**Warning for mentions of homophobia and its consequences**

Jolene Harris' is from a ruined world that used to be much like our own. Though she's lived in the Paperverse for several months now, the mental and physical trauma linger with her, inextricably welded into her psyche. Because of this, she is slow to trust and slow to befriend, which has affected her ability to make a living as an adventurer.

Before her world was warped and destroyed, Jo was unambitious outside of the realm of her hyperfocuses: climbing, hiking, automotive mechanics tinkering, and pretty nerdy media consumption. She grew up the youngest with four brothers and a very conservative, rural family, was so focused on competing with them for the affection of her parents that she had little energy left to focus on her own ambitions. She struggled in school, and was near to failing out of high school before she was forced to get on track by the intractable force of her family.

Coming to the city (Calgary, Canada, or a version of it almost like our own) around the equivalent of 2010, Jo was by chanced roomed with another student named Ryan Planter, who was brilliant and not really suited for becoming an engineer. He was also deeply closeted, bullied terrifically, and on the edge of committing suicide due to it. They'd formed a tentative alliance in classes, but that became a faster friendship when Jo talked him down, and promised to have his back. It wasn't a perfect friendship, but it was a resilient one. When the world ended around them, Jo and Ryan were marked by the fallout in different ways. They survived traumatizing encounters with eldritch horrors, and struggled against their own slowly changing psyches and bodies. For a while, they harboured the hope that they'd somehow escape the city and find peace and safety.

That was never to be, unfortunately. Jo was pulled through a portal into the Paperverse during a perilous confrontation, leaving Ryan to fend for himself.

She still harbours psychic flack from the nightmare of her changed world, which sadly also benefits from her fiery Paperverse powers. Jo is not a classic hero; she is surly, acerbic, with a crude sense of humour. She doesn't fully understand how she's changed, but her fear over admitting that she has psychic parasites makes her volatile. She can be friendly, and she's a stout ally to those willing to put up with her abrassive attitude, but she is also a pile of work with both mundane and supernatural trauma.

She misses Ryan. She suffers survivors guilt atop everything else.