Meet the cast: Candy

Candy has no second layer. She says exactly what's in her head about half a second after it gets there, likes who she likes out loud, and would honestly not understand why a person would do it any other way. She's the first woman who really talks to you in NOIR: Skin Deep, and the least complicated person in the whole story.

*Name* — Candace Vega — "Candy" onstage

*Age* — 25

*Role* — a dancer at The Velvet Room

Her look is built for the floor — maximum contrast, maximum impact, engineered to pull every eye in the room under the club lights. And she lives in it exactly the way you'd guess: she takes up space without thinking about it, sits a little too close, puts a hand on your arm before she's known you five minutes, with no sense that personal space is a thing other people keep.

She came up out of Riverside, started out training to do hair and makeup, didn't finish, and drifted into dancing because the money was immediate and the hours bent around a life she was still trying to figure out. Three years on, she's still figuring it out, and she's fine with that. She isn't ashamed of the work and she isn't precious about it either — it pays, she's good at it, and that's as deep as she needs the question to go. She doesn't plan two moves ahead.

She flirts because she likes the attention and likes you — not because it's working toward something, because it isn't. To her you're just a customer she happened to take a real liking to, and she has zero interest in complicating that. You don't have to read her. What you see is honestly what's there — and that's rarer than it ought to be.

She's your way into The Velvet Room — the first taste of that world before the story gets its hands on you. She isn't a long arc, and she was never meant to be one; not every person who matters to a night has to matter to the whole case. Sometimes a good night is the entire point of someone, and Candy is one of the good ones.

More of the cast soon. 🖤