Meet the believers, doubters, friends, enemies, and ordinary people caught in something they cannot explain.
SPOILER-FREE · CHARACTER GUIDE
ADRIAN LUZ — The Skeptic
Intelligent, ambitious, and fiercely certain of what he believes—or rather, what he doesn’t.
Adrian has built his worldview around reason. An Ivy League education and a future full of possibilities seem to place him firmly in control of his own story. But when increasingly disturbing experiences begin challenging everything he considers rational, skepticism becomes more than an intellectual position.
It becomes something he has to defend.
Visual: Adrian should absolutely lead the page. Young, polished enough to reflect his academic world, but not corporate. I’d give him a slightly guarded expression rather than a smile. He should look like somebody who is accustomed to being the smartest person in the conversation—and is beginning to encounter something intelligence alone cannot solve.
HADREA VERGA — The Enigma
Hadrea Verga enters Adrian’s life like the beginning of an ordinary college romance.
Beautiful, confident, and magnetic, she is the one who crosses the room and asks the reserved Adrian Luz to dance. But Hadrea’s story quickly becomes tangled in Adrian’s deteriorating world—and in the lives of people far beyond him.
Orphaned young and raised by her fortune-telling grandmother, Hadrea comes from a background that sits strangely close to the supernatural questions Adrian is determined to dismiss.
As relationships fracture and loyalties shift, Hadrea becomes part of a much larger question running through Skepticism:
ADELINA PEREZ — The Believer
Where Adrian questions, Adelina believes.
Her faith gives her a framework for things Adrian would rather explain away, creating one of the novel’s most important tensions: what happens when two people can witness the same world and interpret it completely differently?
I wouldn’t make her portrait overtly religious. Let her look like a normal young woman whose faith is simply part of who she is. That makes the contrast with Adrian more interesting.
MARIO VITALI — The Friend
Mario belongs to Adrian’s human world—the friendships, conversations, ambitions, and relationships that existed before anything became strange.
That makes characters like him especially valuable in Skepticism. The supernatural doesn’t arrive in an isolated gothic mansion. It begins invading the lives of young adults who are supposed to be worrying about school, careers, relationships, and their futures.
His portrait can consequently feel warmer and more relaxed than Adrian’s.
TRINA — The Loyal Friend
Trina is Adelina’s best friend, roommate, and one of the people drawn into Adrian Luz’s increasingly complicated world.
Warm but far from passive, Trina is willing to speak her mind—especially when Adrian’s behavior crosses a line. Her faith connects her closely to Adelina, while her growing relationship with Mario brings the four friends together even as Adrian’s experiences become increasingly difficult to explain.
CATALINA LUZ — The Family
Adrian’s story isn’t happening in a vacuum.
Catalina helps establish the person Adrian was before the events of the novel began changing him. Family can recognize things in us that friends and acquaintances miss—and sometimes notice a change before we’re willing to acknowledge it ourselves.
For her portrait, I’d deliberately create some subtle visual resemblance between Catalina and Adrian without making them look identical.
HORACIO ROMERO — The Warning
Some people enter a story carrying answers.
Others carry questions that make everything worse.
Horacio belongs closer to the novel’s unsettling side. His portrait shouldn’t immediately scream horror character, though. Skepticism works because its paranormal elements emerge from an otherwise ordinary world.
I’d make him serious, slightly difficult to read, and visually distinct from the younger college-age characters.
JAKE MAXWELL — The Privileged One
Jake represents a very different kind of power from anything paranormal.
Wealth, status, confidence, and the assumptions that come with them make him recognizable long before anything supernatural needs to happen. He’s also useful because Skepticism isn’t only interested in demons, possession, or belief. It’s interested in the ugliness ordinary people are perfectly capable of producing themselves.
His portrait should look expensive without becoming a caricature. Clean-cut, attractive, confident, perhaps even charming at first glance. The discomfort should come from knowing him, not looking at him.
MATHEW WRIGHT — The Authority
Mathew expands the world beyond Adrian’s immediate peer group and gives us another adult presence within the social structure surrounding these characters.
I’d make his portrait considerably more conventional and established than Adrian’s generation. It will visually reinforce that Skepticism spans families and communities rather than functioning solely as a college horror story
BELINDA WRIGHT — The Social World
Belinda helps populate that deceptively normal world surrounding Adrian.
And that’s something I would emphasize throughout this entire feature: these people should look like they belong in a drama before they look like they belong in a horror novel.
That makes what eventually happens around them much creepier.
JENNIFER — The Familiar Face
Jennifer rounds out the younger ensemble and helps preserve the feeling that these are recognizable young adults living recognizable lives.
PASTOR FLORES — The Shepherd
Pastor Flores is a man of faith confronted by a young man determined to challenge it.
When Adrian first encounters him, he sees little more than another preacher asking a congregation for money—and openly accuses him of being a fraud. Pastor Flores responds not with retaliation, but by revealing that the church’s offering is being used to help underprivileged families.