Nemo
Name: Elodie Sunderland; called Nemo
Gender: Female
Ethnicity: Born to a Scots-Irish mother and a father of unknown ethnic origin
Age: 19
Region of origin: An isolated academic-agrarian society located on René-Levasseur Island in Lake Manicouagan, Quebec; known by residents as "the Colony".
Occupation: Pilgrim, explorer
Breed: Nagah (weresnake)
Height: 5'6"
Build: Muscular, with a longish torso, wide shoulders and few bodily curves (although she is highly flexible). Medium breasts but very narrow hips.
Hair: On the reddish side of strawberry blonde, loose curls, cut short (chin length) except for two long locks framing her face.
Eyes: Hazel, closer to brown
Skin: Naturally fair, but she tans very easily, so she can be pictured anywhere along that spectrum. Light spatter of freckles on cheeks, nose and shoulders.Tattoos/Piercings: None
Scars: Early in the story she acquires long burn scars on both legs from an encounter with a cannibal's torch.
Other features: Five forms in total: human, near-human, serpent-woman, large serpent and small serpent. Her serpentine forms take on the features and coloration of a water moccasin (Agkistrodon piscivorus), and in her middle form (the serpent-woman) she retains arms and has a hood like a cobra, even though she loses them in her large and small serpent forms.
Clothing: Typical Colony clothing is comprised of many layers to compensate for changing weather conditions and often has a somewhat medieval look. A normal traveling outfit consists of tight-fitting trousers, leg wrappings, shoes or boots, a shirt or shift, and a knee-length surcoat tied with a belt or girdle. Hair is styled in several ways: held in place with a headband or coronet; covered by a hood, veil or wimple; or simply bound or braided, with or without ornamentation. Clothing tends to be well-crafted in the Colony, and frequently the outer layer will have decorative embroidery. While Nemo doesn't usually wear all these layers while trekking through the desert, her clothing is still of a level of craftsmanship considered unusual or even unknown in the unsettled areas of the Western Lands.
Weapons: Nemo is trained in the use of tools and farming implements as weapons, enabling her to use improvised weapons as easily as a trained swordsman would use a sword. Early in the story she carries a ship's gaff hook as a weapon before losing it in a desert flash flood; later she "upgrades" to an agricultural scythe as a close-range weapon. She also carries a revolver and a rifle, both designed to take the same ammunition.
Mount: Milo, a domesticated male reindeer
Personality: In childhood, Nemo was outgoing and spirited. She was a gifted athlete, played lots of active games, and cultivated many friendships. As she grew older, however, she began to realize that she had few natural aptitudes for the activities most highly valued by Colony society: academics, diplomacy or agriculture. Many of her adolescent years were spent feeling frustrated and somewhat adrift as her peers settled comfortably into their adult ambitions and new roles. Her teenage discontent mounted until she underwent her first transformation into her small serpent form, an event she came by naturally and gently. Spending time in serpent form became a release for her and she assumed it frequently and happily, correctly recognizing it as a natural part of her being. As she learned to find self-directed comfort through transforming, she underwent a personality shift. In her adulthood she can be described as a "spiritual savant" of sorts. Despite her lack of scholarly aptitude, she has a deeply intuitive understanding of the spiritual world and a talent for recognizing ritual gesture and sacred objects. As a personality, she appears on the surface simple and humble; but like an ocean, her roots run deep and she's full of contradictions. She is by nature a gentle, sensuous and loving person, who feels connections easily with others and desires their friendship or even just their physical presence, even as her odd, compulsively religious mannerisms and diffident temperament make it difficult for others to connect back. She is dutiful almost to a fault, and has an instinctive and strong sense of morality that she holds herself to without intellectualizing or rationalizing. After the emergence of her other, more bloodthirsty forms, she believes her unique shapeshifting must be a manifestation of some kind of sin or character flaw deep in her nature, and that giving in to even the pleasurable, sensual small serpent form represents moral failing on her part.
Background & story so far: The infant who would become Elodie Sunderland was found abandoned in a makeshift crib by a scouting party of Colonists in the wreckage of a Third Age city far south of Manicouagan. The party, not wanting to leave the child to her death by starvation or cold, brought her back to the Colony with the intent to raise her as one of their own. She was adopted by a married couple who had been part of the scouting party. Her foundling origins were never a secret to her, nor did she feel out of place in the Colony (in fact, interfamilial adoption and communal childrearing was common). She was a social child who made fast friendships and was exceptionally athletic and physically capable. In her mid-adolescence, she made her first change to small-serpent form, but she found that with the physical transformation came a gradual personality shift. Formerly outgoing and charismatic, young Elodie became withdrawn and increasingly spiritually attuned, inadvertently distancing herself first from friends and then from her two lovers. Feeling isolated and out of place in what was originally a natural, comforting home, she sought spiritual pilgrimage aboard the Eaglet, a newly constructed vessel designed to ford the Western Ocean for the first time, and seek out lands beyond. On the sea voyage, the Eaglet came under attack by a mutant sea creature. The stress of Elodie's injuries triggered her first transformation into her monstrous serpent-woman form, and the remaining crew's attempts to subdue her ended in their deaths by her hand. Elodie, now returned to her natural form, bailed into a dinghy with weapons, clothing and enough food to sustain her for a few days, and eventually washed ashore on a beach, forsaking her given name and her right to return to her former home. The story follows her travels across the Western Lands. She obsessively keeps a journal to chronicle what she observes and learns of the physical world, her own spiritual journey, and the revelations she discovers about her own past, present and future.
Relationships:
-Ancestor spirit nest: Selah, Odessa and Jacob
Nemo is capable of keeping contact with three ancestor spirits from her family tree, all of whom lived and died in different periods in history prior to the Apocalypse. Because Nagah hunt only in packs (called "nests"), and Nemo is the only one of her kind that she's aware of, her three ancestors comprise the rest of her nest. Selah, Odessa and Jacob act as her teachers and initiators. As all of them are senior to her, her relationship with them is like that of a child and parents or a student and teachers. Although Nemo is trusting by nature and at first takes their counsel as gospel, as she learns more about the present-day world around her, she slowly begins to question the validity of their wisdom and instructions.
-Friend/guide/lover: Jonah Morse
Nemo and Jonah met while she was on the road to Zion, and after helping her in a fight against a malevolent spirit heading a dangerous cult, Jonah offered to guide her the rest of the way. During the travel, the two of them quickly become very close physically (they sleep beside each other, cuddle frequently, and kiss). Although Jonah is very open and curious with her, Nemo must keep certain emotional boundaries up; for example, she's bound by the laws of the Nagah not to tell him of her true nature (he is aware that she's a shapeshifter like he is, but assumes she's a different breed). Sidestepping Jonah's drive to uncover hidden information sometimes proves a challenge to Nemo, but she's willing to take the risk in order to keep his friendship.
-Adoptive parents: Leah and Jonas May
Jonas and Leah May were the adoptive parents of the infant Nemo, who was a foundling rescued from an abandoned Third Age city. Jonas and Leah, a married couple, were among the scouting party who discovered the baby girl while exploring a hollowed-out building. Jonas was the first to hear the baby's cries and followed them to a room that contained three artifacts: a hanging mobile crafted out of fishing wire and prayer cards, a cross made of dried woven vines, and a makeshift crib that held the baby. No sign of a parent, nearby food, or enough insulation to shelter the baby from cold weather was present, so the scouting party returned to the Colony with the infant, whom they called Nemo amongst themselves. Jonas and Leah decided to raise the baby as their own, giving her the name Elodie. They were very open and honest with their daughter about her origin, but when recounting the story of her discovery, they omitted the details of the unsettling objects in the room with her. Although Leah and Jonas were good parents to Elodie, as she grew older and increasingly different from her peers, she began to wonder about the gaps in her origin and kept her transformations secret from her parents. They became concerned for her emotional well-being after her breakup with Rhee and Noah, and believed that her desire to join the Eaglet's crew was entirely the result of the loss of her first loves. While they weren't wrong, Elodie was able to convince her parents that she would be able to do more good elsewhere than on the island. Recognizing a passion and clarity of purpose they hadn't seen in their daughter in years, they reluctantly allowed her to go.
-Mentor: Nathan Houston (deceased)
Nathan Houston, a much older Colonist who became the ship's master of the Eaglet during its journey across the western ocean, was young Elodie's mentor back home in her village. A skilled shipwright and seasoned sailor, Houston taught Elodie about fishing, knots, the piloting of a sea vessel, and navigation by the stars and the position of the planet's rings. Her close friendship with him planted the seeds of much of her desire to explore the world outside the Colony's island.
-Ex-girlfriend and boyfriend: Rhee and Noah
Elodie's first true love relationship began with her childhood friend Rhee, the daughter of a shepherd and a member of the Colony's governing council. The two were inseparable as young girls and as they grew into adolescence and adulthood, their relationship blossomed into a love affair. The two brought Noah, another friend their own age, into their relationship as well, and the three of them intended to marry and create a life together after each underwent their rite of adulthood. Rhee took on librarian duties keeping the documented history of the world prior to the Cataclysm, and Noah easily found apprenticeship with his carpenter parents, leaving only Elodie without adult responsibility. In the final years of their relationship, Elodie's changing personality began to alienate Noah and Rhee, who subsequently grew closer to one another and further from her, until Noah and Rhee finally broke it off with their third partner. Elodie's desire to prove herself a worthy adult and to allow distance to mend her broken heart was a factor that drove her to volunteer for the Eaglet's dangerous sea voyage.
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