Poppy Li

**Poppy Li** is *Grimpop*'s co-founder & *Mythic Quest’*s former lead engineer and co-creative director. She is equally as ego-driven as Ian, but doesn’t see it that way. She started working at Mythic Quest right after she graduated from MIT.

## Personality

Poppy is an expert coder who connects better with her computer terminal than her co-workers, employees, and fellow humans. Poppy just wants to contribute creatively, and she knows how to make a good idea cool, but struggles to procure cool ideas herself. That Ian excels in this very thing only serves to further her frustrations. She seems to lack an understanding of social cues and normalities.

As time goes on, Poppy become just as skilled at manipulation as Ian. This is seen in the way she "inspired" Ian and Dave to help her with her speech at the Women for Gaming event ("Grouchy Goat").

She's Australian and Filipino. She frequently uses Australian slang that other people at the office don't seem to get.

## Background

### Before Mythic Quest

Poppy grew up in Australia with her Australian mother, Olivia, Filipino father, Benito, and older sister, Tracy. Even at the young age of 10, Poppy had a big interest in video games--particularly Final Fantasy IX. She also had piano classes, which she did not enjoy, but still excelled in.

Poppy was closer to her father than she was her mother, as seen in Sarian. He knew about the fact that she was hiding her knowledge of Filipino from her mother & frequently indulged in her antics to game in secret.

After finishing her piano recital, Poppy received a bicycle which she then used to go and play video games in her local library. It is then when she found *Sarian* and started to idolize Ian Grimm.

Sometime after this, Poppy started to shorten her last name "Liwanag" to "Li" and went on to go to MIT. She also attended a lecture hosted by Ian where he talked about his game, Twin Daggers, and proceeded to collaborate with him.

### Raven's Banquet

The production of *Raven's Banquet* was particularly stressful on Poppy. Constantly having the office take her work for granted and undermine her, she was set on quitting her job at Mythic Quest Studios and taking a job from their biggest competitor, Cold Alliance Studios. After too much indecisiveness on her part, however, she was rejected by Cold Alliance Studios and stayed at MQ, being made a co-creative director.

During this expansion, she added a new mechanic into the game with a shovel and a new party system called *Dinner Party.* One of the last bits of major coding she did for *Raven's Banquet* was to introduce an in-world virus called Blood Ocean and its vaccine into the game.

### During Quarantine

During the COVID-19 quarantine period, she swiftly had to remove Blood Ocean from *Mythic Quest (game)*, since it was obviously in poor taste following the rise of the COVID pandemic ("Quarantine"). Once she had finished this task, she found herself with little to do and completely isolated in her apartment. It was revealed that her mental state had completely deteriorated during the pandemic through a video call from Ian. When Ian unexpectedly showed up at her house one night when she was particularly down, she found his non-sexual companionship a buoying force.

### After Quarantine

In the early aftermath of her being made a co-equal to Ian, she presided over the company's Everlight festival as queen. In Titan's Rift, she was soon thereafter faced with the challenge of coming up with the name for the new expansion, when Ian skipped town for a "sabbatical". To arrive at the new name, she had to go through several tortuous sexual dreams that largely involved Ian ridiculing her sexual prowess.

## Appearances

* Season 1
	+ "Pilot"
	+ "The Casino"
	+ "Dinner Party"
	+ "The Convention"
	+ "Non-Player Character"
	+ "Permadeath"
	+ "Brendan"
	+ "Blood Ocean"
	+ "Quarantine"
	+ "Everlight"
* Season 2
	+ "Titans' Rift"
	+ "Grouchy Goat"
	+ "#YumYum"
	+ "Breaking Brad"
	+ "Please Sign Here"
	+ "Backstory!"
	+ "Juice Box"
	+ "TBD"
* Season 3
	+ "Across the Universe"
	+ "Partners"
	+ "Crushing It"
	+ "The Two Joes"
	+ "Playpen"
	+ "The 12 Hours of Christmas"
	+ "Sarian"
	+ "To Catch a Mouse"

## Trivia

* Poppy's last name, "Liwanag", is a Filipino word that directly translates into the word "light".
	+ This could be a direct representation on how Ian and Poppy's dynamic is; Ian's last name being Grimm, "grim" meaning mirthless or dark and Liwanang meaning "light".