Her name comes from the Zapotec language and means I love you.
Personality:
There are many ways to describe Nayeli, though it depends on who you ask. Some would call her a loner, and they would be somewhat right, she does prefer to have extended amounts of time to herself, but she also enjoys spending time with those that she cares about. Others might call her a show-off with the act she puts up about how she's the queen of the forest and how often she preens over her mismatched eyes and how beautiful they make her. You might even call her rude with the amount of sarcasm she uses, but if you really knew her you'd see deeper. Like how she's learned to dislike the company of other plumies, how she's scared of appearing weak and how insecure she really is about her eye.
Quirks
As one might guess, Nayeli is a bit of an odd one. Partly because she's lived out in the forest for so long, and partly because that's just who she is. Of all the odd things she does, these are the important ones:
•Because of her blind eye, she moves her head side to side when walking, and she has better hearing.
•She's okay with murder. Don't question it.
•Being a nomad makes her hard to find.
•If someone litters when she's nearby, she'll find their home and fill it with animal waste.
The Story of Her Eye
So you'd like to hear about how I manged to blind myself? Alright then, I've got some time to kill.
It should have been a good day. Everything had started out great, I had met up with a friend, gotten ice cream and gone off into the forest to see what I could find. The only problem being that I couldn't find anything, even the birds were silent as I hiked through the woods. Really though, I should have taken that as a sign that something was wrong, and trust me, something was very wrong that day.
In my boredom, I wandered further out than normal, much further out. I had gone so far that I had left the nature preserve and wandered onto the property of a dye company. Not that I was aware of that fact at the time. No, I was ignorantly bliss at the time.
It was not too long after I left the preserve that I happened upon a creek. At first glance, the creek looked like any other creek would, rocks, water, spongy grass, all that stuff- but had I bothered to look closer I would have noticed that there was nothing alive in the itself creek, not a single cell of life. Unfortunately I didn’t look closer, instead I hopped right in, a scene already playing out in my mind. I was no longer bored, instead I was an amazon queen who was currently fighting a crocodile who had threatened her. So immersed was I in my game that I didn’t take notice of the fact that a burning sensation had start to cover my body. It wasn’t until I splashed most of my muzzle, including my right eye into the water that I realized my mistake.
Immediately, I pulled myself from the water, trying to shake out the poisoned water, but it was far too late. The burning covered my whole body, including my eye which I could barely see out of, trying hurt too much for me to bare. Through all the pain, a single thought pulled itself through, ‘I have to get away from here’. So I began to move, stumbling forward one step at time, away from the gurgling of the creek.
Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I blacked out.
To this day I have no idea how long it took me to wake up, or how long it took me to drag myself to civilization. All I can really remember is waking up in the hospital. It was there that I found out three very important things that would change my life forever.
The first was that I had lost my sight in my right eye, which was now completely white.
The second was my fur and feather was glowing. They still do, it makes hunting at night hard.
The third was that I could no longer tolerate most man-made chemicals.
It was the third that lead me to flee society, into the forest. I was hardly able to breath in a city, let alone drink the water or eat any food. Just before I left I was practically living in the hospital, a single whiff of a perfume was enough to send me back.
Looking back on it now, I'm almost glad that creek was there. If I had avoided it, I never would have found this new life.
That didn't stop me from punishing the ones who had dumped the chemicals in the creek.
But that my dear friend is a story for another time.
Interests
Nayeli has two main interest besides surviving; birds, and her flute.
Even before Nayeli's accident, birds had been something she was fond of, everything from their range of sounds to their flight fascinated her. After her accident and after she ran off into the forest, she found that the birds became an extremely usefully tool to help her survive. A crow could lead her to a kill, and a robin's alarm call could keep her out of the way of a predator. It took her a long time, but she can now understand the meaning of most bird calls and even make a few of her own.
Finally, she has a flute; it was a gift from a friend it's a handmade, native american six hole woodland style flute, and it's something she treasures deeply. Nayeli is a good player and will play whenever she has spare time. Sometimes people walking in the park will stop to listen if they hear her.
(Click the image to hear it.)
(Credit for art
Shadow~catmuteani, hellohihi corgie)
