CHARACTER INFO

[congenital]

Character Name: kay(la) cross
Character Age: 31 (born october 6th, 1993)
Skills:

• INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: - Her liberal arts education and on-the-job training have provided her with skills in research, critical reading, interviewing, and writing. She specializes in medical discrimination and ableism, so she's well-versed in medical terminology, legal jargon, philosophy, ethics, and basic psychology. She's alright with photography, but very good at getting into places she shouldn't be and getting people to talk to her.

Abilities:

• LATENT HEMOVARIANT DISORDER: - Kay inherited vampirism. For the time being, this just means she struggles with anemia, obsessive thoughts on morality and harm to herself and others, poor circulation, and sensory sensitivities to sun, light, heat, sounds, and certain food allergens (e.g., garlic).
  
  However, if she is exposed to fresh blood from another living human at the time of her death, she will develop:
  
  
  • Accelerated healing
  
  
  • Extended lifespan
  
  
  • Increased appetite
  
  
  • Severe mood swings
  
  
  • Vivid and intrusive flashbacks
  
  
  • Antisocial behaviors, like risk-taking, manipulation, and disregard for social norms
  
  
  • Tendencies towards depersonalization, derealization, and reduced empathy
  
  
  • A necessary hunger for fresh human blood, which if not sated, can cause slowed or difficult breathing, lowered heart rate, lowered core body temperature, fatigue, violent urges, and psychotic episodes.

BACKGROUND HIGHLIGHTS:

• ELI: - Kayla Cross was her parents' second child, seven years younger than her brother Eli. She learned to look to him in all ways as a protector, but as she grew up, her ability to understand his eccentricities and also navigate her parents' harsh expectations in a way that he could never successfully do also made her into his interpreter/liaison. She was the peacekeeper in her household, learning what and what not to do from how his behaviors were punished, then advocating for him and mediating when hostilities between him and their parents grew.


• YALE: - Kay had spent her youth in rural Indiana, so the culture shock of coming to New Haven to study at Yale in 2011 was overwhelming for her. She spent her undergraduate years simultaneously commodified and excluded, but always aware that satisfying the elites around her was her path towards the enviable status that her parents wanted for her. This experience taught her firsthand about the stratification of class in America and how insurmountable it is, because even being accepted and being exceptionally skilled compared to her wealthy peers didn't level the playing field. When she graduated, the best job she could land was an unfulfilling gig writing clickbait at BuzzFeed while her wealthier but less-skilled classmates went on to MSNBC and the Atlantic. Her long-term boyfriend at the time regarded this career choice as unambitious and broke up with her, leaving her broke in NYC and struggling to get by so she could keep her job.


• (UN)DIAGNOSIS: - In 2016, when she was 25, her brother Eli was almost killed in a kayaking incident. Diagnosed with LHD, he returned to their family home in Indiana to recover, as did Kay, to help her parents provide him with support. The stress of negotiating their parents pushed him into a psychotic episode, and he attacked Kay, drinking her blood and nearly killing her. She was hospitalized for several weeks for reconstructive surgery. Once she recovered, her parents claimed that Eli cut contact and alienated the family after the attack, and he was unreachable. The incident did not trigger her LHD, but led her to research the disorder and discover that it was genetically linked and that many of the pre-rez symptoms mirrored her own experiences and ailments. Instead of seeking her own diagnosis, Kay sought to mask her symptoms, keenly aware that any serious harm could cause her to 'turn,' like Eli did.


• PROMOTION: - In 2020, Kay moved from a position writing clickbait for BuzzFeed ("what coffee order are you?") to working at Slate after one of her freelance articles about disparities in pandemic response and policies earned the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics. This move marked a shift in priorities for Kay, from just trying to get by on her skills and doing what other people wanted her to do and making them happy, to following her ethics and interests. She realized that her positionality afforded her a platform and opportunity to make a difference for vulnerable people who were being talked about and around, but not allowed to speak for themselves.


• EXPLOITATION: - In 2021, a former classmate, resenting that they had been passed over for the Slate position in favor of Kay, published a story on the struggles faced by the loved ones of people with LHD, many of whom wind up estranged as a result of the condition. The article featured an interview with her parents about Eli's attack, and in it, her parents admit they forced estrangement with Eli to protect Kay. Furious that they had lied, Kay cut contact with her parents, which got her eviscerated on social media as the story lingered in the media circuit and got picked up by fringe networks that argued LHD was not a real condition, let alone a genetic one. This began her efforts to reconnect with Eli.

PERSONALITY HIGHLIGHTS:

• PHILOSOPHY: Kayla values balance and peace. She sees herself as responsible for maintaining the homeostasis of the world around her by mediating conflicts, satisfying others' needs, and keeping people happy. Fights are better avoided, and everything can be solved by seeking mutual understanding and compromise. However, she grapples with how to reconcile this with her strong sense of justice that demands that all people be treated with dignity, as that's not something she can really be willing to compromise. She attempts to thread the needle through this conflict by infringing on her own boundaries and needs while trying to preserve the comfort of others. She believes that not all people with LHD meet the stereotype, but that her disability nonetheless predisposes her towards some kind of moral failing that she must make up for or avoid succumbing to.


• DESIRES: Mostly, she wants to receive praise and validation for demonstrating that she has merit. Kayla sees herself as someone who struggles to get recognition for her skills to a degree commensurate with other people. This has fomented some resentment in her: she is privately competitive, always comparing herself to others. She wants to outperform people who have had more advantages than her to prove that she has more worth than they do because she believes there is a finish line where people will stop questioning, challenging, and doubting her. If she works hard enough, performs well enough, she thinks she'll get the praise that she deserves and feel satisfied.


• FEARS: Despite wanting to feel recognized and seen, Kayla fears having her weaknesses identified. This leads to efforts to deny her own needs out of fear that people will refuse to meet them. In her mind, one of her great weaknesses is having LHD, so she's terrified of anyone finding her out, and works to mask her symptoms by denying her own needs, but it also makes her extremely afraid of risks of physical harm, because she knows that death would cause her to 'turn.' Beyond that, she's really afraid that she's actually a bad person, and that she's just another case of confirming the stereotypes of people with LHD because of that.


• WRONGS: Kayla is complicit in her own marginalization because of how she lets other people set the parameters for conversation about LHD. Even if she knows on some level that the stereotypes can't be true about everyone because her own experience is different, she unconsciously surrenders to them by trying to defy them and by avoiding diagnosis. She fears that having LHD does make her a lesser, worse person, so she doesn't want to confirm that it's true. She clings to denial about her own diagnosis while comforting herself with righteous actions that try to help other groups and other people, trying to reassure her compulsions that being liked by enough people or inoffensive enough will excuse the bone-deep sense that she is an ableist liar who can't imagine something worse for herself than having LHD. She blames herself for siding with her parents against Eli, even if she didn't know better at the time, because on some level she does still resent and fear him for hurting her.