Short Character Profiles -- Nakia

I find character profiles as stressful and boring as filling out forms at the doctor's office, so I created The Atelier Cafe as a way to help me come up with new characters and get to know established characters better. But character profiles are still important for keeping track of basic information like names of tertiary characters.

But, I spent two days working on Jacki's profile and she's a secondary character. And I still don't even have any of my main characters listed on the Character Profile page, so that's a bit ridiculous. I created the smallest profile template I could think of and I'm going to try to whip out some character profiles of characters I already know so that if I'm writing a story and I can't remember someone's middle name or alias, I'll just be able to look it up.

I'm going to use a separate post to explore some of the Auras.

Name: Nakia 

Aliases or Nicknames:

[NOTE: Nakia is a thousands-year-old character, and she has probably at least a dozen aliases that I haven't thought through yet that allow her to be a person "on paper" and travel freely from country to country. I'll list the ones I know here, but I'm sure I'll be adding to this list as I work on the story and need more aliases.]

Pike -- The King's nickname for her.

Sunshine "Sunny" Sinclair

John Sinclair (deceased)

Karen Sinclair (deceased)

Era:

Pre-Rift, Rifted, Mended

Appears In:

Beverlee Hills Mummy, Beware the False Moon.

Importance:

She's the main character in Beverlee Hills Mummy, and a tertiary character in Beware the False Moon.

Main Goal: To find the king so that she can return to the Afterlife; the only place she's ever felt safe, loved, and happy.

Relationship to Other Characters: The king is her god for a long time, but she makes certain connections in Atlantis and in the 1700s. I haven't worked them out yet, so I'll have to update this. In Beverlee Hills Mummy, her closest friends are Thai, China, and Candy, Ophelia, and her assistant Kim.

Backstory/Infodump:

Nakia was a peasant in Egypt under the rulership of Neferkheperu Amenhotep IV (fictional king) (his friends called him "Khepu") around 1500 BC. When she was seven, she was taken from her parents, and brought to the palace to serve the sadistic princess Ahmose. For reasons that Nakia never knew (but that we'll explore in Ahmose's profile), Ahmose took an almost instant hatred to Nakia and spent years abusing her verbally and physically. She even forced Nakia to write a letter to her parents saying that she was very happy in the palace and didn't love them anymore.

Although being a palace servant, especially a retainer to a princess, was an elevated position, Ahmose didn't let Nakia socialize with other servants, kept Nakia in rags, and made up reasons to punish her, which she would do, cruelly.

Although the custom of retainer sacrifice was long dead (haha), when Khepu died, Ahmose insisted that he have his favorite servant be entombed with him. Nakia was killed and mummified and placed in the king's tomb to keep him company in the Afterlife.

The Afterlife was better than Nakia could have imagined. She wore fine clothes, the weather was always perfect, and she and the king only napped and slept for pleasure. They passed their days in a gazebo set atop a waterfall. There's no way of knowing how many aeons went on like this, but for Nakia, it was a blink before the king disappeared.

The nature of the lush (see the Worldbuilding section) that makes up this world is that it responds to thoughts, so when Nakia wants to be where the king is, she ends up back in his tomb. When she realizes that, she thinks she's a mummy and that is the form that lush allows her to take. Nakia missed The King by just a few moments. It's Nakia's own horror at her situation and body that prevents her from finding him immediately.

She finds some robes to swaddle herself in, and follows the footprints she finds leading out of the crypt. There, she loses track of the king, and spends the next several hundred years looking for him. She eventually tracks him to the island of Atlantis around 1000 BC. He's left by the time she gets there, but Nakia makes a friend, the daughter of a geologist. When the volcano Atlantis is built on is threatening to explode, the friend betrays Nakia's secret that she's a mummy and she's sacrificed to the volcano. The volcano erupts anyway, if you can believe it.

Nakia hurt and angry. She sulks in the silty ocean water for a few hundred years, processing not only this betrayal but the years of humiliation and abuse that Ahmose had heaped upon her. She also reflects on her tracking of the king and comes to the realization that he's been evading her. This hurts even more, and adds another thousand years onto her big sulk.

When she emerges, she's fully opalized bone. It's (barely) within the realm of reality for an entire human body to be opalized in 1500 years in the right conditions. 

Anyway, The Mummy emerges from the ruins of Atlantis, ready to find The King and drag him back to The Afterlife. She's tried being a person twice now, and has failed both times. She wants the comfort and beauty of her little gazebo and waterfall and her board games. She could actually return to the Afterlife at any time, but because she thinks that she needs the king in order to return, the lush doesn't take her.

Unfortunately, the king continues to evade her. The next part of her story that I know doesn't happen until around the 1700s. She makes the mistake of making friends again, and is betrayed again. After a witch trial that Nakia fails, she's burned at the stake.  She goes back to trying to find The King, triply done with trying to be a person.

The main part of her story takes place in modern-day Beverlee Hills (an alternate universe very similar to ours). She's had plenty of time to grow with new technologies, so there's not much she doesn't know. She has several aliases with paper and electronic trails, and she has an assistant named Kim (now that the king's nickname is Khepu, I may change that, I'm not sure). Kim's main job is to help Nakia with her investigations and to keep track of all of Nakia's aliases. They all live in different countries and travel often so that them suddenly travelling somewhere doesn't raise any red flags with the government, in case Nakia  needs to become them.

The inciting incident happens when a fictional couple, John and Jane Sinclair, who are two of Nakia's aliases die in a plane crash. A lot of Nakia's financial and other resources belong to the Sinclairs, so she has to decide whether to let those resources go, or pose as their equally fictional daughter, Sunny. The kicker is that the Sinclairs have a solid connection to one of the king's favorite aliases.

Nakia moves into the Sinclair's mansion and enrolls in Beverlee Hills High school. (This is her waking nightmare. She doesn't need to sleep but you can't stop a girl from daydreaming.) Anyway, Here, haunted by the ghosts of teenage girls that have made her entire existence torture, Nakia is more determined than ever to track down the king. 

She does! And he tells her not only that he's been avoiding her on purpose, but that she doesn't need to look like a skeleton. He tells her about lush and about how he chooses his own form. He has no intention of returning to the Afterlife any time soon, and he shoos her (gently) out to go build a life for herself.

The Mummy is crushed by The King's attitude. She'd hoped that he had been avoiding her in order to protect her for some reason. It doesn't help that him having this conversation with her a couple of thousand years earlier could have saved her a lot of heartache. She finally sees the resemblance between him and his daughter.

Her saving grace at this point is that she has finally made some true friends; the teenage girls at Beverlee Hills High. She also has a -- maybe -- boyfriend. She allows her body to grow flesh and hair and to even remove her bandages so that her friends get to see her. My favorite part is that they all just start talking to her normally before realizing that her bandages are gone. She's been emotionally stunted at the age she died for thousands of years and she finally allows herself to relax and grow.

The Rift (see the Worldbuilding section) probably a few years after this, and I don't have anything on this character until we get to Mended times, when she is a ship captain (maybe of illegal things) who helps Jane figure out that the prophecy is bunk created by The King for his own amusement. She declines the offer to join the group and see him. It's been literally thousands of years but she's not ready. She likes her life, and she's letting her body age naturally. She figures that when she's too unsteady on her sea legs, she'll sacrifice herself to the sea and go see the collection of connections she's amassed in the Afterlife (see the Worldbuilding section). 

I took most of this from the Worldbuilding posts that I made last week. I'm going to polish this up and add it to the Character Profiles page. I also need to update the Worldbuilding page with sections on Lush and the Afterlife.