Naia 👁️

Officially, Naia’s life started when she was 10. She has very few concrete memories of her life before then, and everything she does remember is incredibly fuzzy. She recalls having two loving parents and constantly being in and out of medical facilities, but knows little else. At the age of 10, she was taken in by Yasmin Hassan, a woman living in a city in the Californian desert southwest, and intermittently raised alongside her visiting nephew, Ayman Ibarra, who she grew to consider a brother. Despite her extreme shyness, she instantly clicked with their neighbors, Ellery and Kendall Shih, and formed a particularly close bond with the confident and protective Ellery.

Throughout her childhood and teenhood, Naia was something of an outcast. She was very anxious and struggled to interact with others who she wasn’t already close to, and she had very little academic success in spite of her smarts. Another “alienating” quirk was her complete and total fascination with aliens, something she’d displayed from a very young age. Despite being an otherwise practical and logical person, Naia staunchly believed not only in the existence of extraterrestrial life, but that she knew exactly what they looked like. Because of this, she taught herself how to draw in the hopes of putting her beliefs into images, which then sparked an interest in speculative biology.

Though her social ineptitudes didn’t impede on her life all that much, her lack of success throughout school weighed on her heavily and greatly exacerbated her existing anxiety problems. The amount of time she was forced to dedicate to even getting a passing grade in her classes ate away at any time she could have otherwise dedicated to extracurriculars or hobbies, though she did get a retail job in her senior year in an attempt to feel “normal” in comparison to her classmates. Being so stretched thin and stressed out caused her to become more withdrawn than ever, and it was at this point in her life that she sought out medical care for her mental health. Though her circumstances continued to weigh on her, she began to feel much more equipped to manage it all, both with medication and newfound coping skills.

After just barely managing to graduate high school, Naia, determined to prove herself as independent, moved into an apartment on her own. Shortly thereafter, however, she began having strange, vivid dreams that would go on to worsen her already precarious mental state. In her dreams, a man she doesn’t recognize sits with her and questions her about her childhood and her current life, and though he isn’t scary, he is forceful. The surreality of these dreams and what seems like the invasion of privacy by the individual in them would continue to plague Naia, causing her to lose great amounts of sleep. She also began experiencing vivid hallucinations of glowing green eyes appearing on her face and bleeding black blood. She became increasingly paranoid and fearful that she was being watched, which caused her already delicate grip on her newly independent life to loosen. After suffering a particularly severe nervous breakdown, Naia quit her job and moved in with Ayman and Ellery, who had been renting a house together. Now living with two of her closest friends, Naia felt much more secure, though nonetheless severely burnt out. Despite this, her dreams persisted, and she decided to spend her newfound free time on picking them apart and trying to get to know the man who has been questioning her.

One day, out of the blue, Naia’s teen neighbors, Shelley and Adam, came to her for help with a concussed, amnesiac alien. The alien, who could only recall his ID number, was a mild-mannered, curious teen. Shelley and Adam had encountered him after school and, in their panic over his monstrous appearance, Shelley hit him over the head with a baseball bat. Despite this, the alien, who they decided to call “Five”, held no ill-will, but rather looked at the new world around him with wonder and appreciation. Naia, though incredibly out of her depth, felt both vindicated in her staunch belief of extraterrestrial life and sympathetic towards the young, amnesiac alien. Despite protests from Ellery, who views the quest as a decidedly bad and dangerous idea, Naia swore to help Five find his way back home.