Rougeina

• Build & height: 1.70 m, a dancer's build: long-legged, light, all tendon. She stands on the balls of her feet and is never flat-footed.
• Face: sharp, fine-boned and pale, with a small scar through her left eyebrow and a mouth that rarely smiles. When it does, the crew stops talking. Age 27.
• Hair: crimson. Until Saga III ch. 93 it was long and straight, in a high tail that whipped like a blade. The Gate Yard took it: the Sea Frame went black on a lock of it, which Veyra kept. Since then it is cut short, ragged at the jaw, and she hasn't evened it.
• Eyes: cool green. When she marks a Swap target, a pinpoint of silver-rose light shows in her pupil for a frame.
• Skin & sin-mark: her sin-mark is on the inside of her right wrist: two interlocked rings, one silver (Pride) and one rose (Envy). Envy (unsealed) has inscribed fine rose script up her forearm over 27 years. Pride is sealed, and its ring is cold silver and still.
• Clothing, layer by layer: dark wrapped bindings at the chest · a sleeveless fitted top of charcoal silk · a long split skirt of deep wine cloth slit to the hip for kicking, over tight black leggings · always barefoot, the soles hardened, faint rings on the toes · a harness across the back holding eight thin blades, crossed in an X of four over four · black fingerless gloves.
• Signature item: the eight blades in their X, and the silver-rose afterimages she leaves behind.
• Movement: she is already there. Panels show her after she's arrived. She perches on high places (masts, chimneys, statues) and never sits where others sit.
• Voice: low, clipped and dry. Short sentences. Rare laughter, and when it comes it's sudden, bright and helpless. Her balloons are narrow and sharp-tailed.
• Variant looks: Faceless (Saga II Arc 4): smooth skin where the face was. She still sees and hears, but has no mouth. The 12,001 (ch. 197): eight blades become a storm of silver-rose ribbons. All five (ch. 408, Envy): for one heartbeat, all five of them in one body.

She trades places with anything she can see. A stone, a gull, a lantern, a man's blade in mid-swing, a falling tear. Blink, and she is where the thing was and the thing is where she was.

• Rules: it needs line of sight. Size doesn't matter much, but mass does: Swapping with a boulder hurts, and Swapping with a ship would kill her. It works on her own phantom trails too (ch. 51), because they're hers.
• The erasure kill: whoever she kills is forgotten by everyone except her. The world closes over the gap: names vanish from walls, boards close ranks, even the killer's employers forget. Baldr (Saga I) and Stillmark (Saga II) are carried by her alone.
• What it can't do: Swap with what she can't see (blindfolds, fog, Stillmark's Anchor-Sight, which freezes the places of everything he looks at). Swap twice inside one heartbeat (until the 12,001).

• Home tempo: Astralis, which is unstable and phases with the observer. In Astralis she is as fast as whoever is watching her believes she is.
• Burn cost: every Swap leaves a phantom trail anyone can follow. A full burn leaves a thousand, a glowing map straight to her.

• Phantom trails: every Swap leaves a fading silver-rose afterimage that can be followed. That's how Baldr found the crew (ch. 23), and how Stillmark hunted her (ch. 60).
• She alone carries the memory of everyone she has killed. No one can grieve them with her. Since Saga III, each name slows her heart (Tempo −1 per name she carries alone).

• Stillmark (Bastion, built for her): Anchor-Sight. Beaten in ch. 62 and killed, and now forgotten by all but her.
• Blindness, smoke, darkness: no sight, no Swap.
• Mirrors and copies: a Nightmare that copies her Swap (ch. 51); Kali borrowing the Swap (ch. 9).
• Baldr's ink: "Your ink lands where I was." His orders hit the object she swapped with.
• Her face: Räva can steal it with one laugh (ch. 57). Without it, even her panther growls at her.
• Her fear: being forgotten, especially by the idiots on that deck.

• The black panther: big, silent and yellow-eyed, it moves like a shadow with eyes. She has never named it; it answers to a click of her tongue. It sleeps against her back.
• Her mother's shard: the Archive shard with her mother's misrouting, ROUTED BY ORDER OF ARCHITECT THREE. She keeps it on her, not in Vigolas's coat.

She doesn't fight in front of you; she fights where you were. She opens from high ground and comes in with Swap after Swap from behind and above, eight blades closing in a ring. She finishes with one clean cut. Defensively she's never there to be hit. Team combos: Captain's Pull → Swap (Vigolas throws her toward a spot and she Swaps the rest of the way) · Shared Beat → Swap (she moves on Kompis's kept line) · Sightline → Tear-Swap (Smurjan finds the exact point, she appears there) · MACRO : SLIPPERY → Eight-Blade Dance.

• Wants: to finish the list. To find out what happened to her mother. And, though she'd never say it, to belong.
• Fears: being forgotten.
• Contradiction: the killer who makes people disappear is terrified of disappearing. She is proud, and she laughs at Vigolas's jokes when she thinks nobody's watching.
• Humour: bone-dry. "Took you long enough."
• Habits: sleeps sitting up with a blade; sharpens all eight blades in the same order every night; perches; counts exits.
• Alone: she unfolds the list and reads the crossed-off names aloud, very quietly, so someone has heard them.

• Vigolas: the man she robbed on day one. They have an unspoken understanding: he never asks about the list.
• Kompis: he saw her mother's shard in ch. 3 and never told anyone. She trusts him because of it.
• Kali: the only one who ever beat her at her own game (ch. 9). Grudging respect, and they bicker like sisters.
• The panther: her shadow, and the only one who can't forget her. Except when her face is gone.
• Stillmark: the man she killed out of mercy, whom only she remembers.

• "There's one in there that's mine."
• "I remember every one. That's the price. I carry them so they're not nowhere."
• "A reflection can't go first."
• "I'm afraid of being forgotten by him. By the idiots on that deck."
• "Took you long enough."