Please welcome ZARINA WEST to Amity Station. They are an EL-2 CITIZEN belonging to THE BELIEVERS and are known to be INTELLIGENT, INDEPENDENT, and RESOURCEFUL as well as SELF-SERVING, SELF-DESTRUCTIVE, and IRRESPONSIBLE. They live in RING 8 and work as a SMUGGLER.
Quick Facts
Name: Zarina Morgan West
Nickname: Z
Age: 24
Faceclaim: Katherine McNamara
Pronouns: She/Her
Sexuality: Polyamorous Pansexual
Myers-Briggs: ENTP - The Debater
Enneagram: Type Three - The Achiever
Moral Alignment: True Neutral
Occupation: Smuggler / Drug Maker
Appearance
Height: 5′5″
Hair Colour: Ranges from bright pink to pinkish blonde
Hairstyle: Loose but immaculately curled
Eye Colour: Green
Mods: None
Tattoos: An Orange-infused sound wave around her left wrist, an Orange-infused fractal pattern from her right collarbone around her right shoulder and tapering off toward the small of her back, various smaller Orange-infused tattoos
Background
TW: Death, Drug Overdose
Zarina’s life is and always has been dominated by the Orange. Her mother, her father, her older brother by quite a few years - all of them were O-Heads, had been O-Heads for as long as she could remember, and never showed the slightest indication that they were willing to stop. Not even when her and her sister’s psychic abilities began manifesting and the consequences of their actions materialised in a very real and sometimes dangerous way. She resented them for that, almost as much as she resented the “gifts” she had that she’d never asked for.
On the other hand, her brother - a diehard Believer - was as excited about her new abilities as she was reluctant to use them. But she loved him, and it wasn’t like Z had anything better to do than to tag along to the odd meetings and meet other Believers. Honestly, she was never sure how convinced she was herself of their cause, but she enjoyed having a place to go and a group of people who all thought that she was special. They encouraged her to embrace her abilities, and with time she not only got comfortable with using them - she mastered using them to her advantage.
While Zachary was protective but not always the best influence, and Zarina was clever but an unpredictable wild child, their sister Zinnia was the peacemaker and moral core of the family - the one person Z confided in and trusted implicitly. She was their anchor, so when The Big Sick swept the station and Zinny was one of the 218 people whose lives were lost, what remained of their already dysfunctional family quickly fell apart. Her parents dipped, and whatever responsibility Zach still felt for her was increasingly overshadowed by his addiction.
A bright girl with an aptitude for chemistry, Z had been experimenting with the Orange out of both intellectual curiosity and in an attempt to improve the product - to produce a better high, a stronger high, a longer-lasting high. Her brother supported her efforts, and in her academic zeal and desire for his approval, she wilfully ignored the fact that all she was doing was making a better drug for an addict. When he finally overdosed on her supply, she found herself on her own with no one to blame but herself for what happened.
It was a wake-up call that she desperately needed, but at that point she had been doing it for so long that she didn’t know how to get out. The whole operation - the supply chain, the smuggling, the refinement process - it was her baby and it needed her to function, and to be honest, she needed it to function. In her crisis, Zarina tried pivoting toward creating a safer high instead of a better one, hoping to reduce the high fatality rate of overdoses. It’s a good cause, but most days she fears it’s too late to turn things around when she’s already made so many mistakes.
Misc
Despite how she makes her living, Zarina doesn't do any kind of drugs herself, or even drink very much. Her vice of choice has always been casual sex, which she enjoys frequently and with many different partners.
She has a number of Orange-infused tattoos. Most of them are decorative rather than the ritualistic tattoos her fellow Believers tend to sport, but one of them - around her left wrist - is identical to the one her brother had before he passed.
When she was 16 years old, she began a physical relationship with one of her teachers that continued until her sister’s death. She always insisted that it was consensual, and still thinks of what they had as a perfectly healthy relationship between equals.