Meet the cast

Every key on the keyboard belongs to a friend. Here’s who they are and where they come from. Nothing here spoils the story past the first chapter, beyond who you’ll meet.

Why every key has a friend

You learn A because Alice is there, Z because Zorro arrives, and Q because Quasimodo needs you. The letter, the character, the finger, and the key become one memory, so your fingers have a reason to remember instead of a row of letters to repeat.

Where a key sits says something about its friend, too. Alice is on the home row, where your pinky rests. Zorro is one row down, the drop into the fight. Quasimodo is one row up, a reach toward his bells.

The first three

Alice, on A

From Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Carroll’s Alice is seven; Keyfolk’s is seventeen, curious, a little wry, and the kind of person who keeps asking “but why?” until the answers run out. She walks into every chapter after her own, so your first key never gets rusty. Her portrait is from Arthur Rackham’s 1907 illustrations.

Zorro, on Z

From Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano (1919). Keyfolk’s Zorro is older and quieter than the swashbuckler you might know, and his jokes are so dry you might catch one a line late. His portrait is a still of Douglas Fairbanks in the 1920 film The Mark of Zorro.

Quasimodo, on Q

From Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). He’s the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, who lost his hearing over years of ringing the bells and still feels them through the stone. In Hugo’s novel he gives the bells names, and Marie is his favourite. In Keyfolk he speaks in sign, so his lines are marked (signs).

The whole keyboard

Keys	Friends
A · Z · Q	Alice, Zorro, Quasimodo
S · X · W	Scheherazade, Xio, Wendy
D · C · E	D’Artagnan, Cyrano, Eliza
F · G · V · B · R · T	Frankenstein’s Creature, Gerda, Virgil, Baba Yaga, Robin Hood, Titania
J · H · M · N · U · Y	Jean Valjean, Holmes, Mulan, Nemo, Ulysses, Yvain
K · , · I	Kay, The Pause, Ishmael
L · . · O	Lupin, The End, Orlando
; · / · P	The Bridge, The Choice, Pinocchio

Where they come from

Most of the friends come from stories that have shaped storytelling around the world, and many of the originals are free to read on Project Gutenberg:

• Scheherazade, from One Thousand and One Nights
• Wendy, from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904)
• D’Artagnan, from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844)
• Cyrano, from Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897)
• Eliza, from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913)
• Frankenstein’s Creature, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
• Gerda and Kay, from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1844)
• Virgil, from Dante’s The Divine Comedy (about 1320)
• Baba Yaga, from Slavic folklore
• Robin Hood, from the English ballads
• Titania, from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (about 1596)
• Jean Valjean, from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862)
• Holmes, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (from 1887)
• Mulan, from the Chinese Ballad of Mulan (about the 6th century)
• Nemo, from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
• Ulysses, from Homer’s The Odyssey
• Yvain, from Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (about 1180)
• Ishmael, from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)
• Lupin, from Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories (from 1905)
• Orlando, from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928)
• Pinocchio, from Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883)

Keyfolk adapts them rather than retelling them: the language is updated, timelines are shorter, and some friends get scenes their original authors never wrote.

Fun facts

• Xio is the only friend made from scratch. No widely known story character’s name starts with X, so Keyfolk created one: a mapmaker who draws the routes others would rather keep hidden. Xio’s portrait is Johannes Vermeer’s painting The Geographer.
• The punctuation keys are friends too. The comma is The Pause, the full stop is The End, the semicolon is The Bridge, and the slash is The Choice. Three of their portraits come from Punctuation Personified, a children’s book from 1824.
• The hardest punctuation mark lives on the simplest key. Your right pinky already rests on the semicolon.
• Every portrait is real public domain art, cropped to a circle around the face and otherwise untouched. The oldest is a third-century Roman mosaic of Virgil, and the narrator’s is a picture of Grammar from a book printed in 1517.
• Everyone sounds different. Each friend has a way of talking: some are shy, some playful, some dodge the question, some are wry. Listen for who says the plain true thing a beat after everyone else.

If a character or tradition here matters to you and you think Keyfolk got it wrong, we’d like to hear from you.