Minor Arches characters

This is a list of minor characters that appear or are mentioned in the visual novel Arches.

## Allen

**Allen** was a young rat and one of Brian's victims. Brian bought him a meal at a bar and then at some point kidnapped him, bound him in his trailer, and stuffed a rag into his mouth. While Brian was away, Allen died from drowning in his own vomit while gagged. Cameron later has a vision of Allen's death, and calls in an anonymous tip to report what happened to him.

## Bobcat Student

Near Lake Emma, Cameron has a vision from the perspective of an 18-year-old **bobcat student** at Echo High, who drowned in the lake in June of 1954 after her ex-boyfriend James pushed her from the roadway into the water. In her last moments, she feels dejected about her prospects after graduation and thinks her death is for the best.

According to the news report found by Devon, her death was ruled a suicide, but Cam's vision proves otherwise.

## Cameron's Mother

The troubled single **mother of Cameron Wilson** used various drugs, mostly meth or other amphetamines, and worked three jobs. She wanted to be an astronaut during her childhood but became discouraged after watching the Challenger shuttle explode in the fifth grade, and blames that disillusionment for leading her down the path to a troubled life. She gave birth to Cameron when she was 17 and living out of a van.

Due to her addiction and untreated mental health issues, she believed that God spoke to her through the box fan in the trailer she came to share with Cam. The voice from the fan instructed her to seek out things shaped like arches and half-circles, and told her that passing through the correct one would take her to heaven but the others would be Satanic deceptions. Despite her apparent disconnect from reality she never stopped caring for Cameron, and even saved him from an overdose at one point.

On the day she died, she told her son that even he looked like an arch and that the Devil had taken him. After saying she would be back to save him, Cameron's mother left their trailer and then drowned a few hours later while trying to swim under a bridge. She looked 'done' the last time Cameron saw her, and he believes her death was a suicide.

As Cam begins coming to terms with his apparently psychic abilities and realizes that he too has been seeing arches, he wonders if possibly his mother was like him, and once had similar visions but turned to stimulant use to try and stop seeing them, only to lose herself in a downward spiral of meth-fueled delusion instead. When he sees the luminous arches that save him and Dev by guiding them out of Echo's mine, Cam says to his departed mother that he 'found it,' presumably a reference to the heavenly arch she had been searching for.

## Cody

**Cody** is a bull and a friend of Cameron. He is a Mormon.

## Devon's Mother

**Devon's mother** is the mother of Devon Ortega and possibly also Lupita. She struggles with an addiction to benzodiazepines, which according to Dev were carelessly prescribed to her in the wake of Lupita's death. His mother's addiction is a major reason why Dev does not trust psychiatry.

## Dylan

**Dylan** is Cameron's abusive ex-boyfriend. He was physically violent towards Cam and seems to have been emotionally manipulative as well, and badly damaged Cam's already shaky sense of self-worth.

## Timothy Esposito

**Timothy Esposito** was a skunk born in 1985 and killed by Brian in 2005. He was from a 'decaying, industrial Midwestern city' but moved to Mesa, where his interest in breathplay led him to a BDSM-themed party and he caught Brian's attention. As he walked home afterward, Timothy was kidnapped by Brian. Despite being strong enough to nearly escape multiple times, Timothy died after two weeks in captivity when Brian accidentally strangled him to death.

## Daniel Gallegos

**Daniel Gallegos** was a ferret born in 1996 and killed by Brian in 2014. He was from the capital of Sonora, but was staying with family near Echo to work a summer job and save up money for his university tuition. Brian kidnapped him outside a club and tortured him for a month before beating him to death with a tire iron. Several customers came to Brian's trailer to buy drugs and saw Daniel restrained there, but none intervened to help him.

At one point, Brian erroneously uses Daniel's name while describing Devon.

Daniel's grave appears in Echo.

## Jason

**Jason** is a mutual friend of Cam and Dev, who attended a Halloween party with them in 2019. In the short story set during that night, Cam and Dev get intimate in their car while they wait for Jason to leave the party.

## Jesús

**Jesús** is a fox and Devon's ex-boyfriend. The two dated for two months during college at Pueblo University. Devon took being dumped by him very hard, and Arturo set Dev up on a date with Cameron to help get him over it, which led to their relationship forming. Jesús was Dev's first real relationship, and Dev regretted never really getting to know him.

## Benjamin Kowalski

**Benjamin Kowalski** was a rabbit born in 1977 and killed by Brian in September 1998. Benjamin was a runaway who left home at sixteen and eventually settled in Payton, where he worked at a grocery store. Brian was his drug dealer. Benjamin was not gay, but agreed to come to Brian's trailer and have sex with him in exchange for two ounces of weed. After four days of torture, Brian accidentally strangled him to death.

## Larry

**Larry** is Devon's friend, with whom Dev initially planned his expedition to Echo. Something prevented Larry from making the trip, and Dev says he won't be inviting him again. This leads Dev to invite Cameron instead.

## Lupita

**Lupita** was a close relative of Devon's who drowned at a young age when Dev was twelve. Little is currently known about who she was as a person, but Dev blames himself for her death.

During his first hallucination in Echo's motel, Cam's phone plays a staticky version of Devon's voice that asks "Lupita" to explain what death is like, and "she" answers only with a demonic scream. Afterward, Cam decides that the vision felt like a lie or trick with something nefarious behind it.

While Dev is drugged and chained up in Brian's trailer, he recalls being berated for not 'watching her,' presumably referring to the circumstances of Lupita's death.

## Maria

**Maria** is a leopard and Arturo's girlfriend. The two seem to have met in college at Pueblo. Maria has bipolar disorder, for which she takes antipsychotic medication. She has struggled with feeling like an 'unpredictable mess,' but Arturo has supported her throughout their relationship. After Artie's injury in Echo, Maria resolutely supports him as he recovers.

Maria is also a close friend of Cameron, and has known him for slightly longer than he has known his boyfriend Devon.

## Sara

**Sara** (last name either Mendoza or Montoya) is a jaguar who Arturo briefly dated in high school. Artie thinks of her while trying to recover his memories after being shot, and recalls that they broke up because he failed to comfort her after she was bullied by other girls at their school.

## Wolf from the Meseta tribal council

While attempting to use his "powers" in the motel, Cameron manages to experience a vision of an unnamed **wolf from the Meseta tribal council** who hung himself in the same room during the late '90s. While viewing the wolf's experience, Cameron describes him as wearing a suit with a bolo tie and senses that he is sad, angry, and terrified. Cameron's perspective then changes as he makes contact with something more malicious.

During TJ's route in Echo, Chase has a very similar vision while in a room in the motel that may be the same one Cam and Dev later investigate, although in this case the Meseta man who hangs himself is a fox instead of a wolf.

## Unnamed Freshman

The **unnamed freshman** is the young college student from whose perspective the opening narration of Arches takes place. His name and species are unknown, but he was a talented track and field athlete for the University of Pueblo who was drugged, kidnapped, and killed by Brian at some point prior to the start of the story.

## Unnamed Narrator

The **unnamed narrator** is a person Cameron overhears during part of one of his visions who recounts a story in which they and their wife encountered a creature made of static while walking in the woods of Echo. The narrator and their wife heard bizarre and nasty comments yelled at them in a playful tone, in a voice from the treetops that sounded male but oddly electronic. The narrator did not see the creature directly, but their wife describes it as a shadowy person that the light bent around strangely, and afterward the narrator begins having recurring dreams about it.

Although the two tried to avoid discussing what they saw, at some point the narrator became determined to leave a record of the unexplainable creature by participating in some kind of interview about it, which seems to be what Cam hears in his vision.

Based on a similar story of this creature given by Janice during Echo, which she says came from her grandfather, this unnamed narrator may be Andy or another member of the Adler family, although this is not confirmed.

## Young Otter

While first attempting to escape Echo, Cameron notices what appears to be a **young otter** on the road by the side of Lake Emma, which causes him to swerve Dev's Jeep and get it stranded in a ditch. When Cam and Dev exit the vehicle, however, the otter is nowhere to be seen, as if it was never there at all. In order to comfort Cameron, Devon then explains that an otter child drowned in the lake during the early 2000s and it is possible that Cam saw some form of his apparition.