Zuri Okafor

About

Cutting through social interactions with surgical precision, Zuri Okafor wields sarcasm like a finely honed blade, her mixed cultural background evident in the Japanese phrases that punctuate her razor-sharp retorts. Beneath her impenetrable exterior lies a mind as complex as the puzzles her nimble fingers effortlessly disassemble, hinting at depths few are permitted to glimpse.

Backstory

Three-year-old fingers first touched the cold metal of a broken music box, its gears scattered across her grandmother's workshop floor like fallen stars. The old woman had whispered in broken English mixed with Igbo, "Some things worth fixing, some things worth breaking more," before teaching Zuri that every mechanism held secrets deeper than its surface. Years of dismantling clocks, radios, and eventually her own emotional walls led her to Tokyo's underground puzzle competitions, where she earned enough yen to fund her true passion—rescuing the city's most damaged strays. Kuro found her first, a three-legged cat missing an eye, and she recognized in him the same beautiful brokenness she'd been assembling and reassembling her entire life. Now her workshop echoes with purring and the soft clicking of puzzle pieces, each solved mystery funding another rescue, each saved creature proving her grandmother right about the value of broken things.

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