#2 – Roland Wong

(Whew!  This is a little late – mostly due to my deciding to work with the colors and inks in Clip Studio, a program I recently purchased.  Nice program – lots of useful tools – but not the wisest choice I’ve made while laboring under a deadline.  Also: Photoshop layer folder don’t work in Photoshop Elements, so I had to bounce between two programs to get the template to work right.)

Roland Wong is Cosmetigene’s best salesperson in the Greater Vancouver Archology.  A man of great charm and charisma, he makes his living selling cosmetic gene enhancements.  Want eyes that changes color via your mood?  Looking for tiger-stripe hair or glow-in-the-dark fingernails?  How about some chlorophyll in the skin to give you that extra bit of pep through the day?  Cosmetigene has it all, and Roland can sell them to just about anyone.

It’s not a bad life… but Roland misses the days when he worked an entirely different job, as a plainsclothes detective in the GVA Police Force.  There his charm had been used to coax testimony out of reluctant witnesses, and to ease criminals into confession.  He’d been good at that job too – perhaps a little too good.  On a corruption case, he found he’d angered the wrong high-ranking official, and soon found himself out of work.

But his past collides with his present when a routine sale becomes a terrible murder.  One of Roland’s gene enhancements for a client was altered: instead of giving his client the robin’s-egg-blue skin she wanted, it turned her skin cells into toxin-producing factories, poisoning her from the inside.  All evidence points to Roland, and his job, reputation, and freedom are on the line… unless he can find the real killer.

Category: 2013, Scifi