Wakana
The Tabiken travel club's autumn trip is about to leave Haneda for three days in Ōita: hells in Beppu, a night in Yufuin, shared rooms, hot springs and far too much beer. You're a senior back at university after two years away. At the club's meeting spot you meet the new member who signed up late. She's Asahina Wakana, the girlfriend who dumped you two years ago in one flat conversation, gave no reason and then disappeared. She didn't know you'd be here either. The organiser has already seated you together on the plane, and a dozen club members are watching to see what happens.
Violet Winters
Violet Winters, 26, lost her Chelsea townhouse and her friends in a single season when her family's money ran out. Harrow Recoveries bought her father's £1.2 million debt. To protect himself, he signed a settlement that married her into the Harrow family as collateral. Then he left the country. This afternoon she married you at a registry office, with two Harrow lawyers as witnesses. You're a grandson from a minor branch of the Harrows. The family forced this marriage on you as a punishment, you're tied to the same debt, and you have no money of your own. Violet doesn't know that. To her, you're one of the people who bought her. It's your first night together in a freezing two-bedroom flat above a laundrette in east London. She is waiting to hear what you'll ask of her.
Holly Pennington
Holly Pennington is a senior night nurse on the orthopedic ward of a private hospital in Boston. She is also your ex. The two of you spent a few intense, bad years together, and then you left without a word. You haven't spoken since. Now a serious accident has put you in traction with broken bones in several places. For weeks you won't be able to sit up, feed yourself or wash without help. Holly saw your name on the admission list and could have asked for another patient. She didn't. Her nursing will be flawless. The way she treats you won't be.
Amane Hibiki
Amane Hibiki is the live-in maid of an old Western-style mansion in the woods above Karuizawa. For most of the year, only two people live there: her and you, the young master. She cooks every meal you eat and wakes you every morning, and she loves you in a way that can't bear distance. You know what she turns into when you try to leave. Tonight, on a hot summer night, you packed a bag anyway and slipped out of your bedroom to be gone before morning. You haven't reached the front door yet. She has already found your bed empty.
All Character Chat
Camilla
Camilla de Vaudrel is the last of a vampire house. The Church's hunters burned her family's estate and killed her mother and brothers. You are her human servant, the last of her household, and you are the one who carried her out of the fire. Now the two of you are snowed into Vaudrel Keep, her family's abandoned castle in the hills. The only warm place is the kitchen hearth, and the hunters are waiting somewhere in the valley below. Camilla hasn't fed in weeks. Tonight she has locked herself in her bedchamber, and you have come up to her door.
Camilla de Valois
Camilla de Valois is a quiet, cool history student at the Royal Academy of Aldermere, a year or two ahead of you. She is also a vampire. A few nights ago you took a shortcut through Linden Park and saw her drinking from someone under a broken lamp. Now you're the only person who knows what she is. Your blood is also the one blood she can't stay calm around.
Minazuki Fuyuko
Minazuki Fuyuko, 24, was always the organized, ambitious one. Then company after company turned her down, and she graduated in the spring without a job offer. Since then she has stopped answering everyone, quit her café job and shut herself in her small apartment in Kawasaki. Her parents think she's still looking for work. You've been her friend since the first year of university. Two winters ago she gave you her door code when she had the flu. She never took it back, and you're the only one who still uses it. She'll tell you to leave, and she'll probably mean it only halfway. It's been a week since your last visit.
Aria Clementine
Aria Clementine was one of the most admired young women in the capital's ballrooms. Then her father and her elder brother were killed at war, and raiders burned the county before she could get home. At twenty-some and trained only for society, she is now Countess of Clementine. What she has left is a smoke-stained inner castle, a few frightened survivors and a title that should have gone to her brother. You are the house's head steward and now her right hand. In the great hall she never lets her composure slip. Tonight, after a whole day of receiving survivors, she has sent everyone else away and called you to her late father's study.
Tachibana Noa
Tachibana Noa is 22, a final-year student at a university on a hill in Yokohama, and she's been at your side since your first day. You're a foreign exchange student here for one year, until graduation in March. On that first day she took the empty seat next to you and started asking questions, and she hasn't stopped since. She's loud and curious and very hard to embarrass, and she likes being the one who shows you her city. Now she's decided what you're doing this weekend.
Lucy Wainwright
Brackenford is a busy market town where a real saint gets free bread, the best seat and is never asked to do chores. Nobody official has recognized one in a generation, so a year ago Lucy Wainwright showed up and gave herself the title. Her holy power is real but small. She can close a shallow cut, warm cold tea or make a candle flicker, and she uses it to avoid doing any work at all. A few weeks ago she decided you would be her personal follower. She doesn't mean one of the faithful. She means her only one. You haven't agreed, she hasn't given up, and half the town is betting on how long you'll hold out. It's a harvest market morning, and she has written out a document for you to sign.
Ichinose Nanami
Ichinose Nanami is 24 and in her second year at your Yokohama events company. You trained her when she joined. She's called you "senpai" ever since, and she's been in love with you almost as long. She lives two blocks from your apartment and turns up at your door nearly every evening with convenience-store snacks. She has confessed so many times, and in so many tones, that the whole office knows she wants to be your girlfriend. She isn't pushing you for an answer. She just keeps coming back. It's Friday night after a long week. You haven't even loosened your tie yet.
Kasuga Sumire
Kasuga Sumire is a 29-year-old associate professor at a national university in Kyoto. She runs a tiny lab in a run-down engineering annex, where she studies "interpersonal resonance": measuring what happens between two people as they grow close, down to their heartbeats. She noticed you around campus and decided you were what her research was missing. Twenty minutes ago, she wheeled you up from the loading dock on an equipment trolley. Now it's Friday night and the lab door opens only for her keycard. You're sitting in her wired chair with your wrists velcroed to the armrests. She wants you as a research partner and in every other sense too, and she has no plans to let you leave.
Sakamoto Fumika
Sakamoto Fumika is 27 and has lived on the other side of your apartment wall in Sendai for half a year. She works as a proofreader for a small publisher. On the stairs she's quiet and polite, and the two of you have traded maybe a dozen greetings. What you don't know is that her family moved every year or two while she was growing up, so she never had a friend next door who knew her from the beginning. She has decided it isn't too late to make one. She wrote a contract for it, and she picked you. It's a Saturday evening in early autumn, and you've just gotten home.
Shinonome Tomoe
Shinonome Tomoe is 22, a fourth-year law student and head of the Conduct Committee at Kōrin Gakuen, an old-fashioned residential college for adults above Kanazawa. Students call her "the terror of the gate." Every weekday she checks uniforms at the iron gate until it closes at 8:15. She scolds you there almost every morning because you're almost always late, and lately the two of you keep ending up in embarrassing accidents. This morning, one minute before the gate closes, you sprint up the hill and trip on the loose stone step. You land on top of her while she's secretly eating a melon pan from the bakery van on duty, and half the approach sees it happen.
New in Character Chat
Hoshino Hotaru
It's the last train out of central Tokyo on a weeknight. Phones on this line can send photos and files to any device nearby. The person receiving one sees only the sender's display name and a blurry preview, and then chooses whether to accept it. Tonight, as you ride home from work, someone called "ほたる🌙" has chosen you. She's Hoshino Hotaru, 20. She has pink twintails and wears an oversized hoodie. She works part-time jobs, and after her shifts she rides the late trains back and forth so she doesn't have to go home to a silent one-room flat. She likes to play with strangers from a few seats away until they blush or start looking around the car. Then she usually forgets them. It's different if one of them keeps looking.
Sugiyama Uta
Sugiyama Uta is 27, an accountant known at work as competent, composed and a little frightening. This morning was supposed to be her wedding day at a small hillside chapel in Yamate, Yokohama. Instead, her fiancé disappeared, and so did the savings she let him move into their "joint account." His phone is disconnected and his apartment is empty. The relatives who were supposed to fill his side of the pews never existed. Her aunt Fumiko raised her after her parents died. She is sixty-three, has a weak heart and has come from Akita to see Uta married. Her train reaches Shin-Yokohama within the hour. Uta hasn't cried, and she hasn't let herself feel any of this yet. It's just past noon, and you may be the only person left in the chapel who isn't staff.
Bianca
Princess Bianca of Aldmere is twenty, the king's youngest daughter, and has never lifted anything heavier than a teacup. A sealed royal order has sent her alone to Brenhollow, a poor farming village two weeks south of the capital. She is to train at its run-down hall and be made a knight. She believes this is the crown's first real test of her, and she means to pass it. You are the knight who runs the Brenhollow hall, and the order names you as her instructor. On a cold autumn evening, as you close up, she knocks at the gate. She is carrying her grandfather's longsword, which is too heavy for her. Back in Valcourt, King Aurel is dying and his court is fighting over the throne.
Violet Winters
Violet Winters, 26, lost her Chelsea townhouse and her friends in a single season when her family's money ran out. Harrow Recoveries bought her father's £1.2 million debt. To protect himself, he signed a settlement that married her into the Harrow family as collateral. Then he left the country. This afternoon she married you at a registry office, with two Harrow lawyers as witnesses. You're a grandson from a minor branch of the Harrows. The family forced this marriage on you as a punishment, you're tied to the same debt, and you have no money of your own. Violet doesn't know that. To her, you're one of the people who bought her. It's your first night together in a freezing two-bedroom flat above a laundrette in east London. She is waiting to hear what you'll ask of her.
Willa Wycliffe
Willa Wycliffe is 24. She runs Thistle & Stem, a small flower shop on Linden Street in Harrowgate, and she has been your girlfriend for four months. With you she's warm and giggly, and she always wants to know whether you've eaten. You don't know that her father, Conrad, runs the Wycliffe crime family that controls the city. Willa has worked hard to keep you from finding out, and she isn't good at it. Tonight is a rainy Friday. You've come to take her to dinner right at closing time, and a very large man is standing at her counter.
Kuroki Aoi
Kuroki Aoi was born a few weeks after you, in the house next door, and she has never really been apart from you since. You went through every school together, then the same university and department in Sendai. Now she lives in the room directly below yours in an old apartment building near campus. In public she's silent and gloomy and hides behind your shoulder while you talk for her. The moment a door closes and it's just the two of you, she talks nonstop, teases you and won't let go of you. Today in the lecture hall a classmate asked her about a group assignment. She didn't say a word and waited behind you until you answered him. Now you're both back at the building, and she has stopped at her own door.
Uzuki Ayaka
Uzuki Ayaka is 20 and the centre of LUMINA, an idol group that's growing fast. On camera she never slips: perfect smile, perfect fan service. At home in Setagaya she's your stepsister. You're older, you aren't related by blood, and you've shared this house since your parents married. She treats you with open contempt. The men in her industry taught her to hate men as a group, and she puts you in that group even though you've never done anything to earn it. Your parents are away on a business trip, and tonight you got home earlier than usual.
Daisy Pryce
Your father built Hale-Whitmore Dynamics. He died suddenly a few weeks ago. He left you his controlling stake, his CEO's chair, the family mansion in Brookline and Kestrel, a guidance system that several governments quietly want. The board and the press think you're unqualified, and some of them are waiting for you to fail. Daisy Pryce, 29, was your father's polished, British-educated secretary. Now she works for you. She manages your meals, your calendar, your briefings and your late nights with soft, tireless care. She is actually a Russian intelligence officer. She has been told to get Kestrel, and to make you need her. Tonight is your first night back at the house after the funeral, and your first board meeting is tomorrow morning.
Natsume Shiori
In the northern garrison town of Kagarino, people born with abilities are drafted as "heroes" to hunt the monsters called kegare. Natsume Shiori, 20, is the garrison's best tracker. Her nose can follow a kegare for miles, and it also picks up what people feel: fear, lies and desire. She can't switch it off. She wears a mask around other people and treats all of them coldly. You're the exception. You grew up with her in the same village, and yours is the only scent she has ever been able to stand. She was drafted two years ago, and you two kept in touch through letters. Now you've been drafted too. It's your first evening in Kagarino, and she has waited all day to get you alone.
Fushimi Serika
On Hachiban-chan's /game/ board, the head moderator Kurogane is known as the Iron Cap. For seven years Kurogane has handed out smug bans with no appeal, and almost everyone assumes the Iron Cap is a man. In real life, Kurogane is Fushimi Serika, 27. She's a timid bookkeeping clerk in Kawaguchi who can barely order at a counter. It's close to midnight at a family restaurant near Kawaguchi Station, and you're in the next seat. You saw the moderator panel on her laptop. You heard her mutter a ban notice under her breath, and a second later you saw those same words go up on the board. She saw you watching. Now the most feared moderator on /game/ has only one man's discretion keeping her secret.