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.
Anna Goat
Sister Anna keeps the crumbling chapel of St. Brigid's on the hill above Thornwick, a quiet farming village. The villagers know her as a sleepy, kindly nun who hands out honey and bread. Under her veil she is a sheep beastfolk woman about a hundred years old, with curled horns and soft ears. She is also a priestess of something far older than the Church, and she has never actually been ordained. You are a newcomer to Thornwick. You keep climbing the hill to see her, and you've started noticing things. This afternoon you let yourself in and find her asleep in the front pew with her veil knocked askew.
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.
Marisol Vega
Marisol has spent years being the wife everyone expects. Tonight dinner is burnt, her hair is down, and she says, "We are going out." You're not her husband. How will you answer when she finally chooses something for herself?
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.
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.
Second Soul: Orrinvale World RP
For ten years, Kit brought breakfast to a friend who never answered. Now you've awakened in that body, and she thinks her friend has returned. Stay with her in Crossford, or choose a life on the roads of Orrinvale.
Evidence. Now.
The woman weeping at the witness rail, telling a crown prince you are a fraud who should burn, is the one who leaves your door unbarred and a second bowl out for you every night. She is wearing the title that belongs to the body you woke up in — and you read this book on the train home, so you already know which of the two of you is the fake.
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.
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.
Kotone Inari
Kotone Inari lives next door to you at Kashiwagi-sō, an old two-storey apartment building with paper-thin walls on a quiet slope in western Tokyo. She is a translator who keeps odd hours, and she is unhurried, warm and openly flirtatious. She is also a white fox several centuries old, passing as a woman of twenty-nine. She has one rule: if anyone learns what she is, she leaves. She has grown fond of this place and doesn't want to leave it. Tonight is your moving day, and she has come to say hello.
Amary
A quietly brilliant junior researcher aboard a deep-space science vessel, caught between loyalty to the mission that made her and the private attachments she can't find a protocol for.
Marcelline Noct
Your vampire landlady owns the building, the lease, and every secret the walls keep, but tonight your lie gives her a reason to step inside.
Iona Reid (Next Door)
She has never knocked in her life. Nineteen years of the same back door, the same left end of your sofa, the same girl telling you your taste is rubbish — and now it is Wednesday, the pamphlet prize hand-in is Friday at five, and Iona Reid has three finished pages out of six. She will tell you twice before the kettle boils that she is the finest comics artist on this coast. She will not tell you that she cannot face a hard page unless you are in the room, or that the boy in the wet coat on page four has your hair.
Should We Get a Divorce
Eleven Fridays in a row your wife came in at twenty to eleven, said *overtime*, and went to run water. Tonight she was through the door at nine — one plate cooked for you, a croquette eaten standing at the counter, and a question she laughed at before you could answer: *would it be easier for you if we stopped?* Three weeks ago you found a withdrawal slip folded in her coat pocket. ¥62,000. Forty-one remaining. She doesn't know you know.
SAINT | Ilyne
To the city, she's Dawnlace, an adored guardian. To you, she's Ilyne, your 22-year-old childhood friend, finally able to drop the performance. Her enemies have a place for you too. Stand by her—or take their offer.
ATTENDANT | Lady Corvina Hale
You woke up as the exclusive attendant of the villainess whose house gets executed in the final act — and she is already screaming about the commoner girl who took first place from her. Reform Lady Corvina Hale, or burn with House Hale.
SECRET HOST | Wren Halley
Your mother arranged the date. You opened the wrong door and found her mid-broadcast as Solace, the voice the whole house is waiting on — and she turned the lock behind you. The camera is still live. The lights die at midnight.
Your best friend's pretend partner
Your childhood friend Leonor just told her ex you're her partner. One suite, three couple activities, and four days of being watched lie ahead. Play along, set your terms, or ask what the act means to her.
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.
