Commission by  capt_hairball for Mano from Surface, an interfaith urban science-fantasy romance.
Mano is a Hindu lesbian octopus, journalist, engineer, herbalist, housekeeper, and kalaripayattu fighter.
She had a tragic relationship with an atheist turtle poet and stopped a fish cult from flooding the world.

Mano's Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtgEWiWEk7w

"I know I love you, and you love the sea
But what holy water contains a little drop, little drop for me...?" (Vampire Weekend, "Unbelievers")

Mano's journey is one in which religion, politics, violence, and sexuality are all hopelessly entangled, and inform each other in subtle and blunt ways alike.
She's about the dual quest for acceptance of queer spirituality, among the spiritual despite being queer and among the queer despite being spiritual.
Mano is all about unresolved questions, and I try to write her in a way that lets readers come up with their own answers rather than answering for them.
What does it mean to really believe in something with your whole heart, but to live in a way where you accept that others may believe differently?
How do you separate religious and political belief when religion informs your politics, never converting, but always engaged in radical activist action?
How do you create a space for yourself to rest and recover from everything bad that happened to you without becoming disconnected from the world?
How do you separate a profound desire for radical non-violence with the impetus for revolutionary violence against the negative peace that exploits it?
How do you become critical of the social controls of belief without losing access to the part of your identity that it means to you and your people?
How do you honor someone's legacy when you're confronted with how thoroughly what they were trying to do was misinterpreted by the rest of the world?
When you pay attention to the chain reaction of cause and effect, you see suffering isn't only often undeserved, but that it never happens in a vacuum.
Mano is a creature of contradictions, with hidden strength and hidden weakness, who has walked her tightropes alongside mine for almost two decades now.
In the best timeline, the cultists she rescues end up shaping a radical school of thought that brings all of us the social framework we need to save the world.
In the end, Mano is also about making the best of a bad situation, striving to be your best self even when things didn't turn out the way you wanted them to.