Natalie

Natalie Lee Evans is a 15-year-old, pastel yellow girl who is another one of Sarah’s closest friends. Being the other half of two of the main four who have always lived on Miracle Island, she is another one of Sarah, as well as Antcruz’s earliest allies. Meeting Sarah at her brother’s arcade “Avery’s Super Spacecade,” she later met Antcruz and eventually started crushing on him, admiring his abilities and heroism, and becoming inspired to aid him in battles using her newfound admiration for bombs. It’s because of this that Natalie became one of the most useful allies in terms of combat and skill, with her bombs being extremely powerful and her being able to pull off unique tricks with them. She is also a part-time employee at Avery’s Super Spacecade, being the prize giver at the prize shop. Some of Natalie’s favorite things include video games, drawing, and manga. Her favorite food is a baguette, which goes best with margarine.

Backstory
Natalie was born on February 27, 2006, on Miracle Island. Her family is quite a nuclear one, consisting of her, her parents, Ren and Jezell, her older brother, Avery, and her cat, Catfish. This doesn’t even count their maid, Yogurt. As you might be able to tell, Natalie’s family is relatively wealthy, with Ren being a businessman working at a telecommunications service and Jezell being a photographer for PiP Fashion, a competitor to Sarah's Studio Presence clothing brand. However, Natalie’s downfall works as somewhat of a contrast to Sarah’s—-Rather than having no money and thus not being able to provide for their children, her parents have the money, but would rather use their money on expensive things such as jewelry and cars, wanting to increase their “rich” images. This was noticed by Avery at a young age, even back when Natalie was a toddler, so he told them off about it. They responded by buying out a building for Avery to start his own business in, with the building eventually becoming Avery’s Super Spacecade as it was finishing up production. The arcade was a relative success, being the closest arcade to Miracle Academy, so Avery was easily able to gain enough revenue to provide for not only himself, but his sister as well. Natalie would not begin working at the arcade herself until years later, due to Avery already having assistance from Nova, but would still regularly hang out in the arcade after school, not only to help out her brother on certain tasks but also because she had unlimited access to everything since she was directly related to Avery. At age 12, during just an ordinary day in her brother’s arcade, Natalie would meet Sarah, who was confused with how one of the machines worked. After Natalie helped Sarah, the two would continue to talk regularly and eventually became best friends, later getting to meet Antcruz and developing romantic interest in him later on, as well as forming a normal friendship with him as well. Like Sarah and Dash, Natalie was motivated to assist Antcruz in future battles after witnessing his first battle with Ava. However, unlike Sarah and Dash, both of whom used already pre-established weapons, Natalie took a bigger risk—actually going as far as tracking down Zane’s laboratory, sneaking inside, and stealing bombs from the bomb factory department. She would then use her artistic ability to customize the bombs and then lock them away for use in future battles--much to Avery's dismay, but he would agree to keep it a secret from their parents as long as she was only using them for the purpose of good. This would be recurring for the rest of Natalie’s status as a heroine, with the bombs not only being incredibly useful, but also indirectly disadvantageous to Zane as bomb production in his laboratory would repeatedly and significantly slow down.

Personality
In terms of personality, Natalie could be seen as a more exaggerated counterpart to Antcruz, but with her own quirks as well. Much like Antcruz, she is a bit of a geek, taking interest mostly in video games and manga, and also having art as one of her hobbies, another thing she took inspiration from Antcruz on. She is also a bit tone-deaf when it comes to modern trends and topics among her peers. Despite this, she is still keen on being as sociable as possible, loving to make friends whenever she can, although she isn’t quite as successful in that regard as Sarah and is prone to making things awkward sometimes, especially when Antcruz is in the same environment as her; Despite this, she still continues trying her best. One social strength that she has over Sarah is that she's more willing to participate in anything, whether it be a battle or just another one of Antcruz and Dash's basketball games. She is generally a very happy and confident person who is rather difficult to put in a bad mood. In general, Natalie can be seen as having her own unique, bubbly personality, while sharing the positive aspects of Sarah and varying aspects of Antcruz.

Appearance
Natalie has a pastel yellow skin tone with short, light orange-ish pink hair with two supersized twin drills, and bright, pink eyes, each with two eyelashes. Her outfit includes a pink crop-top hoodie with a white crop-top worn underneath, leaving her bellybutton to be visible, as well as white shorts, light pink socks, and purple gloves and shoes, with the latter having pink bows strapped onto them.

Antcruz
What is possibly Antcruz’s strangest relationship is his friendship with Natalie. While Natalie has a crush on Antcruz and has made it no secret despite never being direct about it when he’s around, Antcruz just considers her as a good friend and takes her flirtatious acts as “friendliness”, showcasing his more naive attitude in certain circumstances, although he does seem to have a limit, as shown by his tendency to leave before or during her sleepovers with Sarah, especially near bedtime. Despite the annoyances, Antcruz cares about his friend and has no problem helping or sticking up for her when the occasion asks for it. A moment that best represents Antcruz’s attitude towards Natalie was when she started working at Avery’s Super Spacecade in order to pay for damages she accidentally caused to Antcruz and Dash’s basketball court, later letting Antcruz fill in for her due to her feeling stressed out and him feeling guilty.

Sarah
Sarah and Natalie are best friends, with Natalie being one of Sarah’s first friends since escaping to Miracle Island, meeting each other at Avery’s Super Spacecade while Sarah was still trying to find her way around. Since quickly becoming friends, they have often paired up with each other for their assignments at Miracle Academy and have often had sleepovers together, with the latter being much to Antcruz’s dismay. Sarah also looks up to Natalie in a similar way to how Natalie looks up to Antcruz, with Sarah admiring her quick improvements and determination in battle. Natalie has gone on record saying that one of the reasons she decided to work with bombs was so that she could outdo Sarah’s explosive bullets if they were to do competitions.

Dash
Dash has ounces of respect towards Natalie, finding her skills and reflexes in battle to be impressive, but gets a bit jealous of her due to the fact that Sarah hangs out with her so much. Although Dash generally likes Natalie, it’s because of this that he’ll jokingly make fun of her behind her back, with her playful and energetic personality, her crush on Antcruz, and her revealing outfit being subjects of ridicule. Dash has referred to her as “a badass with the body of a whore and the personality of a naive child.” Natalie’s attitude towards Dash is similar, liking to gossip about him occasionally, though this is usually just for shits and giggles rather than an act of jealousy.

Nia
Aside from getting to see Antcruz, Nia is one of Natalie’s favorite parts of her sleepovers with Sarah. While she has a cat herself, she finds it much more interesting to see an actual alien in real life, and respects Sarah even more knowing that she’s able to raise and take care of one. Natalie’s bond with Nia is almost just as good as Sarah’s, though Nia, of course, sticks with Sarah instead, knowing that she’s her caretaker.

Trivia
- While Natalie is currently in need of a voice actress, she was at one point going to be voiced by @VeloStriker22. Her auditioning lines were recorded and finished, but when asked about voicing her again for an upcoming project (likely Artist Review), she declined since she was busy.

- Natalie was my first OC to initially be designed with Gacha Life in early 2019. I was initially against the idea of giving Antcruz a “love interest” sort of character, but got the idea to make what one would look like if I ever actually did make one while screwing around in the program. I thought the end result was too cute to pass off.

- Natalie is also my first OC to have any sort of family show up in the universe, with them being introduced in a doodle posted in mid-2021. While my other OCs do have families, they’re either only mentioned in their backstory or just not present at all.

- Interestingly, Natalie’s debut drawing showcases her with cleavage (despite her just coming off of age 12) and no belly button due to bad anatomic choices at the time. Natalie wouldn’t be given cleavage again until she canonically turned 14.

- While Natalie’s design has remained relatively unchanged since she was introduced, there have been some other alterations that have been made since then, such as her original long, pink/white-stripped socks being removed and her twin drills becoming larger and more extended. Most of these changes were made to associate her less with her original Gacha Life design.

- Natalie’s canon birthday is February 27, 2006; only a week after Antcruz’s birthday. I chose this date for her because this would give her another reason to be attracted to him, the delusion that any simple little coincidence such as this indicates that they were "made for each other."

- Natalie is my favorite character to draw. This is very ironic considering that she’s one of the hardest characters of the cast for me to digitize.