Pompeia

BASIC INFORMATION

Full Name: Pompeia Khan

Species: Mermaid-Mortal Hybrid Human

Sex: Female

Gender Identity: Female

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Pronouns: She/Her

Languages Spoken:

-Common Aurean (Native Language)

-Otrar (Raised in a bilingual household)

-Classical Aurean (Can read/write decently but struggles with pronunciation)

-Centralian (Knows a few words and phrases)

-Galactic Basic (Fluent)

-Arturian (Near Fluent)

-Skellig (Barely conversational)

Eye Color: Brown

Hair/Fur Color: Dark Brown

Birth Date: February 4, 27 BR (age 48 at end of series)

Death Date: N/a

Birthplace: 133 Via Ferrea, Lapum, Argentolia, Aurean Dominate

Death date: N/a

Place of death: N/a

Cause of death: N/a

Burial place: N/a

Titles:

-Knight of the Square Table

-TBD

Residences:

-133 Via Ferrea, Lapum, Argentolia, Aurean Dominate (27-13 BR)

-Castle Arturia, Caerbannog, Seaxe, Arturia (13 BR-present)

Affiliations/Loyalties:

-Knights of the Square Table

-Kingdom of Arturia

-Aurean Dominate

-Khanate of Tangolia

Family:

-Yıldırım Khan (Father)

-Marcia Khan (Mother) nee Nuardiana 

-Elisabeta Khan (Sister) AKA "Santa Muerte"

Mentors:

-Queen Bowdig

-King Arturius

10 Closest Friends:

-TBD

Students:

-Weasel

Enemies:

-Elisabeta Khan/Santa Muerte

-The Cabal

-Tatian Empire

-UNISYN

BIOGRAPHY

Pompeia Khan was born on February 4, 27 BR in the Siderenio neighborhood of Lapum in the Aurean Dominate's Argentolia Province. Her father, Yıldırım Khan, was a Tangolian noble from Rishud who migrated to Argentolia after being forced to flee after supporting a failed challenger to Qajeer I's status as the Tangolian Khan (also known as Khaghan in Otrar Tangolian and Channus Oriens in Aurean).  Her mother was a half Mermaid named Marcia Nuardiana from Lake Ferum who Yıldırım fell in love with shortly after fleeing his home. The two married and planned on starting a family in the city of Ferum, but moved south to Lapum due to the better job prospects. Yıldırım got a job working for the Port Authority of Nicopolis-Lapum, and Marcia raised the twins she gave birth to soon after arrival, Pompeia and Elisabeta. 

However, Yıldırım and Marcia failed to consider the massive influence of the criminal organization Hoc Nostrum in the area when they moved to there, and before long, Yıldırım found himself being extorted and harassed at work by Hoc Nostrum members. While the harassment at work was little more than a nuisance, the real damage came when the Hoc Nostrum came to their home and demanded Elisabeta, by this time only three years old, in exchange for their "protection" while holding Marcia at swordpoint. Reluctantly, Yıldırım handed her over, vowing to free her and bring her home one day. He never would. 

While the Hoc Nostrum mostly left Yıldırım alone after this, the entire family was inconsolable. Marcia blamed Yıldırım for her disappearance, and their relationship never truly recovered from the incident. As a result, Pompeia was raised in a home where both her parents were fighting constantly. By the time she was six, both her parents had become raging alcoholics held together only by their love for her. Around this time, Yıldırım caught the Blood Bleaching and almost died from it, but thanks to Marcia and Pompeia's Mermaid heritage, they were immune. 

Like all Aurean children, Pompeia started school at age five, learning to read and write in Aurean. By the time she was eight years old, Centralian was introduced as well, but she would forget the language later in life. In school, Pompeia made quite a few friends, most notably Melissa Kantakouzenos, Tansu Sarıgül, Maria Numeriana, Quintus Herennius Pullus, and Mae Sungsook. They would all hang out after school, especially at each other's houses, but never at Pompeia's because her parents wouldn't stop screaming at each other for long enough. Despite making some friends, however, Pompeia was often bullied, particularly by the Aurean and Centralian kids, for her unusual (by their standards) facial features and her parents' reputation for alcoholism. 

However, Pompeia was able to enjoy her father showing her elements of Otrar Tangolian culture, such as teaching her how to use a bow and arrow, playing the morin khuur, telling her Tangolian stories, making traditional foods like börek for dinner whenever Marcia didn't cook, and using the Otrar Language around the house. When he could, he would take Pompeia by train out to Arithrae in the desert north of the city, where he would teach her how to ride camels. This came with some problems, however, as her father allowed her to start drinking airak, an alcoholic drink, when she was far too young for it.

When Pompeia was seven, ethnic tension in Lapum reached a fever pitch when Aurean legionnaires murdered a Tangolian civilian, Yi'it Arslan, causing four days of ethnic chaos in which dozens were killed and large areas of the city were burnt and looted. Pompeia watched from her window as entire neighborhoods went up in flames. After this, many Aureans and Centralians, terrified of the Tangolians they shared the city with, fled for Nicopolis and other nearby cities. As a result, Quintus Herennius Pullus moved away and Pompeia missed him dearly. Yıldırım, while uninvolved in the riots, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was arrested and tried on trumped-up arson and breaking and entering charges. He was able to afford a decent advocatus (Aurean equivalent of a lawyer) and thus was able to avoid being convicted, but this was nevertheless a scare for the family. 

Every summer, Pompeia and her parents would go to the beach at Argerna, at the southern end of Bisada Island. While Yıldırım didn't care much for the water, Pompeia and Marcia went swimming all the time, since it was the only place the two of them could really experience their Mermaid forms.  Every year, they would be in town for Argerna's massive Independence Day (marking the anniversary of Aurea's independence from the Haxamanian Empire over 5,000 years ago) celebrations at the town's massive boardwalk. Pompeia and Yıldırım particularly enjoyed eating from a Tangolian-run döner stand that was there every year. Pompeia made friends with plenty of others her age whose families were also there for the celebrations as well, and even ran into friends from Lapum there from time to time. As she grew older, she would sometimes find herself going to wilder and wilder parties held by the...less scrupulous crowd.

While her parents were too busy drunkenly bickering to notice, Pompeia increasingly found herself sneaking off to parties, where she'd impress everyone by holding her liquor better than anyone else (thanks to her airak habit). Eventually, by the time she was thirteen or so, many of the boys would start giving her sexual attention. She welcomed it at first out of curiosity, but quickly turned against it when they started asking for sexual favors and she lost control of the situation. Before anything too serious could happen at one of these parties, Pompeia would find herself outside of Aurea altogether. 

One day while Marcia was out visiting a relative in Ferum for a few days, Yıldırım took Pompeia to his job at the Port Authority with him on a day he was tasked with inspecting the implementation of Aurea's brand new rail network in the city. While he had his back turned, Pompeia found a baby camel that escaped its cargo crate and found herself chasing after it. She eventually chased it into an empty car on a freight train when the door closed behind them and the train started moving. Helpless to get off or stop the train, Pompeia could only watch as she was taken from Lapum north through Imbreus, across the Imbreus Mountains, and into the Argentolian Desert, where the train stopped for a day at Eresus for more freight to be added to other cars. Pompeia tried as hard as she could to bang on the locked door and windows to get someone's attention, but no one noticed her the whole time the train was stopped there. The train then pressed on north through the Argentolian Desert, crossed the Monsaltu Range, and finally stopped at the tropical port of Olinthaseia, over a thousand miles from home. While Pompeia and the camel she had with her were asleep in a large cargo crate, the cargo was taken off the train and put on a startreader bound for Caerbannog, capital of the Kingdom of Arturia.

The next morning, Pompeia and the camel woke up in a warehouse in Caerbannog. Trapped in a land that spoke languages completely foreign to her, Pompeia took to wandering the street with the camel, which she adopted and named Kursat, and begging passersby for spare change using hand-drawn signs to communicate. Within a few months, of her arrival, a mysterious Badger by the name of Dirgelwch who spoke rudimentary Aurean took her into his home. Dirgelwch helped nurse Pompeia back to health, but as the days passed, she began to suspect something was off: there was a cellar Dirgelwch refused to let her into under any circumstances that she would see other men walking in and out of. One day when she snuck down there, she saw numerous young girls around her age wearing tattered clothes and given only piles of straw to sleep on. Quickly realizing what was going on, Pompeia hatched a plan to both escape herself and sneak the other girls out with her. However, Dirgelwch was waiting for her at the top of the stairs and threatened her with a knife. Unarmed and desperate, Pompeia stuck both her hands out in a last-ditch attempt to protect her face from the knife, and unintentionally using Frost Magic, pushed Dirgelwch to the ground with a burst of cold wind. While Dirgelwch was on the ground, Pompeia managed to get herself and the other girls out of the house. Although Dirgelwch was not far behind them, she and the girls managed to lose him in a series of alleyways. Eventually, Pompeia was discovered by constables.

The constables tried to ask Pompeia where she was from, but none of them could speak Aurean. They tried to get her to point out her hometown on a map of Arturia, but this proved fruitless due to Lapum being offworld. Unsure of what else to do with her, the constables put her in an orphanage outside Caerbannog run by Anandist monks. One of these monks named Gildas spoke very basic Aurean and was able to communicate with Pompeia, albeit haltingly. When he asked Pompeia to tell him about how she escaped Dirgelwch, she mentioned being able to push him away without touching him. Upon hearing of this, he immediately informed King Arturius, the King of Arturia, that he had found a magically talented child and that he should send someone to pick her up and take her in for evaluation.

Less than a week after she arrived at the orphanage, Pompeia was picked up by King Arturius himself, who took her to Castle Arturia in Caerbannog. He had his wife Queen Bowdig subject Pompeia to a series of tests to determine her magical aptitude, and they were both astonished to find that not only did Pompeia have a talent for Frost Magic, but she could also use the other two Elemental schools of magic: Storm and Fire. When the two inquired about any spiritual heritage, Pompeia informed them that she was a quarter Mermaid on her mother's side, and they responded by explaining to her that this made her far better able to handle multiple schools of magic at once than most mortals. King Arturius and Queen Bowdig then offered to train her in magic and induct her into the Knights of the Square Table, their secret society aimed at upholding peace and balance in the galaxy in the Man of Light and Shadow's multiple-millennia-long absence. As this would require Pompeia to stay with them on Castle Arturia to train, Arturius and Bowdig gave Pompeia the choice of staying there to train with them or having them pay for startreader and train tickets back to Lapum later that month. They also informed her that she would not be able to write to her father while on Arturia, as the isolationist Aurean Government did not allow civilian mail from "hostile nations", which Aurea regarded Arturia as. However, they told her Kursat would be allowed to stay as well due to them having plenty of room in the castle stables. While Pompeia missed her father, she knew that if she returned to Aurea she would never be able to study magic due to it being essentially taboo outside of priesthoods there, so she chose to stay. This decision would eventually transform her into one of the smartest and most powerful people in the galaxy, at the cost of enormous guilt for abandoning Yıldırım. 

Over the next two years, Pompeia grew skilled in her use of Frost and Storm Magic, quickly learning how to harness them at will and synergize between the two in ways that impressed even Arturius and Bowdig. However, despite being able to use Fire Magic as well due to her Mermaid biology giving her command of all three Elemental schools, Pompeia struggled with it and failed to harness it with the same ease as Frost or Storm. Her roommate, Mahlea Locklaha, was a woman two years older than her from the faraway world of Navayu who clashed with her massively. Each was jealous of the other's magical abilities, as Mahlea was a single-school Fire user who desperately wanted to use Storm and Frost as well like Pompeia but could not, and Pompeia desperately wanted to improve her Fire. At first, they could not communicate with each other at all, as Mahlea spoke no Aurean, but as all Knights of the Square Table were required to study Galactic Basic plus one Arturian language of their choice (two if they did not know any Arturian language on arrival like Pompeia and Mahlea), the two eventually started talking in Basic. However, this didn't help much and the reserved, cynical Mahlea found herself constantly annoyed by Pompeia's cheery, bubbly optimism. This was often worsened by Pompeia taking an interest in "figuring out" Mahlea, as she saw her as "mysterious".

Learning all these languages proved a massive challenge for Pompeia, as she had already been brought up speaking a form of the Nicopolitan dialect of Aurean as well as Otrar Tangolian at home, on top of having had to learn Centralian and the old-fashioned Classical Aurean in school. There was simply not enough room in her head for all these languages, and within her first two years at Castle Arturia, Pompeia had completely forgotten Centralian, lost a great deal of her grasp of Classical Aurean, and even grew somewhat rusty with Otrar. In exchange, she had mostly figured out Galactic Basic, learned enough Arturian to survive in Caerbannog on her own if she had to, and had made some limited progress studying Skellig, the native language of the island of Skellig in northern Arturia. She never entirely abandoned her Aurean and Tangolian roots on Arturia though, refining the camel riding and archery skills her father taught her by riding Kursat around the castle grounds and shooting arrows at training dummies.

Michael, a five-year-old Ishga boy and heir to that planet's throne, arrived at Castle Arturia a year later.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

27 years old by the end of Book 1, Pompeia is fairly tall for an Aurean woman, standing at five feet and seven inches tall when the average Aurean woman is only around 5'2".  She also has a slender but muscular warrior's build both naturally and from her years of training under King Arturius and the Knights of the Square Table. As a mixed Aurean and Tangolian, she carries features of both groups. Her hair color and skin tone are more consistent with her Aurean heritage, with her skin somewhere between olive and honey, while her hair is straight, a dark auburn, and can be kept in a wide range of styles. For everyday wear, she normally simply wears her slightly-longer-than-shoulder-length hair down, with her characteristic widow's peak sticking up a bit at the center. However, for more formal occasions, especially once she enters Aurean politics, she often wears her hair in the elaborate nodus style, parted in three ways, with the hair from the sides of the head tied in a bun at the back while the middle section is looped back in on itself, creating an effect not unlike a pompadour or bouffant, liberally using hair extensions when necessary. In battle, Pompeia always ties her hair back into a simple ponytail to prevent it from getting in the way. Her facial features show more of her Tangolian heritage, with both of her dark brown eyes featuring prominent epicanthic folds. Her face overall is very flat, with wide cheekbones and a fairly inconspicuous jawline. Her nose is small and not very prominent. Her lips are also much fuller than one would expect for most people of Tangolian heritage, being more in line with those of her Aurean mother. Her eyebrows are long, thick, well-kept, and follow a very gentle curve. She doesn't wear much makeup except in formal occasions, when she usually puts on some eyeliner made from kohl and oil with ash, a dark bluish eyeshadow, and sometimes some rouge on the cheeks. 

She generally wears a long sleveless tunic going down to her ankles. On more formal occasions, she adds a long, pleated sleeveless Aurean dress called a stola over that. In expressly political situations such as when speaking to the Aurean Senate, she will often replace the stola with a toga. In battle, she wears her own set of self-made armor with Aurean and Tangolian influences. Her lower legs are protected by steel lamellar splint greaves, and her body is protected by a full steel lamellar cuirass. Her upper arms and upper legs generally rely on the padded gambeson she wears underneath her metal pieces for protection, and long pteruges extend from the shoulders. A smooth, bronze vambrace protects each of her forearms.  In battle, she uses either her spathion-style sword or her compound bow as weapons. Her helmet, Aurean in style, is long and thimble-shaped, made up of long, splint-like sheets of steel, not unlike her greaves. These taper and curve towards a rounded tip, from where a plume of red horsehair is draped over the back of the helmet. Each of her cheeks are protected by lamellar cheek guards, and a noseguard extending down from the bottom-center of her helmet protects her nose.

After being elected Domina, there were also a few occasions in which Pompeia would wear the Aurean Dominate's imperial regalia, such as during her coronation, important religious ceremonies (i.e. the inauguration of a new temple or during major animal sacrifices), and when giving her annual State of the Dominate address to the Aurean Senate. Her depictions on the coinage and paper money also show her in the imperial regalia. The imperial regalia consisted of many items. In her right hand would be a golden orb depicting the sun. In her left hand would be a golden scepter tipped with an eagle. Over her stola dress, she would wear a cloak called a chalmys made from a seamless rectangle of silk about the size of a blanket, usually bordered. It is normally pinned with a brooch at the right shoulder. At the two edges of the cloak are large panels in a contrasting color called tablia, beginning about level with the armpit and reaching down to about the waist. Pompeia's chalmys is royal purple and the tablia are golden. The chalmys would also be brightly patterned, with designs of all sorts of figures and symbols from Aurean mythology, including minotaurs, centaurs, gorgons, heroes, Gods, past Domini, lightning bolts, and tridents; and the chalmys's borders would be heavily encrusted and embroidered with all sorts of gems. Most notably, the regalia included the Crown of Sahul Invictus, symbolizing the Dominus's sacred anointment by the sun God Sahul. The Crown of Sahul Invictus, made of gilt bronze, is a radiate crown with spikes jutting out to all sides, much like the crown on the real-world Statue of Liberty, symbolizing the rays of the sun.

As Pompeia is a quarter mermaid, when she goes into the water, her legs and lower garments disappear, replaced by a bright indigo, scaly fish tail slightly longer than her legs would have been. Usually when in water, she wears nothing but an indigo bikini top to match the tail. In all her appearances, she is famed for her radiant but unconventional beauty, and this gets her...quite a bit of unwanted male attention. She is known to oscillate back and forth very quickly between being a disarming presence in a room due to her usual cheerful and friendly demeanor and frequent laughs and smiles, but also using her height and build as a means to intimidate when it suits her. Both on land and in water, Pompeia has webbed hands due to her Mermaid heritage.