tab Name: tab tab Kalani Mayne (it was just Kalani on her homeworld, and Main St was the first sign she read when she landed, so she just took that when asked for her last name, lol)
tab Nickname: tab tab She's never had one but she's not opposed
tab Gender/Pronoun:
tab tab Her planet doesn't really do gender but she/her or they/them works fine
tab Age: tab tab 824 in Kuanian years = 412 in Earth years
tab tab tab Kuanians age like normal humans until they are 14, when their bodies begin to change. To avoid getting sick, they need to go into a cocoon to complete the maturity process; they will stay in the cocoon for 1-4 years and when they emerge they will age at about twice the speed of humans; they have lifespans of about fifty years. tab Birthday: tab tab She has no idea, especially because space math, so when asked she just said the day she landed on Earth - somewhere in the end of August/early September zone
tab Sign: tab tab Virgo
tab Gemstone: tab tab Peridot
tab Blood Type: tab tab blood for the blood gods AB+
tab Fav. Food: tab tab she is a vegetarian and this is not optional
tab Hated Food: tab tab meat. disgusting
tab School/Occupation: tab tab her 'job' is figuring out earth. after that, it will be finding ways to resurrect her poor planet :c she has no concept of money or earthly responsibilities, so like...help her. (once she figures out money as a concept - Kua'kua was mostly trade based, and as the planet's Senshi, Kalani got everything she needed for free, pretty much - she will try to find a way to make money by gardening/plants/etc)
Hobbies: tab Gardening tab tab It's so nice having plants that aren't dead, or formerly your neighbors. Mostly focusing on community gardens until she has an appropriate place of her own, Kalani - like most Kuanians - has a green thumb, and she can't help but use it. It's second nature to her, and she has immense knowledge of, and loyalty to, growing things. Plants > people in Kalani's book.
tab Butterfly keeping tab tab It's strange that creatures so similar to herself are so...small and...uncommunicative, but she understands that they are fragile, and on this planet, some are at risk of extinction. There has been enough death for creatures like this, so she has a dedicated segment of her garden exclusively consisting of butterfly-friendly plants, and soon will discover the magic of ordering caterpillars/butterfly larvae through the internet, and then she will be
unstoppable even more obsessed with her little cousins, as she calls them.
tab Sailing tab tab Though she hasn't done it in....many many many many
many years, since the Before Times, her people were once voyagers, and they carved beautiful boats and ships to sail across the chaotic ocean that separated the island landmasses from each other. All Kuanians knew how to sail, how to surf, and how to fish, but Kalani was especially gifted at sailing, with something about the exactness of the knots coming naturally to her. It will be quite a while before she tries out the hobby here on Earth, but once she gets more comfortable and less...you know, dead inside, she would come to enjoy it once again.
Virtues: tab Optimistic By Force tab tab After witnessing a mass extinction event and going through the stages of grief about it, Kalani is now, somehow, absolutely determined to live, and have something resembling a happy life, if she can. She has a
very high high-water mark for 'things are terrible', which has given her perspective, to say the least; as such, things that might bother or upset others tend not to be that big a deal to Kalani. It could always, always be worse, and she would know - she's seen the worst there is.
tab Kind By Choice tab tab It would have been very easy for Kalani to give into the darkness, if not in the sense of her own life, then in the sense of her mind. She certainly is not the naive creature she was when she first awoke as Sailor Kua'kua, nor is she the person who knew her place in the world and how to move through it, but one thing has remained constant amid an absolute sea of insecurity: Kalani's first impulse is almost always to be kind. No matter how beaten down she herself feels over her failure to protect her planet, she does her very best not to take it out on the strangers here on Earth.
Flaws: tab Foolhardy tab tab Centuries of living by herself and being essentially unable to die has made Kalani careless. She forgets, here on Earth, that she is no longer sustained by whatever it was that kept her afloat back on Kua'kua. She is not impulsive, per se, but she does have a lingering lack of self-preservation, caused halfway by living through the worst and being immune to it, and halfway by the apathy that followed after - for a very long time, there was no one to care if she died or not, so why should
she care? Of course, on the surface level, she doesn't think that way anymore, but just because those tendencies are buried doesn't mean they're dead.
tab Unforgiving tab tab While she doesn't go in on causing pain unnecessarily, once someone has made themselves her enemy, they are her enemy for Ever. Living in a post-apocalyptic world made it all very simple for Kalani: you were good or you were bad. You were alive or you were dead. Just as she will never forgive herself for allowing her planet to fall away to the rot, she will never forgive those she deems a threat to goodness or an enemy to life. If you're not with her, you're against her, and that's all that really matters, in the end.
Physical Description tab Eyes: tab tab Large, golden.
tab Hair: tab tab Black pixie cut. Likes hairclips as a concept.
tab Face: tab tab Somewhat angular, but babyfaced.
tab Skin Tone: tab tab When not in her true skin, she appears to have light brown skin.
tab Body Type: tab tab They are Itty Bitty in all ways. zero curves, zero height.
tab Clothes: tab tab Human fashion escapes her entirely. She has no concept. As a rule, though, she likes loose-fitting/flowy clothes more than tight-fitting clothes.
tab Physical Features:
tab tab See above. As she grows in stage and becomes healthier & more in tune with her Kuanian metabolism here on Earth, I would love to accentuate any butterfly-adjacent aspects I can get away with (such as antennae, tiny scales along fingertips/cheekbones/other accent places bc did you know some butterfly wings are covered in SCALES?).
tab Backstory/History:
Kalani was born and raised among the rest of her community, unaware that there was anything unique about her at all. When it came time for the cocooning ritual, when she was the Earth-equivalent of about 14 years old, still, no one knew there was anything unique about her. It wasn't until she emerged from the cocoon, her round ears replaced with faintly winged tips, and was greeted by a Mauvian did she - and the rest of Kua'kua - learn that once again, the planet had a Senshi to represent it. Out of the cocoon came Kalani, and Sailor Kua'kua, once again.
There had been a lot of previous Sailors Hellebore, because Kalani’s people didn’t live that long when compared to other species, and the memories came to her in bits and pieces, like she was aging in echoes, teaching herself what she somehow already knew. It isolated her from the rest of her community, putting her in a category all her own, but she got used to the loneliness after a while, and she tried to use the wisdom of the previous Sailors Hellebore to the betterment of everyone around her. As she got older, she accepted a position of administration, mostly concerned with, unsurprisingly, her community’s main subject of trade: hellebore (or, at least, that's what it would've been called on Earth).
The plant grew on Kua’kua like dandelions on Earth: everywhere. The people who grew up around it, were cocooned in its leaves, were immune to its poison, but that wasn’t the case for the rest of the galaxy. It was a valuable commodity in all of its forms, and Kalani was able to help guide her people to a respectable place in the universal trading routes.
Maybe that was what opened the door to chaos. If they had just kept themselves to themselves…maybe they would’ve been spared. Kalani didn’t rightly know, and there was no way to know for sure. She’d almost forgotten the loneliness of her youth, now that she knew her place, had grown into it - until.
Until the first time she saw someone
covered in black hellebore pollen, or at least what
looked like black hellebore pollen, and was in fact a parasite, working in symbiosis with chaos to spread both the parasite and the darkness throughout the entire planet.
And they didn’t seem - upset, or confused, as Kalani was the first time she saw it happen. They seemed perfectly happy. Kalani had ordered the person quarantined for study, but the study didn’t help her understand what she saw.
The pollen faded. Or seemed to fade. In its place, over days, grew little seedlings, little flowers that looked
almost identical to the hellebore flowers her people spent their lives caring for. But hellebore didn't do that - hellebore couldn't growi
out of living people.
Where were the roots? That ridiculous question was what haunted Kalani. If this plant could grow out of people,
where were the roots?
The quarantine was overrun in days. Their species lived quickly, and it appeared they would die quickly too; after the flowers came, the minds departed, leaving just a vacant, dazed shell behind. They did not become zombies, they just became…empty. Beautiful, empty flower-people, crested and covered in the very thing they all relied on.
When the first person died, Kalani insisted on being there for the autopsy, even though it was dangerous.
The spores, the doctors said.
You, of all of us, cannot get infected!But she was Sailor Kua’kua, and no one would tell her on her own planet where she could or could not go, so she went to the autopsy. She watched the careful incision give way to…
Nothing. Nothing but miles and miles of roots, twisted branches that seemed to have sucked their host dry from the inside out.
A parasite. A parasite that grew along with, or gave spread to, the darkness, the chaos, that Kalani had begun to suspect was nibbling at the edges of their planet. It was so much worse than she feared.
Kalani did not go to any more autopsies, but not out of concerns for her own safety: the doctors who had warned her away were more right than they knew. It appeared she
literally could not get sick, at least not in the way her people were. So she spent her time among the living, trying to devise ways to help them, to save them. They did not want to be saved; by the time the pollen was covering them, by the time that first symptom appeared, it was already too late. There was nothing to be done.
And so the loneliness returned, darker and more full than any loneliness she had ever experienced before in her life. She buried her people, and then she buried everyone else: there was no corner of her world that wasn’t touched by this evil, and there was nothing she could do for anyone she met. Nothing except sit with them, hold their hand, and sing them a song to ease their passing. Even the plantlife, what had once been the cornerstone of their society, wilted and died, replaced with this mockery of their devotion.
At least they didn’t seem to feel much pain. In fact, it was the opposite - getting ‘seeded’, as they took to calling it, led to cults, all of them chasing the high that evidently came with getting infected. No pain, no sadness. Just a glazed sort of carelessness, that nothing really mattered, and then - nothing really did matter, not to the dead.
Kalani wished the doctors had been wrong. She wished that she
had gotten sick, that she had died with her people, that her soul would be reborn into the next Sailor Kua’kua, who would know how save them. Who would know what to do.
But no such luck. No matter what she did, she persevered. First she was in denial about her own apparent immunity; then angry. Then she began offering up all kinds of deals to the disease, to the universe at large: what could she offer that would release her from this isolation? She would do anything to be free of it, free of the guilt, free of the suffering, free of the
emptiness that was now her constant - and only - companion.
No deal came through. No matter what she offered, no matter what she tried, she couldn’t seem to join her people.
She couldn’t seem to die.
And that meant all she could do was live.
It took her a long time to accept that. She didn’t know how many years; more years than any member of her species had ever lived, she was sure of that; as their lives were cut short, hers seemed to become elastic, stretchy, slowed down. Like the universe wanted her to suffer for as long as possible.
But if she was going to live, then she would live. If it wasn’t the next Sailor Kua’kua’s job to find a way to save her people, it must be her own. Upon this acceptance came a tug, an idea - something that felt a little like hope. She’d almost forgotten it, over all the years, like she’d forgotten so many other things.
She didn’t have to stay here on this mass grave of a planet. If she left - maybe she could find out what had gone so wrong, and find a way to bring her planet, if not her people, back. Surely somewhere in the widest reaches of the universe were people or tools that could
fix this.
With grim determination, she set about preparing herself for a journey to…somewhere. Anywhere else. Anywhere that wasn’t dead and haunting her every breath.
If she would live, then she would
live.
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