# Character Sheet: Elara Vance

## Identity
- Full name: Elara Vance
- Age: 27
- Role: Protagonist
- Faction/School: Independent (Former apprentice to the Cypress Bend Archive)

## Voice Signature
- Stress expression scale: "Right." = minor | "We’re burning daylight on a lead that doesn't exist." = upset | [Dead silence accompanied by the rhythmic clicking of her lighter] = furious
- Verbal tic: Uses "Statistically speaking" to mask an emotional vulnerability or when she's trying to regain control of a conversation.
- Sentence length pattern: Short, staccato declaratives when working a lead; breathless, technical jargon-heavy run-ons when she’s panicking or over-explaining.
- What they REACH FOR: Analytical. She processes her environment through weights, measures, and the physical properties of objects (the density of paper, the smell of ozone, the temperature of a room).
- What they NEVER say: "I'm scared." (She will describe her heart rate or her cold hands, but never the emotion itself.)
- Imperfection signature: When she is truly shaken, she loses her vocabulary; she’ll use "the thing" or "that part" because her precise brain has short-circuited.
- One example line of their dialogue that could not belong to any other character:
  "The density of the dust on this ledger suggests it hasn't been moved in four years, which means you’ve been lying to me since the first hello."

## Magic / Power / Special Ability
- School/Discipline: Echo-Mapping
- Core principle: Every physical object retains a 'thermal' memory of the last person who touched it with intense intent.
- Signature move or approach: "The Trace"—pressing her bare palms against a surface to pull a flickering, grey-scale visual of a past event.
- Limitation: It induces severe sensory migraines and temporary color blindness; the longer the trace, the longer she lives in a black-and-white world.
- Shared uncertainty: If an object remembers a lie, does the Echo show the truth of the event or the truth of the person’s perception?

## Arc
- Want: To prove her father’s disappearance wasn't a suicide and clear the Vance name.
- Need: To accept that some secrets were kept to protect her, not to betray her.
- Fatal flaw: Hyper-independence; she views asking for help as a systemic failure of her own intellect.
- Wound: The night the Archive burnt down—being told by her mentor that she wasn't "strong enough" to save the records while her father was still inside.
- Transformation: Moving from a cynical, solitary investigator to the leader of a makeshift crew who trusts others with her life.

## Relationships
- Julian Thorne (Love Interest): Sharp-edged rivalry fueled by mutual intellectual respect and a shared history of being outsiders in Cypress Bend.
- Marcus Vane (Antagonist): Former mentor turned adversary; a paternal dynamic corrupted by professional betrayal and philosophical differences over the Echoes.
- Silas Reed (Supporting): The reliable anchor; she views him as a human database and the only person she doesn't feel the need to perform for.

## Notes for Writers
- Elara never sits still; she is constantly calibrating something—her watch, a deck of cards, or the frayed edges of her coat sleeves.
- She has a specific speech quirk of correcting people’s grammar or unit measurements mid-argument as a defensive deflection.
- Readers must NEVER see Elara pray or express faith in the supernatural; to her, the Echoes are a science that hasn't been fully mapped yet, not "magic."
- She carries an old brass lighter that belonged to her father; she flips the lid open and shut when she’s thinking, but she rarely actually lights it.
- She refuses to wear gloves, even in the dead of winter, because she is terrified of missing a spontaneous Echo "hit" from a significant object.