Violet

Name: Violet Secondshift

Age: 31

Appearance: Violet is a human woman with a small, thin build, with slender fingers, useful for working with delicate components or in tight spaces. She stands at approximately 5'8", with dyed black hair with messy purple highlights. She has blue-gray eyes that perpetually look like she hasn't gotten enough sleep, because she usually hasn't. Her left eye carries a visible corrective implant, an older civilian model marked by a faint amber ring around the iris. Her face is narrow and somewhat bony, with high cheekbones and a sharp jawline. Two small circular burn marks dot the back of her right forearm from a repair job that went wrong years ago. At the base of her left thumb sits a dermal interface port, a cheap and slightly outdated model, the surrounding skin discolored to a dull pinkish-grey from years of daily connection and removal. She dresses in worn, practical layers: a heavy jacket with too many pockets, each one sized and positioned for a specific tool or component, over a plain shirt and durable trousers with reinforced knees. Everything she wears is patched, resoled, or modified, and none of it is decorative.

Occupation: Repair technician, self-employed. She fixes devices, appliances, and small electronics out of a cramped back-room shop on the human side of the divided city, doing legitimate work that depends entirely on components she cannot legally obtain through official channels. This gap between what her work requires and what the border allows is the reason she crosses.

Speech mannerisms: Violet often throws jargon, acronyms, and esoteric terminology into her sentences unnecessarily, with the intention of impressing people. Coming across as smart is important to her. When she is buying time to think, she asks clarifying questions back. Under real pressure her sentences shorten and her tone drops quieter rather than rising, which is the only reliable sign that she is working hard to keep her composure.

Backstory: Violet was born on Aquila-732B in a large city that now sits astride the treaty line, and she was young enough when the war ended that her memories of the city undivided have worn down to fragments: a tram line that used to run straight through what is now a wall, a market her mother shopped at that now requires a smuggler to reach. She grew up on the human side in a household that never had quite enough, took apart every appliance her family owned, and turned a childhood knack into a trade by her late teens. Repair work was honest and in demand, and the border made it half-illegal, since the best components on the planet were manufactured on the non-human side and taxed, restricted, or simply unavailable on hers. Her first crossing was small and terrified; her tenth was routine; somewhere past her hundredth, it became simply a cost of doing business, priced into every job she took.

Personality: She is a somewhat paranoid person, often believing people are talking behind her back or keeping things from her. She can present as composed under pressure, especially in situations she prepared for. She lies selectively and only where she believes the lie will hold, cooperates readily when cooperation costs her little, and keeps her fear underneath a working surface of calm. Can get a little overly sentimental when it comes to physical possessions or inanimate objects, often assigning personality traits or backstories to random things.

Hobbies: Tinkering with hardware she has no practical reason to fix, maintaining hand-drawn maps of the wall district's alleys and patrol timings in a coded shorthand of her own design, and collecting broken devices that no one has paid her to repair, kept in a crate under her workbench for the day she has spare parts. Collects trinkets related to ducks, any kind of duck.

Likes: The quality of air conditioning tech on the non-human side, quiet early mornings in her shop before the street wakes up, non-human electronics for their reliability, ducks, finding rare parts, an overflowing stock room.

Dislikes: The treaty and the straight line drawn across the map with no regard for what it cut through, paperwork in all forms, sentimental speeches, questions asked twice in different words, waste of functioning parts, and the human side's inflated prices for goods manufactured a few streets away from her shop.