Quill Cardenas

is trying her best (main character)

Her surname is pronounced "car-DEH-nas".
Her dad's nickname for her was "Porcupine," but everyone else has called her Quill since she first changed it as a kid.

Female (she/her, transgender)

13

I imagine she’d identify as aroace when she’s older, but she hasn’t given it much thought at this point in her life.

She's old enough to hold her own, but something about her--possibly that she's always hanging out in weird, shady places and seeming cheerfully oblivious to this fact--makes you want to ask her where her parents are.

A little below average for her height and age.

Around 5' 2" (157 cm)

Dark brown

Her hair is medium-length and curly, falling a little past her shoulders. She usually wears it in two poofs.

Dark brown

Human

Medium brown

Black and Latina; American

She's tallish and thin, with little muscle.

All the clothes she wears are either remnants of her old private school uniform or from the thrift store. You'll never see her without a yellow jacket that's about four sizes too big for her and covered in patches she sewed on herself.

Perpetually scraped elbows and knees; a missing tooth on the upper left side of her mouth from a fight she got into in sixth grade

She stims a lot, usually by flapping her hands or bouncing her legs.
Tends to talk really fast when she’s nervous, excited or explaining something, to the point where sometimes she’s completely unintelligible.
She hates sitting for long periods of time. She's always pacing or bouncing around or moving her hands. Or all three at once!
She has a habit of aimlessly wandering around when she's bored, to the point of regularly tripping on things or falling down stairs.

Long term: to go to college and to become a detective, work in forensics, or basically anything that would let her hop around dimensions and solve crimes.
Short term: helping with whatever Croce is doing at the time.

She's bored. All the time. She thinks adventuring is cool and likes the rush of adrenaline that discovery gives her.

Strong sense of adventure, nonexistent sense of self-preservation. She's extremely reckless and will jump headfirst into dangerous situations without thinking.
All her life she's been labeled as a problem child and "troubled", and she no longer tries to exceeds anyone's expectations in that regard. She doesn't like fighting, but will result to physical violence if someone is acting aggressive towards her and won't knock it off.
She's fairly distrustworthy, especially of kids her own age. She tends to assume that people being overly nice to her want something from her or are making fun of her, and so in general she can be pretty rude to people she doesn't know well.
She can come across as insensitive and tactless, especially when discussing more morbid topics like death, but it's not purposeful.

Avoids kids her own age as a general rule and often acts rude towards them to encourage them to screw off as a self-defense.

She's really good at doing research and finding information when the subject interests her.
Fitting into small spaces and finding ways into basically anywhere. I.e., she could definitely break into someone's house if she really wanted to.
Concerningly skilled at playing Otamatones.

Roller-skating; rereading Sherlock Holmes stories for the five hundredth time; exploring; researching random conspiracies, especially local ones she could investigate. She has a conspiracy board up in Anthony Croce's office where she puts up newspaper clippings, photos, and objects she's found. She and Anthony will also work on projects together where they'll research and try to prove the existence of various cryptids and urban legends. And then force whoever is in their vicinity to sit through a seventy-four slide presentation of Why Bigfoot is Real Fuck You.

Adventurous to the point of recklessness.
She's a very friendly and kind person to be around after her initial period of "why the hell are you hanging around me" wears off, but most people don't stick around long enough to find that out.
If you express interest in something she likes, she will go on and on about it basically forever.
If she's faced with a lot of options, like flavors of ice cream, she will spend a good ten minutes not being able to make a choice while everyone's waiting on her to order, then end up getting the same thing she always does.
Will cheerfully tell you exactly how she'd kill you if she was a murderer. In great detail. And it's pretty smart, too. No one would ever know. She’s not trying to be creepy, she just thinks it's cool.

She has psychosis that's likely from some form of schizophrenia, but she hasn't been diagnosed for anything and isn't sure of its root cause. She has a lot of hallucinations of all sorts--visual, auditory, sensory, you name it--and occasional delusions. She also experiences sleep paralysis almost nightly.

She thinks of Cyrus Hecate, Anthony Croce, and eventually Dallas Dame all somewhat as cool older siblings.
Elliot Luong: Quill's only friend that is actually 1) her age and 2) not a horrific interdimensional entity making repeated attempts on her life.
Azazel: a recurring "hallucination" of Quill's.

She would probably define herself as agnostic. Her parents don't practice any sort of religion. Although she puts most of her faith in provable things like science, she hasn't ruled out some sort of deity or afterlife, and she likes to believe there's something out there.

English; took Spanish classes throughout school but is far from fluent. She also knows a few phrases (namely, curse words) in French and Italian from hanging around Jacques Device, Dallas Dame and Anthony Croce.

She is thirteen her ass does NOT know much about politics. She would appreciate if she were allowed to live her life as a trans girl though

Intern for Cross and Co. PI. She'd like to have her own PI agency or work a forensics job one day, or basically anything that would let her travel interdimensionally.

Earthy green. When she was little, she would proudly state it was the “color of nature”.

Vanilla ice cream

A baseball bat that she bought at a garage sale. The rusty nails hammered into it are her own addition.

Her top five would have to be deer, cats, crows, octopi, and tardigrades, in no particular order. Good luck asking her to narrow that list down.

August 27

Gets mostly C's with the occasional B mixed in. She's planning on going to college for something forensics or criminal justice-related once she's saved up enough money to go (America, amirite).

TL;DR: A fairly normal student in a fairly abnormal world, who in looking for a little adventure gets swept up into a massive mystery.

She’s had a relatively unassuming life so far. She realized she was transgender as a pretty young kid, and was able to transition socially mainly because of her dad. Though she’s been living as an out trans girl for years, her mom just barely tolerates it. Quill's dad was generally more encouraging of her than her mom, but he died in a car accident when she was ten. She begins to see Cyrus and Anthony as sort of parental/older sibling figures because of her distant relationship with her actual mother.
The story begins with her getting an internship at Hecate and Co.. She runs around different dimensions (and sometimes, even other city districts!) with them, encountering funky entities from other worlds and solving mysteries, meeting other characters along the way. All is not what it seems, however, and while growing closer to her new employers, she gets quite a bit more adventure and mystery than she bargained for.

Originally she had this semi-tragic backstory of her dad dying and her mom being shitty to explain her behaviors but then I realized it would be infinitely funnier if she had a totally normal nuclear family life and just turned out exceedingly silly and fucked up regardless. Her parents both work full-time and are therefore somewhat absent from her life, but they both love her a lot.

Chaotic good

She has her own Spotify playlist if you feel like checking it out! Here's a list of some of the songs that remind me of her the most:
- “Only in the Movies” and “In The Sink” by Plumtree
- 「カゲロウデイズ」("Heat Haze Days" ("Heat Haze Daze"?)) by Jin
- 「脱法ロック」("Law-Evading Rock") and 「い～やい～やい～や」 ("whateverwhateverwhatever") by Neru
- "Hang Me Up To Dry" by Cold War Kids
- "When You Die" by MGMT
- 「ぼくらはみんな意味不明」 ("Nobody Makes Sense") and 「リアルにぶっとばす」 ("KICK-ASS *LITERALLY") by Pinocchio-P
- "FIGURE IN THE BACKGROUND" by SNAKE POOL

Quill's Pinterest board

For a much quicker overview of her character, you can visit her refsheet.net profile :-]

Artists of the gallery illustrations, in the order that they appear:
- First four drawn by me; other guy in the second and fourth images is Anthony Croce
- @Mavpinxx
- Me again
- @_spaceyrat_
- @nyas3lf (this one also includes Azazel!)
- @edansa_ca2 (also including Jacques Device and Dallas Dame!)
Go check out their accounts, all their art is absolutely incredible!!

2/1/22 update: This character's the exact same Quill, just with a shiny new surname! I got her original surname from Harry Potter years ago, and while it was taken from such a minor character that I doubt anyone would associate it with the series, it's been leaving a bad taste in my mouth for a while. I also thought it would make more sense for her to have a surname that's more common in Mexico since her dad was originally from there :)