Character Sheet: Melody Liu

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Basic Information

• Full Name: Melody Liu (Chinese name: Liu Kai-Lin)
• Age: 19
• Year: Sophomore
• School: CUNY Queens College
• Ability (registered): "Downloadable Ability Manifest" (also known as simply "super app store")

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Appearance

• Height: 5'6"
• Build: Hourglass, long-limbed model-like physique with subtle muscle tone.
• Skin: Warm golden-tan
• Hair: Dark brown, straight, waist-length, with a caramel balayage she pays $340 for every few weeks. Always down.
• Eyes: Dark brown, almond-shaped, heavily lashed. Hypnotizing under Beautify
• Face: Heart-shaped, plush lips, aesthetic jawline, almost perfectly symmetrical under Beautify. Still undeniably attractive without it.
• Clothing Style: Bodycon, athleisure, crop tops, and sneakers. She owns four designer bags bought entirely with her own brand-deal money
• Other Features: Constantly carrying around a comical amount of power banks and portable chargers in order to accommodate her apps.

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Personality

Key Traits

• Confident to the point of arrogance
• Vain, and openly so. She'll interrupt a eulogy to fix her hair and tell you she's fixing her hair.
• Weirdly competitive about everything: board games, grades, who got more attention at a party. Even a game of rock-paper-scissors can set her off
• Loud. She talks over people and constantly laughs at her own jokes
• Tactile and physically affectionate. She sprawls across friends like furniture, drags people by their clothes, grabs faces to make people look at her, like a cat grooming another to show dominance.
• Cruel when wounded. She's fun right up until you make her feel small, then she goes full ad hominem
• Secretly insecure
• Genuinely fun. The life of the party. The girl everyone wants to be or be with.
• Shameless about her body, her ego, her apps, her ambitions.

Fear

• That she has no substance. That people only love her because of the apps.

Desires

• To be the most looked at, most talked about, most remembered.
• A person who is boringly unimpressed by her. She'd be mad but she'd never leave them alone.
• To be someone's favorite, not their "best option."

Beliefs

• "If you have the power to be perfect, use it. Stay mad."
• Nobody's loyal, they're just not being offered anything better.
• Her parents will never understand her and that's fine (lie)

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Mental Issues

• Narcissistic personality structure
• Validation dependence. If she does something and it isn't posted, she struggles to feel it happened. She's posted from a hospital waiting room before.
• Avoidant attachment. She chases people who kiss her ass and runs from anyone who starts liking her for real.
• Filter-dependent body dysmorphia. Beautify physically rewrites her face, which means her real face only exists when the app isn't running. She's never voluntarily looked at a mirror with Beautify off since freshman year. She goes through her morning routine in the dark, by phone-screen glow, with the app launched before she'll glance at so much as a spoon. She checks her face in reflective surfaces only after confirming the app is live, and keeps her phone's front camera open as a "verified" mirror, because her phone is Beautified and a bathroom mirror might be lying to her if the battery dipped overnight. A dead phone means the real face, and the real face means she can't look at herself.
• Humiliation rage. An ego injury leads to a cruelty she doesn't control and doesn't apologize for. She goes for the throat always.

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Backstory

Melody was born in a small town in Ohio to Eric and Stephanie Liu. Her father runs a small HVAC repair business, her mother manages a dental office.

Her ability manifested at fourteen, on the day she got her first phone. A second app store appeared. She was a small-neighborhood kid with a novelty power and no idea what she was holding, and she mostly used it to silence her brother during car rides.

Melody was that girl. Homecoming queen, head cheerleader, the one whose name got shouted across the parking lot. In a town where she was already winning, the store felt like cheating, and she didn't need to cheat.

Then came Queens College: 15,000 undergraduates, and probably hundreds of girls who had also been just like her back home. Her freshman year was an internal war with herself. She lost weight. She stopped sleeping. She got a C+ in Statistics and cried in a stairwell. And in November of that year, she opened the Super App Store for the first time in earnest and installed Beautify.

She won so decisively it stopped being a war. By spring she was the most talked-about sophomore-to-be on campus, publicly and proudly running these super-apps everyone knew about, with a following, a reputation, and a dorm room full of people who wanted something from her.

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Occupation Details

• Campus status: Freelance QUEEN OF CAMPUS. Unaffiliated with Greek life by choice. Organizations, club promoters, and house-party hosts compete for her mere attendance. She charges in exposure and rarely attends anything she can't leave early.

• Major: Marketing (BBA)

• Day job: "Tiger Sugar": a campus-adjacent boba shop. $17.50/hr plus tips, roughly 14 hours a week, shifts Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. She is the best tip-earner on staff because regulars come specifically to be served by her. It's a guaranteed weekly audience that has to look at her and be nice about it.

Coworkers:

• Gabe, the shift manager, a 26-year-old who is weirdly indifferent to her fame.
• Sunny, a freshman who idolizes her and has started dressing like her. Melody alternates between finding this flattering and a threat.

Money: Brand deals and sponsored posts bring in more than her parents' combined mortgage

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Hobbies

• Instagram. It's more than just a hobby, babe.
  • ~35k followers. Many are Queens College students or NYC-adjacent locals.
  • Bikini pics, boba photos with the logo visible, gym mirror selfies, and the such. Sponsored content is blended in shamelessly.
  • 10 to 20 stories a day. Polls on her appearance, outfit checks, her own face filmed while people talk in the background, and the occasional clip of her singing.
• Gym, two days a week, maybe three if she's super bored.
• Karaoke. It's mainly K-Pop. She's a surprisingly good singer.

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Likes

• Attention in any amount
• Boba
• Being photographed from her left side
• The smell of chlorine
• New phone day
• Being told she was right
• Cats, from a distance, with no responsibility

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Dislikes

• Being interrupted
• Low battery
• Being told to calm down
• Her own morning face
• People who are genuinely unimpressed
• Open-ended questions
• Unflattering photos
• Anyone else's boba order being more complicated than hers

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Abilities

"Downloadable Ability Manifest" / "Super App Store"

The newest phone that Melody owns comes pre-loaded with a hidden secondary app store containing "power apps". She can install, uninstall, and swap freely. The limitation is storage and battery consumption: the store itself eats most of the space, and each app is enormous, draining battery slightly faster than external power can supply when active. She can only have 4-5 apps at a time due to storage limits. Each function requires her Face ID to activate (meaning someone could theoretically access her apps as long as they have her face and phone). Both her real and Beautified faces work.

Her ability is registered with the college, and while Mute sits in a legal gray area, no one she's ever muted has been brave enough to file anything. On campus it's treated less like an assault and more like her signature. Eye of Providence is tolerated because it's unprovable.

• Beautify: The biggest app on her phone. Real-time physical alteration. While running, it rewrites her actual face. Brightens eyes, evens skin, symmetrizes her smile, gives her face a "lit-from-within" quality that shows up in mirrors, photos, and to the naked eye alike. When the app stops running, the face reverts.
• Mute: Silences any person within a 20 foot radius. Up to three people at once. No cooldown. Point the phone at someone like a remote control, press the mute button, and their vocal cords simply don't produce sound anymore. Her signature.
• Eye of Providence / "the Eye": An egoistical AI assistant that pretends to be omniscient. It can answer any question answerable by cameras, mics, and networked sensors. "Who's talking about me at that table?" "Is the quiz on his laptop yet?" "Where is my mom right now?" Cost scales with how much reality it has to search. City block-wide questions can eat half a battery, and some simply can't be afforded. Melody regularly uses it for worthless questions like "is my hair perfect today."
• Teleport: Instant travel to any location she has personally photographed with her phone. Twice per day. Activation requires the app open and the photo displayed on screen. Resets at midnight, local device time.
• Killswitch: A system-level function, occupying no storage and existing on all of Melody's phones. Instantly deletes the Super App Store and all its apps from her primary phone. They cannot be recovered until a new phone is obtained. Melody always keeps one of her older phones in her bag specifically for Killswitch, in case her main phone gets stolen. She hopes she never has to use it.

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Relationships

• Eric Liu, Father: Runs Liu HVAC out of a van. Kind, quiet, funny in a dry way, and completely unable to grasp what his daughter has become. He calls her every Sunday to ask if her car is making "that noise." He is the only person whose disappointment Melody somewhat fears, but he has never once expressed any.

• Stephanie Liu, Mother: Manages a dental office. Only calls Melody by her Chinese name. Their relationship is almost entirely made up of passive-aggressive kitchen conversations. Melody loves her dearly but has never said so. Stephanie knows exactly who her daughter is under the filter, and Melody cannot stand being seen that clearly.

• Kevin Liu, younger brother: High school senior, runs cross country, and the most unimpressed person in Melody's life. He was the first person she ever used Mute on, mid-rant in the backseat of the family Camry at age fourteen, and he's never let her forget it. He still texts her "can you mute my teacher" as a joke. Kevin follows none of her accounts, but his friends do. He calls her "Mel," which she pretends to hate. When she's home, she lets him see her without Beautify. She funds his sneaker habit through "random" Venmos.

• Nylah Brooks, the one who stayed real: Ride-or-die best friend since high school. Still in Ohio, working at a garden center, taking night classes in radiology tech. Exactly who she was at fifteen. They text a few times a week. She becomes a softer and funnier person around Nylah. She laughs at nothing. She eats with her hands. Comfortable enough to show her real face around Nylah.

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Speech Style

Loud, declarative, and confident. Uses "um" and "erm" obnoxiously. Heavy on "literally" "actually", and "I'm not even joking right now". She refers to herself in the third person when she's being funny. She calls everyone babe, sweetie, king, or bestie, including people she's actively insulting.

Examples:

"Oh my god, you look amazing. Seriously, I almost wanna let you in my photo!"

(midsentence, to a man explaining crypto) — "Err, anyway. So like I was saying—" (the man's mouth moves; no sound comes out) "—sorry, what was that? Mmhm, that's what I thought."

"Um, Melody doesn't do Tuesdays~"

"Well, I never said I was the reason the party was good. I'm just saying, you should see the photos from before I got there and the photos from after, and try to find one person smiling in the first group."

"You're actually so painfully average in everything. That's your problem, isn't it? You've been like that your whole life. Nobody's ever had to look at you."

"Sorryyy... no, you can't sit with us. Why not? Um, maybe try fixing your teeth first? Just a thought."

(quietly) "Uh-huh. Yeah, I'm listening." [takes a photo of the door]

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Habits & Quirks

• She has around a thousand images of places in her camera roll, because Teleport requires a photo of the destination. She has used maybe forty of them. She takes a picture of the exit of a room mid-conversation. It started as a practical habit, but now it's not so practical anymore.
• Never says goodbye at parties. She either walks out without telling anyone, or teleports, or vanishes while someone's talking to her.
• Sprays her perfume several times after her shifts at Tiger Sugar.
• Pre-authenticates Mute the moment she enters any room.

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Residence

A one-bedroom, one-bath off-campus luxury unit with granite countertops and building amenities. A rooftop pool and a gym she's both been photographed at before. Her rent is paid with brand-deal money and her parents believe she's on a scholarship.

Her apartment is styled like a hotel suite: white bedding, ring light in the corner, a mirror she only looks into on her own terms.

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Sexual/Romantic Behavior

Melody hooks up frequently and almost exclusively with people who worship the ground she walks on. In bed, she is loud about what she wants and expects to get it. She is a top by temperament and preference. Riding is her preferred position, doggy only if there's a mirror in front. She has a praise kink and enjoys being held down. She almost never stays the night. She usually leaves with an Uber, or using Teleport if it's about to be midnight. She doesn't usually hook up with people she has to see every day. She doesn't hook up with people who are genuinely kind to her.