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Liang
Voiced by: Matthew Yang King (English), Daisuke Ono (Japanese)
The protagonist and narrator of the story. The son of a spirit hunter from mainland China, he moves to colonial Hong Kong in search of job opportunities in the growing metropolis.
- Brainy Brunette: He is a pale dark-haired young man with engineering skills.
- Character Narrator: He provides most of the narration and exposition in the story.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Liang has a natural aptitude for machines, and does well in his first job as a railroad worker. By the end of the short, he's making fantastic automatons, and even engineers a new body for Yan that can shift between human and fox forms.
- Long-Haired Pretty Boy: He let's his hair down by the end of the episode, and is complimenting a lot his face.
- Mr. Fanservice: He has several scenes where he is shown how ripped and attractive he is.
- Nice Guy: Liang is a man of kindness and honor who never seeks out conflict. He is the only one of his gender shown to treat Yan with compassion and respect, when others see her as a monster or a sex object.
- Non-Action Guy: Unlike his father, he decided not to take up his job of hunting spirits, nor does he engage in any combat or violence at all.
Yan
Voiced by: Sumalee Montano (child), Elaine Tan (adult) (English), Rie Kugimiya (Japanese)
The deuteragonist, and a shapeshifting huli jing. Following the death of her mother, she and Liang develop a close friendship and budding romance. However, her new life in Hong Kong results in a traumatic loss of her former identity.
- Action Girl: After Liang upgrades her cyborg body, she roams around Hong Kong as a vengeful vigilante.
- Asian Fox Spirit: Yan is a huli jing and can shift between the form of a human woman and a mystical multi-tailed fox at will. As The Magic Goes Away, she undergoes Shapeshifter Mode Lock and is trapped in human form. And soon afterwards, she gets stripped of her human form as well.
- Cybernetic Mythical Beast: At the end of the short, Yan is given an upgraded body able to transform into a cybernetic nine-tailed fox.
- Cyborg: The Governor forces her to become one until all that's left of her original organic body is her head.
- Full-Conversion Cyborg: Liang's reconstruction of her body reveals there was almost no organic material left after the Governor's surgeons had their way with her.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: She's forced to resort to prostitution just to survive after The Magic Goes Away, but nonetheless retains her morals. Even after she goes on her hunting spree, it's out of revenge for the local women being sexually abused by the Englishmen.
- Ms. Fanservice: Brutally deconstructed. On one hand, she is an admittedly beautiful woman shown nude in multiple instances, and she's part of a species that takes advantage of their attractive appearances. On the other hand, this same appeal is what results in her being reduced to a prostitute and later an unwilling sexbot, which also means that most of those aforementioned nude scenes aren't actually played for fanservice.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: She wants to hunt prey, like she did in the old days. Liang gives her a body capable of hunting; and all the various awful people in the city, particularly the evil British colonists who abuse the locals, provide her plenty of fodder that she can kill without remorse.
- Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: Just like her mother, she's a hauntingly beautiful woman with pale skin and dark hair.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: Yan doesn't seem to possess a sense of shame for nudity. She is completely naked when she meets Liang for the first time without showing to be particularly ashamed or bothered. She is also aware of the effect that her nude body has towards Liang, commenting that she noticed how he looked at her. Even when some years pass and Liang and Yan become friends she seems to keep her lack of nudity taboo. In the scene where Yan is fed by Liang, in fact, she doesn't seem to worry about her breasts being completely visible.
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: After The Magic Goes Away, she loses the ability to turn into her fox form, and is trapped as an (outwardly) ordinary human. Which is problematic, as without that, her only skills are... well, she has none. All she has is her beauty. Even more tragic in the original short story; because much as in Chinese mythology, a huli jing's true form is the fox one rather than the human one, meaning that she's stuck in a less comfortable, "wrong" body.
- Though, in her robotic fox form her tails appear organic, suggesting she might have regained some measure of her magic.
- Transforming Mecha: At the end, she can switch from a humanoid cyborg form into a robotic huli jing.
- Unwilling Roboticisation: The Governor has her unwillingly converted into a cyborg, because he's robosexual.
- Vigilante Woman: Graduates to this by the end, when she attacks a gang of would-be rapists as part of her "hunting".
Liang's father
Voiced by: Matthew Yang King (English), Hideyuki Tanaka (Japanese)
Liang's late father. He was a spirit hunter who fought and killed various supernatural creatures, including Yan's mother.
- All There in the Script: His real name is never mentioned but he's credited as Renshu.
- Anti-Villain: He murders Yan's mother without hesitation or remorse, but only because he (wrongly) believes that her kind are inherently dangerous to humans. He's otherwise just a working father who does this job to provide for his son.
- Badass Normal: He's an ordinary human who knows how to fight and slay various supernatural creatures.
- Character Death: He dies offscreen sometime during the Time Skip when Liang grows up into a young man. In the original story the short is based on, he was Driven to Suicide because the decline of the supernatural left him without work; he died penniless and largely mocked by the wider community.
- Hunter of Monsters: What he did for a living. He slayed numerous demons, monsters, and other magical beings that were (allegedly) evil or dangerous to humans. Deconstructed because he was at least partly motivated by prejudice against non-humans; and showed a ruthless determination to kill any mystical creature whom he (rightly or wrongly) assumed to be evil, regardless of their actual guilt or innocence.
- Would Hit a Girl: He's willing to kill a woman if she's actually a shapeshifting fox creature in disguise.
- Would Hurt a Child: He was also willing to kill the aforementioned fox-woman's pups, just in case she had any (Liang lied to his dad that she didn't in order to protect Yan).
Tsiao-Jung
Voiced by: Gwendoline Yeo (English), Rika Fukami (Japanese)
Yan's deceased mother, who was also a huli jing just like her.
- Ambiguously Evil: Huli jings are believed to seduce human men for nefarious purposes. While she does attempt to have sex with a man, she claims to have never intended to actually harm him. In any case, her daughter Yan is shown to be a good person; so Liang's father's belief that their species are Always Chaotic Evil proves to be false, and that his murder of Yan's mother was ultimately pointless.
- Asian Fox Spirit: A shapeshifting huli jing just like her daughter.
- Full-Frontal Assault: She is completely naked during the fighting scene with Liang's father, as her clothes disappear as she turns into her half form state. Just like her daughter, she doesn't seem to be ashamed of being completely nude in front of others.
- Lady of War: She's a notably graceful fighter, swerving and curling around Liang's father in both human and fox forms.
- Monster Is a Mommy: As Liang and his father chase Tsiao-Jung back to her lair, it soon turns out that she has a young daughter (which would explain why she starts defending herself more ferociously). Liang lies to his father about Yan's existence in order to save her from sharing her mother's demise.
- Off with Her Head!: She gets gruesomely beheaded by Liang's father.
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: The bucket of urine that Liang's father throws on her leaves her stuck between human and fox forms.
- Shapeshifting Seducer: She tried to sleep with a hysterical male human, who was seemingly entranced and hypnotized by her. Though she claims that he desired her completely out of his own free will and consent (and insists that he came onto her first).
- Technically Naked Shapeshifter: While she turns into her half-human form, her clothes disappear. Also she is completely naked when she comes back to her basic huli jing form. This means that her clothes are the result of a mere illusion she uses.
The Governor
Voiced by: JB Blanc (English), Ken Uo (Japanese)
The corrupt British governor of colonial Hong Kong, and a frequent client of Yan when she worked as a prostitute. He has horrifying surgeries conducted on Yan for the sake of satisfying his depraved sexual urges.
- Antagonistic Governor: To call him a Corrupt Politician would be an understatement. He's also a completely insane and amoral rapist, gleefully abusing his power and authority to get away with his vile crimes.
- Asshole Victim: Given all the terrible things that he did to Yan, there's not a single bit of remorse from her after killing him, nor does Liang question that he really had it coming.
- Ax-Crazy: His behavior is extremely bizarre and insane even for an evil politician. How many other villains go so far as to kidnap and turn people into cybernetic sex slaves?
- Big Bad: He's the closest thing to a main villain in this short, though he doesn't last long.
- Composite Character: In the original's short story, it's the governor's son who abuses and enslaves Yan.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: He ends up getting his jaw ripped open by Yan. Really couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
- Death by Adaptation: He gets killed by Yan unlike in the short story where she simply chokes her abuser into unconsciousness.
- Evil Brit: He's an Evil Colonialist in charge of running Hong Kong, all while he (figuratively and literally) rapes the local Chinese people, both for British economic interests and his own sick personal amusement.
- Fat Bastard: He is terribly obese and is the evilest person in the short.
- Hate Sink: He is a cruel and disgusting man who abducts Yan to painfully transform her into a cyborg, so that he can treat her as his own personal sex toy.
- Karmic Death: After tortuously mutilating Yan's body and sexually abusing her on a regular basis, she eventually has enough of his cruelty and then brutally kills him.
- No Name Given: His real name is never mentioned.
- Robosexual: According to Yan he could only be aroused by machines, which is why he had her turned into a Cyborg just to satisfy this bizarre fetish.
- Stupid Evil: His illogical actions done to satisfy his lust lead to his downfall.
- Too Dumb to Live: It's not entirely clear why exactly he made his Sex Slave so unbelievably strong. It's not entirely clear why he thought making a robotic sex slave from an actual live person was a good idea in the first place, since the end result is basically just a human head on an entirely artificial body.
