#leolie

So! Julie! She's a year older than Leo, making her 19 to our girl Nora's 18, and an artist

Julie cut off contact with her parents when she was 14 (they sucked), and two years later she found herself mutated, and since her roommate has a green keel-bellied lizard...she got stuck with bright blue-green scales and a pretty long tail

It sucked those first few months, obviously, but she was already kinda a hermit, and what's done is done, so she wanted to focus more on finding what her new normal looked like

Weirdly enough, very few mutants were content to live semi-normal lives, mutant communities were very.....combat focused. Even if Julie was interested in fighting, her tail would give her a massive learning curve, so.......no, that's not happening

So how will she contribute to the mutant community? Well, tattoos don't really stick around through the mutation, and getting tattoos the regular way doesn't really work well (fur and scales don't cooperate with tattoo guns, and that's before you take into consideration things like shedding), so she'll focus on bringing tattoos to the mutant community! Luckily her roommate (a biologist in college) took her mutation well and is happy to help figure out how to make that actually possible

Its not just tattoos, she learns how to do a wide variety of piercings and body mods, her only limit being actual surgery (she has a strong stomach but not that strong). She believes its important to give these options to mutants, its not mandatory, but if a mutant decides they want to have fun with their form, have control over how they look, then they see a future with their mutated body. Its acceptance. The majority of them didn't choose to be this way, but now that its done they should have the chance to have fun with it, should they want that

Outside of her new career, Julie has found a love of parkour. It started out as something she did for convenience, since the rooftops are safer to travel on for mutants than the road is, but it turns out the species she was mutated from are super big on climbing, so when she's feeling particularly pent-up, scaling the nearest skyscraper is the ideal workout for her

I haven't quite worked out how Julie met Leo yet, but Leo's siblings weren't there for it. They had no idea about Julie for the first few weeks, and even after they found out their sister was seeing someone they still didn't meet her for a while after that. Leo hasn't really had many opportunities to have a life completely separate from her siblings, and she loves them, but Julie was a breath of fresh air. Aaaand Leo wanted to keep her GF to herself for as long as her nosy siblings would allow.

Julie is a pretty smart person on her own, she started one of the first "mutant" businesses, of course she's smart. And no matter how chill she is, she likes to stick to her schedules. But with Leo......that all kinda goes out the window. For both of them. Their braincells cancel each other out and suddenly they're staring at a livestream of a goldfish tank for three hours straight.

It has it's downsides, schedules fall to pieces after they start dating, everyone hates it, but it also gives them the rare opportunity to just...forget their responsibilities. And since neither of them do that ever, anyone who plans on interfering with it is gonna find waaaay too many ninjas in their house the next night