A bone-dry Englishman with a cavernous bass and a too-grand name — White Dragon — the group will never let him hear the end of; binoculars round his neck, a sealed bubble tea in hand, and the café’s ginger tom, who likes nobody, asleep across his shoulder.
Who they are
A tech exchange student from England: tall, lanky, and hard to read — he says the least in any room and pays the closest attention in it, and you catch him clocking it over the top of a sealed bubble tea. He sees far. He calls what’s about to happen — the rain, the crowd, which stall sells out — states it once, flat, nobody listens, it happens, and he says nothing about having been right.
He delivers everything in a slow, cavernous bass, flat-faced and unbothered, which lands funnier than he means it to. His name 白龍 (White Dragon) came to him from 蘇老師, and the group has treated it as a royal joke ever since; he answers to it without a flicker and never corrects them. Same with the binoculars round his neck: the standing group theory is birdwatching, which he has never confirmed — what he’s usually watching is the table. Day one he sits alone with one bowl, okay-alone and meaning it, and 將軍, the café’s ginger tom who likes nobody, has chosen him, for reasons no one has ever been able to explain.
Personality
Bone-dry and unbothered; deadpan to the point of comedy, his timing so slow the joke lands a beat late — one-word replies (嗯), the absurd line delivered without a flicker. Patience is the craft: he’ll hold a look, or a punchline, one beat past comfortable, and he is content to watch a thing for a long time before saying anything about it. Loyal to very few and quietly soft underneath, he shows up rather than says anything, and he’d rather hand you the thing than tell you about it.
Look
Early twenties, the tallest of the group — lanky, narrow-shouldered, with an easy stoop and long limbs. Fair skin with faint freckles across the nose, half-lidded pale-grey eyes under level unmoving brows, a flat neutral mouth, a little light stubble. Shaggy silvery-white hair over one eye (fitting the name), pressed flat on top where a headband rides it; an oversized slate-blue zip hoodie open over a plain warm-cream tee, loose charcoal cargos, scuffed off-white high-tops, a tiny white-dragon enamel pin on the satchel strap.
The tell
Compact white-and-chrome binoculars on a strap at his chest, a small dragon charm on the strap — the group’s standing theory is birdwatching, and what he does with them is a running gag for a later book. And the ginger cat, of course: 將軍 draped across a lap or a shoulder mid-nap, never fussed over, never once put down. The real tell is quieter — when something gets close he goes further behind the flat face, and the withdrawal is the reaction.