I didn’t set out to write a novel. I didn’t name characters with divine purpose or hidden lore. When I first opened the file that would become The Heater and The Hack, I just needed a name that didn’t sound ordinary. I typed “username” backwards—Emanresu—and it looked exotic enough to keep going.

But then something happened.
I passed ten thousand words.
Then twenty.
Then fifty.

Twenty-seven chapters later, I realized… introspection was killing me. We were all in Emanresu’s head a good 60% of the time. I needed a foil—before I even knew what a foil really was.

So I injected a childhood companion into the world.
And who better than “a user”?

Thus, Resua was written in.

For twenty-seven chapters—as I lengthened and combined and fleshed out the material, from twenty-seven chapters to fifteen—the names stuck. The characters hardened. Their names stopped being letters on a line and started feeling like people I knew.

Their names sounded like breath, and memory, and myth.

And suddenly… “username” felt small.

So I made a change. Subtle, but reverent.
Emanresu became Emanrasu—a single vowel shift that kept the intonation, but gave it soul.
Resua became Rezua—softer, older, no longer tied to keyboards and placeholder syntax.

What began as convenience became canon.
The names are no longer jokes.
No longer backwards tags.

They’re vessels now. They carry the myth because they survived its creation.

I didn’t name them.
I heard them wrong the first time—
and only later got it right.