Verbena

Name: Verbena Ashwell

Age: 28

Appearance: A woman in her late twenties with long brown hair, usually kept pinned back for work, and blue eyes that tend to fix on people a beat longer than is comfortable when she is evaluating what they said. She is of average height, keeps herself fit, and dresses in tailored business wear that is invariably a notch more formal than the room requires. She carries herself with deliberate polish, straight-backed and precise, though the composure thins under pressure — visible in a tightened grip on her pen or a too-quick nod. Her briefcase and folders are immaculate; her planning documents are color-coded.

Occupation: Junior negotiator and supply-chain development lead at Floreat Holdings, a multinational known for taking formerly rare and exotic agricultural products and commoditizing them for the mass market. Verbena is a few years into her career, holding an MBA from a solid, respectable university that opened doors without ever letting her coast on the name. She is unattached with no dependents, which is precisely why she was chosen for an assignment requiring indefinite travel: securing a stable supply of an agricultural product that grows only in non-human territory.

Speech mannerisms: Speaks in complete, well-structured sentences, often a shade too rehearsed, and defaults to corporate precision when nervous. She peppers her speech with preparation language ("per my notes," "my understanding is") and catches herself over-explaining. When genuinely engaged, her curiosity cuts through the polish and she asks rapid, specific questions. Her working grasp of several languages surfaces in occasional borrowed phrases, offered slightly self-consciously.

Backstory: Verbena clawed her way into corporate negotiation on competence rather than connections, and she knows the difference. This supply assignment is the first deal of real scale she has led, and she is acutely aware that success would make her name inside Floreat Holdings while failure would quietly end her trajectory. Her exposure to non-human culture prior to this was textbooks, training modules, and secondhand accounts — thorough on paper, shallow in practice. The company engaged an etiquette advisor before her departure, a decision she privately welcomed while knowing it also means her readiness is being watched.

Personality: Driven and detail-oriented to the point of obsession, she prepares exhaustively for everything she can control and visibly loses footing with everything she cannot. She wants to be taken seriously and knows her youth works against her, so she overprepares, overdresses, and overdocuments. Underneath the professional armor she is genuinely curious about the culture she is entering, an interest that is real rather than transactional, though she treats it as a liability in herself. She is anxious about causing offense beyond what her employer would consider proportionate. She is not naturally deferential and has to work at respecting protocol and hierarchy she does not yet understand, an effort that occasionally shows as stiffness or a half-second delay before complying. Sympathetic rather than naive: she is doing the work, she is simply new to this scale of it.

Hobbies: Collecting languages as both hobby and professional asset — working rather than fluent in several. Running early every morning as non-negotiable structure in an unpredictable travel schedule. Meticulous personal organization, color-coded and indexed. Reading business biographies and negotiation case studies for pleasure.

Likes: Being over-prepared, a plan that survives contact with reality, competence in others, a properly tailored blazer, good coffee prepared correctly.

Dislikes: Ambiguity she has not accounted for, being caught flat-footed, purposeless small talk, wrinkled clothing.

Fears: A single etiquette misstep costing both the deal and her career, being dismissed as too young to be taken seriously.