#zsb text

im thinking,,, maybe ben worked an entry level food service job in his teen years,,

took multiple 'gap years' rummaging up whatever money he could for school.

the red and white shirt was part of the uniform for this greasy pizza joint,, he would end up keeping it into college.

Also,,, been thinking that he's pursuing an entomology degree w a minor in music?

yeah i could really go into the metaphor here but basically Cookie feels cursed by his past experiences (in particular, his romantic relationships) in a way that causes him to avoid new opportunities with the preemptive assumption that everything will just go wrong again and that he, and everyone around him, will just get hurt. In this way, the 3rd door represents his relationship with Ben and the hesitation and guilt Cookie feels. Even though Cookie really, really, wants to pursue a relationship with Ben, his fear keeps him from opening that door.

Phrozyr (Neo) fell off an icy mountain. In life, she was a hiking guide for groups of people on the same mountain. As Phrozyr, she served the same function she did in life, keeping people on the right path and away from danger by scaring them away from the wrong path. Occasionally, she would make examples of brash hikers who broke the rules and went off-path (killing them), something she saw as necessary to protect others (as the deaths of these rule-breaking hikers would spread as cautionary tales that deterred people from hiking into dangerous terrain).

Three (Douglas) was a school janitor that either slipped and fell or got pushed down a flight of stairs. As a spirit, they mostly stayed undetectable and could only be seen wandering the halls after hours. Because of their fluid nature, i can imagine them slinking through pipes, faucets, and drains, possibly startling the people who caught a glimpse of them.

Romeo (Theo) died of heart failure in a hospital after an incident on stage put him in stress-induced cardiac arrest ((subject to change)). Romeo, using his reality-bending powers, entertained sick patients with performances as they approached death to give them a gentle ease into the afterlife (but because of the gentle and fun aspect of his shows, many of the patients' egos didn't actually persist into the spirit veil, as a spirit is only created in sudden or high-stress deaths).

I can imagine him being a good bed-side companion to patients that had otherwise been given up on by everyone else, like the very elderly or comatose.

Like,, imagine all the stories of dementia patients seeing monsters at the end of their hospital bed except this time its a funny little robot that does a dance.

And Jackie, of course, became "The Siren of the Bluff" after drowning in a lake. She was the most active and vengeful of the four, dragging victims into the depths of the water, and was responsible for many disappearances when she was most active. As is typical of sirens, she would lure men out into the lake with her song.

Friendships:

Eks & Leon

Bea, McKaylee, & Lainey

Siblings (and such dynamics): * = the older sibling

Bea & *Aydan

*Aydan & Alice

Cookie & *Evelyn

*Robbin & Phoebe

*Zachary & Ben

Parent/s & Child (and such dynamics):

Aggie & Polka

Robbin, Evelyn, Zachary & Bea

Groups:

Montes, Liz, & Blank (crime trio)

Heidi, Jimbo, Jax, Polka, & Aggie (circus troupe)

Phrozyr, Three, Romeo, & Zero (Team of spirit assassins)

Mars, Lorren, & Alleric (2nd team of spirit assassins)

Ryan, Pot, Hanz, Creature, & Dei (group of friends with a mission to make their world a better place)

Violet, Aqua, Blue, Minty, Anti, & X (digital vigilante group)

Other Relationships:

Jackie & The Inventor (strangers from different time periods trapped together in another state of reality!)

Eks & Jesse (A boy and the ghost that haunts him)

Demon Aydan & Daniel ~aka~ Servant Demon & Boss Demon (Villain duo)