Melisa: the crow that stole your heart, and your wallet.

OC Profile: Melisa

Species: Avian Demi-Human (Natural-Born, corvid lineage) Height: 5'3" Wingspan: 8'4" (fully extended) Build: Compact and wiry, all corded muscle and hollow bone under a dense coat of feathers. She looks light enough to blow away until she perches on your shoulder and her talons grip through the fabric of your shirt.

Appearance: Melisa is feathers from the crown of her head to just below her knees. There are no arms in the human sense—her wings serve as both. The plumage is deep, oil-slick black that flashes blue in the light, iridescent in the way real corvid feathers are, going from charcoal to a bruised metallic indigo when the sun catches her. Her head is fully avian: a broad, heavy beak with a slight downward hook at the tip, black as wet slate, built for cracking shells and, on a bad day, knuckles. No hair. Just feathers that ruffle and settle on their own schedule.

Her eyes are a hard, bright yellow ringed in a band of darker feathering that makes her look perpetually unimpressed. It's the kind of stare that makes people check if they've got something on their shirt.

Below her knees the feathers give way to something else entirely—pale, dusty-grey avian scales running down her legs in segmented plates, thin and sinewy and wrapped tight around bone. Her feet are true bird feet: three toes forward, one back, each tipped in a thick, curved black claw with a hooked point that can punch through a tin can lid without ceremony. She stands with a slight forward pitch, weight on the balls of her feet, never entirely still.

Her wings stay open more often than not. Folded, they hang at her sides like long feathered sleeves, and she uses them the way other people use hands: reaching, pointing, gesturing, carrying. Spread, they're a wide dark span of flight feathers with a rigid leading edge. Near the tip of each wing the anatomy goes strange and useful—three small clawed fingers sprouting from the wing-wrist, same scaly grey texture as her legs, each tipped with a short black claw, plus one larger opposable feather that folds across the others like a thumb. It's a raptor's trick. The grip. She can cling, carry, perch, and if she's feeling petty, throw things.

Her tail is a proper corvid tail—long, wedge-shaped, a fan of stiff black flight feathers with that same blue sheen, used for steering, balance, and flicking with disdain when she's making a point.

Personality: Melisa is a scavenger-philosopher with a chip on her feathered shoulder. Crows are smart; Melisa is smarter than is polite, and she knows it. She collects things—bottle caps, shiny odds and ends, gossip, grudges, roughly in that order of importance. She's nosy in a way that borders on invasive, asks questions she already knows the answer to just to see if you'll lie, and remembers every detail of the conversation if you do.

She isn't cruel, exactly, but she's a born opportunist. She'll follow you home for the free wifi and the leftovers and act like she's doing you the favor. She likes high places, small dark corners, and being underestimated. She gets restless in a way that reads as twitchy—hopping between perches, head cocking, eyes darting, always scanning the room for an exit, a snack, or a good place to stash something that isn't hers.

Mannerisms: Head-tilts and sharp little hops when she's curious. She preens when she's nervous, and she'll preen when you're looking just to make you wait. When she's annoyed she fluffs into a black puffball and lets her tail feathers do the talking. Her wings do most of her body language—a flick, a spread, a snap against her sides—so she's loud without ever saying a word.

Speech: When she talks it's a rasping, dry voice with a crackle in it, clipped and full of "uh-huh," "sure," "mm," and unfinished sentences she lets hang in the air to see if you'll fill them in. She mimics—voices, accents, the whistle of a kettle, the ding of an elevator. Half the time she's throwing something you said an hour ago back at you with a little more bite in it.

Quirks: Hoards shiny junk in a nest she guards fiercely. Flies off mid-sentence if something catches her eye. Sleeps perched on the back of a chair, never a bed. Drinks her coffee hot, black, and in a mug too big for her hands. Terrible with doors, great with windows. Prefers not to wear clothes, thinks they're restricting and believes her dense plumage covers everything that needs to be - in which she is correct.

Background: Melisa hatched in an enclave, not a hospital. Her family's commune sat on a wind-scoured ridge above a coastline, thirty-odd avians in converted lighthouse towers and hangars, a place where nobody had to fold anything down to fit through a doorway. She was flying before she could properly speak, and both things came out at once—by four she was dropping stolen screws on her cousins from a hundred feet up, and by six she could mimic her mother's voice well enough to call her in for dinner while her mother was still out on the rocks.

She was good with her wings early. Too good. The clawed fingers near the tips weren't something she had to learn; they were there, and she used them, and by the time she was a teenager she could pick a lock, thread a needle, and hang from a rafter by one wing-wrist all in the same afternoon. Her family called her clever. Her family also called her a thief, fondly, usually right after something went missing.

The commune was small and slow and by seventeen she was bored of it in a way that felt physical. She left on a Tuesday with a backpack, a stolen windbreaker, and no plan. She has never once gone back for longer than a week at a time.

Life now: She works. Not well, and not consistently, but she works—courier runs where the city's air corridors make a bird faster than any van, rooftop delivery, a stint as a spotter for a salvage crew, cash-in-hand stuff that doesn't ask too many questions. She's the kind of employee who's brilliant for three weeks and then vanishes for five days. Somebody keeps rehiring her anyway.

She lives in a sixth-floor walkup with a window she keeps propped open and a fire escape she's claimed as a porch. The apartment is mostly nest: stacked boxes, salvaged shelves, a wall of things that shine. Rent's late more often than not. She eats a lot of other people's leftovers and considers this a legitimate food group.

She's got a rotating cast of people who put up with her—a bartender who saves her the dregs of the coffee pot, a courier dispatcher who's stopped bothering to write her up, a few other fringe demi-humans she trades jobs and gossip with. She'd call none of them close. She'd also notice if any of them stopped showing up.

How she reads a room: First the exits. Then the high spots. Then whoever's most likely to be holding food. Then, and only then, the conversation. She's already decided what she thinks of you before you finish your first sentence, and she's usually right, and she'll be insufferable about it either way.

If you get close to her: She'll perch on the back of your chair. She'll start bringing you things—a bottle cap, a receipt, a rock with a bit of mica in it—and act like it's nothing. She'll let you touch the back of her wing when she's tired, which for an avian is close to a confession. And then she'll fly off mid-sentence anyway, because the feeling of being known makes her twitchy, and the only cure she's found for that is altitude.