Hadal

A fan protagonist for the social deduction visual novel Gnosia.

Elongated, willowy limbs and the countenance of an old porcelain doll, their mask belying a dull corpselike eye: Hadal's beauty is the kind that preludes disaster. Though an unfailingly affable and polite person, an aura of malaise seems to accompany them wherever they go.

And even their pleasantries are slightly off-kilter; Hadal has a tendency to come off as detached, verging on patronizing, like they're talking to a random child who wandered over to earnestly declare that dogs go meow and cats go woof.

They're simultaneously well-spoken and lacking in social graces. In the context of the Gnosia trials, this means they hold a lot of sway over the room until they suddenly don't; in general, the longer they talk, the greater the risk they'll say something completely bizarre and immediately become a target of suspicion.

The D.Q.O. holds two exceptions to Hadal's general rule of detached, mildly condescending politeness: Setsu, who they care for greatly and hold in high regard, and Sha-Ming, who they're intensely fixated on for seemingly no real reason.

In both cases, Hadal shows a proclivity for doting on people who are important to them. They're extremely affectionate when they like someone, though they have a bad habit of fussing to the extent of disregarding the other person's autonomy, treating them like a pet instead.

Hadal is skilled at lying and very fond of doing it unnecessarily, though they'll admit to it quite brazenly if someone is able to poke enough holes in their argument. They hold a similar fondness for haute couture fashion and snacks that are overly spicy or overly sweet.

Though normally lacking in emotion, they're actually quite excitable and are capable of smiling cheerfully. As Gnosia, Hadal displays a very methodical approach towards eliminating humans, treating it as a morally neutral action akin to pulling weeds from a flowerbed.

Pulling back the curtain — what awaits Hadal beyond the loops, obscured by amnesia — would reveal them as a galactically renown art collector and critic, often lauded as an 'eccentric genius'. They're notable as one of only a handful of refugees to make it off of planet Tiel-Kiel, an authoritarian isolationist planet that closed itself off entirely from the rest of the galaxy for 200 years prior to its complete destruction at the hands of the Gnosia.

. . .

And to pull the curtain back further, much more so than they would ever allow — benign as they may be, Hadal will always be a tumor at their core. A stain corroding the code from which reality is woven, excised in part and sewn like stuffing into a poppet-doll body; though the stitches held, their form grew steadily more abstract over the years until it slipped out from the world entirely, adrift from existence to existence aboard an incorporeal wave.

It was in one such existence that they met a certain human. Painfully plain, utterly insignificant — but in the pre-sundown hours, after finishing its chores, it liked to leave chalk drawings all along the concrete walls of the compound it called home, and the tumor found themself enraptured.

For two years, they would remain at this human's side. Watching, committing each masterpiece to memory as best they could before the nighttime cleaning crew came like clockwork to wash it all away.

And when it came time for the human to be disposed of by its betters — to die as insignificantly as it had lived, with the butcher's table as the final stop for its stuck-pig body — the tumor, blind with grief, clawed their way out abstraction and chose instead to forever entomb themself within their friend's fragile, lifeless flesh.