Some Q&A regarding V "Sketch" laCroix...

There isn't much visual information about her available yet due to the existing tablet being too slow and finicky to use. As soon as we get a new tablet we'll be sure to draw the actual character sheets for the band members. For now, here are some commonly asked questions about the lore!

Q: What is the TML?

A: The Technical Musicians League is the very league that every musician dreams of entering because it gives participants the only chance to play sets in the largest arenas and stages to compete for the largest amounts of prizes. It's kind of like the CDL or the NBA except it's instruments.

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Q: Is Sketch's real name Fuyuka Matsumura?

A: No. She has six first names and six last names but V really is her name and her primary last name really is laCroix.

Her real name is V Sevenspike Celeste Nelephry Yumi Hyerim Moon-Shichigawa-Schwarz-Beaulieu-laCroix-Cassidy I. No, she is a pure European. She doesn't even have any Latino blood either. She also goes by "Verity" or "Vivace".

She was mistaken for someone by the name of Fuyuka by the Matsumura family, only because her younger twin sister was reincarnated as the oldest daughter Hanami and the laCroix family did have minor ties with the Matsumura family even before then. However, because Sketch picked up the legendary doomsday axe when she was ten, she managed not to die for 15,000+ years, unlike Hanami, who passed away some time while Sketch was separated from the rest of the laCroix family (the reincarnation process allows Hanami to still remember all events prior to her previous deaths; she even helped Sketch escape from the Matsumura family).

Aside from this, she was raised in other parts of Tokyo for a time by her one of her aunts' Shichigawa family. She often sneaks to visit the Shichigawa family and has a room dedicated to her backup equipment there. However, this was only possible because her said aunt married a Japanese man. The said aunt is a famous ice cream parlour owner.

Despite having uploaded various videos and posts debunking all affiliation with any Japanese mercenary clans, the Matsumura family and various other mercenary clans are still trying to hunt her down to this day.

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Q: Can Sketch end up losing the doomsday axe at some point?

A: The legendary doomsday axe literally makes the owner the new deity of death, and it can be disarmed in three ways.

The first way is that the owner discards the axe willingly. Many deities found the weapon to be too much power for them to handle and it had driven them mad, so they did eventually forsake it. This isn't a problem for Sketch, however, as by discovering that there are strings installed across the weapon she discovered a way to not only keep herself alive but fully bend the weapon's power to her will, so if she ends up losing ownership, that won't be the reason why. She pretty much uses the axe just like another guitar and she doesn't have much other concern aside from maintaining the said power just as some kind of insurance policy, so the weapon is virtually free to do whatever it wants as long as it's there whenever she needs it.

The second way is that the owner gets hit by a disarming curse, which is only possible if the deity wasn't really that powerful to begin with. This isn't a problem for Sketch either as unbeknownst to her she already happens to be one of the Elder Gods of Destruction, which means she was already one of the gods before she picked it up. She also gained ownership of the White Ring and the Black Ring which control the Queen of Light and Queen of Darkness respectively, which makes her all the more immune to the disarming curse. However, there are only three beings that can cast the disarming curse, all three of them being underlings to one particular demon lord that Sketch has a vendetta against, so she is pretty much the last hope of keeping the axe from the demon lord and preventing the entire world from eternal slavery. This is why some of the people who tried to force-recruit her into their little crusade ultimately decided to let her keep going down her path of being the eternal rockstar. By holding onto the axe she's doing everyone a favour by keeping it from the wrong hands. She doesn't even have any real agenda concerning it, she just wants to be a rockstar (and that means both queens are also free to do virtually whatever they wished as long as they come back whenever Sketch needs them).

The third way is the only actual way Sketch can lose ownership of the axe. Unlike the other gods that gained ownership of the axe in which they just couldn't die, for Sketch, respawns are real. That means she can technically "die" but all that the doctors have to do is mend her back up and use the defibrillator to bring her back to life (this is why she accumulates more and more stitches as time goes on). There is just one problem with this. If doctors can't put her back together, she can't be revived, so if she ends up spewing into a million pieces, that's game over. The chances of this is still rather high due to her unfathomably bad luck.

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Q: Does the legendary doomsday weapon have a name?

A: Lilith. She is also the female spirit that lives inside the axe. The queen-genies of the rings also have names. Karin for the White Ring, Emily for the Black Ring. In dialogues Sketch refers to them by these names a lot, and even in the actual story and material they will all be referred to by their names to keep the protagonist's serious yet oblivious nature.

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Q: Why is a naval officer living with her as a common law partner? Isn't she trying to avoid marrying him?

A: Sketch was avoiding marriage in general, and she really did try to marry her bandmate Sophie while disguised as "non-binary", only as a means to make sure she doesn't end up in the same predicaments she wound up in when she was younger. That said, she never had any animosity toward Captain Patrick Cassidy, it's just that neither of them were aware that there was an arranged marriage planned for the two of them and they would never know until way after the fact. At first she's bitter over the fact that she did wind up carrying his biological daughters, but one, he doesn't even like it in the navy (he's only there just because both his parents are traditionalist admirals), and two, most her daughters did opt to join her band as soon as they first met, the daughters knowing fully well that Sketch is a returning veteran rockstar. This would eventually lead to Patrick and Sketch marrying each other anyway, due to the unconditional love and support from the whole family, hence the Cassidy name. Sketch in particular would even go as far as build stronger armour and weapons for her husband's men, and the same would go to two other naval officers she would eventually befriend.

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Q: Why are the band members not allowed to have sex or drink/smoke/vape?

A: It's not so much that Sketch is intolerant to those things as much as she had suffered a lot of trauma regarding sex and the aforementioned substances. Half her family were heavy smokers and drinkers and they've pretty much thrown their lives down the drain, while the other half, including herself, wound up unfathomably unlucky and ended up as either rape victims or wrongfully convicted over a felony charge due to being disabled. Sketch happens to be one of the few who suffered both rape incidents and wrongful convictions, but she does happen to be the unluckiest in the laCroix family, having suffered much more of those things simply because of bad luck vs everyone else combined.

Fun fact: Sketch's late mother was the one happy-go-lucky lady who didn't have to suffer any of the laCroix curse and became a stage manager that focused on "putting on a show" and "delivering a performance" which was one of the major factors that led to the corruption in the music industry, and this is why she resents her mother so much. Her mother didn't have to go through anything, while she herself wound up going through the worst of the worst.

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Q: Why can't the band members have tattoos? A: Sketch never said anything about tattoos. In fact, she does have a barely-noticeable tattoo of a pair of blue dice depicting box cars on her right arm just below the shoulder. She also has a dagger design on the dorsal side of her right hand. Due to her shapeshifting capabilities she can also be seen with a tribal tattoo across her forearm occasionally. It resembles a geometrically-perfect blue star (with black outlines) and a long black wing with thin feathers protruding from it, very much like the ones often seen in biker decals that are meant to resemble a coat of arms.

As for why other band members don't have a tattoo yet, that's simply coincidence.

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Q: What is a "technician"? Why does Sketch resent natural entertainers so badly? Why is she strongly against people using stage effects?

A: The Technician vs Performer dynamic is the very main focus of the lore.

You have the Performer type players who just do everything naturally and they're more focused on putting on a show and entertaining people and doing things just for fun. Most modern acts in the TML fall into this category, which is ironic for a "technical" musicians league, which further drives a chip on Sketch's shoulder.

And then you have the Technician type players who are the polar opposite. Their craft is their lifeblood. They've put in years and years of commitment and hard work into what they do. They may not enjoy it (they don't enjoy it at all), but they have no plan B as they are inept at everything else but they are really exceptionally skilled at the one thing they do.

If we were to put this on a scale, we have the Performer-Technician scale, with the pure Performer being 0 and pure Technician being 14.

Most characters in the lore fall somewhere between 1 and 4 while most of Sketch's bandmates fall closer to the middle. There are some bands and their respective characters that fall closer to 8 or 9 and they would be considered the "normal" Technicians.

Due to Sketch's unique circumstances she is known for her unconventional warfare (i.e. unconventional and unique ways of doing things), but she still goes about them in a very calculated and intellectual manner with the sole purpose of trying to win and gain critical acclaim, making her a hard 14, albeit a different breed of a Technician but still a Technician nonetheless.

The major problem she sees with the way things are is that most of the labels tend to celebrate putting on a spectacle above pure musicianship and skill, and what she has a strong distaste of regarding this is that only those who won the genetic lottery and were born with "good" looks and "good charisma" ever get a chance to take the large stages, and even then, the labels tend to favour an insider's son over someone with the actual qualities they look for.

Sketch sees technical skill as the great equaliser. It allows anyone with enough research and hard work to stand a fighting chance. It allows the regular people the chance to become a true rockstar and provide a much more powerful experience with none of the tricks or fakery. This is why she is often seen lamenting over the "good old days" because they really were the good old days where you had to be exceptionally skilled just to be let in the door to the industry. She also loathes the fact that all of the years and years of music theory teachings from the classical eras were long since forgotten and she has the toughest task of all: to reinstate the importance of technical skill and reteach the lost lessons on music theory. She is fully convinced that if one is really skilled at one's instrument, one would never need stage effects or any other form of trickery.

Sketch is far older than she actually appears because she picked up Lilith at the age of ten which led her to only age in intelligence since then. She is actually a legendary veteran who wound up locked in prison for over 31 years just because someone decided to throw a ton of money at a bogus case just because they hate her, and she just began rehabilitating to catch up on everything she missed while she was away and return to the field as the last guardian of music theory.

Another important part of the lore is that this "delivering a spectacle" way of doing things (and subsequently focusing on the performance aspect rather than the actual proficiency and skill on the instruments) and using visual effects for the stage sets are actually against the regulations. The admins and judges simply have grown less and less discerning and let pretty much everyone else get away with murder... except for Sketch. She was pretty much singled out but the actual reason why she's bitter is the fact that she is the only one ever that keeps to the integrity of the TML.

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Q: What does Sketch look like?

A: Her natural hair is a dark blue, just like her mother, but what makes Sketch stand apart from the rest of the characters in general is that she would always dye her hair a bright teal and never cut or tie her hair which means she would just put it all down and keep it long. That is, if you don't count the obvious... the fact that she looks just like one of the Thrasher-type zombies if you don't count the hair and the bluish skin, blue inside of mouth, and blue blood. She also has no lips and her mouth is very small. She has large prosthetic eyes that can change into any colour. She has no nose.

A Thrasher-type zombie is known for having long dark hair and massive claws her fingers have grown into. They are known to be only clad in the remains of a tattered white tank top and panties and not wearing any shoes. Because Sketch also has massive fingers that look like they have grown into Thrasher claws, she is often mistaken for a Thrasher-type zombie. She is actually an amalgam of at least 31 different species along with her human self; one of the said species just happens to be a shapeshifter and that's why you don't see the features of the other species.

The massive claw-like fingers that Sketch has is both an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time. Such fingers make Sketch require guitars with at least nine strings that are custom made but when she does obtain the instrument she needs, she is very agile and proficient on the fretboard.

She is often seen wearing either her band uniform or player jerseys of esports teams she owns, all of which are blue, or black with blue accents; but she is never seen wearing anything casual. She can also often be seen wearing formal attire which will always be black with blue accents. She is often mistaken for a villain due to all the black she wears.

The major difference between Thrashers and Sketch is that Sketch managed to escape the facility she wound up in very quickly and thus she never came in contact with the virus. While Thrashers did end up with hands that grew into large claws, Sketch was just born with large claw-like hands. Due to this important difference, Sketch is simply mistaken for a zombie but was never a zombie to begin with.

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Q: Why does Sketch hate sushi/Japan? A: She never said anything about hating sushi or anything Japanese. She just dislikes it when she, her band, or her bandmates get mislabelled as Japanese. She seems very stoic and always-angry on the surface but in actuality, she's trying to tiptoe around everyone's perception of what the "real" V laCroix is because she has a very legitimate concern of being replaced by an impersonator one day, and this had happened before, which makes her all the more alert at all times. Not even her bandmates know this (only the most dedicated fans do) but her favourite is the Eel. She also loves the Masuzushi.

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Q: Why does Sketch speak in a British accent if she's French? Her bandmates don't have a French accent let alone a British accent...

A: Back when Sketch was still a big name neoclassical shredder she travelled between France and UK a ton. It got to the point where she would go as far as attend a British high school when she attended high school for the first time (obviously she would end up forced to go to high school over and over again for different unlucky reasons despite having already gotten her D. Tech, D.M.A., Ph.D. in culinary, and D. Chem much earlier). She also occasionally speaks in Scottish and Irish accents.