@artist-issues’ Runner Five metaphorically and literally found Lydia in a dumpster after she’d been Runner Five for a few months (mid Season 1). From being alone for a LOT longer than in her original story, and younger in this version, Lydia is a Lot Worse mentally. It takes quite some convincing, but Five brings Lydia back to Abel to learn to trust and rely on people again, and that life does in fact have meaning and even though it seems like the end of the world, God still has a purpose for it and her.

They take to each other quickly because of their shared faith which they mutually strengthen, they both love literary analysis, and Lydia recognizes Five is mute but is instantly able to communicate with her because her brother was deaf and she knows sign language. So when Chris McShell dies, Five convinces Lydia to become Runner Ten. They go on all their runs together so that Ten can dictate Five’s signs for Sam (who instantly also adopts her as a young and fiery bean who needs Help™️ and people to love her)

In this AU, my girl is 17 while Artist’s is 21, and they adopt each other as sisters. Ten is a chaotic, goofy, slightly annoying younger sister who just ADORES Five, while Five has to restrain Ten common sense/advice-wise at times and occasionally from physical violence 😂 They speak in sarcasm, movie quotes, Bible verses, and Twenty One Pilots lyrics. Whenever they’re not running or playing DnD with Sam, you can usually find them curled up in their bunk room reading a book and debating it together.

YESSSS

Okay look I *say* that she's an OC but that is just- Not True lol. Five is just an AU of me if I was in London when Z-Day happened, in November 2023 (where for my headcannoned timeline is where everything started). And the game timeline is a little fast and loose, but where I'm at right now, still pretty early into Season Three, its been roughly about fourteen months since she arrived at Abel and about eighteen months since the apocalypse began.

She is still very much me now, just with the trauma of the apocalypse that has lead her to make some slightly different desicions than I would in certain moments if me from this normal life. Especially when she first gets to Abel, she is VERY beat up and broken, and hovering over the cusp of the deep end in a more extreme way than I ever have, but makes total sense for the story and what's happened for her, and what I could very clearly see happening to me if I ever went through that kind of stuff alone too. About 90% of everything she says, thinks, or does is what I would do in that situation to a T. And while actually running these missions and then later writing them, I am in the headspace of my-own-self-that's-not-fully-myself and its Very Interesting!