Coco Holmes

ᎪᎪ  ᎰᎵᎺᏍ (ᏥᏍᏚ ᎤᏍᎪᎸ)

R E F S H E E T

B A C K S T O R Y

A descendant of the legendary investigator Sherlock Holmes, Coco Iris Holmes is overall a vigilant, systematic, and deep-thinking girl. She lives in Wisteria, a city on the coast of North Carolina, USA. She is also hardened and experienced for her age, having survived COVID 4 times, losing a hand, and countless attempts to kill her. She has respect and love for her family and close friends, and wants to learn the truth around crimes, paranormal activity, and other things affecting Wisteria, North Carolina, and personally apprehend those responsible or come up with a solution. She also wants to continue her family’s legacy of private investigation. Coco even has the steady gray eyes of her ancestors. Her hair is dark, straight, medium-length, and shiny and she has a large mole to the right of her nose. Along with Sherlock Holmes’ British and Irish ancestry, Coco is also Native American, an Eastern Band Cherokee.

Sherlock Holmes was Coco’s great-great grandfather. In World War I, as he was in his 60s, he went through a late-life crisis. Years earlier, Sherlock had been in a disastrous relationship with Irene Adler. But his disinterest in women had worn off by now. He met a Frenchwoman named Anais Lefevre, a third of his age. Anais’ first husband had been killed in the trenches, and she then had a fiancé that abandoned her. She came to England on a small steamer to escape her war-torn home. They produced 2 sons, born in 1917 and 1922. Sherlock himself peacefully passed away in December 12, 1936 at 82, just weeks before his 83rd birthday. With his much younger wife Anais beside him, the last newspaper he ever read was about King Edward VIII abdicating. The family tradition went on through the 20th century but faded out after World War II. After the war, a son and grandson of Holmes moved to America. Before Coco, her aunt Jenette, who lived in New York City, was the last member of the Holmes family involved in detective work. She died on 9/11 when the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, before Coco was born. 

Meanwhile, on Coco’s mother’s side, her mother is an Eastern Band Cherokee. Her ancestors had managed to avoid the 19th century wave of Native American removals. Despite living on the “wrong” side of North Carolina for this branch of her ancestry, if Coco gets the chance, she may travel across the state to Cherokee, North Carolina for powwows or other events. Her Cherokee ancestors had the family name Tsi-S-Du-U-S-Go-Lv (ᏥᏍᏚ ᎤᏍᎪᎸ), which means “pale rabbit”.

Like her ancestors, Coco is great at detection and deduction. She has a magnifying glass, one which is very important to her, which she just occasionally uses to avoid losing it. The handle is the same one used by Sherlock and his descendants. The lens, however, is not same one that Sherlock had, but the lens it currently has is also special in its own right. The metal frame and glass came from the debris from the World Trade Center, where Coco’s aunt died. Coco takes great notes of cases and keeps as many of her notebooks, files, and flash drives as she can comfortably store. She also knows a lot about weapons and chemistry (mainly drugs and poisons).

Holmes wears her Rubber Shell, which makes her more mobile and offers some protection from small bullets. The Wisteria Police provided her with patches to wear on the back of her outfit when working a job for them. The Rubber Shell is a prototype police body armor jumpsuit, intended to be easy to hide under a police uniform. Coco’s suit was made by a firm as police throughout the US began wearing ballistic vests full-time during the 2010s. The jumpsuit’s inventors thought this was blurring the line between regular police and tactical units, making the general public uncomfortable when seeing an officer. Coco’s suit is rated at NIJ Level III, which can block some rifle bullets. But some more powerful rounds may get through the suit, and Coco doesn’t normally wear a helmet.

Coco owns several guns she uses in her frequent confrontations with criminals. She is a fan of large weapons, and small, cute weapons, but nothing in between. Her most powerful weapon is the HAAWC, an anti-tank missile launcher. But the missiles are hard to get as a non-military, private law enforcer, and Coco never has more than 3 or 4 in her stockpile. She had to use it once against a Lenco Bearcat stolen by the Del Rigo cartel. She also has the BH-25, a 25mm sniper rifle. This fires shells almost an inch in diameter, which come in explosive, armor-piercing, and other types, and can easily penetrate heavy cover or armor. But at 63 pounds, this gun is much too heavy for Coco to use standing up. Coco’s favorite weapon is her YM-6 Urban Breach Weapon, a prototype medium machine gun. This fires 7.62x51mm rounds fed from a belt or magazine. She tucks the gun under her shoulder and fires it with her right hand, or uses the grip, in which she drilled holes for her left prosthetic hook. Another firearm Coco owns is an AssaultLady, a small 2.23mm bullpup with a binary trigger, where one round is fired when she pulls the trigger, and another when she releases it. Coco also has an Uzi, the famous 9mm SMG from Israel. Coco also has a tiny, pink Salamanca 009 9mm pistol and a 7.62mm sniper rifle from Japan called the Hachimaki. She doesn’t use shotguns because they have too short of a range. 

Aside from her detective work, Coco has also done other police duties. For example, she might help catch speeders on the Wisteria area’s highways, rescue a cat stuck in a tree, or talk down a suicidal person. Her vehicle, a Mercedes-Benz A250, also has a sirens and light system on loan from the Wisteria Police.

Coco’s parents moved to Wisteria in the 80s, where they would meet, date, marry, and have a family. It is an city in the Tidewaters of North Carolina that sits on a peninsula between the Pamlico and Neuse Rivers, where they flow into the Pamlico Sound. The city is full of crime, debauchery, and wealth inequality. Wisteria is the main part of the WiBar area, a cluster of cities on the southern edge of the Tidewaters, its neighboring cities being Barfleur, New Bern, and Morehead City. 

Coco’s family owns one half of a nice house at 221B Baker Street in the Regnum neighborhood. Coco’s room is cramped with all her weapons and forensic equipment. She has 3 bookshelves of textbooks and notebooks in the room. Coco keeps all of her notebooks for 1 or 2 years. She also has a gaming PC with a bunch of monitors, and one of her worst nightmares is someone touching it. Her walls are decorated with some LED strips and other girly things, but she also has a Christian cross, an ankh, a Cherokee dreamcatcher, and “CIIIR” written in bullet holes in the west wall. Coco’s parents reluctantly let her shoot the monogram into the wall after Charles III was crowned king, to reflect on her British ancestry. Coco’s number is 357-555-2626.

Coco drives a Mercedes-Benz A250 configured as a police cruiser but she might also ride in the local taxicabs (Wisteria’s taxi sector is dominated by 2 rivaling companies, Hansom Bros. and aCab.) or the Wisteria Metro to move inconspicuously. Coco’s Twitter handle is TheCocoHolmes.

In one incident with the drug boss Jose Del Rigo, Coco lost her left hand. As Coco had a large enough amount of evidence against him, she embarked on a potentially suicidal mission to arrest him. He was extraordinarily dangerous even for a Homeland Security or FBI SWAT team. Even the guards at the federal supermax prison in Colorado were unsure the prison could hold him. Del Rigo was arguably more powerful than Pablo Escobar or El Chapo ever were, and there was speculation that he may have been a werewolf or vampire. As Coco entered the crime boss’s stash room, he tried to shoot her with his homemade railgun, the Investigator Eviscerator. As the boss pulled the trigger, the weapon’s rails surged with huge electromagnetic forces, sending the ammunition forward at Mach 8. The projectile itself pulverized the wall Coco was taking cover behind but missed Coco, but the extreme force of it passing by her hand was enough to tear it off from her arm. Had Coco been hit anywhere on her body, she likely would have been turned to pink and red mist. The wall being destroyed by the bullet caused a large part of Del Rigo’s lair to collapse. This separated the two of them, allowing Coco to escape. To avoid bleeding out, she had to wrap the arm in paper towels from the hideout’s bathroom and hold it with her other hand until she got to the hospital. When an FBI unit checked out the ruins of the hideout, they only found a small fragment of one of the fingernails from Coco’s left hand. Coco, with help from the shop class teacher at her school, Strand High School, built a special prosthetic hook, with a small gripping mechanism, and the hook is detachable. However, Coco is seething with determination and will not let the loss of her left hand get in her way. Even with her disability, she still has her sheer intelligence, family history, and the dirtiness of her city to stand on when it comes to getting clientele.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Coco caught the disease not once, but 4 times. The first time was in May 2020, when she didn’t even feel like logging into her Zoom school sessions. The 3rd time, at the very start of February 2021, was the worst of Coco’s COVID episodes. She once again had to miss school, threw up twice while watching the Super Bowl, and her detective work was for several days limited to giving police departments advice. The 4th time was when she got the Delta variant. Unbeknownst to Coco, the third time she got COVID was after one of Del Rigo’s henchmen sprayed the virus onto her doorknob. 

Coco’s family includes her parents, who live in the floor below her at 221B Baker. She has a brother named Micah, who is 7 years older than Coco and is an official in the Wisteria city council. Micah is lazy and spends a lot of time drinking at Diogenes Beach, but is Coco’s major link to the city government.

Coco’s best friend is Timber Watson, her childhood classmate and a descendant of Holmes’ sidekick. She has straight, brunette, and much longer hair than Coco. Timber lives on her aunt’s farm with her parents. The Watson family settled in Paradise, California, but lost everything in the wildfires in 2018, with no insurance. They were destitute and living in tents. The Watsons eventually raised money for a bus ticket to North Carolina to move in with Timber’s aunt. Timber later enrolled at Strand High School, the same school Coco went to. They were the best of friends, though neither understood why. But then, they were assigned a paper in a history class about how their ancestors or family were impacted by historical events. When Coco and Timber discussed the essay during lunch, Coco told Timber of how her ancestor was Sherlock Holmes. Disbelieved, Timber then said one of her ancestors was Dr. John Watson, Sherlock’s assistant. The girls were descendants of the legendary detective duo, the families of each reunited by fate.

As North Carolina girls, Coco and Timber watch most games between UNC and Duke together, or games involving UWist’s team, the Slates, often while eating BBQ. The Holmes and Watson families are also fans of their local baseball team, the Wisteria Puffers. Every year, the Puffers play “I-99 Night”, a nighttime game against their arch-rivals, the Virginia Vipers. A similar game, the ”Fight for I-50”, is also occasionally played with the Raleigh Moles. Coco and her friend also are followers of the Carolina Panthers and Hurricanes. Coco and Timber are both avid watchers of shows like Outer Banks and Wicked Tuna. WUNB, channel 11, is Wisteria’s PBS station. Channel 11 has its own PBS feed, PBS Pamlico, from 9AM to 8 PM and off these hours, it broadcasts PBS North Carolina’s feed. Sweet potatoes are a delicacy in North Carolina. Coco exercises Southern hospitality in that she will hold doors open for Timber or even civilians, and regularly addresses Timber as “my dear Timber” or “my dear Watson”. 

Coco’s second best friend is her calico cat, Amber. Amber was a kitten Coco adopted when she was 12, saving her from being put down.

The duo are also Zoom friends with Eleanor Edartsel, who lives in New York City. Coco also sometimes employs young irregulars on Baker Street as spies. These are led by a teenager who only calls himself Kason. He is short, has spiky brown hair, and always wears a hoodie with the hood up. He is good at infiltrating gangs, and is also arty. But Kason vapes a lot. In one job Coco hired him for, she very reluctantly paid him with a pack of vape pods. Coco felt guilty for a while after this, knowing how hazardous vaping is to one’s health. She knew her ancestor Sherlock was famous for smoking tobacco, but Coco wanted nothing to do with it. Also being an Eastern Band Cherokee, Coco absolutely abhors the commercialization of her tribe’s sacred crop. One of Kason’s right-hand boys is Sahil, an Indian boy adopted by American parents.

Another ally of Coco is Vitaly. He is from Ukraine. When Putin’s Russia invaded his homeland, he fled to Italy by hitching rides on several cargo trains, and then the US. He now works as a longshoreman on Wisteria’s container port of Adler Island. Vitaly has an H1B visa and is working on getting his green card.

Because Coco is a famous detective from one of the field’s most prominent families, a lot of individuals and gangs want her dead. Coco’s work often pits her in direct combat against her suspects, and she has been hit by bullets more than a few times. There have also been super thought-out assassination plots against her like staged car crashes or “accidentally” dropping a pallet of bricks on her. The closest anyone came to killing Coco was when Del Rigo blew off her hand with a home-built railgun, an invention the military had been trying to accomplish for decades, only to be beaten to it by criminals.

Her archenemy is the drug lord Jose Del Rigo, who is responsible for almost half of Wisteria’s crime. Him destroying Coco’s hand doesn’t help their relations either. He resembles Count Orlok from the silent film Nosferatu, with his bald head, crooked nose, and preference for a trench coat. Along with the Investigator Eviscerator, the railgun that destroyed Coco’s hand; he also has a heavy rocket launcher that can shoot down a fighter jet; and an incendiary polearm made from an oven heating element hooked to a battery in a backpack. One of his more grandiose and evil plots was when he tried to nuke Wisteria, and Coco, Timber, and Eleanor worked together to save the city. Del Rigo has a right-hand man and secretary, Colonel Morelo.

In one of his most evil plots, Del Rigo once stole a nuclear bomb to destroy Wisteria, until that plot was foiled by Coco, Timber, and Eleanor. Del Rigo‘s right hand men devised a plot to hijack a Safeguards Transport. They built a light mecha suit with 20mm autocannons and rotating blades on the arms. These blades could cut through the foam released from the trailer walls to immobilize intruders. A nuclear weapons convoy was ambushed on I-64 west of Norfolk, Virginia. Del Rigo’s men used anti-tank rockets to destroy the heavily armed escort vehicles and helicopters. Del Rigo personally wore the mecha and his 20mm cannon tore through the truck’s driver and guards. He used a high density diamond/nanotube saw to saw a hole in the back doors. Activating the rotating arm blades, he was able to simply shrug off the trailer’s immobilizing foam. The mech had its own oxygen tank to protect Del Rigo from the tear gas released inside. The stolen warhead was loaded into a van, to go through a relay system of henchmen to transport it to Wisteria. By the time Holmes arrived to check out the ambush site, all of the guards were dead and Del Rigo got away.

The nuclear plot culminated in Eleanor and Timber working together to defuse the stolen nuke, planted between the Carolina Column, the tallest building in Wisteria and both Carolinas, and the city hall. Meanwhile, Coco personally chased Del Rigo up the tower and confronted him on top of the main spire. A struggle ensued, with Coco using her hook as a melee weapon against the crime lord. Coco landed some good jabs on the evil man, but she knew the fight was unwinnable on the tiny confines of the top maintenance platform of the spire of North Carolina’s tallest building. Coco next did the bravest thing she had ever done. She used her knowledge of baritsu and pretended to fall off the spire and tower, down to street level. Del Rigo, thinking he had 187ed his biggest single enemy, climbed down the spire and rode the elevator down unnoticed. Timber later went to the top of the antenna and saw the footprints of both Coco and Del Rigo. Timber’s heart sank as it seemed both had fallen 112 stories to their deaths. Actually, as Coco was falling from the building, she gripped a windowsill on the 95th floor with the hook. She climbed up onto the ledge, and holding on with her hook, she used her right elbow to smash the window, and climbed in amongst the shocked and confused office workers in the building.

Coco’s second worst enemy is Al-Qaeda, for killing her aunt in the attacks of September 11.

Coco’s other major enemies include the Roadster Fraudster, an individual who sells stolen cars with the VIN altered, and who always misspells the word sale as “saie”; the I-50 Butcher; the Channel Bomber; the Naegleria Man, a serial killer who uses the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri as his weapon; and A04, a dog fighting ring, who after one of their leaders was killed by a SWAT team, kidnapped the cops’ children and used them as bait to train their dogs.

Coco is also known for killing the legendary, infamous “Gator of the Astervilles”, a colossal truck-sized alligator that had cursed members of the rich Asterville family since one of their ancestors practiced witchcraft in the colonial era, but was then eaten whole and instantly by a massive alligator. In the swamp to the east of Barfleur, using a mannequin of Mr. Asterville’s daughter as bait, Coco shot the gator dozens of times, weakening him so Timber could jam explosives in the beast’s mouth. 

Coco has also investigated the attempted sinking of the aircraft carrier, USS George H.W. Bush. The ship had been hit by a large explosion, one which ripped a hole into her port-stern. After a drive up I-99 from Wisteria to Norfolk, Virginia, she took a boat to the carrier, which had a gaping hole in her hull. Scuba diving into the Chesapeake Bay in her yellow swimsuit, she found ropes embedded into the seabed around where the explosion happened. Coco deducted that terrorists had set a trap for the carrier. Surveillance footage from several places onshore showed that two strange men were active along the Hampton Roads around the time of the attack. Coco identified these suspects using immigration records, allowing the CIA to investigate the matter further. It was later found that al-Qaeda - the same people responsible for killing Coco’s aunt - had developed a new improvised naval mine known as the “Al-Hadiat”, or ”present/gift” in English.

Another one of Coco’s more memorable cases was when the Wisteria Police tried to arrest a neglectful parent, but she fired at the police with a rocket launcher. When the SWAT team was called, she destroyed the armored car, killing all 6 cops inside. Coco was called and she dodged the missiles to shoot the woman in the leg, and the woman was arrested with the murders of 11 police officers tacked onto her original charge of child neglect.

There was also an odd case in which four mean high school students in Barfleur built a trebuchet and put it on a trailer. They lured their teacher to the parking lot, grabbed her, loaded her onto the trebuchet, and launched her from it. Later, at the same school, a janitor found a live warhead from a Mark 48 torpedo in a locker. Coco found out that it was stolen from the navy station in Morehead City to the south, and that a student used a small automotive engine crane to hoist the 1,000-pound warhead into his locker. 

In another case related to a school, she had to help track down a gang of 3 who broke into UWist’s physics lab to steal 0.2 grams of Californium, one of the most expensive elements on the periodic table, worth about $5 million. 

Coco has also helped bust a refund scam ring in Wisteria targeting the wealthy people of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. These criminals were pretending to be representatives of a bank in Dubai. They would contact victims about a transaction and then attempt to refund the money, but “accidentally” transfer too much. They would then persuade the victim to purchase a large amount of gift cards and give them the codes on the back. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation got a tip from someone in the same building as the scam ring and planted an informant in the scheme. But this officer suddenly disappeared. Soon, the call center, in an office building in the Strand area of Wisteria, was raided. Coco was involved in the raid, which involved a brief gun battle of state and city authorities and Coco against the rifle-wielding scammers. The NCSBI informant was found dead, having been beaten and stabbed when the criminals found him out. Also found was a printout from Google Maps of his nephew’s school, indicating to Coco that the scammers were about to target the child in some way.

In yet another one of her adventures, she helped debunk a smallpox scare, when a cartel threatened to steal smallpox from the CDC’s Atlanta lab and release it unless their recently arrested leader was freed. 

Coco Holmes periodically travels outside her home state for work. Five times in her career, she has gone to the neighboring state of Virginia to work cases. These include Del Rigo’s nuclear weapon theft and the terrorist attack on an aircraft carrier, as well as a rapist in the mountains to the west of Roanoke. During this latter case, Coco drove the entire length of I-56 end to end, from its eastern end in the port of Wisteria at I-550 (she had gotten onto I-50 near her home and then got on I-550) to its western end at I-81. She also travelled to Atlanta to investigate the “Gray Widow”, a woman who deliberately married several terminally ill men to get their estates. Coco has also carried out her work in Chicago, New Orleans, and Houston and is willing to take on cases in Tennessee (though she has yet to work a case there).

NON-CANON INFO BEGINS

END OF NON-CANON INFO

Q U O T E S

“Elementary, my dear.”

“There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it!”

“I have the advantage of knowing your habits.”

“I see that you’re, like, professionally busy right now.”

“It’s not easy to express the inexpressible.”

“This whole ring’s like, from Murphy to Manteo [across the whole state of North Carolina]”

“Our own state capitol building is a story of irony. It burned down in the 1800s while workers were trying to fireproof it.”

(upon spotting the Gator of the Astervilles) “Timber, get the bomb ready! I’ll weaken him as much as I can!”

“Criminal drug ship, go f- yourself!”

(confronting Del Rigo on top of the Carolina Column) “Sometimes you have to do it by hand!” (fist fight breaks out)

“Maybe we can catch a bus to Wisteria.”

“Everyone knows NCDOT sucks, so the Wist has to rely on itself to fix the roads.”

(on a road trip, yawning after waking up in the passenger seat) “What state are we in?”

“Aha!”

“Ooh....”

“Herekittykittykittykitty!”

(4 second long gasp) “OMG! TIMBER! I just read on Instagram that Mr. Beast is coming to Barfleur this week!”

(at Burger King) “Hey. Can I get 2 Triple Whoppers, an Impossible Whopper, a Sourdough King meal, 2 Chicken Fries, a Rodeo Burger, a BK Veggie, 2 Ch’King Sandwiches, 4 large fries, 2 medium Dr. Peppers, 2 medium Sprites, a medium root beer, and a large Cheerwine?”

“Be my guest, but U TOUCH MY SETUP U DIE!”

P L A Y L I S T

Theme song 

Others:

🎵🎶 

W I S T E R I A

Wisteria is Coco’s home city, population 797,810. “Wis” is its common nickname, and it together with neighboring cities is called the WiBar area. But it has so much crime, debauchery, and wealth inequality that some call it “Listeria”. Wisteria is North Carolina’s second largest city after Charlotte. It is also the 18th largest city in the US, ahead of Seattle and Denver. The city is located in Pamlico County in eastern North Carolina and contains 82 percent of the county’s population. Wisteria has a Ranally city rating of 2-AA and is classified by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network as a Gamma city. It is the US’s fifth largest banking center, after New York, the fellow North Carolina city of Charlotte, San Francisco, and Minnesota’s Twin Cities. It is also the second most major fishing city in the mainland US after Empire, Louisiana. Wisteria has the area codes 357 and 745, and zip codes beginning with 269 or 285, with 28514 being the most common zip code. The city proper has an area of 206 square miles. This gives it a population density of 3,868 persons per square mile. Jenny Haniver is the mayor of Wisteria.

Among truckers and other CB radio users, the city is called the “Big Vine”, because the city’s namesake plant is a vine. Wisteria is also known for its excessive freeways. Interstates 50, 56, and 99 serve the city. I-99 runs throughout the easternmost areas of North Carolina, from Wilmington, Delaware to Savannah, Georgia. Interstate 50 starts at I-25 in Raton, New Mexico and ends at Diogenes Beach in Wisteria. I-56 travels through southern Virginia before turning southeast into North Carolina. These roads also have several triple-digit auxiliary or bypass roads, the most popular of these being I-499, which snakes throughout the WiBar area. Some miles west along I-50, I-30 branches off in a TOTSO to go to Fayetteville, then Charlotte and beyond, eventually ending in Fort Worth, Texas. Many of the Wisteria area’s highway interchanges have even earned local nicknames like “The Morehead Maze”, “The Amoeba”, “The Squid”, and “The Ear”, but the busiest by traffic volume is the “Half and Buck”, the I-99/I-50 interchange in Lower Wisteria.

Wisteria also has an extensive metro system, moderately necessary for a city its size. Amtrak also serves Wisteria, with a station on the south side of the city. Despite Wisteria having more robust public transportation than even the larger city of Charlotte or the state capital of Raleigh, it has one of the most lenient and flexible parking systems of any city in the US. Parking lots called “extendable parking” lots are found throughout the city. Parking in these lots is free for up to six hours a day, but more time can be purchased online or at the parking booth. Parking spaces along streets are more expensive and enforced as they would be in any other city.

One landmark of Wisteria is the Carolina Column, a 1,421-foot (434 m) tall skyscraper with 112 floors that was the second tallest building in the world when opened on Thanksgiving Day 1977 (The Sears Tower still beat it by just 29 feet). Starting as a radical proposal to drop real estate prices in Wisteria by creating lots of space, the Column is known for its dark green facade and the top few floors and short spires clad in orange. Though not the tallest building in the world, it had the most floors, at 111 when it was first created, one more than the World Trade Center in NYC. It remains the 29th tallest building in the world; 9th place going by floors; 5th tallest in the US; and the tallest in the US outside New York or Chicago, the 13 original colonies minus New York, and in any city under 1,000,000 people in the world. The building was an early attempt at arcology, the science of condensing a city into a single large structure. The Carolina Column has a restaurant, observation decks, and even a movie theater in its top few floors. A rooftop outdoor observation platform, considered the 112th floor, was added in 1998. 

Before the Carolina Column was built, the 1,000-foot, 72-floor Saitama Building was Wisteria’s tallest tower, built in the mid 1960s by a Japanese bank, as Japan enjoyed an economic boom. The Saitama Building has a large green Japanese-style roof with “Saitama” written on the wall in Kanji. The building’s owners claim these to be the largest Kanji characters on a building outside Japan in the world. It is the second tallest building in the city and the Carolinas. Before that, the tallest building in Wisteria was the Fezziwig Building, which has 48 floors. The Fezziwig Building was built after World War I, when the Fezziwig Organization moved to the US from Britain. Wisteria is also home to a UN field office in a 57-floor building built around the same time as the Carolina Column. 

Most buildings in Wisteria outside the business district are one to several stories high. Most of the city between Paget Street and the Neuse River is defined by narrow, dense brick buildings, such as 221B Baker Street. The city has about a dozen Waffle Houses, including three in the Carolina Column alone, two on Diogenes Beach, and one at the airport. As the second largest city in North Carolina, Wisteria is also dotted with Food Lions, and Cheerwine can be found almost anywhere. The WiBar metro area has 18 ABC liquor stores, state-run liquor stores that are the only places to legally sell high-alcohol beverages in North Carolina. This state taxes liquor so much that many drive to South Carolina to buy cheaper and privately-sold liquor. But in the case of Wisteria, this drive is over 100 miles long, making it such that it would only be cheaper to go to South Carolina to buy liquor, if buying a lot of it, due to the cost of gas. This has spawned a black market for liquor in northeastern North Carolina.

The third tallest building in North Carolina is the Bank of America Center in Charlotte. Though Charlotte is a larger city than Wisteria, it relies mainly on horizontal sprawl and has fewer and shorter skyscrapers. Wisteria does have its own FAA Air Route Traffic Control Center, ZWI; while Charlotte relies on Atlanta’s, ZTL.

Wisteria, despite paralleling Charlotte in size and importance, is inferior to it in sports. It is the 7th largest American city with no NFL team (and the second largest outside California and Texas after Columbus, Ohio). However, aside from UWist’s Slates, Wisteria has one non-college higher-league team, the Wisteria Puffers of Minor League Baseball. Since the Puffers entered the Triple-A League in 1991, they have had vicious rivalries with the Virginia Vipers and Raleigh Moles. With a pufferfish as their mascot, the team colors are white, dark purple, and xanthous, a shade of orange-yellow.

Wisteria’s most popular newspaper is the Tider, which is published twice a day due to the many events that happen in Wisteria. 

A few blocks from Coco‘s home on Baker Street is a large mall known as the Circle of Life. It contains 159 stores with a capacity of 192 and is the second largest mall in North Carolina. The building is circular and surrounded by Conan, 12th, 16th, and Stewart Streets. Its corridors are laid out in concentric circles with four linear corridors. The building has six levels. Its anchor tenants are Target, Kohl’s, and the largest McDonald’s in North Carolina by table count. The mall was affected by Hurricane Florence and the COVID pandemic but the resolve of its owners and its popularity kept it open in both cases. Coco shops at this mall because it is within walking distance of her home. Another mall in Wisteria is the Helios near Diogenes Beach. This mall is smaller, with 30 stores. There is one store in Helios that sells only wetsuits.

Coco goes to Strand High School, on the north side of the city. Wisteria also has the University of Wisteria on the mainland, near the intersection of I-50 and I-499. UWist’s athletic team is the Slates, Coco’s favorite basketball team. But the university was the site of a scandal in the 2010s, when a student’s final grades came back after he had graduated, which dropped his GPA too low for the cum laude distinction he had been given. The school revoked his honors. Distraught, the student committed suicide by jumping off the I-99 bridge by Diogenes Beach. UWist is also a notorious parking trap, with the university explicitly using parking tickets as revenue. UWist is home to a major reserve of the element Californium, which it receives from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to be distributed across the US east coast and Europe.

To the south of Wisteria, along Interstate 99, is another city, Barfleur, home to Coco’s best friend, Timber Watson. It’s smaller in population and area, but at least as dirty as Wisteria, with the nickname “Barf”. One tourist attraction in Barfleur is the “time capsule Walmart”, which still has a video game area with a demo setup, and sells aquarium fish and has lobster tanks. The Hotel Farquhar is that city’s tallest building. Further south still is Morehead City, and to the west of Wisteria is New Bern (Morehead and New Bern exist in North Carolina in real life). Manteo International Airport (WIS) is on the western side of Barfleur, with 3 runways and 2 terminals. The airport is the international airport for both Barfleur and Wisteria. The WiBar area also has the smaller Pamlico Airport with shorter-distance service to other cities in the region, mostly through PotatAir. If any given destination has at least one Food Lion or Waffle House, PotatAir most likely offers flights to it. They are a major regional low-cost airline in the southern US, with Wisteria, Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, and Dallas as its major hub cities. Their mascot is a sweet potato. WiBar, together with the Research Triangle, Piedmont Triad, and Charlotte, form the Super Polytope region containing most of North Carolina’s population.

The suburbs between New Bern and Wisteria have gained the local nickname of “Westeria”. The industrial area of Goose City is the largest of these suburbs, followed by Bayboro and Oriental. This area is dominated by McMansions, freeways and stroads. Near the cloverleaf between US-170 and I-499 is the only Buc-ee’s in North Carolina. Coco eats here sporadically.

The Pamlico tribe historically lived in the region. The large inlet to the west of the modern city was named Henrietta Maria Bay by English settlers. Bath (established in 1705) and New Bern (1710) were the first English towns in the region and in North Carolina. Centuries later, both of these towns would be encroached by Wisteria, becoming mere suburbs of the latter. In 1731, a permanent fort, Fort Bunn, was built by the British on the land between the Henrietta Maria Bay and the Pamlico sound as a coastal defense for New Bern. The town of Devon was created to accommodate the fort. During the American Revolution, Barfleur, on the opposite side of the Neuse River; and Regnum were established by loyalists to Britain as breakaway communities of Devon. Strand began as a fishing town on the north side of the peninsula in the 1820s. 

The Civil War hit the area hard, with naval action occurring in the Pamlico Sound. Fort Bunn was occupied by Confederate troops at the beginning of the war, who dug trenches between the fort and Diogenes Beach. By the beginning of 1863, the fort was successfully secured by the Union. More than 2,000 slaves were freed. Following the end of the war, the towns on the peninsula agreed to unite and pool their resources for reconstruction, supervised by the U.S. Army to prevent a new rebellion. Fort Bunn was decommissioned in 1892 after 161 years of service and its land turned into a park.

The resulting large town was named Wisteria, thought to be from the wisteria plants that the area’s soil supported, though these were dwindling due to overfarming and urban development. Mauve dye had just been discovered by the British chemist William Henry Perkin, allowing the new city to economically use purple as its official color. Wisteria grew as a port city thanks to the digging of the Portsmouth Canal in the 1880s, a clearing of the Outer Banks that made it easier for ships to enter the Pamlico Sound. Meanwhile, a Eucharistic miracle occurred at Wisteria’s Catholic chapel on the morning of May 10, 1884, in which a host began to develop blood vessels and move with a crawling-like motion on its plate. Shortly afterwards, the parish was promoted to a diocese, Dioecesis Glyciniensis, and its priest made a bishop. A new street, Diocese Street, was built to serve the chapel.

Skyscrapers and automobiles had begun to appear in Wisteria by the beginning of World War I. In 1923, Wisteria’s last dirt street, Scarlet St., was paved with granite blocks (though some dirt roads remained in the first ring of suburbs into the 1960s). At the same time, asphalt began to be laid on other streets. At the moment the US Highway system was formed in 1926, US-17, US-64, and US-70 served Wisteria. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration extended the Barfleur Peninsula in a land reclamation project. 

As World War II began, the US-64 segment in Wisteria was expanded with the Wisteria Inner Freeway, built in 1941-42 to help Lend-Lease aid more quickly get to the Port of Wisteria to be shipped to Allied nations. With US-17 entering Wisteria from a bridge across the Neuse River, Barfleur finally experienced significant growth as a suburb of Wisteria, before becoming a city in its own right by the middle of the 20th century. From 1957 to 1996, Wisteria was North Carolina’s largest city. As Eisenhower began construction of the new Interstate system, Highways 17, 64, and 70 were rerouted in favor of the new freeways. An extension of US-35 to Wisteria was completed in 1970, reusing some of US-17’s old routing. The interstate running from southeastern Wisteria to the west began its life as I-40 when it was opened in the 1960s. The Devon Tunnel was built to carry this highway under the historic and popular Devon district. But when the interstate segment from Raleigh to Wilmington was opened in 1984 and I-40 was rerouted onto it, the old Raleigh-Wisteria segment was made part of I-50. In 1991, a tourist-oriented extension of this interstate to Diogenes Beach was opened, running through the new Regnum Tunnel and indirectly intersecting with I-56 before ending into Sound Ave. by the beach.

Wisteria continued to grow as the Carolina Column was opened in 1977. But by 1996, Charlotte had retaken its title as North Carolina’s largest city. The Column and many other skyscrapers were evacuated during the 9/11 attacks, in which Holmes’ aunt was killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Owing to Wisteria’s emphasis on tourism, the Carolina Column’s observation deck was reopened within 2 weeks of 9/11. Twenty years later, with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia under Vladimir Putin, the Wisteria metro area began accepting Ukrainian refugees. In Barfleur, an area near the I-99/I-499 highway interchange became known as Little Ukraine. Coco’s friend Vitaly was one of these refugees. Wisteria has also recently found itself in the action after Roe v. Wade was overturned. It has been rumored that the UN, which has a field office in the city and is headquartered in New York, plans to buy a piece of land and declare it as international territory in order to open an abortion clinic there.

Being in the Tidewater region, most longtime inhabitants of the WiBar area speak in the Hoi Toider dialect. Wisteria itself has its own slang. To “tivy” or “tivy off” is slang for going to sleep or retiring.

M E M E S

E X T R A S  /  M A P S / L O R E

The world according to Coco:

The Wisteria Metro:

A map of the region:

World cities and their distance from Wisteria:

Destinations offered by Coco’s favorite budget airline, PotatAir:

Road stuff:

You can see Wisteria from Hatteras, NC: (cta Oydman on Wikipedia for the original pic)

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DESIGN CHANGES:

 (2/23/2022): I have found out that Sherlock Holmes’ original canon eye color, as Arthur Conan Doyle himself envisioned, was gray, not green. His eyes were described as steady gray in The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone. So I will adjust Coco’s design. I will also tidy up her ref anyway and add more weapons.

 (9/11/2022): Redesigned Coco’s suit so the legs look more badass.