Character Profile -- Kim

Maeve Isolde Knight

Aliases or Nicknames:

Kim (nickname for all but family)

Knight Is Mutable (internet handle)

Miss (adoptive family calls her this)

Era:

Pre-Rift

Appears In:

Beverlee Hills Mummy

Importance:

Secondary Character

Main Goal:

To help -- but never to meet.

Relationship to Other Characters:

Nakia's personal assistant (usually digital), "Sunny's" legal guardian.

Backstory/Infodump:

Kim was born to very rich, very abusive parents. When she was five, she was unofficially adopted by a schoolmate's equally rich but kind parents. Officially, they only ever "kept an eye on her" while the birth parents were out of town, but practically, Kim lived in their house from age five to age thirteen, when her parents decided they wanted her with them.

Kim who'd grown up tracking her parents' phones and digital calendars found refuge in hacking in general, and knew that it was a matter of time before her parents wanted her back, so she prepared. She took on freelance hacking jobs on the dark web as early as age 11 and built her Bitcoin portfolios as well as translating that into traditional currency. 

When she stumbled upon Nakia's ad for a personal assistant at age 13, she was glad that it was a full-time gig because, I don't know if you know this, but hacking gigs on the dark web can get a bit dark. All Kim had to do was make a couple dozen aliases seem like real people who owned homes and vehicles, travelled, vacationed, and otherwise exist. She didn't know or care why this was the job. It paid well and coincided with her birth parents demanding she return "home".

She physically disappeared for five years, only contacting her adoptive sister a few times a year -- never around a holiday or birthday, and never the same way twice (in person, phone, email, text, etc and since she was a hacker, she could used emails and phone numbers that were existing contacts in her sister's phone). After she turned eighteen, she reunited with her adoptive parents and has Sunday dinner with them and her sister every week. She declines dinners when she knows there will be additional guests, and her parents have learned not to trick her into showing up to find guests there.

Her catching up with her parents and sister once a week is her only social interaction until she comes to Beverlee Hills. Two of Nakia's aliases, John and Jane Sinclair were booked on a plane that crashed. Unfortunately, the actors playing them really did die. Their daughter "Sunny" was "in school" and set to join them the week after. 

In order to save the fortune and contacts that the fictional Sinclairs had, Nakia has to pose as Sunny and Kim as Sunny's guardian. Nakia is pissed when she finds out that Kim is so young (twenty-one) because Kim could have posed as Sunny and hired someone else to play guardian. (Kim lied about her age in order to get the job and her hacking skills were better than Nakia's so Nakia didn't know until she met Kim in person.)

Kim, understands the volatility of incredibly wealthy and powerful people understands that she's on Nakia's shit list for losing not only the Sinclairs but also the two very reliable actors (not easy to find) who played them. So, even though losing the Sinclairs was not her fault, she intuitively (and correctly) understands that Nakia blames her and that she is on thin ice. She knows that Nakia made initial moves toward emptying out Kim's accounts and destroying her digital presence. Kim would have been fine, since Nakia has no idea who Kim actually is and Kim has plenty of money under her own name and several aliases. 

Kim doesn't know why Nakia changed her mind, but she's determined to win back her trust. Nakia has overall been a very generous boss and Kim genuinely likes her job. It's like playing digital dolls with real people and assets. Also, Kim's agoraphobic personality does not lend to her wanting to look for another job. So, when Nakia demands that Kim play Sunny's guardian, Kim puts on her big girl pants and moves all the way from Connecticut to California.

One thing that Kim did before she knew she'd be moving to California was staff Sunny's house with gardeners, housekeepers, a butler, etc. So, now, not only does she have to leave her home, move across the country for an indeterminate amount of time away from the only social circle she's comfortable with, and be surrounded by strangers. She does her best to avoid the staff in person, preferring to communicate through text and emails, but she does have to talk to people, and it's torture. She also has to interact with Nakia, balancing her almost worshipful awe with genuine terror. And she has to interact with Jacki, who is painfully observant. (Kim reminds Jacki of three kids in a trenchcoat because she's trying to hard to seem older and more experienced.)

Anyway, throughout the trilogy, Kim will be undergoing a similar set of challenges as Nakia -- basically, finding it hard to be misanthropic when faced with actual people, as opposed to successfully avoiding them. However, her core set of friends will be staff members, not the girls Nakia goes to school with. 

However, Kim's main arc will revolve around tracking Jackie, initially to get dirt on her so that she can be blackmailed into not monitoring Sunny too closely. Once she and Nakia realize that Jacki is genuinely trying to do good and only breaks rules to help kids, not herself, they get involved, sometimes to unexpected detriment to the kids they're trying to help. So, the trilogy will basically have Kim occasionally meeting with Nakia to update her on current events and get instructions on what to do next.

Kim is fascinated by Jacki -- not just her professional life, but her family and dating life. Jacki has a huge extended family that she is very involved with, and she actively dates, even though her schedule is so busy. Jacki has a very distinctive fashion sense, an unapologetic personality, and is, basically, awesome. Kim's whole job since she was thirteen was to manage the lives of fictional people, but to see a real person moving around in the world, so engaged with it basically allows her to observe the ins and outs, triumphs and sorrows of those things. 

By being a shut-in with a limited social circle, Kim gets to experience genuine love and connection and avoid intense rejection and cruelty. But Jacki's life is full of pretty good friends and acquaintances and frenemies and work colleague. Every human interaction doesn't have to be fraught with the context of good versus evil, best and worst. Most people are mid, most experiences are mid, and it's okay to be mid. The main thing that Kim takes away from watching Jacki is that she doesn't have to be so constantly vigilant against the worst cruelty that humanity has to offer. Most people who suck, suck midly to moderately, and Kim can survive that. She's survived worse.

I don't want Kim's arc to end dramatically. I want it to be the middle of her story. She doesn't need closure on her relationship with her birth parents, she doesn't need to get married or be someone's best friend, she doesn't need to be the smartest person in the room, and she doesn't need to be vigilant a hundred percent of the time. She just needs to be.

I forgot to explain the nicknames. K.I.M. is Kim's dark web persona, but she just goes by Kim. K.I.M stands for Knights are Mutable. "Mutable" means "liable to change" and Knight is Kim's birth surname. Her full birth name Is Maeve Isolde Knight, and her backwards initials spell "Kim". Kim going by such a generic name is kind of a middle finger to her birth parents with all of their appearances of fanciness and manners and shit.

Her adoptive parents and sister call her "Miss" because it's a combo of the beginning of Maeve and Isolde. None of them know about her online persona and would be shocked to see anyone calling her "Kim".

Maeve does't call her adoptive parents "Mom" and "Dad" or any iteration of that because growing up, she didn't want to risk rejection from her adoptive parents and she definitely didn't want to risk her birth parents finding out. She has gotten into the habit of not referring to them by title or by name. To her adoptive sister, she calls them "the 'rents" but with plenty of irony, again, to avoid any potential rejection.

Maybe by the end of the story, Kim's sister will invite her to call them "Mom" and "Dad" and Kim will accept.

I should also establish Kim's and Nakia's dynamic. In the beginning, they are both so hypervigilant and overly sensitive to perceived insult (pitching or catching) that they kind of bump into each other a lot, verbally. Kim is in awe of Nakia but doesn't like her, and Nakia resents relying on anyone else for anything that she has to convince herself that she doesn't actually need Kim (and technically, she doesn't, but Kim makes her life a lot easier.)

By the end of the trilogy, Nakia won't actually need Kim anymore because she'll have settled into the Sunny persona and can let the rest go. The aliases were created as a networky way to track down The King, and Nakia does that in the second book, so Kim should probably be out of a job about halfway through the third book, if not the beginning. So Nakia won't need Kim but they both will be more secure in the their ability to handle conflict, and will have built a level of trust that they can part on good terms (and a nice big, fat bonus for Kim).