Nahia Charaiz

Character name: Nahia Lucine Charaiz Gender: female Age: 31 Weight: 125 lbs. Height: 5'9" Hair color: dark brown Eye color: green Ethnic origin: indeterminate; at least partly Basque Species Type: newtype Other Information: -Somewhat obsessive about getting her name pronounced right, and strongly dislikes nicknames. -Has some emotional repression issues, having come from a family in which emotional expression was generally discouraged. -Has a tendency to overwork herself, and has been shown to neglect food, sleep, and overall health in favor of work.

Biography: Nahia was born into privilege in Iso, the middle of three children of a small upper-class family with a long and prestigious history of military and civic service. As a child, she took inspiration from the Alliance's militaristic culture, and though she, like many children, dreamed of piloting one of the great war machines called mobile suits, she realized as she grew that her true calling lay in the realm of politics. Setting aside her childhood dreams of the military, she instead enrolled in the University of Iso after high school, intending to get a degree in law in preparation for her future political career.

This changed before long. A battery of tests undertaken before she entered the school indicated the presence of newtype potential; surprised and overjoyed, she accepted the offer to join the military and enrolled in the prestigious Halsey Military Academy, working towards both her officer rank and, alongside it, her desired law degree. Despite the stress placed upon her by both the grueling Halsey program and the dual education she'd chosen to undergo, her marks were notably high, though stronger in theoretical and academic fields than practical ones; in addition, she gained something of a reputation for her confidence and ability to speak convincingly. Late in her tenure there, one of her instructors, the famed General Callahan, took notice of her after she became one of the few students to stand up to his infamous browbeating, and introduced her to a contact in the Alliance's intelligence department who offered her a job there once her education ended; this was an offer that she would later accept, and that would lead to the later rise of her political star.

Things remained no less stressful after her graduation, and overwork became part of her daily life. After completing her degree and her training at Halsey, she took a position in what was essentially an Intelligence-sponsored propaganda program--the conversion of the Alliance press corps into the "Department of Information"--and worked alongside Intelligence for long enough to get enough of a feel for their methods as they would allow. Once the conversion was complete, she broke off ties with them and settled into the department as a personal assistant for one of the officials, working her way gradually up the ladder.

Simultaneously, however, she had military duties to fulfill, and duties to the enigmatic Diana Institute as well. She did not enter frontline duty at first--there was, after all, no need for a government official to risk her neck unnecessarily with the current political situation--but she was on occasion sent into real combat against those few threats that showed themselves in peacetime. It was in one such fight that her newtype abilities awakened; after this, she found herself working far more closely with the Institute than she ever had as a "potential" while they were trying to awaken her, and she began to spend more and more of her time with them and their tests, as well as testing new newtype-use designs.

Her reputation gradually grew, the political and military halves building on each other as well as on the prestige of her family name, at the price of her life outside work, and the death of her sister Aintzane in a firefight with a terrorist cell did nothing to deter her. The Alliance essentially became her life; there was nothing beyond it. The emotional and psychological stress that was the natural consequence of this demanding schedule, however, took its toll, and she found herself gradually struggling more and more to keep her head above water, even suffering minor breakdowns on occasion.

It was at about this time, in early 221, that she met Diana researcher Cathan Sheridan, who took an interest in her empathic abilities and took up her case, working directly with her from then on. Cathan, a skilled psychologist despite his relative youth, became one of a rare few whom Nahia confided in--though she told him relatively little, trying to present a strong face to the Institute as she did to everyone else, taking him on as a confidante to even that degree provided her with enough of an outlet that she could, for the most part, get by. Diana's interest in her intensified as Sheridan's research proceeded, and the seeds of the Folie project were born. Her time there was marred by a single incident, in March of 225, in which Nahia was used to gauge the success of the so-called "Stewart Method"--in other words, a refined process for the creation of artificial newtypes--by exposing her to one of its graduates; the incident left her with deep psychological scars and, after the researcher in charge nearly injected her with a dose of gamma glipheptin, a healthy distrust of the Institute and its methods that she found herself able to do little about.

Some days later, after his mishandling of the separatist incident and the furor over Perreti, Press Secretary (and, privately, Director of Information) Lawrence Wensley quietly resigned, turning the position over to Nahia, who, while not the deputy director, was Wensley's personal aide and considered the best candidate for the job. She was handed a difficult situation--even aside from the separatists and Perreti, not two weeks after she'd assumed her position, the Sovereignty resumed open war against the Alliance and killed several thousand civilians in an attack on the Side 3 colony cluster. Hampering Nahia's propaganda campaign was the fact that the Alliance needed as many soldiers as it could get, as well as the partial completion of the Folie project--the resultant prototype, the "Rig Ring", was slated for use in the counterattack against the Sovereignty, forcing Nahia to spend time with the Newtype Corps and run things from afar.

The next month or so was spent attempting to balance her duties as an elite frontline soldier and her duties as Director in an increasingly difficult situation, but she managed up until mid-May, at which time a young man in a similar situation to her own--Turner Cross, a relatively new member of the Department of Information who had been newly assigned to the Newtype Corps--was taken by Diana for experimentation, and returned an Extended, under the impression that Nahia herself had sent him. This was the last straw for Nahia, and she left the Institute over Sheridan's protests, entirely unable to deal with the implications of this act. However, between her existing stress, the slowly building psychic stress from the artificial newtypes she spent so much time around, her prior trauma--exacerbated by the and the fact that everything she knew was crumbling around her, she soon found herself heading inexorably towards a breakdown.

Desperate for something to cling to, when Sheridan contacted her about rejoining the Institute, she accepted his argument that Diana's actions were for the benefit of the Alliance and rejoined, being called upon almost immediately to join the mission to claim the Divinidad, a Thanatos-created mobile armor that had been discovered some months ago on Earth. When its intended pilot failed to complete reentry, Nahia was chosen to take his place, and entered the armor only briefly before psychic stress forced her to retreat, leaving it open for the son of disgraced Alliance leader Joel Perreti to claim. When the younger Perreti fired the atmospheric distortion missiles with which the Divinidad was equipped and let the armor be destroyed, the resulting burst of traumatic "precognition", in conjunction with her prior stress and guilt over the incident, left her in a state of shock.

While her deputy took over her position and the Legion worked to fight off the mysterious suit that was terrorizing their homeland, Nahia remained in the halls of the Diana Institute, where Sheridan and his colleagues worked to return her to a somewhat functional state. It was two weeks before they could get coherent speech out of her, and longer than that before they could coax the full story from her. Once it became clear that conventional therapy was doing too little too slowly, they resorted to less orthodox means. Under Sheridan's guidance, she underwent memory modification via hypnosis, replacing her memories of the Divinidad battle and the worst of the prior month's trauma with more innocuous ones, carefully crafted to avoid triggers. However, the shock to her brain left her legs paralyzed as well, and the months of psychological therapy ran alongside months of intensive physical therapy.

Once she was judged mentally healthy enough to return to her position as Director, she did so despite being wheelchair-bound, and has since recovered enough to be able to walk with a cane; much to her chagrin, she has been barred entirely from the field until further notice due both to her condition and her psychic reactions to large-scale combat. This, however, has not prevented Diana from working on a replacement for the destroyed Folie, seemingly indicating that this prohibition will not be a permanent one.

Affiliation: Alliance of Artemis

Prototype Mobile Suit: NGDIMS-FI-02N/UL2 Folie Imposée