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glowsferatu) wrote2018-11-11 01:40 pm
glowsferatu) wrote2018-11-11 01:40 pm
reapp
γ CHARACTER INFO γ
CHARACTER NAME: Kanaya Maryam-Lalonde
CHARACTER AGE: 21
SERIES: Homestuck
CHRONOLOGY: After the credits
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: Nonah private housing
BACKGROUND β: wiki link
Kanaya is a troll, insectine humanoids from the planet Alternia, the center of a vicious, darwinistic empire. She belongs to the jadeblood caste, putting her somewhere around the middle of the society's hierarchy. Typically, this would put her on a track to the brooding caverns when she came of age, taking care of the Mother Grubs, 30ft moths who facilitate troll reproduction. But fate had other plans.
Like all trolls, Kanaya was chosen by a lusus following her pupation, a beast of her world who would act as her legal guardian. In an incredibly rare circumstance, the lusus who chose Kanaya was herself a Mother Grub, abandoning her duties in the brooding caverns to raise Kanaya, and dooming herself to a short life. Her death came when Kanaya was 13, and she left Kanaya a Matriorb, an egg that will hatch into a new Mother Grub.
That same day, Alternia was destroyed by a game she was playing with her friends, leaving them as the final 12 surviving trolls. Through completing the game, they discovered that it was Space's way of reproducing new universes as a result of their efforts. It's all overcomplicated bullshit, just go with it. But they weren't able to enter into the new universe they created, and were trapped on a meteor in a Void outside of time and space.
The cramped quarters became a powderkeg of drama, between intercaste tensions and various conflicts between teammates, and with the violence their society is built on, it wasn't long before the bodies hit the floor. Eridan, an arrogant highblood who she thought was her friend, killed one of her other friends in front of her, and maimed another. When she drew her own weapon against him, he first destroyed the Matriorb before shooting her through the stomach, leading to her death. But Kanaya was a jadeblood, and jadebloods are...special. A transformation that would have happened as she grew into an adult triggered in self defense upon her death, awakening her into a Rainbow Drinker, a vampiric condition so rarely witnessed that it's become mythologized in Alternian fiction. Becoming one herself, aside from her newfound cravings for blood, she became able to survive fatal most wounds, gained impossible speed, and started glowing in the dark. With these new gifts, she hunted down Eridan and chainsawed him in half, after beating up some of her other dangerous teammates.
In the universe the trolls created, a planet called Earth died the same way Alternia did, with four friends playing a game. Through the techno-wizardry of a member of Kanaya's team, the trolls were able to access the internet on Earth and communicate with these players. And so, Kanaya met Rose Lalonde, a girl who infuriated and intrigued Kanaya in her disregard for every piece of advice she offered in trying to understand the game. As Rose's team came to discover their session of the game wasn't viable, they made a plan to escape it and reset the session, through further overcomplicated fuckery. The short of it is, Rose and her brother Dave wound up on the meteor with Kanaya and the other surviving trolls, where they would take a three-year journey together to the new, reset session.
It took a couple years of dancing around each other and their own feelings, but Rose and Kanaya eventually started dating and fell in love. When they reached the new session, they met one of its new players, a teenage version of Rose's mom, Roxy, because that's just what happens in this canon, I guess. Through playing the game, Roxy gained certain powers that would change Kanaya's future, stealing the destroyed Matriorb from nonexistence, and restoring her hope that her species could continue. They just had one obstacle left.
Her Imperious Condescension, the empress of the Alternian Empire, survived and crossed beyond the dimensional barriers herself. Roxy's Earth-B was under her heel, but what she wanted more than anything as to create a new Alternia, with Kanaya and the Matriorb finally giving her a route to fulfill that dream. Kanaya, disillusioned with the old Alternia and the way it did just about everything, wasn't into this. She'd rather start a new troll society that avoided the darkness at the root of the old one. (The Condesce was also working for some great demon king at the center of corrupting the game and its associated universes, but this was pretty much never relevant to Kanaya's story.) So, Rose, Roxy, Kanaya, and John, the previously unmentioned protagonist of the whole story, fought the Condesce and prevailed against her, while everyone else fought a bunch of other threats to their future.
Some more bullshit went on, Kanaya helped them create their new universe, and everyone went on to it, with a new Earth-C to settle on. The Matriorb was hatched, they got everything kickstarted, then time traveled 5000 years in the future when there was a flourishing civilization of numerous sapient species for them to live in, all nearly deifying them as their creators and heroes. Rose and Kanaya got married, and Kanaya went to work in the brooding caverns of the Troll Kingdom, managing the other jadebloods, while Rose worked alongside her to study xenobiology. They live a very happy life there.
IN-GAME HISTORY β:
Kanaya was an imPort for over six years, starting on May 30, 2011. She originally showed up in the City just after killing Eridan, only to find him and the rest of the trolls already there. It was a weird time, having to come to terms with a new situation on a new planet, with her species still on the verge of extinction and especially still trying to kill each other. If there was one thing left that she could depend on, it was her ability to fight, and so she appointed herself as a protector of her friends, to take on and take down any threat that presented itself, even if it came from other trolls. In particularly, she came into conflict with Gamzee often, a homicidal juggalo troll. It was a rough way to live, but any injury she took was always healed by her new powers, even going as far as regrowing an arm Gamzee'd ripped off once. This made her double down on the task as it blossomed into a martyr complex, her central philosophy becoming that it's better for her to get hurt than anyone else.
Of course, no imPort ever stayed dead for long in the City, so Kanaya was never able to end these conflicts as definitively as she would have liked. As the years went on living alongside malicious forces continued, new solutions had to be explored, begrudging non-aggression pacts made at the urging of her friends. Getting support from the criminal justice system couldn't guarantee results any more than she could on her own, leaving her disillusioned and bitter, but no less willing to fight, even just to vent her frustrations.
Of course, as this was all happening, she was still on a new planet living among a whole different species, with others expecting her to know what she's doing. She had to find a way to adapt. Enrolling in school to learn more about Earth was the first step, but she had a lot of catching up to do. A few adult mentors helped give her more firsthand experience, but she tended to keep them at arm's length. She didn't want anyone's pity, she was supposed to be capable of taking care of herself and others, no matter her age. That was what she's for. And so, she dropped out of school in her second year, after having a spectacular breakdown at prom, because she didn't see it as anything more than a waste of time better spent working to support her household. In her time as an imPort, she'd been a magazine editor, a tailor, a shopgirl, a waitress, a bartender, an EMT, a teacher, an executive assistant, a fashion designer, administrator for a vigilante team, and the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company, many of them at the same time, and an amateur accountant throughout all of them. She worked herself as hard as she could take, and often even harder than that. Keeping busy always helped take her mind off of other stressors, even if it was replacing it with just another stressor.
Most of her time in the City was dominated by Vulcanus' campaign against imPorts, but there two specific instances that affected her profoundly. The first came with the Skrull infiltration, when shapechanging aliens taken from another universe kidnapped imPorts and replaced them. She regarded them as a threat at first, but as she came to understand their motivations, felt like she was looking in a mirror. Many of them were just kids, their allegiances decided only by proximity and convenience, used to further the cause of powers greater than their own. The only difference between her and them were circumstantial, and she felt a great swell of pity for them. Immediately after, of course, the other imPorts summarily executed them, so that wasn't great. If you want to put an ill-at-ease alien teen even more ill-at-ease, that's a great way to do it.
The second came when the president of Venezuela invited imPorts to a celebration in Merida, as a show of good faith. Vulcanus took the opportunity to release an imPort-targeted virus in the city, which hit Kanaya by reversing her regenerative abilities, eating away at her body until she was literally skin and bones, looking more zombie than vampire. It wasn't a great time, and in a fit of pique she may have thrown her detached arm at someone who didn't deserve it. It shook her self perception and how she related to being undead, a condition that already turned out very differently from the expectations she'd built from every single work of fiction she'd ever read. She felt more thing than person anymore, a body trying to imitate life. She was withdrawn and depressed for the month following, until being kidnapped and forced into a deathmatch. Better for her to get hurt than anyone else, she offered herself up to the other girls in the fight. But her motivations were more suicide than sacrifice.
By the time she was resurrected, she had spent a few years back home to mellow her out, and that plus seeing the distress her death had caused her friends was enough to get her to think more about taking care of herself. If not for her own sake, than for theirs. It wouldn't be easier, but it was imperative that she be better than she'd already been.
There were other Vulcanus attacks that she participated in the response to, including one time they sent a knifefighter with prehensile hair to kill her (that poor girl got such a haircut), but the most important before the end was New Vesuvius. It was Vulcanus' crown jewel, a world where imPorts were subjugated and executed, their fullest realization of their goals. imPorts from the City were taken there by Vulcanus' own Porter, Clotho, and sorted into service the same as their predecessors had been. Kanaya was put into a soldier caste, and realized quickly her most important goal was to survive and ensure the survival of as many others as she could, even as it was discovered that death in New Vesuvius would guarantee a return to the City. They got out of it, but they had witnessed the worst possible outcome, just how far inflamed anti-imPort sentiment could end for them. But maybe even that wasn't the worst.
At the end of the year, Vulcanus called down Atropos on the City, and that world ended. Kanaya was among the survivors who arrived in Cape Canaveral, but the losses were too big to process. Surviving the end of her own world never felt real the same way this one had, where she was right in the midst of all the death and destruction. She grieved for a very long time, maybe she never really stopped, never quite let go of the feeling they were responsible for it because they survived, that they can't let things ever get that bad again. The first year, certainly, it informed nearly every decision she made.
It certainly had everything to do with why she came out the gate strong against the anti-registration movement. Keeping peace between imPorts and natives was vital to her, and the burden of compromise would always be the responsibility of imPorts. She certainly included enough caveats for her trust in the Americans whenever she tried to explain it to anyone, but the real truth is she was terrified and desperate, and she would have taken any deal they put in front of her.
That terror started getting palpable after the first attacks by the Hornets, but only a few people knew well enough to key into where her head was at, because she was still trying to do that thing she always does, repressing and refining it into something productive. When that thing she's repressing is enough paranoia to jump at every shadow she sees, her productive expression is an obsession with security. Trying to derail town hall meetings with rants about how they aren't safe, and that they're attracting more danger to everyone around them, punching out an innocent clown in the Castle Rock hay mazes, taking on countless spy missions with her friend Annie in an effort to root out their enemies, and putting together a team to run security at swear-ins that literally no one else cared about. She hid it pretty well, but she was spiraling.
Because as all of this was going on, there was a more person threat Kanaya had to contend with. Back in the City, before Atropos ended everything, Rose had fallen under the machinations of Norman Osborn, being groomed to be his new Green Goblin. When Rose finally admitted it to Kanaya, there was nothing they could do about it. Once they reached the new world, and Norman continued, Kanaya tried reaching out to heroes from his universe for help, but no one could tell for how vague she was being. Only Spider-Man caught on, but without proof of actual wrongdoing on Norman's part, they couldn't act yet. While Rose tried to redeem the Green Goblin into a more heroic figure, a new player appeared on the scene: Hobgoblin.
Hobgoblin was cold, almost mechanical, with all the charisma of Michael Myers. They started causing trouble just to get attention, picking fights with heroes and stalking Rose on numerous occasions. It was clear Norman put a contingency into action when Rose started resisting, and his plans started taking shape when Hobgoblin began abducting subjects for his experiments in splicing dinosaur genes. (Yes, that's a real ass thing that really for real happened.) When Spider-Man thwarted one of these abductions, they finally had a lead to Norman's secret lab. He and Rose acted quickly, springing into action to free the subjects there, but they didn't get their exit portal when Kanaya never showed up. Hobgoblin, however, did.
In the ensuing fight, they discovered that Kanaya was behind the Hobgoblin mask all along, but not before she brutally beat Rose. Kanaya hadn't even been aware of it until that moment. See, nearly a year before, Norman started injecting Rose with nanites, under the guise of a proprietary performancing enhancing cocktail that would make her costumed activities more effective. But the thing about dating a vampire is that some people are really into being a snack, and so, the nanites would up in Kanaya's bloodstream instead. When Norman activated them and the wrong girl answered the call, he wasn't about to look a gift-superpowered-alien in the mouth. And so, a tragedy was born.
Kanaya, of course, was devastated. After a failing to kill Norman in revenge, she put as much distance between herself and Rose as she could, and turned herself in to the police. In a desperate attempt to get even a fraction of the punishment she felt she deserved, she put out a confession to everything, leaving Norman out completely. If everyone thought she was unrepentant, maybe they'd hate her enough to do something about it. It didn't quite get the results she wanted, and so she was left to stew. At least, until the Hornets bombed the prison. Kanaya was the sole surviving inmate from the imPort ward, which meant she would be the first subject to the new probationary system, officiated by Frederick Chilton, who'd been her psychiatrist for the preceding year.
And, not a week after her release, she was brainwashed again during the Hornets' last hurrah, superimposing their own minds onto unsuspecting imPorts. Kanaya couldn't have done much for them while still nullified and recovering from the bombing, but she helped a hacker imPort leak compromising information on various imPorts, and threatened to fight anyone who took issue with it. She sure tried, but she was easily beaten. After she came out of it, she had to acknowledge that even if the Hornets didn't care about collateral damage, they had a point to be concerned about how dangerous imPorts were. Having been through the criminal justice system, she found it to be woefully inadequate towards imPort criminals, and advocated for greater accountability within the community. No one really listened.
Once her nullifier came off, Kanaya was seeking penance, and with Chilton's encouragement, she began to consider using vigilantism to repay the crimes she'd committed. She moved to Maurtia Falls to explore it, but also to put as much distance as she could between her and Rose, and filling a vacancy left with veteran imPort Ruka when the last other troll finally exPorted. Neither Kanaya nor Ruka were exactly friends, but if the two had to be alone, they might as well keep each other company. She also kept her nullifier after her probation ended, to dampen her powers when she wouldn't need them, in case someone tried to use her again. Still, her vigilante goals gain momentum when Import Ambassador Revan hired her to start a crimefighting initiative with Jacob Taylor. They called it Operation Archangel.
Kanaya made uniforms and personas for them both, Jacob becoming the Protector and Kanaya taking the name Echidna, and they gathered around a dozen imPort volunteers in the Devil's Nest, a bar Kanaya worked at before every other employee exPorted. From that base they launched investigations into organized crime families in Maurtia Falls, planning the best way to cripple them. Some of those plans weren't great, and Kanaya clashed with Jacob frequently on their conflicting philosophies. When the crime families began fighting back, Archangel tried to launch a PR campaign to gain public support. Given the police soon raided and burned down the Devil's Nest, arresting Jacob in the process, you can guess how well that went.
Archangel tried to keep its momentum going in his absence, but a change in structure eliminated Kanaya's administrative role, leaving her feeling disconnected from the group. She couldn't be just a soldier to a new commander she didn't trust, so she quit, writing off the initiative as a total failure.
Previous demons were being dug up anyway, as Power Girl and Blue Beetle continued to investigate what happened with Hobgoblin, not believing Kanaya capable of doing it on her own. Having gotten some distance, Kanaya finally told them the truth, confirming their suspicions about Norman Osborn's connection. With Rose, Spider-Man, and Norman's own grandson, Normie, they collected evidence and saw Norman arrested. Normie, inheriting the family business, starts a find to pay rehabilitate and reparate the surviving Dino-Men. When Norman was exPorted shortly after his arrest, Kanaya could have rued their efforts as pointless, but instead took it as the Porter acknowledging their hard-fought victory as just.
As further evidence of that victory, Kanaya finally got the one thing she'd always wanted most, when Roxy was ported in with the Matriorb. With Norman gone and her life and hope restored, Kanaya was ready to fulfill the purpose she was hatched for. Ashiah Maryam was hatched on January 13, 2016, and basically everyone who ever met her fell in love instantly with the adorably fat larva. Motherhood changed Kanaya's priorities considerably, and she started focusing on expanding her fashion design firm in order to provide her Daughter Grub a stable future. They had to make it through the hardships inherent of the imPort life. Rose exPorted soon after, just as she and Kanaya were starting to rebuild their life together. A Russian invasion came the following month, and Kanaya helped resisting imPorts fight them off. Soon after, Ruka finally exPorted, and Kanaya moved with Ashiah to the government housing in Nonah, so they wouldn't be so lonely.
Even still, she made a support group for other non-human imPorts, somewhere they could vent without fear of prejudice, and just be themselves. Even if the community as a whole is full of shit, there were still vulnerable members within it who needed looking after. Around the same time, her fashion house made its debut at New York Fashion Week, only it was interrupted when the model in her centerpiece design spontaneously started breathing fire. It turned out she was one of the people infected with Tony Stark's Extremis virus, a new generation of metahumans manifested among the local citizens. One more imPort crime against the native populace, Kanaya was getting so tired of it.
When the OTO made the scene, Kanaya quickly joined in Ken Kaneki's investigations into the group. The parallels with Vulcanus before them were too ominous to ignore. On their first outing, Ken led a group to infiltrate a facility in Lichtenstein, with approval by the US government. Given the nation's allegiance with the Soviets, plausible deniability would be important to maintain, so Kanaya made everyone silly animal-themed superhero costumes, and they called themselves the Menagerie. Kanaya's own costume was a hypergoth set of black robes with a gazelle skull for a mask, she might revisit the aesthetic in the future, if she has the need. The results led to further investigations, including an outreach program for native metas, and a raid on a Heaven Scent warehouse in Mexico. Kanaya was onhand for as much as she could spare the time. She also started a joint venture with Oscorp to provide costuming and assistance to superheros, inspired by how much fun she with the whole Menagerie thing.
She and Ashiah lived the happiest life they were able to carve out, for as long as it lasted. Though Kanaya never could manage to get her dating life back on track after Rose was gone, much as she tried. She finally exPorted on October 4, 2017.
PERSONALITY β:
If you had to boil her down to one thing, Kanaya is one of those rare people who can say her greatest flaw is caring too much without it being a humblebrag, because she takes it so far that it can in fact be debilitating. And not just because she's so focused on everyone else's problems that she doesn't take proper care of herself, though that is absolutely a thing she does. It is to some extent about how caring has shaped the person she is, what she focuses on, and how she relates to the world around her. How caring can often be her excuse for unkindness, even cruelty. It has more to do with how she can't accept apathy, it just doesn't make any sense to her.
Alternia wasn't built for caring, it was a culture of competition. Being better than the troll next to you so you might outlive them, or savvy enough to gut them before they do you. When only the strong survive, who looks out for everyone else? Kanaya liked to think she might, if given the opportunity. When no one cared enough, people always died, and it shouldn't be that way. When she became an imPort, she was appalled by how often she saw that still happen, and how comfortable humans were to just let it. As long as she had power, she had to use it to advocate and fight for the vulnerable.
And so, she has to be strong, all the time. Expressing vulnerability or weakness could make her unreliable, leaving her open to letting people down in ways both big and small. She's failed so many times in so many ways, but if she could be stronger, better, maybe she can keep it happening again.
Somehow people think she's classy, because she puts a lot of work into looking like she knows what she's doing, but oh god she is such a disaster. She does present herself as cool, collected, reasonable, and knowledgeable, but has also spent most of her life about five seconds from a catastrophic nervous breakdown that's only held back by fucking monumental self control. She can't do that, she has to be strong. If she lets it all dam up too much, it can tend to burst spectacularly and publicly, so it's generally better to let it slip a little around people she trusts, but she doesn't trust easily. It's gone badly too many times when she has.
So it helps to have other outlets, things to keep her busy. She always needs to keep busy. Good thing she cares about even little, stupid things, often hyperfocusing on insignificant details while she tries to keep an eye on the big picture. She cares about all of them. A smudge on your cheek, spill on the floor, how long the more veteran imPorts have each been around, how your taxes are coming along, a tear in your shirt, if that painting's crooked, if that charity you're donating to is kind of stupid, if you're eating enough, how many people she's lost since she first ported in, what their names were, that maybe you should get a better hobby instead of doing so many crimes. She'll get onto your case about all of them, too, because if she didn't know better than you then you'd be taking care of it. She cares too much, and so she's passive-aggressive and condescending and neurotic.
There's always a lot going on in Kanaya's head, she contains multitudes. But you can always be sure that she cares. Even when she doesn't sympathize, she probably empathizes. She'll try to meet people with compassion, and somehow it makes sense to her that yelling at you is a way of expressing it. It doesn't make her right; even when she is right, it's often in the wrongest way. She's just complicated and damaged and trying her best. But at least she cares.
She'll be caught in a weird place when she returns through the Porter. She's caught between two lives, the most peace she's ever known on Earth-C, and the most turmoil she's ever experienced as an imPort, and all of them overlapping as if she'd lived them simultaneously. It's a lot to sort through and compartmentalize, and it's been so long since she's had to do any of it. On top of that, knowing that she'd ported out and missed a whole year will mean her reliability has gone to shit right out the gate, and that's going to be heavy for her to deal with, on top of all this anger and bitterness she didn't have at home. It'll be a struggle, but she'll get through it. Surviving is her superpower.
POWER β:
β Rainbow Drinker: Kanaya retains her Alternian physiology, with tough grey skin, horns, fangs, and the whole weird insectine internal anatomy. But more than that, she's also an awakened jadeblood. This gives her enhanced strength and insane speed, lets her survive most fatal blows and rapidly heal from them, and stand on walls/ceilings. It also comes with an intense thirst for blood, especially when she's regenerating, though she additionally subsists on sunlight, which will convert into a bioluminescent glow from her skin.
β Spaceweaving: Kanaya perceives threads in Space that connect to people, places, or things. Manipulating these threads magically enables her to open a dimensional bridge to the location at the end of the thread in question. Time required to reel in the portal depends on how much thread she needs to pull, distance between her and the target, though familiarity can make it much quicker.
β Inconspicuous Field: When active, this field makes Kanaya not so much imperceptible, but unnoticeable. Anyone looking at her will simply skip right over her, as if her existence is so unremarkable that the mind doesn't register it. It isn't effective on anyone who's looking directly at her when she activates it, and psychic resistances can penetrate it. With time and practice, she may learn to extend it in a five foot radius around her, but at the start it will be limited only to her person.
CHARACTER NAME: Kanaya Maryam-Lalonde
CHARACTER AGE: 21
SERIES: Homestuck
CHRONOLOGY: After the credits
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: Nonah private housing
BACKGROUND β: wiki link
Kanaya is a troll, insectine humanoids from the planet Alternia, the center of a vicious, darwinistic empire. She belongs to the jadeblood caste, putting her somewhere around the middle of the society's hierarchy. Typically, this would put her on a track to the brooding caverns when she came of age, taking care of the Mother Grubs, 30ft moths who facilitate troll reproduction. But fate had other plans.
Like all trolls, Kanaya was chosen by a lusus following her pupation, a beast of her world who would act as her legal guardian. In an incredibly rare circumstance, the lusus who chose Kanaya was herself a Mother Grub, abandoning her duties in the brooding caverns to raise Kanaya, and dooming herself to a short life. Her death came when Kanaya was 13, and she left Kanaya a Matriorb, an egg that will hatch into a new Mother Grub.
That same day, Alternia was destroyed by a game she was playing with her friends, leaving them as the final 12 surviving trolls. Through completing the game, they discovered that it was Space's way of reproducing new universes as a result of their efforts. It's all overcomplicated bullshit, just go with it. But they weren't able to enter into the new universe they created, and were trapped on a meteor in a Void outside of time and space.
The cramped quarters became a powderkeg of drama, between intercaste tensions and various conflicts between teammates, and with the violence their society is built on, it wasn't long before the bodies hit the floor. Eridan, an arrogant highblood who she thought was her friend, killed one of her other friends in front of her, and maimed another. When she drew her own weapon against him, he first destroyed the Matriorb before shooting her through the stomach, leading to her death. But Kanaya was a jadeblood, and jadebloods are...special. A transformation that would have happened as she grew into an adult triggered in self defense upon her death, awakening her into a Rainbow Drinker, a vampiric condition so rarely witnessed that it's become mythologized in Alternian fiction. Becoming one herself, aside from her newfound cravings for blood, she became able to survive fatal most wounds, gained impossible speed, and started glowing in the dark. With these new gifts, she hunted down Eridan and chainsawed him in half, after beating up some of her other dangerous teammates.
In the universe the trolls created, a planet called Earth died the same way Alternia did, with four friends playing a game. Through the techno-wizardry of a member of Kanaya's team, the trolls were able to access the internet on Earth and communicate with these players. And so, Kanaya met Rose Lalonde, a girl who infuriated and intrigued Kanaya in her disregard for every piece of advice she offered in trying to understand the game. As Rose's team came to discover their session of the game wasn't viable, they made a plan to escape it and reset the session, through further overcomplicated fuckery. The short of it is, Rose and her brother Dave wound up on the meteor with Kanaya and the other surviving trolls, where they would take a three-year journey together to the new, reset session.
It took a couple years of dancing around each other and their own feelings, but Rose and Kanaya eventually started dating and fell in love. When they reached the new session, they met one of its new players, a teenage version of Rose's mom, Roxy, because that's just what happens in this canon, I guess. Through playing the game, Roxy gained certain powers that would change Kanaya's future, stealing the destroyed Matriorb from nonexistence, and restoring her hope that her species could continue. They just had one obstacle left.
Her Imperious Condescension, the empress of the Alternian Empire, survived and crossed beyond the dimensional barriers herself. Roxy's Earth-B was under her heel, but what she wanted more than anything as to create a new Alternia, with Kanaya and the Matriorb finally giving her a route to fulfill that dream. Kanaya, disillusioned with the old Alternia and the way it did just about everything, wasn't into this. She'd rather start a new troll society that avoided the darkness at the root of the old one. (The Condesce was also working for some great demon king at the center of corrupting the game and its associated universes, but this was pretty much never relevant to Kanaya's story.) So, Rose, Roxy, Kanaya, and John, the previously unmentioned protagonist of the whole story, fought the Condesce and prevailed against her, while everyone else fought a bunch of other threats to their future.
Some more bullshit went on, Kanaya helped them create their new universe, and everyone went on to it, with a new Earth-C to settle on. The Matriorb was hatched, they got everything kickstarted, then time traveled 5000 years in the future when there was a flourishing civilization of numerous sapient species for them to live in, all nearly deifying them as their creators and heroes. Rose and Kanaya got married, and Kanaya went to work in the brooding caverns of the Troll Kingdom, managing the other jadebloods, while Rose worked alongside her to study xenobiology. They live a very happy life there.
IN-GAME HISTORY β:
Kanaya was an imPort for over six years, starting on May 30, 2011. She originally showed up in the City just after killing Eridan, only to find him and the rest of the trolls already there. It was a weird time, having to come to terms with a new situation on a new planet, with her species still on the verge of extinction and especially still trying to kill each other. If there was one thing left that she could depend on, it was her ability to fight, and so she appointed herself as a protector of her friends, to take on and take down any threat that presented itself, even if it came from other trolls. In particularly, she came into conflict with Gamzee often, a homicidal juggalo troll. It was a rough way to live, but any injury she took was always healed by her new powers, even going as far as regrowing an arm Gamzee'd ripped off once. This made her double down on the task as it blossomed into a martyr complex, her central philosophy becoming that it's better for her to get hurt than anyone else.
Of course, no imPort ever stayed dead for long in the City, so Kanaya was never able to end these conflicts as definitively as she would have liked. As the years went on living alongside malicious forces continued, new solutions had to be explored, begrudging non-aggression pacts made at the urging of her friends. Getting support from the criminal justice system couldn't guarantee results any more than she could on her own, leaving her disillusioned and bitter, but no less willing to fight, even just to vent her frustrations.
Of course, as this was all happening, she was still on a new planet living among a whole different species, with others expecting her to know what she's doing. She had to find a way to adapt. Enrolling in school to learn more about Earth was the first step, but she had a lot of catching up to do. A few adult mentors helped give her more firsthand experience, but she tended to keep them at arm's length. She didn't want anyone's pity, she was supposed to be capable of taking care of herself and others, no matter her age. That was what she's for. And so, she dropped out of school in her second year, after having a spectacular breakdown at prom, because she didn't see it as anything more than a waste of time better spent working to support her household. In her time as an imPort, she'd been a magazine editor, a tailor, a shopgirl, a waitress, a bartender, an EMT, a teacher, an executive assistant, a fashion designer, administrator for a vigilante team, and the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company, many of them at the same time, and an amateur accountant throughout all of them. She worked herself as hard as she could take, and often even harder than that. Keeping busy always helped take her mind off of other stressors, even if it was replacing it with just another stressor.
Most of her time in the City was dominated by Vulcanus' campaign against imPorts, but there two specific instances that affected her profoundly. The first came with the Skrull infiltration, when shapechanging aliens taken from another universe kidnapped imPorts and replaced them. She regarded them as a threat at first, but as she came to understand their motivations, felt like she was looking in a mirror. Many of them were just kids, their allegiances decided only by proximity and convenience, used to further the cause of powers greater than their own. The only difference between her and them were circumstantial, and she felt a great swell of pity for them. Immediately after, of course, the other imPorts summarily executed them, so that wasn't great. If you want to put an ill-at-ease alien teen even more ill-at-ease, that's a great way to do it.
The second came when the president of Venezuela invited imPorts to a celebration in Merida, as a show of good faith. Vulcanus took the opportunity to release an imPort-targeted virus in the city, which hit Kanaya by reversing her regenerative abilities, eating away at her body until she was literally skin and bones, looking more zombie than vampire. It wasn't a great time, and in a fit of pique she may have thrown her detached arm at someone who didn't deserve it. It shook her self perception and how she related to being undead, a condition that already turned out very differently from the expectations she'd built from every single work of fiction she'd ever read. She felt more thing than person anymore, a body trying to imitate life. She was withdrawn and depressed for the month following, until being kidnapped and forced into a deathmatch. Better for her to get hurt than anyone else, she offered herself up to the other girls in the fight. But her motivations were more suicide than sacrifice.
By the time she was resurrected, she had spent a few years back home to mellow her out, and that plus seeing the distress her death had caused her friends was enough to get her to think more about taking care of herself. If not for her own sake, than for theirs. It wouldn't be easier, but it was imperative that she be better than she'd already been.
There were other Vulcanus attacks that she participated in the response to, including one time they sent a knifefighter with prehensile hair to kill her (that poor girl got such a haircut), but the most important before the end was New Vesuvius. It was Vulcanus' crown jewel, a world where imPorts were subjugated and executed, their fullest realization of their goals. imPorts from the City were taken there by Vulcanus' own Porter, Clotho, and sorted into service the same as their predecessors had been. Kanaya was put into a soldier caste, and realized quickly her most important goal was to survive and ensure the survival of as many others as she could, even as it was discovered that death in New Vesuvius would guarantee a return to the City. They got out of it, but they had witnessed the worst possible outcome, just how far inflamed anti-imPort sentiment could end for them. But maybe even that wasn't the worst.
At the end of the year, Vulcanus called down Atropos on the City, and that world ended. Kanaya was among the survivors who arrived in Cape Canaveral, but the losses were too big to process. Surviving the end of her own world never felt real the same way this one had, where she was right in the midst of all the death and destruction. She grieved for a very long time, maybe she never really stopped, never quite let go of the feeling they were responsible for it because they survived, that they can't let things ever get that bad again. The first year, certainly, it informed nearly every decision she made.
It certainly had everything to do with why she came out the gate strong against the anti-registration movement. Keeping peace between imPorts and natives was vital to her, and the burden of compromise would always be the responsibility of imPorts. She certainly included enough caveats for her trust in the Americans whenever she tried to explain it to anyone, but the real truth is she was terrified and desperate, and she would have taken any deal they put in front of her.
That terror started getting palpable after the first attacks by the Hornets, but only a few people knew well enough to key into where her head was at, because she was still trying to do that thing she always does, repressing and refining it into something productive. When that thing she's repressing is enough paranoia to jump at every shadow she sees, her productive expression is an obsession with security. Trying to derail town hall meetings with rants about how they aren't safe, and that they're attracting more danger to everyone around them, punching out an innocent clown in the Castle Rock hay mazes, taking on countless spy missions with her friend Annie in an effort to root out their enemies, and putting together a team to run security at swear-ins that literally no one else cared about. She hid it pretty well, but she was spiraling.
Because as all of this was going on, there was a more person threat Kanaya had to contend with. Back in the City, before Atropos ended everything, Rose had fallen under the machinations of Norman Osborn, being groomed to be his new Green Goblin. When Rose finally admitted it to Kanaya, there was nothing they could do about it. Once they reached the new world, and Norman continued, Kanaya tried reaching out to heroes from his universe for help, but no one could tell for how vague she was being. Only Spider-Man caught on, but without proof of actual wrongdoing on Norman's part, they couldn't act yet. While Rose tried to redeem the Green Goblin into a more heroic figure, a new player appeared on the scene: Hobgoblin.
Hobgoblin was cold, almost mechanical, with all the charisma of Michael Myers. They started causing trouble just to get attention, picking fights with heroes and stalking Rose on numerous occasions. It was clear Norman put a contingency into action when Rose started resisting, and his plans started taking shape when Hobgoblin began abducting subjects for his experiments in splicing dinosaur genes. (Yes, that's a real ass thing that really for real happened.) When Spider-Man thwarted one of these abductions, they finally had a lead to Norman's secret lab. He and Rose acted quickly, springing into action to free the subjects there, but they didn't get their exit portal when Kanaya never showed up. Hobgoblin, however, did.
In the ensuing fight, they discovered that Kanaya was behind the Hobgoblin mask all along, but not before she brutally beat Rose. Kanaya hadn't even been aware of it until that moment. See, nearly a year before, Norman started injecting Rose with nanites, under the guise of a proprietary performancing enhancing cocktail that would make her costumed activities more effective. But the thing about dating a vampire is that some people are really into being a snack, and so, the nanites would up in Kanaya's bloodstream instead. When Norman activated them and the wrong girl answered the call, he wasn't about to look a gift-superpowered-alien in the mouth. And so, a tragedy was born.
Kanaya, of course, was devastated. After a failing to kill Norman in revenge, she put as much distance between herself and Rose as she could, and turned herself in to the police. In a desperate attempt to get even a fraction of the punishment she felt she deserved, she put out a confession to everything, leaving Norman out completely. If everyone thought she was unrepentant, maybe they'd hate her enough to do something about it. It didn't quite get the results she wanted, and so she was left to stew. At least, until the Hornets bombed the prison. Kanaya was the sole surviving inmate from the imPort ward, which meant she would be the first subject to the new probationary system, officiated by Frederick Chilton, who'd been her psychiatrist for the preceding year.
And, not a week after her release, she was brainwashed again during the Hornets' last hurrah, superimposing their own minds onto unsuspecting imPorts. Kanaya couldn't have done much for them while still nullified and recovering from the bombing, but she helped a hacker imPort leak compromising information on various imPorts, and threatened to fight anyone who took issue with it. She sure tried, but she was easily beaten. After she came out of it, she had to acknowledge that even if the Hornets didn't care about collateral damage, they had a point to be concerned about how dangerous imPorts were. Having been through the criminal justice system, she found it to be woefully inadequate towards imPort criminals, and advocated for greater accountability within the community. No one really listened.
Once her nullifier came off, Kanaya was seeking penance, and with Chilton's encouragement, she began to consider using vigilantism to repay the crimes she'd committed. She moved to Maurtia Falls to explore it, but also to put as much distance as she could between her and Rose, and filling a vacancy left with veteran imPort Ruka when the last other troll finally exPorted. Neither Kanaya nor Ruka were exactly friends, but if the two had to be alone, they might as well keep each other company. She also kept her nullifier after her probation ended, to dampen her powers when she wouldn't need them, in case someone tried to use her again. Still, her vigilante goals gain momentum when Import Ambassador Revan hired her to start a crimefighting initiative with Jacob Taylor. They called it Operation Archangel.
Kanaya made uniforms and personas for them both, Jacob becoming the Protector and Kanaya taking the name Echidna, and they gathered around a dozen imPort volunteers in the Devil's Nest, a bar Kanaya worked at before every other employee exPorted. From that base they launched investigations into organized crime families in Maurtia Falls, planning the best way to cripple them. Some of those plans weren't great, and Kanaya clashed with Jacob frequently on their conflicting philosophies. When the crime families began fighting back, Archangel tried to launch a PR campaign to gain public support. Given the police soon raided and burned down the Devil's Nest, arresting Jacob in the process, you can guess how well that went.
Archangel tried to keep its momentum going in his absence, but a change in structure eliminated Kanaya's administrative role, leaving her feeling disconnected from the group. She couldn't be just a soldier to a new commander she didn't trust, so she quit, writing off the initiative as a total failure.
Previous demons were being dug up anyway, as Power Girl and Blue Beetle continued to investigate what happened with Hobgoblin, not believing Kanaya capable of doing it on her own. Having gotten some distance, Kanaya finally told them the truth, confirming their suspicions about Norman Osborn's connection. With Rose, Spider-Man, and Norman's own grandson, Normie, they collected evidence and saw Norman arrested. Normie, inheriting the family business, starts a find to pay rehabilitate and reparate the surviving Dino-Men. When Norman was exPorted shortly after his arrest, Kanaya could have rued their efforts as pointless, but instead took it as the Porter acknowledging their hard-fought victory as just.
As further evidence of that victory, Kanaya finally got the one thing she'd always wanted most, when Roxy was ported in with the Matriorb. With Norman gone and her life and hope restored, Kanaya was ready to fulfill the purpose she was hatched for. Ashiah Maryam was hatched on January 13, 2016, and basically everyone who ever met her fell in love instantly with the adorably fat larva. Motherhood changed Kanaya's priorities considerably, and she started focusing on expanding her fashion design firm in order to provide her Daughter Grub a stable future. They had to make it through the hardships inherent of the imPort life. Rose exPorted soon after, just as she and Kanaya were starting to rebuild their life together. A Russian invasion came the following month, and Kanaya helped resisting imPorts fight them off. Soon after, Ruka finally exPorted, and Kanaya moved with Ashiah to the government housing in Nonah, so they wouldn't be so lonely.
Even still, she made a support group for other non-human imPorts, somewhere they could vent without fear of prejudice, and just be themselves. Even if the community as a whole is full of shit, there were still vulnerable members within it who needed looking after. Around the same time, her fashion house made its debut at New York Fashion Week, only it was interrupted when the model in her centerpiece design spontaneously started breathing fire. It turned out she was one of the people infected with Tony Stark's Extremis virus, a new generation of metahumans manifested among the local citizens. One more imPort crime against the native populace, Kanaya was getting so tired of it.
When the OTO made the scene, Kanaya quickly joined in Ken Kaneki's investigations into the group. The parallels with Vulcanus before them were too ominous to ignore. On their first outing, Ken led a group to infiltrate a facility in Lichtenstein, with approval by the US government. Given the nation's allegiance with the Soviets, plausible deniability would be important to maintain, so Kanaya made everyone silly animal-themed superhero costumes, and they called themselves the Menagerie. Kanaya's own costume was a hypergoth set of black robes with a gazelle skull for a mask, she might revisit the aesthetic in the future, if she has the need. The results led to further investigations, including an outreach program for native metas, and a raid on a Heaven Scent warehouse in Mexico. Kanaya was onhand for as much as she could spare the time. She also started a joint venture with Oscorp to provide costuming and assistance to superheros, inspired by how much fun she with the whole Menagerie thing.
She and Ashiah lived the happiest life they were able to carve out, for as long as it lasted. Though Kanaya never could manage to get her dating life back on track after Rose was gone, much as she tried. She finally exPorted on October 4, 2017.
PERSONALITY β:
If you had to boil her down to one thing, Kanaya is one of those rare people who can say her greatest flaw is caring too much without it being a humblebrag, because she takes it so far that it can in fact be debilitating. And not just because she's so focused on everyone else's problems that she doesn't take proper care of herself, though that is absolutely a thing she does. It is to some extent about how caring has shaped the person she is, what she focuses on, and how she relates to the world around her. How caring can often be her excuse for unkindness, even cruelty. It has more to do with how she can't accept apathy, it just doesn't make any sense to her.
Alternia wasn't built for caring, it was a culture of competition. Being better than the troll next to you so you might outlive them, or savvy enough to gut them before they do you. When only the strong survive, who looks out for everyone else? Kanaya liked to think she might, if given the opportunity. When no one cared enough, people always died, and it shouldn't be that way. When she became an imPort, she was appalled by how often she saw that still happen, and how comfortable humans were to just let it. As long as she had power, she had to use it to advocate and fight for the vulnerable.
And so, she has to be strong, all the time. Expressing vulnerability or weakness could make her unreliable, leaving her open to letting people down in ways both big and small. She's failed so many times in so many ways, but if she could be stronger, better, maybe she can keep it happening again.
Somehow people think she's classy, because she puts a lot of work into looking like she knows what she's doing, but oh god she is such a disaster. She does present herself as cool, collected, reasonable, and knowledgeable, but has also spent most of her life about five seconds from a catastrophic nervous breakdown that's only held back by fucking monumental self control. She can't do that, she has to be strong. If she lets it all dam up too much, it can tend to burst spectacularly and publicly, so it's generally better to let it slip a little around people she trusts, but she doesn't trust easily. It's gone badly too many times when she has.
So it helps to have other outlets, things to keep her busy. She always needs to keep busy. Good thing she cares about even little, stupid things, often hyperfocusing on insignificant details while she tries to keep an eye on the big picture. She cares about all of them. A smudge on your cheek, spill on the floor, how long the more veteran imPorts have each been around, how your taxes are coming along, a tear in your shirt, if that painting's crooked, if that charity you're donating to is kind of stupid, if you're eating enough, how many people she's lost since she first ported in, what their names were, that maybe you should get a better hobby instead of doing so many crimes. She'll get onto your case about all of them, too, because if she didn't know better than you then you'd be taking care of it. She cares too much, and so she's passive-aggressive and condescending and neurotic.
There's always a lot going on in Kanaya's head, she contains multitudes. But you can always be sure that she cares. Even when she doesn't sympathize, she probably empathizes. She'll try to meet people with compassion, and somehow it makes sense to her that yelling at you is a way of expressing it. It doesn't make her right; even when she is right, it's often in the wrongest way. She's just complicated and damaged and trying her best. But at least she cares.
She'll be caught in a weird place when she returns through the Porter. She's caught between two lives, the most peace she's ever known on Earth-C, and the most turmoil she's ever experienced as an imPort, and all of them overlapping as if she'd lived them simultaneously. It's a lot to sort through and compartmentalize, and it's been so long since she's had to do any of it. On top of that, knowing that she'd ported out and missed a whole year will mean her reliability has gone to shit right out the gate, and that's going to be heavy for her to deal with, on top of all this anger and bitterness she didn't have at home. It'll be a struggle, but she'll get through it. Surviving is her superpower.
POWER β:
β Rainbow Drinker: Kanaya retains her Alternian physiology, with tough grey skin, horns, fangs, and the whole weird insectine internal anatomy. But more than that, she's also an awakened jadeblood. This gives her enhanced strength and insane speed, lets her survive most fatal blows and rapidly heal from them, and stand on walls/ceilings. It also comes with an intense thirst for blood, especially when she's regenerating, though she additionally subsists on sunlight, which will convert into a bioluminescent glow from her skin.
β Spaceweaving: Kanaya perceives threads in Space that connect to people, places, or things. Manipulating these threads magically enables her to open a dimensional bridge to the location at the end of the thread in question. Time required to reel in the portal depends on how much thread she needs to pull, distance between her and the target, though familiarity can make it much quicker.
β Inconspicuous Field: When active, this field makes Kanaya not so much imperceptible, but unnoticeable. Anyone looking at her will simply skip right over her, as if her existence is so unremarkable that the mind doesn't register it. It isn't effective on anyone who's looking directly at her when she activates it, and psychic resistances can penetrate it. With time and practice, she may learn to extend it in a five foot radius around her, but at the start it will be limited only to her person.