Arnold Crowley

Arnold's defining feature is his hair: a large black mass shaped like a triangular helmet that tapers upward over his square face, finished with short bangs cut in a straight, even line. Thick, sharply angled eyebrows sit above big, wide-open black eyes.

His clothing matches every other boy at Eden Academy, a black button-up shirt worn with black shorts, along with long white crew socks and black shoes.

Fascination with the supernatural runs through everything Arnold does, a fixation inherited from his father's work performing spiritual readings. He pairs the obsession with genuine academic pride, especially in Classical Language, and likes to cast himself as the calm, analytical expert whenever the paranormal comes up.

The confidence is thin. Faced with anything that genuinely frightens him or contradicts his theories, he unravels into panic, imagination and superstition overpowering his reasoning. Even so, he remains willing to investigate the things he fears and shows a wary sense of responsibility toward classmates swept up in his expeditions.

Arnold comes from a household with some renown in Ostania; his father reads fortunes for the country's elite under the stage name Magical★Crowley. During the first term finals at Eden Academy he takes the top Classical Language score in his grade, earning a Stella Star, and grows curious about Anya Forger after spotting her name in second place. At the end-of-class gala he tries to invite her to dance, only for a jealous Damian Desmond to interrupt with a thrown paper ball, and Anya ends up choosing Damian as her partner anyway.

The second term lands him in Science Class F beside Anya and Connie, where he confesses that his conviction that higher beings designed all life on earth wrecked his Biology grade. Overhearing talk of "The Devil Ritual in the Old Schoolhouse," one of Eden's Seven Great Secrets, he proclaims himself a paranormal authority and joins the expedition into the abandoned building, revealing a hidden route there from Cline Hall's dormitory. The trip is rough on his nerves: he decides Anya is being "ensorcelled" when the group's swirling thoughts overwhelm her, retells a rumor that the ritual covered wartime experiments on underperforming students, and bolts with the others when a cape-like shadow sweeps past a window. Like nearly everyone in the group, he is too rattled afterward to bathe or use the bathroom alone.