Isabella Garcia

Isabella Garcia is a six-foot capybara woman who discovered goth culture at thirteen and never saw any compelling reason to leave. What began with black nail polish and an aggressively dramatic eyeliner phase developed into a genuine love of the music, fashion, art, and theatricality surrounding it. Her parents assumed she'd grow out of it. Isabella is now an adult with an ever-growing choker collection, several pairs of platform boots, and considerably better eyeliner technique.

Isabella dresses almost exclusively in black, favors lace, dark lipstick, silver jewelry, and enough accessories to make getting through airport security a strategic exercise. She loves post-punk and gothic rock, horror movies, antique shops, old cemeteries, peculiar historical objects, and plants with warning labels. Her apartment contains enough candles to suggest either excellent ambience or emergency planning.

Despite appearances, Isabella is warm, sociable, and almost aggressively wholesome. She's the friend who remembers birthdays, brings snacks, compliments strangers' outfits, and notices when somebody at a party has gone quiet. Her dramatic streak mostly expresses itself harmlessly through elaborate Halloween plans, themed movie nights, and occasional gatherings with friends that they refer to as “the coven” despite possessing no detectable magical abilities whatsoever. Attempts at solemn occult ceremony have historically deteriorated into takeout and gossip.

Isabella has never understood why enjoying dark things is supposed to require being miserable. She likes spooky stories because they're fun, old cemeteries because they're beautiful, and goth fashion because looking like the mysterious proprietor of a cursed manor makes an ordinary trip to the grocery store considerably more interesting. She is perfectly capable of discussing mortality over coffee and then becoming extremely excited because somebody brought cupcakes.

There is, however, one carefully guarded weakness in Isabella's aesthetic defenses: she genuinely loves cute pastel things. Hidden among the black clothes, horror memorabilia, and dried flowers is a small but steadily growing collection of colorful toys and My Little Pony merchandise. Her friends know about it. Isabella knows they know about it. Everyone has silently agreed that preserving the illusion is more entertaining.

Isabella doesn't consider any of this contradictory. People contain multitudes.

Some of those multitudes are pink and have little pictures on their butts.