Picture made by Nukey.
And a rare picture of her in one of her more... predatory moods.
Though that doesn't stop her from going on with her life as if nothing happened.
UPDATE: Lumi recently managed to gain her human form back, and will likely be played as a human unless specifically asked to be a naga. Most of the information below is in regards to her naga form, though her personality and quirks haven't changed much.
OLD STUFF:
Luminescence, or Lumi as she is sometimes called, is a large, thirty foot long naga with golden scales all over the top of her tail, and a sandy brown underbelly to match. She usually wears a tee-shirt to cover herself up fairly well, and often can be seen wearing an average sized pair of glasses in front of her sky blue eyes. Looking to be around the age of seventeen, the golden tailed naga is quite large for her age, but the thought usually doesn’t come into her mind very often. Oddly enough, her scales are almost always polished to an iridescent sheen, as if she takes great pride in her looks, and she carries a small brown bag around on her back containing all the items and possessions she thinks she will need on a daily basis. If someone took the time to carefully examine her, they would probably notice a great amount of symmetry in her scales, as if she had spent an obscenely long time trying to make everything look perfectly in order. So what makes her different?
“Nooo! Don’t touch! I just finally got them the way I like them!!!”
Luminescence, although usually appearing pretty normal in terms of physical appearance, has several mental disorders that tend to make her life, and the lives of those around her, much more difficult. Her most notable trait is her rather dire case of obsessive compulsive disorder, which had built up to the point where everything about her, or even around her, must seem perfect in order for her brain to stop torturing her mind. She’s usually more self conscious about her own appearance and actions, although won’t hesitate to try to fix other ‘problems’ around her. But she doesn’t strive for perfection due to vanity, no; she strives for perfection because she feels inclined to do everything in a certain way, and sees a pattern in everything. On top of that, she has the belief that no one will approve of her unless she does achieve a state of perfection, so she attempts to be as perfect as possible to get the approval of others. She’s been well known to spend excessive amount of time on a single task, because her brain is unable to tolerate the thought that something could be done better. If it could be done better, it MUST be done better, and making any exceptions was absolutely unheard of.
“Kyah! Please stop blinking so much! You’ve already blinked thirty two times in the past five minutes!”
The naga’s OCD tendencies stretch a bit further than self-perfection, as she sees the need for everything to always make sense, and behave in a certain way. If there’s one thing she hates, it is asymmetry, so Luminescence has a hard time holding up a conversation with someone without making some kind of complaint about how the other person is acting. Watching other people do whatever they want without a pattern or system drives her insane, because she’s unable to fully comprehend how someone can go about acting in ways that seem so disorganized or imperfect. She tends to try to correct people when they do something that seems abnormal, which can quickly get irritating depending on how bad she gets. When she’s unable to fix something, or when someone else ruins or changes something she sees as acceptable, she often has a hard time coping and can shift into panic mode. Unless someone wants to purposely mind torture the poor naga, it’d be best for one to try to meet her standards as best they can, although such a thing tends to be difficult.
“It’s not marshmellow! It’s marshmallow! What? I don’t care if you said it out loud, you spelled it wrong!”
On top of her obsessive compulsive tendencies, she has a few other problems. Simple mistakes or fumbles annoy her to no end, and it just gets worse and worse if she witnesses the error repeated numerous times. Ironically, she can’t stand to see someone do the ‘wrong’ thing several times, but she herself often does so to ‘balance out’ the previous mistake. If she cuts herself on the arm, she’ll try to make an equally large cut in the same spot on her other arm, and if she messes up or makes them disproportional, she’ll continue cutting both arms until they’re symmetrical. At this point, her disorders can get quite dangerous to her own well being, so she tries her hardest to avoid anything dangerous that might only occur on part of her body. On top of that, Luminescence is quite a large bookworm, and can spend several hours a day engaged heavily in reading whatever she comes across, and tends to zone out everything else around her. Because she’s so deep into literature, watching other people butcher language with bad handwriting, bad spelling and grammar, or bad sentence structure will irritate her to no end.
“I’ve already eaten sixteen of them… you can have the rest. Please, just take them!”
Another symptom the naga has involves numbers, and is probably one of her biggest flaws and obstacles in her life. She tends to always do things evenly, and any hint of asymmetry or odd numbers doesn’t sit with her well. She has a unique condition where she tends to group nearly everything in groups that are a multiple of four, such as four, eight, sixteen, or sixty four. This probably wouldn’t normally be a large issue, but it tends to affect almost everything she does. Eating small foods such as beans or fries must be done in group of four, so if she ends up with fifteen pieces of food, she’ll only eat twelve and try to dispose of the extra three in any possible way. Similarly, whenever she encounters a group of objects, she tries to count them to make sure that there’s the ‘proper’ amount. This can a very tedious effort, especially when there is a large number of objects she has to count, or when he’s in the middle of something. She tends to drop whatever she’s currently doing to make sure everything is in order, no matter what the situation. Even while reading a book she has to group the lines of text in groups of four, counting them off until she gets back to one, and even going so far as to re-read some lines if the ending result isn’t the number four. As much as she loves to read, she’s painfully slow at it. She can tend to repeat the same action four times occasionally, due to this problem.
“My friends? Um… books are friends, right? I always liked fantasy…”
When it comes to social experience and relations, Luminescence is near the bottom. It’s not that she doesn’t want any friends, and in fact, she’d probably like to have some to hang around with, but she’s just bad at making and keeping friends. She seems to like creatures of all types and species, although not all of them seem to return her views. She has an intense interest in humans and human life, although being a naga, not many humans tend to trust her enough to let her get close. The few times she’s managed to actually make friends, she usually managed to drive them away some way or another, just by being herself. With all her disorders and deficiencies, she’s actually a difficult person to be around for an extended period of time, unless one can manage to ignore all her annoying and bothersome traits. As much as she’d love to make a friend that would accept her, she has a hard time finding one, mainly because she always has to make small changes or adjustments to them to make them acceptable to her in return. For the most part, people without obsessive compulsive disorder have a hard time understanding why she does the strange things she does, and eventually give up trying. Having no real friends or family, Luminescence tends to spend most of her time alone, or with her books, daydreaming about a simpler life.
“You want me to do what? Why? Wouldn’t that be painful?”
Luminescence, with all her mental symptoms, has a hard time doing some actions that most other nagas would consider the norm. This kind of activity is mostly found with hunting, or consuming other living creatures. She’s perfectly capable of devouring someone around her own size, but since she’s able to eat normal foods just fine, doesn’t always see the need or reason to. Since the naga still tries to fit in with humans as best she can, she usually tries to feed herself with typical human food, although every once in a while she can go out to hunt for some woodland creatures or other wild animals. Her obsessive compulsiveness can be both an advantage and a disadvantage here, as she can be easily distracted while in the process of hunting, or she could have everything already perfectly planned out by the time she goes after her prey, ensuring a perfect catch. In this way, she can either be seen as a bumbling hunter, or a deadly predator. Of course, when a creature can actually speak to her and tries to spark up conversation, it’s much harder for her to actually swallow them, given that she’s usually lonely and lives are at stake. It’s difficult for her to actually eat unwilling sentient prey, because it’s hard to always classify them as food, and even if she does, with the right methods the prey could easily stop her by taking advantage of her disorders. If someone actually asks for her to eat them, she’ll promptly question why they would desire such a thing, and ask a few following questions. If she’s actually convinced at the end, there’s a good chance she’ll finally swallow them, but she’ll usually make a few demands about how they act while going down. Even the prey needs to act perfect, after all! Being prey on the other hand is a different story. If one wants her to go down willingly without thrashing and screaming, they need to convince her first, and then agree to her terms. Oddly enough, she even tries to get people that plan to eat her do it the right way.
“Y-y-you w-what…? I-I-I e-eww… that’s g-gross!”
Having obsessive compulsive disorder makes several forms of physical contact seem awkward, or out of place. She can tend to be a germaphobe often, and only recently managed to accept simple things like hugs or cuddles from other people, granted she takes some type of bath by the end of the day. Her backpack is always filled with several towelettes in case she gets her hands or any other part of her dirty, and she goes through them like someone would go through tissues when they had a cold. With her current outlook, ex is something that probably won’t come up much, either for males or females. If just touching other people makes her worry, actually engaging in intercourse is almost taboo for her mind. There’s a chance she might eventually be convinced to try it, but her mind can’t easily block her repulsion to such a primal act, and will often squirm and fidget if the subject is even brought up. Even something as simple as a kiss can make her writhe and cringe, and seek some way to clean herself.
“Family? Well, I’m of the naga race, so I… oh, direct family? I don’t know…”
As far as the naga knows, she’d never really had a family, or anyone that she could call part of her family. She’d never really seen her parents, any siblings she might have had, or even any clan that she might have belonged to, so she tends to just travel on her own. It’s entirely possible that her old family have left her behind due to her mental deficiencies, although it’s only one possible reason, and had yet to be proved. Since she most likely won’t manage to get a mate or child anytime soon, she probably won’t be able to get a family for quite a long time either. Any offering to adopt her into another family will probably be hard to get her to agree to, as it seems like such an improper and cheap solution.
“N-no! I wasn’t stalking you! I’m not trying to eat you! I was just curious, I swear! Don’t run!”
Luminescence can tend to engage in bad habits with no signs of stopping them, which usually involve trying to watch or observe people to better understand how the work and how they live. She takes a great interest in selecting a random human, and following them around for quite a while to observe and take mental notes on them for as long as she’s able. Unfortunately for her, the act of following someone around for extended periods of time can easily be confused for her trying to hunt someone down for a meal, so most of the people she watches tend to run away when they spot her. Although this can be pretty discouraging, she continues to try, in hopes that she’ll one day learn more. Of course, when the alternative happens and the target she’s observing spots her and comes over to offer themselves to her, it just confuses her beyond belief. There’s not much she can observe and learn from people that try to feed themselves to her, besides that fact that some people have weird habits or tendencies. Although, since what she knows of humans and other beings is limited, it probably wouldn’t be very smart to make the naga think that all creatures want to be swallowed because a few do.
“Quit treating me like a monster… if you’re gonna be mean, leave me alone! I’m gonna go count the clouds…”
Being a naga, Luminescence is often subjected to many stereotypes associated with her species. Some are simple, such as wanting to devour or sex anything in her sight, while others are more akin to how a naga reacts to other species. She doesn’t have any biases or hatred towards any particular race or species, so it tends to upset her when others treat her badly because she’s a naga, or when people think she’ll treat them badly because they’re not. Although she wouldn’t ever treat one species worse than another, humans still seem to be her primary interest, and she often tries to stay close to them when she can. She’s still looking for some people that can accept her for who she is, after all.
Yes, I know this can be quite a big read, but a lot of this information is important if you actually want to play with her.
Shuffling somewhere in The_Mortal_Coil