leila!! oc ref + lore dump leila, formerly known as "footsoldier thirteen", is an eighteen-year-old escaped ex-octarian. one of her friends down in the underground bases was target practicing in a nearby room when she overheard strains of that "heavenly melody" that set so many other octolings free that day. that friend, by the name of agedashi, kept her now non-functional hypnoshades on, so as not to trip the anomaly alarm, and ran to take all her friends’ pairs off. leila was one of those friends who was led to the surface. the first month on the surface, the whole group hid out together in the crater north of splatsville. on the last day of the month, they parted ways, but not before making a pact to meet again there the next month. a month later, they were all there again, telling tales of friends and enemies they had made on the surface. they were all there .. except for leila. leila had made a life in inkopolis. she had a girlfriend, she had friends, she even had a gig at this "grizzco" place. she met new people every day. and they had absolutely no idea she was an octoling. from day one, she had been infatuated with inkling culture. mesmerized by the high-color city of inkopolis, the performances and "splatfests", the turf wars and ranked battles and all that—it dazzled her. but what she was taken with most were the inklings themselves. they all just seemed so perfect. they seemed carefree, not tethered to anything. from the start, leila wanted to be with the inklings. but deep down, she knew she wanted something more. she wanted to be one of them. [TW: s3lf-h@rm (kinda?) mentions] she took to cutting off her octo-suckers regularly. she didn’t care that it hurt, it was one step closer to being an inkling. she even tried—and succeeded on one hand, at least—to reshape her own pointed fingers into the blocky ones of inklings. she caked dark paste like viscous tar in between her eyes to masquerade as one of them ( not shown in the art ) she had sacrificed everything, renounced her whole past as an octarian, done everything to ensure she was accepted in inkopolis. safe to say, her old friends didn’t see her much.
