My Cousin's Keeper/Gabby Noel

Gabby is the POV character in My Cousin's Keeper, and the stealth antagonist of The Last New Start, both written during NaNoWriMo 2021.

She lives in Palmerston, but works in Upper Ashfields for the new advertising and social media management arm of SYL.

Trivia

• Had a Chinese penfriend while in school, who sent her a Captain Kairo collectible figure, and got her into the show.
• Her FriendSpace page is, by her own admission, a mess of reshared cat videos and dumb maths jokes.
  • Except a few months back, when she was fishing for any friends into mdlg, resharing articles asking if it's real in the hope she'd get an answer
• A coworker gave her a bottle of sake on coming back from a holiday; but she seems to have misplaced it
• Had a scary ex named Kieran in high school; the last male she ever trusted. He had recently graduated, and knew how to manipulate more innocent girls to get sex. Spike reminds her of him, although it's not clear if they look alike or it's just because he's an older-looking guy next to Tess.

Appearance

Tess remembers the young Gabby as an outgoing teenager who was a lot of fun, with multiple T-shirts decorated with glitter, a lime-green streak in her hair, and a room practically wallpapered with Paramore posters.

Dressed for work, she usually wear what Tess thinks of as business casual. She has a knee-length skirt and matching jacket, and usually has her hair in a tight bun which shows off a lighter streak in her hair, coming back from her right temple. Sometimes she puts a temporary dye on the streak if she wants to stand out a bit more, but never when she's working.

Relationships

• John Naylor - Cousin
  • Tess Naylor - John's daughter
• Ffrances Jones - girlfriend

Home

• Mentions "programming the vacuum", so presumably she has a fancy automatic one.
• On the landing there is a "faint orange glow", the lights being able to switch to a dim "nightlight mode" to save power. they only light up properly before midnight
• There is now a Captain Kairo figurine standing in front of the TV; a gift from Tess.
• Was originally a four-bedroom house. The master bedroom is in the attic. The others are (from largest to smallest) now the nursery, Gabby's home office (a fancy glass desk, file cabinets containing just about every bill she ever received, and a desktop computer that's fairly high spec but is only really used when Ffrances wants it for gaming), and the current spare room (a boxy little room that was occasionally used for kinky RP, Gabby and Ffrances pretending they're still students in tiny dorm rooms, but is now mostly filled with boxes of stuff that Gabby never got around to sorting out)
• There is a park opposite the house, which is mostly a straight line with odd shaped bits at the sides. Part of it is a disused railway line, mostly torn up now, while the other part is where developers intended the line to go but never built it. The centre is now a cycle path, which has blue-white LED lights that are supposed to be motion triggered. The closest stop for the school bus is on the park too, providing a safer route home if it's dark on the streets, and a couple of stops further along are close to it.