World info and background and such

[legal_eagle]

Character AGE: 28
Character ABILITIES:
Sonya has the ability to fly. Her ability is actually fairly powerful, considering that she's never trained it or used it for anything. She is fairly miffed that this was the power she was born with, as it provides her with no real advantages in her life or career, since New York in particular has very specific ordinances against flying for reasons of general safety. (She also gets motion sick. Her life stinks.)
Character WORLD:
The world that Sonya is pulled from is not dissimilar from our own; the main difference between hers and ours is that there, all people are born with an ability that goes beyond what humans in our world are born with. Some people, like Sonya, can manipulate the elements; some can turn invisible; some can read others' minds; some can influence chance; some can fly. There are as many different abilities as there are shades of hair color, and abilities are passed along in roughly the same way: they're written into one's genetics, so if both of one's parents are telekinetic, then so too will the child be, and so on and so forth.

Naturally, history is a little bit different as a result - though not as much as you might think. Borders are different, sure, some countries that exist for us don't exist for them, and their histories speak of more than a few would-be conquerors who tried to build armies of superhumans with abilities stronger than the average - but just like politics in our world can't sustain extremists, neither can politics in their world, and so just like our empires have crumbled so have theirs.

Sonya herself lives in Manhattan, which is very much like New York as we know it now, in the United States, which is a country that encompasses the original colonies and has an alliance with the central part of the country, ruled over by a confederation of the indigenous people of North America. (Firepower back then was more about inborn abilities than technology, and as such it was harder for the colonists to run roughshod over the locals.)

The level of technological development there is much like our own, with some exceptions: their weapons lag significantly behind our own, since the impetus to develop guns wasn't as strong, while their knowledge of genetics far exceeds our own. This is, in some ways, to their advantage: their wars are less devastating than ours, and certain diseases are better managed as a result of genetic counseling. However, there are certain unpleasant aspects to the society as well: there are breeding programs to produce certain abilities, a practice decried by human rights groups but largely overlooked (or taken advantage of) by governments, and crime is a great deal more rampant, since no one can truly ever be disarmed.

Sonya is a prosecutor, so her life is the law. The law in this world is complex, because so much of it has to deal with the strangeness that comes with people having abilities; moreover, it's constantly having to be revised to allow for new abilities that have sprung up either naturally - or, in recent days, as a result of breeding programs. Every government has to deal with the increasing pace of change in the world, and every government does so to varying degrees; the government of the United States, to Sonya's pride, really always steps up to try to tackle the difficult problems.

Character HISTORY:
Sofiya Karimov was born the daughter of two first-generation immigrants, so that was pretty rough for her. Both her parents were Tajiks; her father had been a musician born in Soviet Tajikistan who had used a tour to defect to the United States, while her mom had immigrated fairly early in life from Afghanistan. Both were smart and ambitious and crafted a life for themselves of success and relative prosperity, and so Sonya and her three brothers grew up comfortable, prosperous, well-educated, and with all the guilt that comes of being the children of two hugely successful self-made people who wanted to see their children's accomplishments exceed theirs and who therefore never, ever hesitated to set the hooks of guilt into them.

Sonya was the second child. She reacted as well as could be expected to the pressure of her parents' expectations; she was a straight-A student, learned to speak Dari fluently, dressed modestly, came home at night, learned the Quran well, never missed a service at the mosque. Her older brother, unfortunately, was essentially the polar opposite: he didn't have the sort of personality where pressure spurs you along to greater success, but instead one where it makes you outright rebel, so the more her parents ramped up the pressure on Pendar the more disobedient he got, and the more disobedient he got the more his parents disapproved, and it all turned into a vicious cycle that ended with him sidling into criminality.

See, Pendar was a good-hearted kid, truly, but he, like his mom, had been born with the ability to nullify the abilities around him. It was a rare ability, and his was very strong. So one of his friends at school, a kid named Michael who similarly grew up middle-class but who was nevertheless the school's resident drug dealer, convinced Pendar to come along on a deal to keep things safe, and when he was on that deal he met a thug whose boss was looking for someone to attend meets to keep them from going south, and so he was introduced to that boss and started working for him - not because he needed the money, but because he needed the respect and appreciation.

Pendar was nineteen when the meet he was working was raided by the police. He was arrested; he was sentenced to five years, which was an absurdly long term and the longest of anyone who'd been present that day, even though he was doing nothing more than standing there. He served three of the five, but in prison he'd tried to stay active, stay ambitious for his boss - and thereby managed to get on the wrong side of certain people with certain connections.

Sonya still loved her brother. Mom and Dad had cut off contact with him, and they didn't let her little brothers see him; Sonya, though, still adored him, and she was so successful and sensible that they reluctantly allowed her to continue visiting him and seeing him. They always met up in the same coffee shop on Saturdays at 3 pm, and that regular schedule was what allowed Pendar's enemies to know his movements and ambush him. She saw him shot from the window where she was sitting. She was the one who called the ambulance, and she was with him when he died. She was only 16 at the time.

Before this, at home, Sonya had acted the perfect daughter: quiet, studious, and shy. That wasn't who she truly was - with her friends at school, she had a sharp and sarcastic wit, and while she was generally a good student she got a malicious sort of pleasure out of making a few teachers' lives hell in subtle ways - but it was the image she put forth for her parents. With Pendar's death, her persona at home and in public were neatly reversed; at school, she retreated from her friends and stopped talking in class, while at home she talked back to her parents and made difficulties for them. Things would have eventually come to a disastrous head if she hadn't left for college two years later, and - realizing she needed a sharp break from everything back home in New York - decided to go to school far far away. That's why she settled on Huntington-Hewes University in the northern part of the Republic of California, an independent nation that occupied the western part of the North American continent.

At college, though, she was rather lost. She made good grades, sure, and got into honors societies - but in some way, she really thought that getting away from her family, and getting away from New York, would allow her to rediscover the drive she'd lost after Pendar's death. She didn't. She made no friends, was passionate about nothing - drifted through four years of university with a 4.0 average and - largely by accident - a major in mathematics with no minor, because she'd happened to register for more of those classes than any other. At age twenty-one, she was about to graduate with a degree in listlessness when, in her very last semester, she registered for a course on constitutional law.

And that was what got her life back together. Part of it was her professor - seventy years old, a conservative lion, and yet one of the few professors who didn't treat her like some kind of curiosity because of her head-scarf - but probably it wouldn't have mattered whatsoever who was teaching it. It was the subject itself that reignited her passion, with its talk of justice and righteousness - a dialogue that hadn't been opened in her calculus classes. It made her start to think about her place in the world. It made her start to consider her life and how it related to the lives of others. It made her reflect on the fact that she was smart, and she was successful, and she had a sense of what was right and what was wrong, but she was as lost as Pendar had been - and as much as she loved her brother, her greatest fear was to end up like him, sad and lonely and with a short life lived without purpose.

A few weeks later she sat for the LSAT. She'd missed the application deadlines, so one year was spent as a paralegal at a San Francisco law firm, during which time she did things she'd been too scared to do in high school and too lost to do in college: she had sex for the first time (clumsily and unsatisfactorily), took a philosophy course at the community college (more satisfactory than the sex), took up smoking (much, much, much too satisfactory, and she quit cold turkey after two months but still craves cigarettes like mad four years later). She broke her halal diet once, tried drinking once, and realized that she didn't feel particularly terrible about doing either, even when she called home and expected to feel guilty as hell. She watched movies she'd never seen before, stayed out late, slowly came out of the quiet she'd imposed upon herself since Pendar died. She delighted her coworkers with her unexpected acerbic observations. She started to make friends again.

And then law school happened. Law school was great for Sonya in some ways: she lost her last vestiges of reserve and isolation, turning into a bold, brave, outspoken young woman. In other ways, it was terrible. She managed to get into Harvard Law, and the program was vicious; the first year was spent learning cutthroat ambition more than it was spent learning actual law. And Sonya, bless her, had only just relearned how to exist in the world, still didn't wholly know herself, and as such all her ambition and aspirations were yet plastic, moldable; Harvard Law took that energy and molded it into brutal competitiveness. Self-worth for the law students became based around class standing, and so Sonya relearned how to put her head down and struggle and use pressure to motivate her; the pressure this time just came from herself.

She graduated from law school a very different person from when she went in. No longer quiet or shy, she became bold and brave - but she also was more competitive, harsher, and less moral. She had a purpose, and a way to help the world, but quite possibly at the cost of her own self. She was hired at the D.A. and started work at the bottom of the totem pole, as it were; she was given all the low-prestige cases, the burglaries and the violations of parole and suchlike. But every case that she got, she worked at with bullheaded stubbornness, and won every one of them, and gradually she began getting work assisting more powerful attorneys on murder cases.

Two and a half years after getting hired, she finally gets to be lead on a murder case herself...And then one of the officers on the case, a sweet-natured young man named Josias DeRuyter, goes missing along with all the evidence from it. And that's where we have her pull point!

Character PERSONALITY:
Sonya is her work, and her work is Sonya. As such, much of how she comports herself springs from her work and the demands it puts on her. She's a non-white female at the bottom of the ladder at the DA's office, and so she acts, first and foremost, as tough as she possibly can; she presents herself as sharp-tongued, cynical, jaded, hard to please, and supremely manipulative. The face she'll show to most people who don't know her is this one: dishonest, sarcastic, funny, quite mean. She's fake-friendly to everyone at first, but as soon as there's any hint of hostility she'll double down on it: she'll be quick to point out your faults; she'll be brutally honest; she'll shrug off any attempts to insult her back. She won't be an asshole by default, but if she has the slightest reason to be one, she will be. She'll foster an image, essentially, of being someone concerned more with hearing the sound of her own voice than actually doing anything.

This isn't the real Sonya. This is an image she fosters to keep people who could get in her way or pose a threat to her ambitions off-guard. But nor is the real Sonya exactly the persona she wears for those who know her better. To her coworkers and to the defense attorneys who she'll sit and have coffee with, and even to her bosses, she'll present herself as a ruthless and cutthroat careerist. She plays the part well, and even believes to a certain extent that this is who she is: someone with very specific ambitions who'll fuck anyone and everyone over to get a promotion. Nearly everyone who knows her a bit better knows her as a backstabbing opportunist, the woman who left the corpses of softer-hearted students in her wake in the quest to be in that top ten percent of her class. They know her as the woman who's not the smartest lawyer in the office, or the second-smartest, or even the third-smartest, but the one who puts her head down and works hard and maneuvers her cases to favorable outcomes and who'll most likely make DA someday. They also know her as being vicious, and that bit is genuine; Sonya is ambitious and opportunistic and gets hostile and jealous towards those who surpass her. It's an ugly side to her personality which she doesn't love, but which she isn't taking any steps to remedy.

The woman of ambition is a lot closer to being the real Sonya than the devil-may-care lawyer with the dry sense of humor is. Because good God is she ambitious indeed: her honest goal is to be DA by the time she's 35, judge by 40, Supreme Court by 55, and then she wants to live till 90 and just keep on handing down exactly the judgments she wants to hand down. But that's the thing: she's this ambitious because she has judgments she wants to hand down. She doesn't just want to make a name for herself; she wants to make change.

Because, poor girl, under that wit and ruthlessness beats the soft heart of an idealist. No one is going to see that soft heart, and if anyone digs to try to find it she's going to make acid comments about how idealism never got anyone a job and so on and so forth, and she doesn't even really admit to herself that it's there, but every once in a while she'll be guided by sentiment and hope rather than by What's Best For Sonya. She doesn't hold any romantic notions about the world, and she knows that injustice exists, and she knows that there are faults within the justice system. Hell, she saw her brother get sent away for two years too many for being the wrong skin color; she has seen the faults within the system. But she believes in herself, and in spite of everything she believes that people can do the right thing, and when it comes to making a moral decision she's going to always go with what's right instead of what's easy (and then come up with elaborate justifications as to how this was right for her career).

A chunk of that does stem from her religion. Sonya has abandoned many of the trappings of Islam: you don't ever get to be on the Supreme Court, after all, wearing a hijab, and you don't network if you won't go out for drinks with people. Her religion was one of the victims of her ambition. And yet in spite of the loss of the more cosmetic aspects of her faith, Islam is still hugely important to her; she still tries to live her life according to the guiding principles of the religion, of kindness, forgiveness, brotherhood, and charity.

It's quite worth noting that for all that she's prickly and difficult and generally standoffish towards new people, she'll be nicer to certain folks than to others. See, the tough, rude, unkind Sonya is tough and rude and unkind to hide her real self (which could be exploited by the sorts who don't like women, or don't like Muslims, or don't like the person who's going to eventually be their boss) and because she gets genuinely hostile towards those who could pose a threat to her ambitions. This means, however, that people who neither pose a threat job-wise or emotions-wise are safe, and so she's a hell of a lot nicer to them; kids, dumb people, bumbling incompetents, thugs who are in over their heads, folks who are extremely earnest or honest, all see a gentler side to her personality than she shows people who could possibly be smarter or better than she is. People who make her life easier in some way, too - coworkers who are very good at their jobs but don't have much ambition, highly competent people in other lines of work, waiters at restaurants - all of them get her respect and get to see a bit more gentleness from her.

But that does not, unfortunately, make for her having friends. When the world breaks down into people you're an asshole to and people you're nice to only because they're beneath you, and when you yourself choose every word to build up the wall against showing any vulnerabilities or softness, no one is going to like you. Sure, Sonya has good qualities - wit, a pretty face, competence - and those are enough to at times win people over enough so that they don't outright hate her. But no one is going to like or want to spend time with someone who's just going to belittle or mock them all the time. So Sonya's life is a very lonely one, because she can never turn off that attitude that people-are-threats, people-will-see-you're-weak-and-get-in-your-way, and so even those who've tried to be kind to her were generally driven away by her bad behavior.

Which is why it's fortunate she has her family. Her parents drive her nuts sometimes, and there's still lingering coldness from the incident with her brother, things that have not been resolved and will never be resolved. But her time away from them reminded her how much she loves them. She's a proud older sister to her two little brothers and likes to dote on them and talk about how much she loves them and get all schmoopy at them, and with her parents she can be more honest about who she is and what she wants than she can with anyone in her life - and even though her parents do sometimes sigh and shake their heads over her choices, they're really very proud of their daughter and love her even when she acts so completely unlike the girl they raised. Her life is her job, but it's going to be the loss of her family that really has a negative impact on her when she's brought to the game; it's only with her family that she can be the person who is most like the person she is.

So. In the end, she's someone motivated by a desire to do good in the world, but that desire is translated unfortunately into ruthless ambition. So she acts always from ambition; she'll screw anyone over to get ahead, and she'll take any advantage of weakness she can find. She is, in short, not a very good or nice or decent person; here's hoping the pressures of being forced to be something like a hero help her overcome that.


PB Info: This hot mamacita is Pegah Ferydoni.