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Sep. 24th, 2018 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
monsterseekingmonster
GENERAL
Name: Hamsi Pudding Khan
Nickname(s): Much like a cat, she won't respond to most things. 'Pud' is a much loathed family nickname.
Gender/Pronouns: Female, she/her/hers
Birthdate/Age: April 24 / Taurus
Grade: Sophomore
Sexuality: Ew.
Major Arcana: Lovers (The Lovers can indicate a moral or ethical crossroads - a decision point where you must choose between the high road or the low road. This card can also represent your personal beliefs because to make such a decision you must know where you stand. Following your own path can mean going against those who are urging you in a direction that is wrong for you.)
Minor Arcana: Swords
Concept: Natural disaster consistently fails upward despite best efforts.
APPEARANCE
| Height: | 5'8" | Hair Color: | Brown |
| Build: | Lean, athletic | Eye Color: | Brown |
The sort of girl that gets told she cleans up nice, Hamsi's naturally quite pretty but finds beauty routines terribly tedious. Her hair always looks like it could probably stand to be either brushed or given a proper curly hair treatment, her make up nearly non-existent, clothes are kind of whatever (daughter of celebrities wears Old Navy clearance rack t-shirt and fashion sweats to lunch). But she does clean up nice. She knows how to do all those things, it's just that the focus required for them is not present until it's absolutely necessary.
PB: Mandeep Dhillon
PERSONALITY
Likes: video games - particularly competitive shooters, shitty video games with bad gimmicks you find on steam, speed running, livestreaming, non-sequitors, high places, snug places, weeping willows, farm animals, How It's Made, blueprints, anatomical diagrams, basically anything that shows bits and pieces and little details of how things are made
Dislikes: Lecture-based classes, to do lists, fake fruit flavoring, humidity, very busy places, crowded areas, flip-flops, group projects and presentations
Hamsi Khan has always been allowed to be precisely what she is. Which is bad. Because Hamsi Khan is bad. Vacillating between extremes, inconsistent and unhappy about it. She is both the remains of a room torn asunder by an act of nature and the act of nature, itself; simultaneously an unrelenting hurricane of a person and the abject disaster left in its aftermath. Equal parts overwhelming and inert, she struggles endlessly to find her own happy medium. Her ongoing mission: to just establish an identity that feels right. Being a teenager is hell, and Satan’s liable to abdicate while Hamsi is in residence.
One thing Hamsi does know for sure is that she is funny as shit. And, okay, maybe the sense of humor is a little weird. Maybe she's a bit too crude. But, to Hamsi, it truly does not matter whether or not anyone else thinks she's a laugh riot, because she finds herself hilarious. And that is a thread that can be followed through much of Hamsi’s personality - who cares as long as Hamsi, herself, is having a good time?
That “me first” mentality means exactly what you’d think. She is insensitive and often selfish, but it's not malicious or competitive - merely unthinking. Moral quandaries rarely receive an appropriate amount of introspection before Hamsi’s jumping head first into whatever she thinks is the best course of action for her. She’s not elbowing others out of the way to get what she wants, but she's not making room at the table or slowing down to give them a chance, either. Her head is just firmly up her own ass.
So, Veruca Salt she ain't, but, golden ticket in hand, she can still reliably be counted on to die in a stunningly stupid way in the chocolate factory. Her consistent lack of judgment is truly impressive. Social situations, dangerous situations, what to eat for breakfast? Somehow, always bad. Like she is only able to pick the worst options in the visual novel that is her life. Hamsi’s a smart girl. Probably. It's hard to say. She's never quite felt adequate in the brains department. Not that you can blame her when the rest of her family is so obviously brilliant. So she leans into it; uses her comparative “below averageness” as a crutch. Does she have a chip on her shoulder about not being a genius? Yes. Will she ever admit to that? Shit man, naw.
And now we’re back at the root of it: no one knows what's actually up with Hamsi Khan. Not even Hamsi, herself. What is her identity? Celebrity daughter? The dumb one? The middle child? All of these things are about her relationship with others. Hammy doesn’t think she has an identity independent of her family and she is horribly self-conscious and sensitive about that fact. She's constantly trying out different activities, traits, interests and styles to see if they suit her and discarding them the moment they lose their shine. She reasons that she's just trying to do what's right for herself. Admirable enough, except that she’s yet to find the right thing and she is heedless of the collateral damage her whirlwinding causes along the way.
Throwing another log on the unflattering fire is Hamsi’s predisposition to boredom - which then makes her lazy on top. Focus eludes her, always. Staying on track with anything is a struggle, one she’s not properly ready to unpack. She constantly feels overwhelmed by everything; like her brain is always full and there's no room for any more details. And yet, she perceives them. All of them. Hamsi is remarkably perceptive, but her retention of information is poor. She can be counted on to lose the thread of a conversation very quickly, or point something out only to forget why she’d even brought it up halfway through. Her response to this, generally, is flippancy. Blow past everything until you do find a place where you can stop off for a moment. It's exhausting. And Hamsi exhausts herself regularly.
This is where the inertia comes in. For all her apparent activity, there's not a lot of forward motion in Hamsi’s life. Sure, there's a whole lot of energy, but it's all being spent in one place - pointlessly tearing her own life apart. She's the sort of girl that needs a push; the type that benefits from invested mentors and good friends and, in the inverse, is easily put on disastrous trajectories by charming people with bad intentions.
Hamsi’s emotions are big, flaring things. Luckily, beneath whatever she is projecting, she is generally agreeable. It's difficult to truly anger, hurt, or irritate her. In general, despite being someone who could really benefit from strong ties and close friends, Hammy isn't terribly good at making them. Breaching the “this is my fun acquaintance" ceiling is difficult and Hamsi doesn't feel deeply connected to anyone in her life but her family. It's something she is aware of. And yet another problem she doesn't want to examine too closely. But she does watch other students sharing secrets and quiet laughter and knowing looks and she envies that.
😊: Perceptive, Agreeable, Energetic, Playful
🤢: Arrogant, Spoiled, Disorganized, Short Attention Span, Out of Touch, Impulsive
SKILLS
Languages: English & Hindi, both fluent.
Breaking Video Games: So, Hamsi's just good at video games, in general. She can pick up a controller or sit at a keyboard and intuitively pick up almost any game of any genre and be good at it. Where she really stands out is her phenomenal ability to break video games. Clipping through worlds, glitching characters, irreparably breaking quests - she doesn't even need cheat software. Most of her live streaming is exactly this - Hamsi playing a game she tries to break. She gets banned from online games a lot.
Crackin' Them Bones: An utterly useless skill. After Hamsi was hit by the car, she found she had developed a truly impressive (and disgusting) talent for cracking basically any bone in her body on command. Gross.
Musket/Flag/Baton Twirling: Hamsi spent her first year of high school on a highly competitive dance line/color guard team. It's a hobby she enjoyed and didn't immediately suck at and so she has stuck with it.
Dance/High Kicking/Athletic: While not necessarily a gymnast, Hamsi has been taking various dance lessons for years. With plenty of training under her belt, she has skill and is quite agile.
HISTORY
Family:
↬ Meena Khan 44, Mother. Actress (stage), model, former Bollywood actress.
Scary smart and effortlessly charming, it's no wonder Meena Khan held hearts in Bollywood in her teens and twenties. Meena is imperturbable, handling with grace the fall of her star back home and an arduous transition to the American market. She's had a few supporting roles in US films, but is more distinguished as a stage actress and model. As she ages out of roles, she has become an outspoken science and education advocate in the media. Meena is the more practical parent, pushing her children to do focus on studying and doing well in school, but she's also a doting mother who shamelessly spoils all four of them.
↬ Imogene Khan (nee Saunders) 45, Mother. Professor of Anthropology, NYU / celebrity scientist.
Actual Genius Imogene Khan has 10 million twitter followers. She's hilarious and a constant ray of sunshine, beloved by the masses. Imogene has always been fairly prominent in her field because she is so brilliant, but an A+ twitter game and charisma in spades means she's become something of a celebrity science consultant. Imogene is the big dreamer of the family, free with physical affection and always encouraging the kids to pursue pipe dreams, no matter how unrealistic.
↬ Arthur 18, Brother. College Student. Former Finchwood Academy Student, in Cups.
Arthur is brilliant, athletic, talented and charismatic, and he has always cast a long shadow over Hamsi. He and Hamsi bicker constantly, but he sees through her ostensible loathing for him and realizes she's always sort of taken comfort in being 'Arthur's dumb little sister'. There's fondness there, even if it's not apparent.
↬ Ajay & Dev 6, Brothers. Small Pantloads
It's not nice to call children assholes, but Hamsi does it, anyway.
Hometown: New York City, NY
Hamsi Khan didn't realize her moms were famous for years. That was largely intentional, but it wasn't necessarily difficult - Hamsi's always kind of been in her own world, anyway. She grew up affluent - understood that she had been born into a different sort of world than most people - but was otherwise oblivious to the fact one mother, Meena, was a model, former Bollywood starlet and successful stateside stage actress, and the other Imogene, was a charismatic Anthropologist with 10 million twitter followers. But, the point is, Hamsi and her siblings were carefully shielded from the wider world. Imogene and Meena commanded a certain presence in the media, but they took care to ensure that details about their children were scant.
The second of three, Hamsi was born to Meena a little more than two years after Imogene had Arthur. Her life was, for all its abnormality, impressively normal. There was never a shortage of love in the Khan household. Self-confidence was boosted, creativity fostered, opportunities afforded and passions encouraged - so long as they were not wholly destructive, and even sometimes when they were. Even though Meena and Imogene were busy jetsetters, they still made a point of making time for the kids. Hamsi grew up happy. You'd think the daughter of celebrities would have a life a little more interesting than that, but, really, she didn't.
Although Hamsi was always easily the rowdiest of the Khan children, her life was still relatively uneventful. She went to the same posh private schools as her older brother, where she endured the terrible shame of being average in comparison to him; stuck in his far more brilliant shadow. There was that time she was hit by a car when she was seven - that was in the papers, Hamsi's first brush with her parents' fame - but even that faded like all big childhood happenings do. A failure to stay on the ground and subsequent inability to stick there once she'd gotten up meant Hamsi was constantly suffering scrapes and breaks and other injuries. But, otherwise, things were just normal.
When Hamsi was nine, the family grew again. Meena gave birth to twins, an act Hamsi still believes is one of the rudest in human history. Two younger brothers - identical ones, for god's sake - meant that not only was she the middle child, she was a superlatively middle child. It was awful. Thankfully, there were video games to distract her. Digital entertainment was never a replacement parent in the Khan household, but Hammy still managed to find a passion for it.
That wasn't the only thing that managed to find a hold on Hamsi’s slippery attention span. She took to dance at a relatively young age, as well. Even as her school performance was just average, she managed to distinguish herself in other, less conventional ways. She was participating in game tournaments by thirteen and on a competitive dance team by her freshman year. She also took to live streaming her game playing antics. While by no means a big social media presence, Hamsi did find an audience fairly quickly. Doing streams and publishing YouTube videos about her game playing was the most she’d ever adhered to a schedule.
It was her brother who found Finchwood. Her brother who applied and who, of course, made it in. Hamsi followed behind him, a duckling. She’d always begrudged him, but so much of her identity was tied up in being his dumb little sister that the prospect of being in high school without him was terrifying. Her being accepted came as a surprise to basically everyone, and her first year was spent largely in her big brother’s far more accomplished shadow. She starts her second year without him, scrambling to establish a place for herself.
COMBAT
ACADEMICS
Core Classes: English, Mathematics, Science*, Social Studies, Training
Elective Classes: Comp Sci, Art, Life Skills
Clubs: Gaming, Dance
General Performance: Hamsi doesn't put in half as much effort as she should and it's clear she's far brighter than her grades imply. She finds schoolwork positively loathesome and is constantly bored in class. She puts in effort in her science courses, for her family, but coasts by on B's and C's (with the occasional D) in everything else. She doesn't need a tutor so much as motivation to give a shit.
OOC
