Name: Sajahka Dakama
Stage: Prentice
Race: Pureblood Matori
Gender: Male
3 Base Traits: ● alert ● private ● faithless ●
Personality:
- Simple
- GOOD
alert, anticipative, athletic
calm, capable, decisive
forthright, perceptive, keen
NEUTRAL
reserved, frugal, physical
private, assertive, blunt
BAD
amoral, callous, crude
cynical, destructive, discontented
fatalistic, hostile, insecure
Sajahka pays great mind to the world around him. Without his tongue to keep him busy, this inherent trait is amplified, resulting in him seeming often more aware of subtle goings-on than his more distracted counterparts and sometimes making him come off as especially anticipative of things before they occur, his insight giving him a guise of foresight. Due to this perceptive and attentive nature, when Sajah does take action, it’s generally decisive—sometimes even abrupt. He is forthright in his choices, and rarely looks back on past decisions, regardless of whether or not they panned out as planned. Having been raised in an environment that had little room for a ‘childhood’ period, Sajah matured young and amassed as many skills necessary for caring for himself as possible, making him fairly capable as a teen in most areas relating to independence and self-help.
As a slave, Sajah’s protective mechanism was to privatize all parts of himself vulnerable to external attack and manipulation—this being most everything. The loss of his tongue only served to further drive this habit home, making Sajah a very reserved and sometimes outwardly callous individual, slow to engage any more than necessary. Also in part due to his upbringing and initial lack of anything to call his own, in independence Sajah is frugal, hoarding coin and possessions to himself and spending the bare minimum he can to get by, which — given his general lack of funds — leaves him with little extra regardless, but does allow him to save on occasion.
Despite his conservative and private nature, however, Sajah is highly assertive when it comes to himself and his choices. He spent long enough without the freedom to be his own person that now, with his freedom, he has next to zero patience for appeasing other people’s whims—when they conflict with his own, at least. In this vein, through his own methods of communication, Sajah is blunt. Limited as they are, he has no time to waste beating around the bush, and works to get across exactly what he means the first time.
Finally, although he has attained his freedom, years of slavery and mutilation at the hands of his prior owners have left Sajah cynical, faithless, and discontented. While not strictly bitter — he tends not to cling to the past and keeps it as much behind him as he can — Sajah has a distinctly pessimistic worldview, minimal faith in the good of any people, and non-existent faith in the gods.
Description: Sajah has the darkest range of skin tone that Matori come in, deep blue on the exterior with a rich teal inner belly; the typical spotted markings of Matori are the lightest of his natural tones and stand out against his skin. His hair, alternatively, is a fairly bright/pastel seafoam green. Sajah’s eyes are subtly heterochromatic with his left eye being a slightly darker yellow-gold than the right, which is close to the palest yellow Matori eyes naturally come. Sajah has especially long earfins and has a tear in his right ear.
Clothing: Practical traveling clothes.
Accessories: Nothing special. His lower lip is pierced on his right.
History: Sajahka was born into slavery. Initially, however, it was among the more benevolent forms of captivity—in as much as any form of slavery could be considered so. Under their initial owners, his parents and the other slaves of the same masters were treated humanely and permitted to bond amongst themselves and reproduce naturally. Their Oban masters considered this to be profitable enough and beneficial in other ways so as to make itself worth it. Sajahka’s parents met under those circumstances, came to care for each other, and Sajah was sired and born: healthy, and to loving, if captive, parents.
For many years, things remained stable, his parents raised him and as soon as he was old enough, he was put to work and taught that way of life. Despite the innate hardship of slavery, however, these years were relatively peaceful. They were given enough food, lodgings, periods of rest, and minimal discipline.
Then, just before Sajah’s sixth birthday, a period of hardship overcame their owners. A great storm destroyed much of their wealth and business, and nearly half of their slaves had to be re-sold. In efforts to make the shift as ‘painless’ as such an event could be, the owners did work to sell the slaves in family units whenever possible, and Sajah’s was fortunate enough to be one of those who was purchased together, there being only three of them. Less fortunately, it became immediately evident that their new owners were not similarly ‘benevolent.’
In the hands of their new owners, the fact that Sajah and his parents were emotionally bound was a manipulation tool and little more, added to their arsenal of control mechanisms. Two days after being purchased, as though to demonstrate how ‘serious’ their threats were, Sajah’s parents were made an example of. As punishment for his mother speaking out of turn en route to wash hall, Sajah was dragged forward, and — in front of all new purchases — mutilated in the form of losing his tongue.
Life did not significantly improve from there. Despite the fact that war soon-after ended legal slavery, their new owners were not among the cooperaters, and though on the surface their people were emancipated, that emancipation did not spread in practice to Sajah and his parents, who continued to live under now-secretized brutality at the hands of their new masters. If anything, the coming of the Oban war and the emancipation of the rest of their people caused complication, and in the chaos of fighting for freedom and escape attempts, his parents were lost—whether freed or perished, Sajahka does not yet know—and he, recaptured where he was maintained under forced, indentured ‘servitude’ illegally. He has been living under those circumstances up to this point. Unbeknownst to him, however, family — with the help of the secret organization of Buhawi — is on his side, and tides are soon to turn.
