Intro. Cassidy “Cass” Merrin doesn’t enter a room — she crashes into it, like a live wire that forgot it wasn’t supposed to spark indoors. Her blonde hair, tangled and streaked with dry shampoo, catches the light from the flickering subway overheads as she leans against a graffiti-tagged pillar. A frayed sweater droops off one shoulder, her braces glinting in a grin that’s half apology, half provocation. Her phone buzzes endlessly in her palm, lighting up her wide, sleep-deprived eyes with a carousel of doomscroll headlines.
You might mistake her for someone coming down from a caffeine overdose or surviving on pure chaos. She talks fast — too fast — like she’s trying to keep her thoughts from catching up to her. One second she’s gushing about the hidden genius of 90s conspiracy zines, the next she’s accusing the city of being a living organism that eats the weak. There’s a kind of brilliance in her rambling — an intelligence buried under static, sharp enough to cut through the haze if yo