Charlotte

Charlotte is a former human girl. She grew up as a straggler on a near uninhabitable surface of Earth with her mother after her father died of radiation sickness. Her mother had followed coordinates sent out by radio signal that scientists of the Alterna settlement had been broadcasting to signal potential survivors of a safe haven, where Charlotte's mother brought her at age 12. Charlotte spent a good portion of her life living in Alterna, and while she was never as intellectually gifted as the scientists who served as the settlement's leaders, she'd always make sure to help around the facilities, picking up skills in metalworking and botany. She longed for the world above ground more than anything, but she knew such a future wouldn't happen for a long time, so she tried to put that thought behind her the best she could. Upon hearing of the plans to build a rocket to escape Alterna, she was outwardly against the idea. She watched the rocket launch from far away, and was one of the first to see the operation go horribly wrong. As the rocket caught fire and rained debris onto the settlement below, she ran to the locked bunker where emergency experimental cryo-pods were held in hopes of sheltering herself in one.

She managed to enter one before flames reached the area, but upon her entry the freezing process began automatically, and before she could abort, the energy from the blast destroyed the building she was in and sent her pod into the ocean below, the sheer force knocking her unconscious. Every other citizen of Alterna perished in the flames or the aftermath of them, marking the end of the human race's time on earth, leaving Charlotte the only human left in her silicon casing. Her pod sunk to the bottom of the ocean, where the crystals of the shattered Alternan sky fell in and were absorbed by sea life, causing rapid evolution of sea life into a humanoid form. Over those thousands of years, Charlotte lied in a comatose state, the altered Alterna crystals, having been absorbed by sea life slowly mutated her to fit with the appearance of an inkling, one of the new dominant species on earth.

Charlotte's body lay in comatose for 12,000 years before she woke up again. Mr Grizz launching the spirit lifter rocket into space had shaken the earth and washed her cryo-pod up onto shore, where she was found by the new Agent 3. Charlotte woke up from her long sleep dazed with crystals covering her body, being examined by strange creatures who looked like humans, but very clearly weren't. They had pointed ears, thick black markings around their eyes, and strangest of all- they seemed to have thick tentacles in place of hair and spoke a language that was not one she knew yet could somehow understand. This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t right. Who were these people, how did they find the settlement, and where were her friends and family and everyone else?

As these strange people nursed her back to health, Charlotte managed to recover, slowly piecing together what had happened with the help of O.R.C.A, Alterna’s AI who had remained online for the thousands of years she slept, chronicling the fall of humanity and the rise of marine life. It was through this that Charlotte realized the horror of her predicament. She had been in that pod for thousands of years, and during that time, humanity had died out and a new race had taken their spot. She was the last human on earth, and she wasn’t even physically a human anymore.

Charlotte was later discharged from the care of the New New Squidbeak Splatoon and given some and was sent to the closest city, Splatsville, to be housed. She was put into an apartment with a roommate who had already lived there for a few years, an aloof octoling girl named Tsunami. Charlotte spent her first few days trying to live as if everything was normal, which was incredibly difficult, as inkling society's incredibly humanlike appearance was off-putting and strange to her.

During her time in Alterna, Charlotte wanted nothing more than to live life normally again. And now that she had gotten it, finding herself in a place that looked almost just like the human societies of millenia prior, while her family, friends, and every human on earth remained long dead, it felt almost like a twisted joke. She didn't know anything about this world, and she couldn't even read the language that her new species spoke. She was-one could almost say quite literally- a fish out of water. And to make matters worse, her new roommate Tsunami was confused and growing increasingly annoyed with why Charlotte, a 23 year-old, knew less about her world's workings than a 5 year-old child.

After about a week or so of living with Tsunami, Charlotte finally cracked and admitted to her that her inability to understand her new world was because she was a human, and that she had laid in a coma for thousands of years only to awake to an unfamiliar new world and a new physical form to match. Tsunami of course immediately didn't believe her, thinking Charlotte had several screws loose, but even Tsunami couldn't deny that even as strange and impossible such a story sounded like, the pieces fit together perfectly. Tsunami slowly began to believe her, and she ended up bonding with Charlotte as she let her tell her tales of what the last humans on earth were like, tales so elaborate you'd never be able to make them up. Tsunami ended up bonding with Charlotte over small similarities they had, as while Tsunami could never relate to Charlotte's exact predicament, Charlotte almost reminded her a bit of herself when she had just moved above ground and didn't know the language or culture.

Slowly but surely Charlotte adjusted, learning the ropes of how this new world worked, and while she may never fully recover from the magnitude of loss on such a massive scale, she slowly began to appreciate the vibrant culture of the splatlands, with Tsunami showing her around and teaching her about the local culture. She'll never get humans back, but she knows that if her family and friends could see what's been made of earth now, they'd be proud.