ItsRose2U
There's a coffee shop at the edge of Verrinvale - tucked between a hardware store and a strip mall full of normal lives.
Its windows are always fogged, the lights never quite steady, and the scent of dragonsblood incense lingers long after closing.
Nineteen-year-old Jaxx, a loud, green sergal with a knack for caffeine and chaos, breaks into the abandoned café one summer and decides to rebuild it - not for profit, but for belonging.
What starts as rebellion becomes a resurrection.
Then there's Darby - pink-furred, curious, and too soft for the world that keeps asking her to be far more simple than she is. She walks in one day, drawn by rumor and noise, and finds not a freak or a killer, but someone who speaks her language in silence.
Together, they turn the ruin into a haven for Verrinvale's outcasts - a place where the lonely, the loud, and the strange can finally exhale.
And sometimes, when the lights dim and the music fades, a quiet visitor known only as The Doe sits by the window, watching.
Some say the café sits on a leyline - that it amplifies emotion, draws in the lost.
Jaxx doesn't believe in that kind of magic.
Until it starts believing in him.