Character Name: Shahrzad al-Tarazed
Nicknames: Zadi
Age and Birth Year:  28/165
Race:  Pruulian short-lived
Caste:  Queen
Birth Territory: Pruul
Home Territory: Pruul

Birthright Jewel: Purple Dusk uncut
Offering Jewel:  Green cut, set into a simple gold bangle bracelet

Role: Librarian
Faction: Sabbah/Tarazed, but based in Onn.


Play By: Pooja Mor
Distinguishing Features:
Zadi has never placed much stock in her outward appearance. She dresses in utilitarian fashion, wears no makeup, and has her hair styled simple braids or a ponytail. Intelligence is where Zadi excels.

Her most noticeable feature, by far, is her body. Zadi curls in on herself. Her muscles are so constantly tense that she can’t straighten her legs or easily stretch her fingers. Her spine is curved to the side and her smile is crooked, her speech slightly slurred and a little slow.  Zadi's body is wracked with spasms, sometimes causing her to shake or jerk uncontrollably. She is unable to walk, and mostly gets from place to place by being carried. She also has a small wheeled board that she can scoot along with her arms or telekinetically, but it’s only good on flat surfaces. She uses telekinesis for pretty much everything, from brushing her hair to holding her precious books.




Personality:

For as much as her disability affects her daily life, Zadi thinks shockingly little about it. She’s never known anything else. Shahrzad has always had people to help her dress, prepare her meals, carry her. She knows intellectually that most people don’t need help with those aspects of daily life, but she also can’t imagine being able to do those things alone. Dimly, in the depths of her mind, she’s aware that her caste and the love of her parents are the only things that saved her. Had she been a witch, her tribe might have left her in the desert as a toddler. But she isn’t. And she wasn’t. So Zadi doesn’t need to think about it. At least, that’s what she tells herself at night, when she’s wracked with arthritic pain and plagued with thoughts of what might have been.

Zadi has always held her cards close to her chest. People often react to her with fear or disgust, and she’s learned not to let her emotions show on her face, not to show how much that hurts. Along with her psychic barriers, Zadi has built emotional walls. She’s terrified of appearing weak in front of anyone - even those she should trust. She needs people to know her mind is strong, and so that’s what she tries to project. As a consequence, Shahrzad can’t open up when she needs to. She’s bricked herself in, and she’s starting to realize that some social situations require more than just intellectual superiority - a concept she was never prepared for.

Shahrzad has always felt like a droplet in the river of fate. She was born into her caste, born crippled - she’s always accepted her path. But now that she’s been put in charge of a real library she agonizes over every decision. How can she best serve the people of Onn? How can she navigate obstacles like the resentment of the Sayyadina or the distrust of other Pruulians? Zadi doesn’t want to choose a side in the current political upheaval, but now she feels pulled in several directions. She isn’t sure if she’ll ever know what the right choices are, and that chips away at her confidence and keeps her up at night.


Likes:

• Acquiring knowledge. Not only does Zadi want to know everything there is to know, she’s always looking for new information. She has Zand carry her to the market each day, looking for books for her library.
• Garbage romance novels. Zadi loves garbage romance novels SO much. Her parents bought her one not knowing what it was about, and it rapidly became her prized possession. Since them she’s found a few more, and whenever she needs a pick-me-up she turns to them.
• Massages. They soothe the ever-present arthritis pain and relieve her tension. She can’t get enough of warm hands on her aching joints.

Dislikes:

• Duplicity. Zadi hates social double-dealing and hypocrisy. She’s a straightforward kind of person, and the idea of doing one thing and meaning another is repellent to her.
• Cold. The nights in the desert can be blisteringly cold, and Zadi's nervous system doesn’t work particularly well. She’s often cold even in warm weather, and to make matters worse she’s bad at Temperature Craft. She combats the cold by wrapping herself in furs and thick woven blankets, and snuggling close to her partners in bed.
• Being spoken to slowly. Zadi knows she speaks a little slowly. She knows her speech is slightly slurred. But she’ll never understand why people feel the need to bend down, get very close to her face, widen their eyes, and talk to her as if she were a toddler. She’s constantly frustrated by how long it takes her to finish a sentence - she thinks in complete thoughts, one after another, fully formed concepts taking only seconds to cycle through. Everyone’s speech is slower than her mind, and her own speech is even slower than everyone else’s. So to have people slow themselves down for her perceived benefit is maddening.

Fears:

• Appearing helpless. This fear is particularly brutal, because there are some ways in which Zadi is very vulnerable. But she can’t stand  the idea of being thought of as a drain on society or a burden on her family. This fear pushes her to always strive for more, work harder, be smarter.
• Mind manipulation: Zadi likes control. She has had little over her life, and she values what agency she does have. The idea of someone rifling through her mind or using her like a puppet disgusts and terrifies her, both on a personal level and as the guardian of the secrets of her tribe.
• Being alone. Zadi has always had her parents and Zand around her - she’s never had to function by herself. She’s never gone more than a day without seeing another person. She’s fine being in a room by herself, or meditating for a few hours, but she can’t stand the thought of being alone for days or weeks or months. During her Offering, she was terrified by the solitude of the Abyss, by the depths spiraling down below her. She fought down until she couldn’t stand it, and shaking and sobbing opened her eyes to the slight disappointment of her cut Green Jewel.

Craft Strengths:

• Mind Shielding: Zadi has had the most education in this area of Craft. Her Black Widow neighbor taught her to protect herself, and Zadi’s personal shields are above-average strength.
• Fine Telekinesis: because of Zadi’s limited dexterity in her hands, she relies on telekinesis to do basic things like write and dress herself.

Craft Weaknesses:

• Power bolts: Zadi is calculating and precise. She shoves down her emotions and tries to be methodical. The idea of just flinging her raw power at something has always horrified her, and she hates (and thus never much practiced) this type of Craft.
• Heating and Cooling: she can do it, but temperature control never came easily to Zadi. Maybe it’s the poor responses from her nerves, or the fact that her body doesn’t regulate its temperature well, but she never quite got the hang of it.

Family:
Mother: Katayoun al-Tarazed, a White-Tiger Eye Healer (b. 143 d. 191 [48])
Father:  Unay al-Tarazed, Jewelless Blood (b. 141 d. 191 [50])
Siblings: None that Zadi knows of.

Zand al-Tarazed is Zadi’s Bonded Male. (Blood Opal to Red Prince, born 108 [age 85, partially long lived])

History:

Zadi’s life has not been one of choice, but of acceptance. She got off to a rocky start, born blue and with the cord wrapped around her neck. By the time she was 10 months old and underweight and hadn’t yet rolled over or sit up, she’d been recognized as a Queen. Normally an infant with such delays wouldn’t be allowed to live. But Shahrzad’s eyes were bright, and she smiled and giggled at everyone who held her, and her parents loved her fiercely and refused to return her to the desert. Her Healer mother,  Katayoun, tried to fix her crooked legs with Craft: she quickly discovered that they were perfectly fine - Zadi’s body was not broken, her ability to control it was. Her parents did their best to care for her, though their daughter never managed to walk or stand properly. As part of nomadic Tarazed life, Zadi and her family travelled all over Pruul. It was never easy - water was precious, food was sometimes scarce, but Zadi was a cheerful toddler. She rarely fussed, and was content to ride with her family’s cargo of artifacts. But as she grew older, her tribe was less and less able to care for her. So when she was five Zadi’s parents broke from their tribe, the only family they’d ever known, and took their daughter to Onn. They took up residence in a small house and settled in to raise her as best they could. Not wanting Zadi to lose her connection to her nomadic roots, her parents told her the stories of the Tarazed. Shahrzade delighted in them, and begged her parents to tell their tribe’s oral history over and over and over. And over and over. And over. Desperate for something else to amuse their housebound daughter, they purchased a book.

This may have been a mistake. Zadi took to reading like a duck to water, and devoured her book (an early history of salt mining in Pruul). She read it and re-read it until the spine cracked, and she pleaded with her parents to bring her more. Katayoun and Unay were poor, but anything they could spare went to books. Zadi read everything she could get her hands on. When she received her birthright Purple-Dusk jewel at age eight, Zadi found a new obsession: Craft. She began studying it in earnest, learning all she could from her parents, and then reaching out to the adults in her community. She’d always used Craft to help her with small tasks, but the more she learned and meditated in the Darkness, the more her power sharpened. A Black Widow in the neighborhood took the time to teach the young Queen how to shield her mind and protect herself against psychic attacks. Zadi also owned one book on Craft, and it became her bible. She studied it until the pages fell out, and learned all it had to give.

Zadi’s book collection began attracting the attention. Local adults were wary and a little fearful of the strange, crippled Queen and her books. Pruulians, being raised on oral history, didn’t much trust the written word. But the neighborhood children were more open minded. Blood and Landen alike, they came with cautious curiosity, which Zadi fed. She would teach anyone who asked how to read, read aloud to the younger children, and lend books to her friends. By the time she was a teenager, her collection filled two small shelves.

When she was ten, Shahrzad met Zand al-Tarazed, a trader from another Tarazed family. The first time they locked eyes, he knew she was his Queen, and Zadi knew she’d be with him for the rest of her life. Over the next few years they went through periods of separation, when his travels took him away from Onn. But when Zadi turned nineteen, she went to her parents and requested Zand for her Virgin Night. Her request was granted, and they spent their first night together. In the years since then they’ve barely been separated, and Zadi has come to rely on Zand’s presence as an anchoring force in her life. At twenty, she made her Offering to the Darkness and descended to receive her cut Green Jewel. She tried to claw her way down to Sapphire, felt it in her reach - but in the end the isolation was too much to bear. For the first time, Shahrzad felt the sharp sting of disappointment. She’d wanted - no, needed to do her best, to prove that she was strong and capable. There should have been no shame in claiming a Green Jewel, but at her core Zadi’s always been a bit hard on herself.

As she grew, so did Zadi’s little library. She was loaning out books so frequently that she developed a system to keep track, using slips of paper tucked inside each book and writing down who last borrowed each book, and when. The house was open to most anyone who wanted to come and see the books, and Zadi spent most of her days perched on the stoop with a book and a cup of mint tea. Her library continued to expand book by book, slowly but surely. But it all came crashing down after the Mineborn brought  the rains. Zadi’s parents, Katayoun and Unay, found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and were swept up in the violence in the Square and killed. Zadi’s world crumbled around her, and she withdrew from the world. Three months passed and dust collected on her books while she grieved.

Salvation came in an unlikely form: a wealthy foreigner had heard about her little collection, and offered to invest. The foreigner offered a building and a budget for more books and staff. This jolted Zadi out of her grief-stricken haze, and she leapt into action. Her book-filled house became a true library, open to the public as a repository of information. Zadi bought every text she could find - fiction, histories, books on Craft - books that had come from other lands were especially rare and precious, and she gave them a place of honor, high on a shelf near her front desk. She hired a few of the children from her neighborhood and taught them to sort and shelve the books by subject and author, and how to use the card catalog. The investment lit the flame of her purpose, and it spread like wildfire. The Tarazed had had no place for her, so she had made one. She was Queen of the library, and its patrons were her people.



Character in Play:

Shahrzad stared bleakly into the mirror. It had been one month since she’d seen her parents, thirty days since they’d been killed. It was the longest she’d ever been apart from them. A separation with no end in sight. Thirty days ago felt a lifetime away -  perhaps it was. She’d read that some people believe that the death of one’s parents was the ultimate passage into adulthood. Shahrzad didn’t feel like an adult. She felt ancient, battered, crumbling, and as unprepared and raw as a newborn.

The unrest in Onn terrified her. Attitudes were shifting, political fortunes changing, and Zadi felt so alone. Her parents had been her fiercest advocates, her staunchest supporters. They had protected her and shielded her from those that would have cast her out of society. And now they were gone. Killed in crossfire, an act of random senseless violence. There was no rhyme or reason or closure: Zadi couldn’t lash out in revenge even if she’d wanted to, for the identity of their killer was lost to the chaos of that fateful day on the Square. Grief was a well, and Zadi was trying to climb the sides. But sometimes her hand- and footholds disappeared beneath her and she slid back down to the bottom.

She needed some distraction, clearly. Frowning, she grabbed the edge of her desk and swung herself off the seat. Dragging her twisted legs behind her, Zadi crawled the few feet to her bed - a pile of furs and pillows on the floor, more of a nest than anything else. Settling herself in, she reached into her psychic cabinet and pulled out an old friend. Its pages were dog-eared and falling out, the spine was rolled and cracked. Zadi opened the book and was greeted by the familiar paper-dust smell, which flooded her mind with memories of comfort and security. The sweet aroma of phantom herbal tea filled her mouth and nose, and she couldn’t help but smile. Her tension slipped away as she sank into the story of the dashing and dangerous bonded Warlord Prince, who fought through armies and slayed fearsome beasts to rescue his Queen from certain death.

Thank you! I'll start fleshing out the app.

yeah, this is super not what I was expecting, but I think I'll roll with it!

Ready for review! If anyone has any questions please message me @skrulls#8309 on Discord or PM me.

Added to the que.

Ready for second review, other than Kenna's sign-off.

edit: switched a couple Tarazed things around
edit: and again, reworked backstory as per Kenna's request

Looked over by me and passed on noted to review.