Personality
Vreeza is, first and foremost, a very high-energy person- they're both naturally hyperactive AND using excessive enthusiasm as a coping mechanism to avoid having to deal with any feelings of sadness, so they make an active effort to maintain as frantic a pace as possible. As a result, they can be a bit much to hang out with, especially since they're also very loud. This has prevented them from making any friends at the gas station near their house, and in fact, efforts have been made to ban them from the gas station, although none of said efforts have stopped them from going into the gas station anyway. Making online friends is much easier for them.
Although they're in a good mood most of the time, the constant excitement also results in Vreeza being somewhat high-strung, so they're quick to become angry or scared if they feel attacked or threatened. They will get extremely vicious in arguments if they feel like they've been threatened, and they're not likely to quit the argument unless they get an apology from whoever has upset them. Pressing them too hard about whether they're human or not is one of the quickest ways to get them to blow up at you because they'll interpret such questions as a potential sign that the person they're talking to would turn them in to the government. As long as whoever they're talking to doesn't set off any alarm bells, though, Vreeza's generally eager to make new friends and tends to skip over the "acquaintances" phase of relationships entirely, or at least to try to. Once they've decided they're friends with someone, they'll almost immediately start acting like they've been close friends for years. They take betrayal hard even if it's coming from someone who they have known for a total of like 10 minutes.
It's very rare for Vreeza to slow down enough to be sad and they'll usually only do it in the direct aftermath of extremely traumatic events, but when they do, they tend to mope around for quite a while before putting their walls back up. Most of the time if they think they're about to feel sad, they will just go to bed and hope the shitty emotions go away by the time they wake up. This has been a remarkably effective strategy for them, mainly because they've figured out that they can use an ice pack as a sleep aid by putting it directly on their face and that level of cold knocks them out no matter how non-tired they were. Even more rare is for Vreeza to be calm and happy- if they're in a good enough mental place to be happy they're not going to waste any time being calm. They don't like to relax. Vreeza does not generally like being around OTHER people who are sad, either, and will go to great pains to try to cheer them up. They're not necessarily very good at this, because a lot of their advice, though well-intentioned, tends to boil down to "why don't you just stop being sad?" which is worse than useless. They'll even try to cheer up people they can't stand, because they would much rather have an argument with someone who is NOT sad than with someone who's just moping around.
Vreeza often comes off as extremely reckless and a lot of their more risky behavior could even be interpreted as self-destructive by someone who didn't know them that well, but they are in fact just really overconfident in their abilities and terrible at judging when something is a bad idea. If they think something would ACTUALLY put them in real danger, they usually won't do it- the problem is getting them to acknowledge that things might be dangerous in the first place. They have managed to survive a lot of things that they'd been TOLD would kill them, and none of those things did kill them, so they've decided that they must be real hard to kill and so do not need to worry about it too much. Why bother with lab safety when you've gone without it for years and you're fine? Who's scared of starting fights when you've won fights against opponents like "an entire SWAT team" and "an alligator?" It's fine to text and drive because every time they've crashed their car they didn't really get hurt that much. That sort of thing. It takes a lot to get Vreeza to take danger seriously if it isn't one of the specific types of danger they've got issues surrounding.
Vreeza is EXTREMELY anti-authority, just in general, and does not respond well to being told someone else is in charge. They don't really want to be in charge themselves, either. Invariably, when someone complains about their job, Vreeza's advice will be to quit said job and maybe also have a fistfight with their boss. Sometimes, if told to do something by someone parading about as an authority figure, Vreeza will refuse to do it even if they'd previously been planning to do it. Even if they decide to go along with what other people are doing, they'll spend a significant amount of time talking about how they're not following orders and are just doing this stuff because they want to. If someone who Vreeza has other reasons to dislike attempts to claim authority, they will go on the attack about it and start a yelling match. The reason they swear so much is largely about this- at school, only faculty were allowed to swear, and students could get in significant trouble for it. On Earth, Vreeza's decided they'll say "fuck" as much as they want, probably even more than they want to just in order to make a point. They get mad if someone tells them to stop swearing around children because they consider it to be an attack on the childrens' personal autonomy, and if told not to swear around a child, Vreeza will make it their personal mission to teach that kid as many swear words as they possibly can. They spent the first 13 years of their life having every bit of their life controlled by other people and now they're not doing that any more.
Vreeza's top priorities are, in order from most to least important, their own life and autonomy, their friends' lives and autonomy, their own and their friends' general wellbeing and happiness, and only after that do they care about everyone else. This is unfortunate insofar as they do not tend to make any exceptions to this hierarchy, even in extraordinary situations- if they could choose between saving one friend or like a thousand random bystanders, they'd save the friend every time, even if they weren't a very close friend. They'll go to a lot of trouble to help others, even strangers, but only so long as they don't think it could result in them or any friends of theirs dying. Another idea about ethics Vreeza has that is generally controversial is that they think it is unacceptable to ever hold anyone or anything prisoner for any reason, and they have a very wide definition of what could count as being held prisoner. They consider imprisonment to be capable of going one of two ways: either the victim never escapes and it's a fate worse than death, and therefore super unethical, OR the victim escapes and attempts to take vengeance on you, which would be bad for you personally. Generally, their thoughts on the matter are that if the person is not dangerous they should just be let go, and if the person IS dangerous then you ought to just try to kill them and get it over with. Although their blanket rejection of imprisonment as ever acceptable has helped them free and befriend scary looking people who weren't actually threats in the past, it's also led them to make really stupid decisions like summoning Bill Cipher to their house without even asking for anything in return in order to prevent him from being imprisoned. Vreeza would attempt to break their own worst enemies out of jail if they found out they were in there.
If placed in a truly unwinnable situation they can't get out of, Vreeza will attempt to cope with it by increasing their bravado and phony optimism to really obnoxious levels until eventually they cannot handle doing it any more and have a breakdown. If placed in a truly unwinnable situation that they CAN get out of, Vreeza will leave, even if it means ditching people they care about or making things worse for literally everybody else. Despite their frequent recklessness, they place a lot of value on their own safety- they just are very, very bad at determining when something might actually be too dangerous to handle. If they've come to the conclusion that something might kill them for real, they're going to get out as quickly as they can with no regard for the consequences. Anyone hoping for Vreeza to make a heroic sacrifice on purpose is going to be gravely disappointed. This is not entirely a self-important attitude, as they don't expect anyone else to make sacrifices for them, either- in fact, they'll actively discourage any kind of self-sacrificial behavior from anyone even if it would benefit them. They do not like it and think that it is a stupid thing to do.
For a long time, they've really wanted to get involved with supernatural stuff, but it only seems to happen to their friends and not to them. This is because, as an alien, they count as supernatural stuff themself and mostly everyone's only gotten to be involved with one thing, but no one has managed to convince them of that because like. Imagine if you went to another country and everyone started calling you supernatural and insisting that you were just as cool as like, dragons and werewolves and stuff, just because you were from a different country. That's the situation Vreeza is in. They just showed up in the swamp for a school project and everyone was like "you count as a magical creature now." All their friends are getting ACTUAL magic powers and they want THOSE.
History
Vreeza grew up on a government-run school space station orbiting their home planet, and did not have a great time with that. Their school was authoritarian and focused on efficiency to the point that the students' (or, for that matter, the faculty's) actual wellbeing was considered insignificant. It was a high pressure environment, with severe consequences for failure- messing up too badly was liable to get you killed. Vreeza spent their academic career getting as close to a fatal mistake as they could without actually making one, in part because of their difficulty focusing and in part because they were acting out for attention, because even negative attention was better than nothing. Socializing with classmates was heavily discouraged, and the longest conversation they ever had with one was when their dorm mate snitched on them for shooting a hole through the wall, which almost got them killed and resulted in them yelling at the dorm mate for a while. Most of their actual interactions were with the faculty, who did not like them because they were always acting out. However, since to the best of their knowledge this was just what literally everybody had to live with growing up and because the security was tight, they did not really try to do anything about it other than working hard on their major classes in order to avoid getting tossed out of the airlock. Even now, they don't recognize this stuff as traumatic even though it certainly left them with some issues- any discussion of the worst aspects of their school is much more likely to come up in a casual conversation in which they talk about it as though it's normal than a serious emotional one.
At age 13, Vreeza left school for their field research project, a routine activity for their school in which students would go do an independent study on another planet and then come back after six months to report their findings. Vreeza chose Earth because they figured its distance from home and its general obscurity would make their project more impressive and did not tell anyone which planet they'd picked because they wanted it to be a surprise, but within a matter of days they crashed their spaceship into a tree and totaled it. Luckily, this was after they'd already set up their house and lab, a tiny building about the size of a small motor home. Lacking any engineering know-how whatsoever, they could not really do anything about the spaceship being broken, so they just set off a distress flare and hoped for the best. Nobody got the distress flare because Earth was way too far away for that. Nonetheless confident that someone would come pick them up eventually, Vreeza continued work on their school project: genetically engineering a really big radish. As impressive as this was to all their friends on Earth, it was really about on par with a baking soda volcano as far as their school's standards were concerned. After running out of rations, they just ate the extra radishes. Despite the many issues with Earth, including lack of appropriate food, horrible weather, unpopularity at the local gas station, having to figure out what was dangerous by trial and error, and the high likelihood of being in huge trouble for crashing their spaceship whenever they made it back home, Vreeza quickly figured out that they liked being stranded in the swamp way better than they liked school, although at the time they mainly just chalked this up to Earth being really cool instead of their school being bad.
About a year after crashing their ship, they went and bought a cell phone and used it to go on the internet and make some online friends in a chatroom, most of whom thought they were a really committed and entertaining troll or maybe like, a confused 10 year old, due to their habit of providing way too much absolutely batshit personal information on the internet. These were Vreeza's first friends and they got attached fast. In addition to just being great to socialize with, their friends provided them with useful information about Earth such as "you should not try to pet a cougar because it will kill you." Vreeza also made some attempts to befriend alligators, which they thought looked like they ought to be intelligent, but these attempts were fruitless and eventually culminated in Vreeza bringing an alligator into their house, and then having to kick it back out of the house after it bit their arm off and knocked over their refrigerator, much to the horror of their friends who were watching the disaster unfold as Vreeza liveblogged it. They still are somewhat bitter towards alligators, just in general, as a result of this incident.
When Vreeza was 16, their human internet friends started encountering supernatural things, which made Vreeza really jealous even though none of their friends really seemed happy about the situation. Despite their best efforts to search the Everglades to find like, some sort of cursed object or something, Vreeza never found anything, which ultimately made their friends suspicious- humans uninvolved with anything supernatural were generally unable to see the supernatural things, even in photos, but Vreeza had no trouble seeing them and complaining loudly about there not being any around their house. After some speculation that perhaps living in Florida counted as being involved in supernatural events, their friends noticed that Vreeza's selfies definitely fucking did not look human and began questioning them about it. Vreeza continued to insist they were human until one of their friends flew down to Florida to confront them about it in person, at which point they finally gave up on convincing their friends they were human. They still were not convinced that being an alien counted as supernatural though, and continued to get increasingly impatient about when their supernatural events would happen.
Shortly after this, Vreeza's door got busted down by a SWAT team at like 5 in the morning. This was not about any of their significant amount of actual illegal actions, but about them being an alien. Although they managed to evade the SWAT team while sustaining only one injury, a bullet in their arm, and escape via airboat after shooting at the SWAT team and hitting a few of them, they were unable to make the SWAT team get away from their house and so they just had to go hide in the swamp. They kept their friends updated about the situation, and their friend Ted, who had turned into a dragon a week or two prior, flew to their location to help them out. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards an invisible man in a suit showed up, intending to offer an airlift and medical care but looking way too much like he might have come from the government and talking way too suspiciously for Vreeza to tolerate. After a heated standoff in which Vreeza demanded the invisible man go away, shot off their injured arm in an attempt to convince him they did not need any medical care, and threatened to shoot him, the invisible man tranquilized them and Ted for being too threatening, took them to the medical ward of the agency he worked with, and then "borrowed" Ted's phone to tell the group chat what he'd just done. This proved to be an extraordinarily bad idea, as all of Vreeza and Ted's friends assumed his actions were malicious, and their friend Gwen went to visit them.
Upon Gwen's arrival, Vreeza woke up from being tranquilized and restrained on a hospital bed and immediately kicked out their IV, started yelling that this guy had kidnapped and poisoned them and was going to kill them, and began trying to kick nearby nurses in the face. This was a severe misreading of the situation, but Gwen took their word for it and began going on a rampage, but didn't manage to get to Vreeza before they were tranquilized again and so had to carry them. Prior to being tranquilized a second time, Vreeza texted all of their friends that they'd just been poisoned and sent the coordinates for their location, causing all hell to break loose in the group chat once again. During the escape attempt, Ted accidentally set his own face on fire, resulting in him being transferred back to the ICU after the escape attempt was thwarted. After making a lot of threats and complaints, Vreeza convinced the head of the organization to let them watch hours and hours of surveillance footage so they could see that nothing had been done to them while they were unconscious, moped around for a while, almost choked on a rock in the cafeteria because they'd seen Ted eat one and figured that therefore they could probably also eat one, got their phone back, and were finally permitted to leave with their friends. This series of events is something Vreeza is still EXTREMELY angry about and they will take every opportunity to launch into very specific complaints about the police and hospitals. The agency that raided their house and the agency that picked them up are distinct entities, and neither one is the FBI or the police, but Vreeza has not bothered with figuring out the distinctions and will usually refer to both as either "the FBI," "the cops," "the government," or some variation thereof. They're certain they're the same entity despite having been repeatedly told otherwise, because why the hell else would they both show up in the swamp to attack them on the same day? Following this, Vreeza stayed at Gwen's house for a while before going home.
Shortly after returning home and fixing the mess in their lab that resulted from leaving it alone for weeks on end, Vreeza found interdimensional chat by googling "free chat room." They've remained in that chat for the past few years, and have like, way too many friends on there for me to list, because there's got to be over 100 muses on that chat and Vreeza's friends with a pretty good chunk of them. For that reason, I'm going to just focus on plot events that are significant enough that Vreeza mentions them sometimes and/or that were character development moments.
Shortly after they joined interdimensional chat, Vreeza's school finally figured out where they had gone and sent a search party. Since it had been over three years at this point, the school had assumed Vreeza to be dead and was mainly sending the search party to retrieve their expensive equipment. Since Vreeza was not dead, though, the search party attempted to pick them up anyway, resulting in a confrontation in which Vreeza was the only survivor after Vreeza decided they were actually not a big fan of the idea of going home to get slapped around some more and be thrown out of the airlock for being too late turning in their project and would rather stay on Earth. This event was very upsetting at the time but Vreeza is mostly over it and will just bring it up occasionally to gloat about defeating the search party.
They kept in contact with their friends in their own dimension, too, and at one point spent a few days helping Ted deal with a problem on the island he and the other dragons lived on- some flowers were blooming that all of the dragons were really allergic to. Despite knowing damn well the ecological implications of doing such a thing, Vreeza hitched a ride to the island with a flamethrower and did their best to get rid of every single one of those flowers. They ended up stranded for a little while because Ted was too sick from the flowers to help them get home, but when they did get home, they took back a sample to try to isolate the problematic compound that was causing the reaction. They did this by paying Josh, a dragon who they do not like, 20 dollars to stand outside their house while they threw stuff they'd isolated from the flowers at him to see out if any of it made him have an allergic reaction. After using this super ethical method to determine what was up with the flowers, they sent it off to some friends in another dimension to get an antidote made because actually making an antidote was way outside of the realm of things they knew how to do.
A while after this, Vreeza got involved with the ACTUAL most traumatic event of their life so far, which they will probably not talk about unless directly asked because there's just no way to spin it that makes them look cool: they went with two friends, Louis and Flacari from interdimensional chat, to go rescue another friend, Will, from being kidnapped in a bunker where unethical experimentation was happening. Although Vreeza went into this fairly confident and the group managed to break out several other captives on their way to find Will, it was generally an upsetting place to be for everybody, and by the time they actually managed to find Will and also Ananke, the guy who had kidnapped him, Vreeza had had enough and just immediately started shooting at Ananke. Unfortunately, it turned out Ananke was immune to lasers, so they did not accomplish much by doing this. They then proceeded to shoot at the ground near his feet to see if they could break the floor and make him fall over, and although it did not make him fall over, it did seem to catch him off guard and so they ran around the room firing at random for a while until Ananke used his powers to make them stop doing that and dredge up their general paranoia. Not one to be discouraged by horrible situations, Vreeza shot him again anyway, which prompted him to use his powers again but worse this time. At that point, Vreeza decided they were done with this entire business and were just going to leave the building, and shot a hole in the wall to leave through. Although Ananke was able to close the hole in the wall, it was painful for him to do, and so he was very angry and flung them at a different wall in retaliation. Still determined to get the fuck out of the building, Vreeza just shot a hole through that wall also, was flung through the hole by the same force that had been flinging them against the wall, and ran off. This did indirectly help save Will because it was so upsetting to Ananke that he also decided he had to leave the building, but Vreeza wasn't even paying attention to the rescue mission at that point because they were busy going as far away from the building as possible. It was too cold outside for them to handle, and they passed out from hypothermia after yelling at everybody to leave them alone and then had to spend several months recovering from that whole debacle at their friends' place. This was when they got their heated suit. Before going home, they attempted to help their friends deal with a problem involving demon goop, but it quickly became clear that they were causing way more problems than they were solving because their main strategy for fighting the demon goop was to shoot at it and that did not tend to accomplish anything but killing whoever it had possessed. Upon determining that they weren't being helpful in the situation at hand and that they did not like being involved with it, Vreeza just went home.
Chat went on a hiatus for a while after this, during which time Vreeza just stayed in their own dimension and worked on a variety of projects including creating glowing tomatoes, starting a YouTube channel that gained moderate popularity among people who thought it was an ARG or something. They've continued using the YouTube channel ever since, posting hundreds of vlogs.
Once chat got going again, Bill Cipher showed up claiming to be trapped in the chat room, which Vreeza took great personal offense to because they've got a lot of issues surrounding being trapped places and so they don't think anybody ought to be trapped anywhere for any reason. Due to their personal issues about people being trapped, Vreeza immediately offered to help Bill out of the chat room if they could, but after a short argument resulting from him being stupid enough to try to use "Scales" as a nickname for them, Bill went offline for a significant amount of time. Vreeza assumed he got out on his own or something but a while later he showed back up with file downloads that he said they could download on their computer to get him out of being trapped, which they did immediately, as a matter of principle. This only accomplished moving Bill from being trapped in the chat room to being trapped in Vreeza's lab computer, which Vreeza was concerned was a significant downgrade as their computer does not even have internet connection, but Bill seemed happy enough with it so they figured it was fine. This state of affairs went on for quite some time, during which Bill suggested making cop eating plants for home security and gave Vreeza blueprints for a weirdness detector which they used to find a very large frog, which they adopted as a pet.
Although happy to finally have a pet, Vreeza nonetheless complained that they were expecting something actually weird and that living in the swamp, they had seen many frogs before. The frog's name is Homare-chan, and Vreeza did not name it themself - they asked their online friends to name it after leaving it unnamed for weeks due to the mistaken opinion that animals must already have names but just can't tell them to people since they don't speak human languages. It IS named after the Yakuza character - several guys from Yakuza were online in interdimensional chat at the time, and Vreeza mistook a joke about naming the frog after one of them for a serious suggestion and named the frog that immediately. Homare-chan has been living in their house since then, and is fairly well-behaved for an interdimensional nightmare frog. He doesn't bite Vreeza, but guests need to be careful not to provoke him.
By coincidence, Vreeza encountered the tabloid photographer who frequently took photos of them and reported them as a cryptid, Verity Valentina, in the gas station near their house. Delighted to finally be able to clarify that they were not a ghost, they agreed to be interviewed, and the resulting interview was published shortly thereafter. Neither they nor Verity got the response they had hoped for from this article - Vreeza's statements were extremely confusing, so Verity was unable to get a promotion by interviewing them, and the publicity allowed the police to find out where Vreeza hangs out aside from their house. This resulted in a raid on the gas station that Vreeza hangs out at, which they narrowly escaped from after nearly destroying the building in the shootout. A bystander caught this confrontation on film and it went viral, resulting in Vreeza's YouTube channel becoming far more popular. Vreeza fled the area and went to stay with their friend Ted on Dragon Island until they recovered from their injuries. Unwilling to stop filming vlogs but aware that Dragon Island was supposed to be secret, Vreeza insisted that they were filming from Canada during this time period despite very obviously being in a tropical location.
Unfortunately, Bill had not come to Vreeza's dimension to hang out and act as a lab assistant, and so when the police raided their house after they'd fled, he left with the police. This made Vreeza absolutely furious, not only because he had ditched them to hang out with the cops but also because it made it clear Bill had been lying about being trapped in the computer, and they near-immediately published a YouTube video callout accusing him of being a bad roommate and a bootlicker. He did not respond to this, and has not shown up again thus far.
When their usual group chat became a bit inactive, Vreeza once again went searching for a new one to join. They did not leave either of the previous ones, though. The new group chat, a separate interdimensional group chat, is where they have been doing most of their socializing lately.
After a long uneventful period in which they talked to online friends a lot but didn't really do much aside from caring for their plants and running around in the swamp otherwise, one of Vreeza's new online friends, the Bookkeeper, fell into their dimension by accident. Delighted to have a new potential roommate who probably would not run off to hang out with the cops, Vreeza immediately invited them to stay at their house. Although the house was definitely not big enough for both of them, they nonetheless had a pretty good time hanging out until Bookkeeper went back home.
Right now, Vreeza is hanging out with two more online friends who ended up in their dimension, Marie and Natasha. Fortunately for everyone, these friends do not have to stay in Vreeza's tiny trailer home - Marie's spaceship and Natasha's van came with them, and so they're neighbors instead of roommates. They're working on building up fortifications so that the next SWAT team to show up has a nasty surprise.
Appearance
Vreeza's 5'1", which is a little short for their age, mainly because they spend several years stranded in the swamp eating nothing but haphazardly genetically engineered experimental radishes and candy they bought at the gas station while also running around all the time and sustaining frequent injuries, so they didn't really have the leftover energy needed to grow a normal amount. After getting home from their first run-in with the SWAT team, they did start having a better diet, but it was kind of too late. They're decently athletic since they spend a whole lot of their time running around outdoors in the swamp, on account of not having anything better to do. They're also a little bit hard of hearing, due to hearing damage from several years of driving around an airboat with no hearing protection all of the time. They talk really loudly partly as a result of this and partly just because they are very enthusiastic, and they've got kind of a weird voice because it's not their real voice- it's the closest thing to their real voice that their translator could come up with for speaking understandable English. Their native language is all lizard noises and their real voice just couldn't handle any human language very well even if they managed to learn one for real.
Almost 100% of the time, Vreeza leaves their holo-disguise on, partially because they need it to appear human but also partially because they're just used to how it looks now and so it's weird for them to have it off, and also partially because it's a light source and is therefore convenient for if they have to go to places that would otherwise be too dark for them to see in.
Notes about the holo-disguise, some of which are visible in the reference but could be just passed off as art style and therefore bear mentioning:
- It should be REALLY OBVIOUS to anyone actually paying attention that Vreeza is not a real human. In their home universe, they manage to get by by virtue of their dimension's Earth having a force preventing people from noticing weird things, but their disguise is not really that convincing. They're not aware of the existence of said force and figure their disguise is just really good so when people start asking questions they're caught off guard.
- Most obviously, the disguise glows. This isn't too noticeable in bright light, but it's fairly noticeable in normal lighting and extremely noticeable in the dark.
- Since the disguise needed to match the proportions of their real face fairly closely in order for the motion capture to work, Vreeza's facial proportions are not very human looking. Their eyes and mouth are both way too big for their face.
- Vreeza only has 4 fingers on each hand, including their thumbs, but humans have 5. In order to deal with this problem, they just mapped the index and pinky fingers on the disguise to the same finger, which means they can't move those independently of one another since they're actually just one finger.
- Due to not having spent too much time actually checking what humans look like before making the disguise, Vreeza's missed some details. The disguise's eyes do not have irises and instead just have red pupils, and they just assumed without actually checking that humans probably also have sharp teeth and a forked tongue like they do so they kept those. Also, they didn't get the hair physics right. Their hair looks passably normal if they're standing still but it doesn't move as much as real hair does, first of all because they didn't notice hair did that and second of all because there is no way in hell they would've had the patience for setting up detailed hair animations for the disguise even if they had realized it. They didn't put together textures for the fabric on their fake clothes, either. Their glasses don't have arms and just float on their face.
- The animation on the disguise sometimes glitches if too much is going on. Most often, this tends to happen when Vreeza cries (because they got tired of working on the disguise and did a really lazy job setting up animations for that since they were hoping they'd not cry in public anyway) and when they're moving around really quickly (because that's just a very demanding thing for the hologram to keep up with). It will also happen if they get electrocuted since the disguise is on an electronic device, and this can lead to long-term damage to the disguise which they'd need their home computer to fix- last time this happened they got a dead pixel line on their face which they went around telling everyone was just some permanent marker they got on their face by accident.
- Because it's a hologram, the disguise doesn't react to outside factors very much, as in, the hair and clothes won't blow in the wind, it won't be visible if Vreeza gets injured or dirty, and if Vreeza puts on real clothes that aren't bulky enough they'll be covered by the disguise and won't be visible. Their heated suit is bulky enough to be visible over the disguise but most normal clothing isn't. If they tried to wear something like a hat with a brim, it'd be especially noticeable because it would clip through the disguise.
- The holo-disguise does not alter Vreeza's actual physical form, and so actually touching them makes it pretty clear that it's not real.
Vreeza is not from Earth and their species doesn't have the same assigned genders as humans but they're not any of their own species' potential assigned genders either. If you asked them their gender they'd say nonquaternary instead of nonbinary since their home culture has 4 potential assigned genders instead of 2, and then they'd have a lot of explaining to do if they wanted to maintain their cover as Definitely For Sure A Real Human. It hasn't occurred to them yet that humans do gender differently - they think neopronouns are just really popular on Earth, and, being trans themself, they think that's great and don't feel the need to ask questions about it.
Skills and Abilities
Vreeza is very knowledgeable about horticulture and somewhat knowledgeable about general scientific concepts, because they majored in horticulture at school before dropping out and were very enthusiastic about it. They're still very enthusiastic about it and will talk about it for a long time if you let them. However, their knowledge base on said subjects doesn't always match up with most people's, because they did not go to school on Earth. Although they know a lot about some things that would usually be considered very advanced, like genetic engineering, that's not got anything to do with their intellect and has more to do with their old school having been very focused on such things, and started kids off with learning Serious Scientific Information pretty much as soon as they were old enough to read and with their home culture having very advanced technology for such things that's a lot easier to get the hang of than the closest human equivalents. Without their lab equipment, there's not that much they can do with their knowledge. They're adequately smart with academics when they care about the subject, but not really that much above average, and they do not tend to care about any subject other than their favorites. As a result, they know very little about things outside their field, such as history, engineering, medicine, and so on. Like, less than most humans their age know. By a significant amount. They know how to do proper lab safety but they invariably choose not to despite the many accidents their refusal to participate in lab safety has caused for them.
Vreeza's pretty good at surviving out in the wilderness because it's REALLY easy to get lost in the Everglades and they've definitely done it before when their phone died and they couldn't use the GPS and just had to wander around until they found their way home. They're good at catching bugs, which they eat, and at figuring out which plants are probably edible. They're fairly good at catching small wild animals, too, but they don't do that for hunting purposes- they do that in order to take poor quality selfies to send their friends like "LOOK AT THIS BIRD I FOUND" and then let the animal go.
Whether Vreeza's ability to shoot a gun can be considered a skill is debatable because they're kind of really bad at it. It is definitely something they can do, though, and their laser pistols have a wide enough blast radius that they've still got a good chance of eventually hitting whatever they're shooting at if they keep at it long enough.
Vreeza's debatably good at arguments. They're not all that good at making actual points but they're excellent at refusing to give up the argument until the other person admits defeat or gives up and leaves. Occasionally they manage to say something that really hits just by trial and error and if they manage that then they'll just harp on that point for the rest of the argument. This strategy sometimes works very well and results in a crushing defeat, mainly in situations where the person they're arguing with is very sensitive.
Vreeza's got pretty good low-light vision but can't see in pitch darkness. Fortunately, their disguise glows, so they're not often in pitch darkness. They're better adapted to deal with radiation than a human, but they are not immune to it- the amount of radiation exposure they've been getting in their lab is not good for their long term health but it would probably have outright killed a human by this point.
They've also got fantastic heat tolerance- the chances of them ever encountering a temperature too hot for them on Earth are next to nothing. Unfortunately, being adapted for extreme heat does not serve them that well on Earth, because they absolutely cannot handle cold weather without accommodation- anything below 105 degrees Fahrenheit is kind of uncomfortable for them, and anything below 65 is not good for their health. They keep their house thermostat set at 130 degrees F. Even living in the Everglades, Vreeza would occasionally get cold to the point of passing out, a potentially disastrous thing to happen in the middle of the wilderness and a very inconvenient thing to happen even if no disaster occurs. Although no one really does it anymore, their species used to hibernate during cold weather back when their planet actually got cold weather, and so if Vreeza passes out from the cold they're generally not waking up unless the temperature improves or they get woken up by outside factors, and if temperatures drop too low they could just die. Luckily, this isn't an issue most of the time lately since they got their heated suit, but if temperatures got below freezing for too long the suit might not be able to keep them warm effectively enough to keep them awake, though it would probably still at least be able to keep them warm enough to not die until someone found them and brought them in the house. They're cold-blooded, so wearing a jacket does not help, they need an external heat source.
Vreeza's most useful innate ability, albeit not one they have to use that often, is that if they lose a limb it will grow back. It takes a couple of weeks, though, and in the meantime they're missing a limb, and also it hurts really badly to lose a limb, so they prefer to avoid getting injured that badly in the first place. Despite having been told many times and having learned not to make too big a deal about it, they're still not 100% convinced that humans can't do this, because the vast majority of humans they see walking around have all 4 limbs and they just don't think that it's feasible for so many people to have never lost one before. They're assuming people are just lying to them about this topic.
For the most part, Vreeza's good at looking on the bright side of things. It takes a lot of really severe trouble to crack their optimism. They're pretty good at getting back up if they're knocked down, and even if they've been through something really serious, they tend to bounce back emotionally within a week or two. This is definitely their biggest strength- they just refuse to be discouraged long-term.
Once Vreeza sets about doing something, they're determined, and they're unlikely to give up unless they get concrete evidence that what they're trying to accomplish is impossible. They're great at trial and error!
Vreeza loves making friends and gets along well with a surprising variety of people. They've probably got friends in every box of the alignment chart, honestly. If someone is uncomfortable with talking about something Vreeza will generally not demand they talk about it. If they don't want to talk about it they don't have to. They hope people they talk to will return the favor. This earns them a lot of points in online spaces where people are usually very nosy. The one exception to this is if they straight up hate someone in which case all bets are off.
