Personality

Anxious and easily put off. Clings possessively to the few people they’ve grown close to. Speaks quietly, but honestly. Abandonment, separation, and self-esteem issues. Extremely prone to sensory overwhelm. Often confused by, if not outright hostile to, social norms.

Creatively driven. Prefers musical and artistic pursuits, with a deep appreciation for art as a means of communicating.

Often seems annoyed or bored in their affect. Good at telling when someone is lying to them, and are prone to calling the liar out on it. Doesn’t laugh often, but finds many things funny.

Overview

One of the protagonists of an SCP-inspired, 1980's urban fantasy setting; the unfortunately chosen vessel for a parasitic phoenix.

Plot Pitch

Kaiana Bajpur ("Baj") was born during the fall of 1965 in Dauntridge, a small, sleepy midwestern town. They grew up troubled and ill-tempered, often not meeting developmental milestones. They were shuffled from therapist to therapist and doctor to doctor before their single mother gave up on the system's ability to help her or her kid. They manage in school, but have few good experiences and even fewer friends.

Until they meet Freya St. Jadis ("Fray"), freshly moved into town.

Becoming fast and best friends, the two latch onto each other through middle and high school. Baj is considered something of a bad influence on Fray, who is a hometown hero and star athlete, but the two remain inseparable. Baj develops an appreciation and talent for musical and visual art, using these media to communicate when words fail them.

Shortly before their final semester of senior year, Baj and Fray have a falling out over Fray's growing list of other social obligations, ending in Baj getting into a physical fight with him. Finally having broken the school system's patience with them, they are expelled, and are quickly shuffled into a different educational program up north. In the mess, Fray doesn't get a goodbye.

Living with their city-dwelling cousin while they finish their high school education, Baj is afforded opportunities and accommodations they didn't get in their rural hometown. Calls home are positive and their demeanor changes for the better. This, too, comes to an end when they faint during a trip to a local art gallery.

They spend a week feverish and delirious afterwards, sick with something medicine doesn't touch. In their haze, they decide they want to be home, they want their mom, and book a bus back to Dauntridge.

Their family's Dauntridge home burns down that night: a violent, sudden blaze that their mother and sister miraculously escape from. Their bus ticket is the last any of their family ever sees of them.

Fray however, being neighbors with the Bajpurs, swears he saw something in the fire: something inhuman, something burning, something that needs investigation. No one listens to him. He is, in fact, actively dismissed and told to entirely drop the matter of Kaiana Bajpur's disappearance. He spends several months doing his own investigations, convinced if he could just figure out what happened, he could find his missing friend and fix things between them.

His nosing around eventually gets him approached by a member of the Library, an organization whose goal is to research, find, and hold supernatural entities. While they claim to not have any information on his friend, they offer some of their resources in exchange for him signing on. Of course, this would mean the end of his dreams of going to college, or having a normal life at all. He accepts.

Imagine his shock when, four years and having agreed to many life-altering procedures later, he's put in the same room as Baj.

Baj, who now has a near-literal fire burning in their eyes and a phoenix nested in their chest. Baj, who's spent the last four years as a subject, a catalogued entity, of the Library.

They have to get out of here, right?