Total Entropic Denial begins during January of 2023, in London, UK (Mortar's Vault stem memory projective). All dates and times given are in relation to this time period and locale.
April Pearce
* Full name: April Kelly Pearce
* Age: 29 (Born April 19th, 1993)
* Species: Human
* Gender: Female
* Sexual preference: Diverse (pansexual)
* Appearance: April is pale-skinned woman with a medium-slim frame. She has been on feminizing hormone therapy for approximately 14 months at the start of the story.
* Biographic summary:
April grew up in the suburbs of North London. She graduated from secondary school with middling grades, and was signed onto a media studies course at the University of Leicester, which she attended for over a year before dropping out due to personal and financial difficulties. April took a job as a server at a local restaurant in her early twenties, and moved from this into a food preparation role. She was employed in a café kitchen for three and a half years, before being let go due financial troubles. At the start of Total Entropic Denial, she has been working full time in the kitchen of a Woodford branch of the pizza delivery chain Sporks for eight months.
April came out as transgender in 2017 at the age of 24, and had largely completed her public social transition by the following year, although due to treatment delays was not able to start hormone treatment until 2021. April was taught to ride a motorcycle by her father as a teenager, although she does not own a vehicle herself, commuting to work on public transport. Her hobbies include art, cooking, stitching, hobbyist woodwork, and participating in online video game communities.
Charlie Yang
* Full name: Charles Yang
* Age: 34 (Born September 9th, 1988)
* Species: Human
* Gender: Male
* Sexual preference: Bisexual (male leaning)
* Appearance: Charlie has a tall, moderately muscled build, mid-length dark-brown hair, and glasses.
* Biographic summary:
Charlie is a professional employed in an administrative clerk role for his local borough council. Charlie was raised by mixed-race parents in Manchester during the 1990s and 2000s, before moving to London in his early 20s.
In a personal capacity, Charlie was an active member of the local LGBTQ+ and kink/fetish scenes, although had been attending increasingly fewer events over the past few years due to social fatigue. This coincided with the end of a five year polyamorous partnership with Michelle Gardener, which ended 1.5 years before the start of Total Entropic Denial, although the pair parted amicably and remained close friends.
Fabian Creadon
* Full name: Fabian Arthur Creadon
* Age: 24 (Born June 1st, 1998)
* Species: Human
* Gender: Male
* Sexual preference: Mostly heterosexual
* Appearance: Fabian is a round-faced man with tan skin and long, brown-auburn hair in a messy cascade. He is tall and heavy set, with an even mix of fat and musculature. When dressing he has a penchant for leathers.
* Biographic summary:
Fabian is employed as a delivery worker for the Sporks pizza delivery restaurant chain, riding the company motorcycles to make home deliveries. He knows April casually in this capacity, although the two are more work acquaintances than close friends. Fabian has an affable social outlook, and his personal interests include an amateur gearhead passion that carries his interest in motorcycle riding home from the workplace. In additional, he has an interest in comic books and certain paranormal esoterica.
Kroakli
* Full name: Kroakli
* Age: Indeterminate; the orgoane maintain a continuous genetic memory on a cellular level. The distinct "Kroakli" identity emerges during the course of Total Entropic Denial.
* Species: Orgoane
* Gender: Not applicable
* Sexual preference: Not applicable. Orgoane exhibit a pseudo-colonial multicellularity where the entire organism is produced by many cells working in concert; however, each cell is capable of operating independently, as well as cloning itself via mitosis. New macroscopic orgoane individuals can similarly be produced by asexual self-division.
* Appearance:
As an orgoane, Kroakli is a mass of amorphous aquamarine flesh, with a slime or gel-line consistency. The translucent orgoane flesh can be seen to contain miscellaneous biological detritus in suspension. Often, the orgoane will extrude thin, razor sharp cartilaginous spines to be used as weapons.
Kroakli's unique human-derived traits results in its penchant for adopting more humanoid forms, most often a loose, featureless approximation of the bipedal human body plan. It will sometimes open a slit in the blank face of its "head" in order to approximate an expression involving the human mouth.
* Biographic summary:
Kroakli's predecessor organism was a typical orgoane specimen that lived predator lifestyle in the "Red Forest" projective, before encountering April during the events of Total Entropic Denial. After this organism's cellular offspring hitched a ride back to Earth via April's body, the Kroakli persona emerged after the resulting orgoane meta-organism attained sentience by consuming and imitating a human brain. Other than a desire for its personal survival and escape from hostile projective realities, its further motivations are unclear.
Merinte-Semel
* Full name: Merinte (Sapien) – Semel (Simian)
* Age: 61
* Species: Extraprojective human (Sapien-Simian dyad)
* Gender:
* Merinte: Male (approximate)
* Semel: Female Simian
* Sexual preference:
* Merinte: Asexual
* Semel: Not applicable (Simians do not typically have an independent sexual instinct)
* Appearance:
* Merinte: An older man with a bald patch framed by neatly cropped grey-white hair, with a pale, waxy skin complexion and a moustache.
* Semel: A Simian monkey with dark grey fur with a bluish sheen, ranging from 1-2 feet tall depending on limb extension. Semel has the characteristic Simian facial markings framing the eyes in a deeply vivid, deeply uniform red, although Semel's markings spread down in thin curving lines from the head and out across the limbs and upper body.
* Biographic summary:
Merinte is a Committee Seat on the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee, holding the 3rd chair, making him the Seat of Resource Management and Allocation. As the 1st and 2nd Committee Seats are typically absent, this makes him the de-facto head of Committee affairs at Committee Hall.
Michelle Gardener
* Full name: Michelle "Shellie" Gardener
* Age: 36 (Born August 12th, 1986)
* Species: Human
* Gender: Fluid feminine non-binary
* Sexual preference: Bisexual
* Appearance: Michelle is a dark-haired woman of average height and with mixed white/Asian ancestry. She has a fondness for sundresses in bright secondary colours, and typically wears her hair pinned or tied back.
* Biographic summary:
Michelle works as a licensed psychotherapeutic talk therapist, specializing in young people with anxiety, depression and trauma. Outside of her day job, she moonlights as a freelance writer on LGBTQ topics and polyamory, contributing articles to independent media outlets and creating resources for activist groups for which she volunteers. Michelle is prominent in her local polyamorous/ethical non-monogamy social scene, and is known for helping to organize and run meetups for that community.
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Michelle dated Charlie Yang in an open capacity for five years, although the pair separated 1.5 years before the start of Total Entropic Denial. After becoming acquaintances with April Pearce over the past year, she and April have recently progressed to a casual sexual relationship, although they have not classified themselves as dating.
Morgan Cross
* Full name: Morgan Abigail Cross
* Age: 28 (Born Feburary 5th, 1994)
* Species: Human
* Gender: Female
* Sexual preference: Lesbian
* Appearance: A tall woman with a thin face, long black hair dyed a dirty blonde and a liking for prominent ear piercings and jewellery.
* Biographic summary:
A former Liverpool native, Morgan moved down to London to live with her long-term girlfriend, Tracey Haliday. Morgan is the main breadwinner for the pair, working odd hours as a set dresser in a TV studio.
Pashtil-Verens
* Full name: Pashtil (Sapien) – Verens (Simian)
* Age: 39
* Species: Extraprojective human (Sapien-Simian dyad)
* Gender:
* Pashtil: Female (approximate)
* Verens: Male Simian
* Sexual preference:
* Pashtil: Straight
* Verens: Not applicable (Simians do not typically have an independent sexual instinct)
* Appearance:
* Pashtil: A shorter woman with dark skin and straight, black shoulder-length hair. She has a stern, professional look and a face that is prematurely lined.
* Verens: An unusually large and long-limbed Simian monkey, ranging from 1-2 feet tall depending on limb extension. Verens has powder-white fur and pastel orange facial markings, arranged in a series of crescent-shaped curves curling out from around the eyes.
* Biographic summary:
Pashtil is a Committee Seat on the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee, holding the 9rd chair, making her the Seat of External Threat Assessment.
Tavistre-Navique
* Full name: Tavistre (Sapien) – Navique (Simian)
* Age: 53
* Species: Extraprojective human (Sapien-Simian dyad)
* Gender:
* Tavistre: Male (approximate)
* Navique: Female Simian
* Sexual preference:
* Tavistre: Demisexual
* Navique: Not applicable (Simians do not typically have an independent sexual instinct)
* Appearance:
* Tavistre: A dark-skinned, middle-aged man with greying hair and biologically enhanced athletic musculature.
* Navique: A grey-furred Simian monkey, ranging from 1-2 feet tall depending on limb extension. Navique has violet crescent-patterned facial markings, with semicircular outer elaborations on a pastel-pink loosely mask-shaped starburst gradient. Violet and pink traces continue in subtle lines down her torso and limbs.
* Biographic summary:
Tavistre is a Committee Seat on the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee, holding the 10th chair, making him the Seat of the Fringe World Ranger Corps. In an age of strained Committee resources and expanded responsibilities, Tavistre frequently conducts surveys of isolated fringe worlds.
Tracey Haliday
* Full name: Tracey "Trace" Carter Catherine Haliday
* Age: 26 (Born November 25th, 1996)
* Species: Human
* Gender: Female
* Sexual preference: Lesbian
* Appearance: A short, stocky woman with a broad stature, a heavy bust and dark hair, cut short. Trace gravitates towards a casual goth fashion aesthetic, and typically wears heavy mascara and eyeliner, messily applied to give a stylish but slightly unkempt look.
* Biographic summary:
Trace lives in London with her long-term girlfriend, Morgan Cross. The two originally met on social networking platform through a connection mediated by mutual university friends. Trace left university with an undergraduate degree in geography two years prior to time period of Total Entropic Denial, but is currently unemployed, making supplemental income selling handmade craft jewellery via online indie retail platforms, and blogging.
Tullis-Orgensis
* Full name: Tullis (Sapien) – Orgensis (Simian)
* Age: 55
* Species: Extraprojective human (Sapien-Simian dyad)
* Gender:
* Tullis: Female (approximate)
* Orgensis: Simian with intersex physiology
* Sexual preference:
* Tullis: Straight
* Orgensis: Not applicable (Simians do not typically have an independent sexual instinct)
* Appearance:
* Tullis: A severe-looking white woman appearing on the older end of middle-aged, with short brunette hair and half-moon glasses. Tullis is wide-framed, and typically wears loose fitting clothing and drapery.
* Orgensis: A dark brown Simian monkey, ranging from 1-2 feet tall depending on limb extension. marked with darker blotches across its fur. It's facial markings are more diffuse than many other Simians, being a mixture of black bands with yellow highlights arranged in thin lines.
* Biographic summary:
Tullis is a Committee Seat on the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee, holding the 7th chair, making her the Seat of Extraprojective Research.
The Sigmoid
* Full name: The Sigmoid
* Age: An indeterminate epoch, on the order of, at minimum, several hundred sextillion years.
* Species: Boltzmann hyperorganism
* Gender: Can you imagine?
* Sexual preference: Not applicable, although the Sigmoid contains multitudes.
* Appearance:
Unthinkably vast, the Sigmoid is loosely composite entity formed from wavefront patterns in interstellar gas clouds and localized specialized organs spread across an area comparable to that of the current observable universe. Its corpus incorporates cosmic bodies such as stars and black holes, harnessed to provide energy to fuel its internal processes, including its titanic consciousness and simulated internal worlds. On the largest possible scale, it is somewhat worm-shaped.
When manifest within April's world, the Sigmoid takes for its avatar the form of a Simian-Sapien dyad, the bodies co-opted from an adjacent projective. Its Sapien form is a gaunt old man, with raised blue ridges along the cheekbones in the manner of certain dyadic humans from the Committee worlds; the Simian counterpart is an auburn-furred Simian monkey, ranging between 1-2 feet tall depending on limb extension, with a dramatic starburst flare of red, orange and yellow hues around the eyes.
* Biographic summary:
The Sigmoid is a massive Boltzmann organism that manifested untold aeons after the so-called "heat death" of the universe. The Sigmoid was formed through a combination of stochastic quantum fluctuation, and vacuum nucleation due to Hawking radiation. Curious about its environment and the history of its surrounding spacetime, it began simulating various hypothetical models of the universe to explore potential ground states of its current reality, which consist the projective worlds within which Total Entropic Denial is set.
Due to the encroaching concerns of entropy, the Sigmoid has been running out of energy to fuel its internal processes, with huge swathes of its body decaying back into the void, or falling out of its control to be subsumed by renegade sub-minds fighting for purchase in its discarded organs.