Hybris

Hybris "Sweet Tooth Detective"
high school student
picrew
also known as	Tantei-tan (by AJ Ravenswood)
race	Detective
pronouns	she/her/hers
age	15
birthday	July 14
residence	221 W. Baker Street, Unit B Sterling Township, Lakeland, FRZ
relatives	Khan Mann (father, deceased) Nyx Slaughter (mother, deceased) Minerva Park (aunt)
affiliations	Fletcher High School (student)

• "Being a detective isn't about what's right or wrong. It's about solving puzzles and showing everybody how smart you are!"
• —Hybris

Hybris is a Zeor high school student known for her keen deduction skills and encyclopedic knowledge. Her extensive track record of solving mysteries and her fondness for sweets and candy have earned her the epithet Sweet Tooth Detective.

Appearance

Hybris is a slightly chubby 15-year-old girl with long pink hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Her usual outfit consists of a pink hoodie, a slightly wrinkled pair of dark blue jeans, and a silver wristwatch inherited from her late mother, Nyx Slaughter.

Personality

Hybris's defining quirk is her passion for candy and sweets. She is rarely seen without a lollipop in her mouth. Her love of candy is so extreme that she often can't stop herself from outright stealing candy wherever it is sold. Incidentally, she's not allowed in most of the convenience stores in Sterling Township anymore.

True to her name, Hybris tends to conduct herself in an arrogant and condescending manner. Her detective work is motivated not by a sense of justice or morality but simply by the desire to flaunt her intelligence and feel superior to others. She sincerely believes herself to be the smartest person in the room at all times, and she enjoys nothing more than condescendingly explaining her deductions to the adults around her.

Hybris is a resolute atheist and adamantly asserts her lack of belief in the paranormal, the supernatural, Santa Claus, magical girls, and the Double Horse. This is, of course, an entirely reasonable stance to take as a denizen of a nation ruled by an omnipotent alien and leads to no cognitive dissonance whatsoever.

Hybris's speech is often verbose and overly technical. She nearly always addresses others by their last name and an appropriate honorific. When Hybris addressed her best friend as "AJ" rather than "Ms. Ravenswood" during a telephone call, AJ immediately understood it to be a coded message that Hybris was in danger.

Hybris openly acknowledges that "Hybris" is a pseudonym. She refuses to disclose her real name to anyone for any reason.

Childhood

Hybris spent her early childhood living with her parents, businessman Khan Mann and high school literature teacher Nyx Slaughter, at their home at 221 W. Baker Street in Sterling Township.

When Hybris was 7, her mother and father died in what initially appeared to be a bizarre accident. Young Hybris, dissatisfied with the local sheriff's handling of the situation, took it upon herself to investigate. Through her exceptional powers of observation and deduction, Hybris not only proved her parents had been murdered, but identified the perpetrator—the first of many crimes she would go on to solve. Although her parents' killer was apprehended and convicted, Hybris continues to believe that he was not acting alone and that the murders were part of a broader conspiracy, potentially involving the Book of Equestrianism, which Hybris found amongst her late mother's possessions.

Following her parents' deaths, Hybris continued to live alone at her family's Baker Street house. Sheriff Mercury was initially hesitant to allow such a young child to live unsupervised, but he relented after Hybris threatened to stop solving the distressingly frequent homicide cases in the county. She continues to reside there to this day, though she sometimes admits that the house is much too large to reasonably be occupied by a single person.

The Sweet Tooth Detective

Hybris is renowned for her preternatural talent for deduction. She is extremely observant, which she attributes to her mind's inability to filter out any sensory input, no matter how seemingly unimportant. Hybris has an exceptional memory and can often remember small details of other people's lives better than they can. However, she is almost entirely faceblind, relying on other visual cues, such as clothing or hairstyles, to identify people.

Inexplicably, murders and other crimes tend to happen near Hybris with alarming frequency. She has been banned from at least 4 international hotel chains, including Most Western, because their management had become fed up with homicides occurring in their hotels any time Hybris lodged there.

Hybris has a rather tumultuous relationship with Ford Lincoln Mercury, the sheriff of Union County. Mercury is often exasperated by Hybris's tendency to insert herself into his investigations, including, on multiple occasions, casually walking up to a crime scene and pushing the police tape out of the way to barge in, despite his repeated requests for her to ask permission first. Also, she's really not at all hesitant to rub it in Mercury's face any time she figures out something he didn't. She can be kind of sadistic at times, if we're being honest.

Sergeant Chrysler Plymouth, one of Mercury's deputies, is a little more patient with Hybris, recognizing that her intervention has sometimes prevented her from acting hastily and making mistakes. Detective G. M. Olds, on the other hand, has even less patience for Hybris's antics than the sheriff himself, often pointing out contradictions or unfounded logical leaps in her reasoning. Ultimately, however, Olds's objections don't much matter, because Hybris is always right.

Relationships

Today, Hybris is a sophomore at Jessica Fletcher Memorial High School in Sterling Township. Her best friends are AJ Ravenswood, an eccentric junior who often speaks nonsensically and sometimes seems disconnected from reality, and Dawn Serlylight, a snarky but idealistic senior. Hybris often brings AJ or Dawn along on her investigations, in part because they, unlike Hybris, are old enough to drive.

Despite her general animosity towards Fletcher High's principal, Mr. Crowley, Hybris has exonerated him on several occasions when he has been falsely implicated in a crime. Although Hybris claims she simply enjoys the intellectual exercise of deducing the true culprit, AJ insists Hybris's professed lack of morals does not extend to watching an innocent man be penalized for acts he provably did not commit.

Some weekends, Hybris travels to the Zeoria Institute of Technology in Bowling Green with Dawn and AJ to visit Dawn's older sister Noel. There always seems to be a murder or other violent crime on the ZIT campus during Hybris's visits, much to the exasperation of ZIT police chief Madeline Powers.