Niko Kuroda

Student

Sixteen years old. The only founder who had not seen anything.

Niko was born in Kitsap County and had spent their whole life in the Pacific Northwest, apart from three years their family does not discuss. They came to the first meeting uninvited, having heard about it in the queue at Pruitt's, and were not asked to leave.

Everyone else in that room was there because something had happened to them. Niko was there because they had been reading about it since they were eleven. Folklore, the occult, the accounts buried in the back pages of the county papers. Long before anyone else in Hollowfield they had worked out that the interesting question was not whether the stories were true, but why the same shapes kept turning up in places that had never spoken to one another.

Ada Merrick's ledger records every member by title. Mr. Pruitt. Miss Merrick. Dr. Whitaker. Sgt. Halvorsen. For eighteen years the ninth line of every attendance list reads, without title, Niko.

Nobody has ever found a note explaining it, and nobody appears to have asked.

Niko catalogued the archive, invented its cross-referencing, and is the reason the Institute's field guide is organised by what a creature does rather than where it was seen. They were still a member in 1997.

*The Institute's youngest founder is the one who treated all this as a

pleasure rather than a wound. Most members since have arrived the same way.*