Personality
Lea loves new friends and new faces. An evening shift barista at Kiana's Place (the two-floor cafe down the street beside the offices) she's always the one asking the customers what they're up to getting coffee that late: her genuine interest in others' lives radiates from her, and people flock to it.
She's always got the big picture in the back of her mind: the goals she has her sights on (such as paying off her loans...), or the portrait she's painting in her head of the community in this corner of San Francisco, how it interlocks and moves, all recorded in various address books and devices scattered across her apartment.
But what's right up before her gets overlooked in the process, such as the growing disarray on her apartment floor, reflecting the state of her thoughts. It wouldn't be uncommon for her to trap herself outside her apartment by forgetting the keycard. Her landlady, Cindy, has become familiar with her face (and rich off of her door-unlocking fees).
When she's not at work, she sinks no small portion of her income in her main hobby, astronomy. Her tiny capsule apartment in Japantown is littered with cafe coupons and stargazing equipment, but her most prized piece is the 8-inch Dobsonian telescope she always has pointed at her window. She isn't one to unload her woes on friends or strangers, but occasionally she will complain about how San Francisco is just about the worst place to be a hobbyist stargazer.
Personality
Oh, you know how it goes. Lea grew up with her parents in San Francisco, joined her middle school's archery club, watched AI-automated infrastructure crop up all across the city, lost a close friend to incarceration when said friend was discovered to be able to alter genomes with a touch...
She moved out of her parents' home in the middle of college hoping to strike out on her own, but wasn't prepared for the financial burden of living alone, nor the nightmare housing market of San Francisco. This has seen her moving into a minuscule apartment in now-overdeveloped Japantown.
It's what they call a "capsule apartment"—where, to jam as many units in a single block as possible, they built each one about six feet wide and twelve feet deep (with just one window), laid them out in circular floors, and put a single doorway at the inner end that opens straight into the rotating elevator, the only one in the building. The kitchen and fridge occupy recesses in the wall, and the dinner table unfolds from the wall. God help the residents in the event of a blackout...
Lea became a barista because she's certainly not netting any big time jobs with her Creative Writing degree. She still writes casually, contributing to a casual science enthusiast website that is low-key a click farm, in between maintaining Reaches of Twilight, an oftentimes poetic informative astronomy website.
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