Moving back to my OCs, here's Mao! She's one of Retta's friends(?) and is a hard-drinking, extremely cynical, sharp-tongued lesbian apothecary who hated the absolute shit out of the previous owner of Retta's body as a result of being bullied by her for most of her life. She struggles to disentangle those emotions and treat Retta as her own person, and even then, she doesn't really understand what Retta is thinking... but underneath everything, she's a surprisingly sweet-hearted girl who wants to look after the people around her.
Like Retta, she was drawn by Riloyoy on twitter; some of her visual identity also comes from Rakkidei, who drew a preliminary design of her in another picture.
Mao's a lot of fun to write about because she fulfils the mandatory gremlin role of the story, but her perspective is also very interesting. When I write the full story, I'm very heavily considering doing it from her perspective instead of Retta's; a big theme of the story is that, just as Retta doesn't understand the world around her, the people of that world don't understand her either, and Mao's perspective of Retta as a cryptid helps to drive that home.
