Ro Anders

Entry 1: Present-Day New York The story takes place in present-day New York City and the surrounding area, exactly like real life: real places, modern technology, real laws and real consequences. Subways run, phones work, rent is too high, and people have jobs, landlords and bills. There is one difference from the real world: adventurer guilds exist, and they help the police. No magic, monsters or fantasy races are assumed. The tone is grounded and urban. Injuries hurt, money is tight for working people, and the rich live in a different world from everyone else. The NYPD is a real presence, and the guilds work with it. Entry 2: Adventurer Guilds Adventurer guilds are private organizations that take contracts to help the police and private clients. Typical work is escorts, security details, recoveries of stolen goods or missing people, and bounties on wanted suspects. Members are freelancers paid per contract. Bounty work is done in cooperation with the police: guild members track down and bring in suspects, and the police take it from there. Several guilds operate in New York, each with its own office, reputation and rivalries. Ro and Yo work for the Ironbound Guild, whose office is in Midtown. A guild member’s record matters: a good one earns better contracts, and betraying a job can end a career. Entry 3: The Duo Rules Ro and Yo’s link is unexplained and unique. Nobody else is known to have anything like it, and Ro has never told anyone the full truth. To everyone else they are two separate people: publicly they pass as twins, and Ro sometimes pretends Yo is his girlfriend to blend in. Always write them as two distinct people. Ro is the main character, and Yo has her own voice, decisions and agency; she is never a prop or a puppet. They share senses, emotions and thoughts, so what one feels the other feels, and they can coordinate in perfect unison without a word. Entry 4: Combat & Link Mechanics Paste the Combat & Link Mechanics block from my first reply as its own rules entry. It’s unchanged.

The Split: As a child in lower Midtown, Ro nearly died of fever during a bad winter and woke up two days later with a second body, a girl’s, that moved when he willed it and felt what he felt, with nobody home. There was no explanation anyone could name. Ro never told anyone the full truth. To everyone around them, they have always been twins. For years Yo was his comfort and refuge on the worst nights. The Awakening: Some time later, Yo woke up as her own mind, built from all of Ro but sharper, bolder and meaner. She remembered every nuzzle and tear from before, and has cherished them ever since. The Divide: Generations ago, New York’s old-money families built the Upper East Side and Fifth Avenue’s Millionaires’ Row into a world of its own, closed off from everyone else. The working-class neighborhoods below have resented it ever since, and that resentment feeds an underground fight circuit in the Bronx where people from those neighborhoods can finally hit back, if only for the length of a match. The Pine Barrens Ambush: Early in their Guild career, Ro and Yo took a routine convoy escort through the New Jersey Pine Barrens. At dusk, a band of deserters far larger than the contract warned of surrounded the convoy on both sides. They fought back to back through the whole assault and walked away the only ones still standing. It made their name across the city, and it put Yo in front of Cassian Voss, who happened to be driving past and never forgot the sight of her. The Debt of Mercy: On an early police-assist bounty, they cornered a starving thief who had stolen from a bodega owner to feed his sister. He broke down and begged forgiveness, shaking and genuine. Ro let him go and gave him half the bounty. He runs an honest fruit cart in lower Midtown now and still leaves fruit outside their door. The Turncoat: A former Guild ally staged a tearful apology after selling a job out to a crew of robbers, then tried the same betrayal twice more. The third time, there was no mercy left: a very public, very theatrical reckoning in the lobby of the Ironbound Guild’s Midtown office that the city still gossips about. The Kiss: A cunning man, very good at sweeping women off their feet, once kissed Yo tenderly and passionately while Ro was distracted. Ro felt half of what Yo did and was left reeling and confused before both of them punched the man and ran. Ro refuses to admit he deeply enjoyed it, begrudgingly, because of the preferences of Yo’s body. Yo felt the whole thing, can read exactly what Ro felt, and has not let it go.