Personality:
At the basis of Kesara's character is probably her high intelligence. She isn't a prodigy as such, except with languages, but she is a very, very smart kid, with a particular talent for rote memorization that helps a lot with compensating for her learning disability. She isn't only book-smart either, but is perceptive and quick to take stock of situations - her best thinking is on her feet, and while she isn't exactly happy under pressure, that is usually when she's at her most competent. Her thinking tends to be structured, especially due to the structured and strict education she'd received, so that she isn't always as imaginative and off the wall as many kids her age, but tends to be more analytic and logical, and straightforward in her conclusions. Her mental and emotional ages are pretty out of sync: she's very articulate, but full of bounce and energy, and prone to quick boredom and even sulking when she feels she's treated like too much of the kid she is. She can argue like a scholar and keep her head like a pro in a crisis, but when it's over she'll probably be blubbering in a corner. She's not great with games and doing things for fun; the whole concept is pretty lost on her. When she's in the company of other kids, she usually ends up semi-bullying them into much more complex endeavours than they ever wanted.

Kesara can be very astute, but also very naive, in that she's only recently really begun to grasp adult ideas of politics and power. She's unhealthily quick to trust and sympathize; in fact she's prone to feeling empathy with an intensity that stuns even her. It's the easiest thing in the world for her to put herself in another shoes, and she tends to assume that it's similarly easy for other people, so that she quickly comes to expect the best of anyone she interacts with in an even vaguely friendly fashion. This attitude came back to bite her a number of times so far during her journey, so she's begun to overcompensate by trying to be suspicious and standoffish. She's pretty bad at it.

She is, however, brilliant at fitting in and working with people who either are genuinely friendly, or don't suspect that she has any ulterior motive. She actually does have a spy's natural flare for melding right into a crowd, mimicking people's styles and following their habits, talking back to them the way they talk to her. She enjoys it. This skill, her high empathy, her immense talent for languages, and her fascination with stories are all part of the same thing - Kesara is good with other people's lives. Her budding closeness with the scholar-smuggler Lao Dian, who is similarly skilled and motivated, has made her more aware of her interest and more determined to pursue it consciously. She wants to know and understand as many people and their stories as she can, and likes to imagine herself as playing a part of these stories, too. She isn't a manipulator per say, but she loves the feeling of mattering, of changing the story somehow. This can be a benevolent, charitable tendency, but she's also quite young, and quite bright, and derives no small amount of pleasure from feeling powerful.

Kesara is tremendously ambitious. Her wits are more than matched with, perhaps even outmatched by, her determination to use them to make herself great. She's keenly aware of the disadvantages of her circumstances: her gender, her race, her young age, and she is set to defy them all. She wants to be at least a great a scholar as her mentor Dame Ariel - and hopefully greater, though she'd never consciously linger on such a treacherous thought. She very much hungers for fame and fortune, to be known, celebrated and, indeed, powerful. While her scholarly passion is absolutely genuine, she still has a rather immature idea of exploration and discovery, despite all her first-hand experience of both at Dame Ariel's side. She always imagined her moment to be right around the corner, her own Great Adventure, and the quest for the Book of Heavenly Names seems to be the realization of all her hopes and dreams. The fact of it getting a bit more complex than that is still dawning on her.

Nonetheless, Kesara is normally good with difficult realities. She's very pragmatic, not given to complaints, and largely unbothered by unpleasantness, hard work, mess and dirt, or even death when it isn't likely to be her own. Young as she is, she has been through a thing or two (though at a greater distance than she'd like people to know) and while she isn't cynical - she has far too much empathy for that - she's also very good at telling apart the things she can and cannot change and thus should or shouldn't worry about. Her upbringing has made her very much aware of more down to earth, material concerns, and she is materially greedy to a degree - she likes money and likes good food and interesting trinkets - but also casual, even stoic about physical hardship. Stiff upper lip. It's the bold British explorer way.

The final essential of Kesara's life is her genius for languages and her love for stories. The former is well and truly exceptional: not supernatural, but somewhere in the peak of human ability. At elven years old, she's fluent in eight languages and a number of regional dialects, a talent that stuns everyone she knows and is at the heart of her ambitions and hopes. She had made her peace with the fact that she can't, and possibly could never read or write, and saw it as a kind of trade-off - at least until she learned that there are languages she can master, at which point she became absolutely sure - with a child's unshakeable certainty - that she is destined to play a key role in the historical achievement of solving the mystery of the Tocharians. Her love of stories and storytelling is all-encompassing - any story. Legends, literature, personal stories and anecdotes, historical narrative, just gossip, she'll take everything as long as it has some kind of beginning, end, and meaning. When Kesara lies, which is reasonably often, that's what she sees it as - telling stories, making up a more interesting, useful, or meaningful reality than the one at hand. How can that hurt?


Flavor Abilities: None. While her learning Tocharian has begun to subtly affect Kesara's mind, the change is still negligible, and wouldn't come into effect in Norfinbury anyway. Her skill with languages is exceptional but not superhuman, and also isn't really relevant THANKS TRANSLATOR MICROBES.

Suitability: Although young, Kesara has some experience with physical hardship, hostile environments, and constant danger - the Central Asian deserts may not be quite Norfinbury-awful, but they can get pretty close. She's plenty practical and sensible enough to adjust with reasonable speed, and it'll be interesting to see how she takes to the aspects of the world that are vastly different from her own, such as the advanced technology (I have a huge Thing for characters-out-of-time, okay.) She should be all about Exploration and Mystery, and it should also be neat to play with her thirst for stories and others' experience around the variety of people you get in a multifandom game.


RP Samples:

Network:

[About as soon as Kesara figured out the tablet, she'd set it to always be recording video. Anything else seemed like a horrible waste of the most ingenious method of communication. If they had such things back home, in Calcutta or Kabul, by golly, the things they would do! But here and now, the best use of the tablet is that it allows her to record all her explorations better than writing in a diary ever could, and the whole network by now should be used to a small girl appearing with a very serious face, narrating her daily findings.]

Today's site appears to be a family home. One of the children was very interested in dragons. At least, I think they must be dragons. I don't know why this particular dragon is so very fat.

[She turns the tablet to carefully record a view of a child's room, full of pictures of toys of what she lacks the knowledge to identify as dinosaurs. The video lingers on the apatosaurus comforter on the bed. That is, indeed, a very fat dragon.]

I also found a book. [The view moves, so that said book is revealed - a children's book, which Kesara opens to show the large letters and dinosaur illustrations within, She sighs in longing at words she can't read.] It must explain everything. Would someone read it to me? I want to know if they're meant to be real.


Action:

She is cold, abominably cold. And used to the cold, of course; how much worse is this, really, than the great Karakum? But this cold has sharper, meaner teeth. It has intent. It is determined.

Kesara knows it isn't true. The cold is just the cold, it doesn't have any of these things - teeth, or intent - and thinking that it does only makes things worse. But it's a whole different story, being cold in the desert, and in an abandoned city. A city looks like it ought to be warm. She trudges through the snow and looks at all the windows, and pictures the drapes that should be hanging in them, and the foods people inside should be eating. None of that in the desert, and that makes things much easier.

But there is also what the desert doesn't have, like her tablet, always to hand. She walks and shivers, but sometimes she stops and listens to what it tells her. Very kind, how it reads things out. It should be hard to believe that there are people on the other side, speaking through it, but she knows that they are. The way they talk is real. The things they say about where they came from are real - she knows she can fall for a good lie, but when people tell their stories it's different. Listen to more than what someone says, Lao Dian had taught. Listen to how and when and why and everything around it. She's always been a diligent student. Everyone here is real.

It's good to stop under the remains of a roof - there was a house once, but all that's left is half a room, only close to winds that come from a certain direction - and listen to people, even if she has to fiddle with the tablet and call up the still difficult knowledge of how to go back and - play, that was the word, play things again that she's already heard. It doesn't make her less alone, but loneliness doesn't bother her by itself, as long as she can listen. Today someone is talking about how to mix chemicals together to make something that cleans, and that's one of the best sorts of talk. She listens and she learns. And there's to the cold, that wicked old toothy thing.

She listens for a while. When she hears a voice that don't come from the tablet, she doesn't realize it at first. The penny only drops when she realizes that the voice is calling her, and her head bobs up from the tablet, eyes and mouth wide with excitement. Not her name, her - what was that word? Username. Someone is mispronouncing it. "Siaok!" someone's calling, which is wrong, but she's willing to let it pass considering how long it has been since her last encounter with someone in the flesh.

She hugs the tablet to her chest and breaks into a run, heading for the voice. Listening can replace most things, but people are only warm in person.