Profile
- General design elements.
- Her dyed-blonde hair is usually kept in a single loose braid. She's a natural brunette.
- Dark blue eyes. She has short eyelashes and the only thicc thing about her are her eyebrows.
- She's white-passing and on the paler side.
- 5'11. Athletic. Could kill you probably.
- Personality.
- Laila is kind of emotionally stunted. She has a hard time really engaging in conversations and understanding others very well and that leads to a lot of awkwardness on her part.
- Usually, this insecurity leads her to try being less invested in conversations, so a lot of people perceive her self-imposed awkwardness as a distant, cool persona.
- She's very self-invested at the moment due to the entire adventure and curse dilemma, which is understandable.
- She's never been in a serious relationship, so she doesn't really know how to handle it when she finds herself in one.
- Laila is kind of emotionally stunted. She has a hard time really engaging in conversations and understanding others very well and that leads to a lot of awkwardness on her part.
Laila's parents were both on the same college campus, which happened to be terrorized by the same siren. Her parents―Joshua Karnofsky, a lanky, awkward young man majoring in education, and Anahi, a dedicated engineering major―both ended up victim to said siren, and cursed with a siren's spell. Said spell would torture its victim with a song of the sea, tempting them to seek water and drown themselves.
However, Joshua and Anahi remained particularly strong willed, and sought out others with the curse, eventually meeting each other. As fate would have it, the two of them ended up falling in love.
They would later go on to have a child, unaware that Laila would inherit the curse from her mother. This would lead to a lot of crushing guilt on Anahi's part, and a difficult circumstance for the whole family. It's hard to explain, "Hey, you know this horrible cursed song that's in your head constantly and makes you want to drown? Yeah, your mom and I did that. I know, wild, right?"
Laila's current story is less about how she gained the curse and more about how she's dealt with it, which is better than most.
She's managed to get to her early twenties without drowning herself, which is quite an achievement. She keeps her job as a lifeguard at her local beach, which satisfies her need to be near the sea without drowning herself in it due to her responsibility to help others avoid drowning, and she's all-around content, if a little dissatisfied, with life.
After an inciting incident where a siren washes up on shore and attempts to give Laila a siren's curse―only to realize she already has it―Laila decides to go on a reckless adventure to find a cure for the curse, if there is one. This leads her to the home of Nerys, Andre, and Achilles, and kickstarts her relationship with Troye and Florence. It's a wild adventure.
- She has depression and insomnia but she mostly has a handle on both of those things.
- She has a close relationship with her parents.
- She speaks English, Spanish, and Hebrew.
- She used to be a competitive swimmer.
- She has a naval piercing that she got as a Teen Rebellion symbol from a friend with a piercing kit and it's a miracle that it didn't get infected.
- Swimming.
- Edgy music.
- The color orange.
- Her partners. 💘
- Her family.
- Not being able to pursue swimming other than her career as a lifeguard.
- Loud parties.
- Loud noises in general.
- Hangovers.
Laila encounters Troye during her shift at the beach, during which Troye nearly drowns and is given CPR. Needless to say, it's a memorable experience.
Her initial opinion of him is sort of indifferent. He's cute, but he's also a practical stranger. As she gets to know him, her feelings gradually deepen and become really confusing, actually. Laila isn't sure what to make of it at first.
As she comes to realize that these feelings are actually romantic and very serious, Laila is sort of terrified. She's never had a serious relationship before, but Troye sort of helps to ease her into it and allow her to take it at her own pace.
She maintains a polyamorous relationship with him and Florence. They're in love.
Florence is immediately intriguing to Laila on the basis of simultaneously being a cute girl and a cool sea monster.
At first, their relationship is nonexistent, though it grows into a friendship and eventually a romance between the two of them.
While Laila mostly confronts her issues with serious relationships while going through the motions with Troye, she realizes this is all very new to Florence.
She personally empathizes with Florence's difficulty understanding her feelings, and she's completely ready to walk her through the process of accepting those feelings.
They're in a poly relationship with Troye. They're in love.
Nerys and Laila are, in the beginning, acquaintances with little interest in talking to each other. Or, well, Laila seems like she has little interest in talking to Nerys, who tries to befriend her on multiple occasions.
It takes a little while, but eventually Nerys manages to strike a chord with Laila and begin a friendship between them.
This friendship is important to Laila's character development, as the two of them learn to deal with their respective curses/charms and grow to care about the other, and their trust in each other is commendable.
Andre is a cool guy, and Laila feels like they have a lot in common. It's like they really get each other, which is nice, considering she has a hard time really getting anyone.
She's also very endeared to his relationship with Achilles, considering they're a prime example of a relationship between a human and another creature. A mermaid in his case, as opposed to a siren in her's. She goes to him for advice about relationships sometimes.
He's kind of distant, but so is Laila, so it works out.
Achilles is nice! Laila thinks they're sweet, and really hopes for the best when it comes to their current situation.
She's rooting for them and Andre a lot, because those two are the only example she has of a relationship between two different creatures working out, and that's kind of encouraging when she starts dating Florence.
Yeah, they're kind of a shit, but Laila finds them entertaining and thinks of them like a particularly obnoxious little sibling.
She grows to care about them a lot, which is inadvisable according to Nerys and Andre, but she can't help it. They're like a cat that puffs up its fur to seem bigger than it is.
Like Z, Laila also deals with depression, and it's still a big part of her life that she's sympathetic towards in others. She hopes Z can work through it eventually.
Laila, unfortunately, is into the dirty burning man attendee aesthetic and finds Billy to be kind of cool.
Yeah, he's inherently suspicious and sometimes it seems like he goes out of the way to push other people's buttons, but he also doesn't exactly seem like a threat to Laila. He just seems kind of incompetent, but a decent dude nonetheless.
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