five people in new new orleans

they keep trying to make New Orleans into New New Orleans and I'll freak the fuck out and start hurting people. these guys like it though.

thank you beloved very reverend evan

Billy Balling, 23 years old. 
He's skinnyfat and wears a black tank tops, suspenders, and a flat cap.He lives in a hollowed out hole in the Bayou St. John trash island. he's got a trapdoor in the ground that people run over, he's got water seeping in through the floor, and he barely notices either since he spends so much damn time in VR. he's a freelance immersive environment engineer and renders everything to a totally obnoxious degree; he'll spend weeks sanding fake floors by hand, his body hooked up to a Mem drip so it doesn't forget what it feels like to exist. mostly old guys hire him to build fake jazz clubs that he populates with racist approximations of jazz legends. when he does leave, he rides an old stupid vespa, and pays people to stand next to it on the sidewalk above his hole so it doesn't get stolen. 

He's got what he feels is a sporting, romantic kind of frenemy thing going on with Denita Mcclung, and he's got to repair his vespa that he broke by hitting a pothole crazy and smashing into her apartment so that he can keep orchestrating meet cutes. he refuses to use any more modern transportation.

He buys Mem from Leandra Eagan, and aside from work use, dopes up on the feeling of being a good person and Denita falling for him. he sees buying drugs as a sort of noble charity he's performing for the poor old lady, and likes to give her gas station snacks along with hitting her venmo. 


Leandra Egan 
61 years old, with bitten arms and knuckles and a ratty airbrushed t-shirt that says "Be Yourself: The Mighty Wolf." She's an absolute deadlift beast, can set a bone with her hands, and can gain the trust of any wild animal by letting it bite and claw the ever loving fuck out of her. She's a homeless libertarian who camps in City Park and she's got a thriving facebook following where she posts pictures of hurt pigeons and ai generated dogs giving children CPR. 

She's fine with selling mem, which she gets from the Pushers by training their bulldogs, but she's gotta find out what’s going on with Billy giving her food all the time; she does not eat it, thinks it’s poisoned and will probably start planning to kill him if he doesn’t stop

She's lowkey thinks Xio is the devil on account of the fact that Xio goes to see the Math Addicts a lot. she thinks thinks they’re behind everything. She's got like the opposite thing going on from angel-numbers people; seeing a number freaks her the fuck out, and if you point out that you can count pretty much anything, she might start to cry. 

Xio
31 and looks like a homeless transmasc penguin with a medical cane. they're usually hanging out by the End of the World or bumming a ride to the Free Store. almost completely smothered in like five different black and white layered tshirt that hang to almost to their ankles. their face is invisible but their nose peaks out behind a curtain of braids beaded with rave kandi and if you look close enough the letters on the beads spell out PUSSY PUNISHER RETURNS: LET THE PLEASURE BECOME MY PAIN. They got Sony MDR-Z1Rs clamped on their little noggin bumping house music nonstop. They can beat people the fuck up kung fu style with their cane, and they're really good at gaslighting people too; everyone in the city is always just being crazy and mean to them and it's never their fault. If they ever stop listening to music, their skin will disintegrate and their organs will slide out on the ground: that's that rave death. They'll totally use that fact to win arguments about who's more serious about sound.

Because of this, they've started to go see the Math Addicts, those crazy Ben Franklin kids who go nuts for numbers, so they can get hooked up to a big machine and get readouts on the progress of rave death. more than anything, this makes them feel important; they don't really get anything else actionable out of this. 

They kind of believe Yoko when they say they can fix what's wrong with them, but they really don't trust doctors at all, and the idea of any kind of medical alteration to their body gives them a panic attack. 

Christian Yoko
43, a gender affirming clinician with big shiny diamond COEXIST necklaces in his chest hair and big wet eyes. Super weirdo, obnoxiously cheesy yarn spinner kind of social worker gay guy who finds insecure trannies and gets them to take nanomedicine treatments in the backyard of his Marigny duplex  to slowly replace the cells in peoples bodies and make them into literally new balenciaga ai looking bitches. Has a beautiful Ken Doll arm that says Don't Piss Me Off on it. 

He sees Xio's condition and dysphoria as a reminder of why his beautification obsession his justified. He has some Pusher contacts, and keeps entertaining the idea of asking them to force Xiomara into addiction so they would be reliant on him. 

Denita owes him money for tattoo removal sessions, and he needs it bad; his ex-boyfriend actually owns his house, and he's technically squatting there while Henry finds himself in Alaska. The money for his practice disappears into complex parleys that revolve around traffic accidents on Claiborne Ave. 

Denita Mcclung
27 and a badass transplant goth bitch with tons of chunky silver bracelets and a constant toneless whistle. Under her biker jacket she's got a giant back piece that’s basically just like an up to date image of the stock market. if she looks in the mirror she could assess the value of any corporation even before it goes public, but doing that makes the tattoo burn like hell for days and days. tattoo was given to her by her fucked up Silicon Valley dad who used her as a stock calculator. he owns her, she can’t have a bank account,  driver's license, or anything. 

This really sucks because she needs money to repair her little Central City apartment after Billy crashed his vespa into it which he thought was cute and she did not!
She also doesn't have money to pay for the tattoo removal sessions she’s been doing with Yoko. To this end, she's been working for been working for the Roofies, crustpunks who got burned by sinkholes one time too many and are the kind of people who think that name is funny. she functions as an on-ground contact doing deliveries etc. from them to the Pushers; they shoot down delivery drones and sell the goods inside.