Aixa

[Deleted]

Original

Name:
Aixa

Age: 2,944
Gender: Usually male.
Species: Jinn.
Planet of Origin: Earth.
Occupation: --

Physical Description: Aixa has pale blue eyes and curly dark hair. He's an inch past six feet. Aixa dresses in plain clothes most of the time. He doesn’t have friends to hang out with, but when he does wander the street, he’s generally wearing just a shirt, shorts, and sandals. He usually has some sort of hat over his hair.

Personality: Aixa has withstood the tests of time remarkably well. His species, the Jinn, are known for their cynical and misanthropic points of view. He, however, rarely gets bored by the mundane passing of time. He’s eccentric and curious about the way humans work. He’d read nearly every book in existence and has an almost limitless supply of useless knowledge (although he’s almost positive that he’ll find use for them somewhen). He has an almost intuitive understanding of mathematics and science, and, in particular, he focuses his scientific attention on – natural - parallel dimensions and ‘other worlds’ that stem from his own.

That obsession with astronomy has a way of seeping through to his everyday conversations. Aixa sometimes slips into a rather poetic way of speaking (“an old habit that Chaucer forced upon me; I don’t rhyme, though, thank the deity”). He is a lover of all things beautiful; he once compared a rather gorgeous young man to the striking and celestial nebula NGC-3576, although he suspected the nicety of his words were lost on the man. He gets smitten rather easily, although to be fair, it’s for the humans’ beauty and mysteriousness, it rarely has anything to do with their actual personality. It’s exceedingly obvious when someone is the object of his affections – he compares them to flowers, nebulae, and in one instance, Helen of Troy. Although rather annoying and unsettling to the man (he likes women, too, sometimes) who is the object of the Djinn’s affection, Aixa relents after a few weeks of pining away.

However, like most beings with intelligence higher than humans, Aixa finds himself mostly clueless about many things involving humans. That being said, he’s often been accused of being creepy. Because he doesn’t understand humans, he observes them. However, because of something the psychologists call ‘the observer-expectancy effect’, the humans never act as they normally would had they been unaware of the lanky brown-haired man hiding in the bushes. The farthest he’s ever gone to understand was in the seventeenth century, when he broke into Galileo’s house and demanded answers to the human psyche. Creepy as he may be, he would never intentionally harm one – unless he feels trapped.

Although he gets flustered easily, it takes a lot to anger the pacifistic Djinn. His years have taught him that violence is an expedient to sorrow, and that only fools fight with fools. But just as being peaceful is ingrained his nature, Aixa has found out from experience that being unwilling to fight doesn’t make him anybody’s pet dog. He’s confident in his own abilities to handle himself in tough situations – and his abilities in general. He can be as charismatic as he needs to be, and isn’t too ashamed to use his low-level empathy skills to manipulate humans. (It only works on untrained humans; Jinn don’t develop their full powers until their 10,000th birthday. Until that point, their empathy levels are laughably weak).

History: When Aixa was created, something extraordinary happened. Due to the humans separating the Jinn’s souls from their bodies, they accidentally tore the newborn in half. He shares the same soul as his ‘twin brother’, Shezaan.

Aixa didn’t venture out farther than the eyesight of his Caretaker – not only because he wasn’t able to, but because he was content to remain where he was. For the first ten years of his life, he explored his small section of Arabia with his Caretaker – a woman named something the alphabet can’t convey – and observed humans from a distance. Already plagued with the Jinn burden of curiosity, he wanted to know why they fought and caused destruction. He was never fully answered, but his Caretaker told him that they were falsely under the belief that because they were humans, they had the right of destruction. When he asked, however, his Caretaker didn’t answer about whether the Jinn had the right of destruction, or what kind of implications come with that right. He watched the stars at night and asked if one could change them, watched the scorpions in the sand and wanted to know if they watched him, saw the humans weep and inquired if he could weep as well.

In the year 778 C, his Caretaker vanished, leaving him the mission to find all the answers to his questions. It was then that he answered at least one of the questions – he could weep, and he did for the loss of the woman who had raised him. Freed from the shackles of his Caretaker’s vision, he made his way to what is now known as ‘Spain’, and stumbled upon his first true taste of humanity; the Basque slaughter of the Franks. It was there when he first heard the name of his future master, spoken acridly from the tongues of the Spaniards – Carolus ‘Magnus’, later to be known as Karl der Grosse, or Charlemagne. Aixa at that time couldn’t comprehend why the murders had taken place, but he knew that he didn’t like it.

It wasn’t until 785 CE that he met Charlemagne. Carolus was preparing to fight with the Saxons and, upon seeing the young, skittish Aixa cowering behind a tree, he walked over and demanded know if he were Arab, Saxon, or any other sort of enemy. Aixa, in response, climbed up the tree with inhuman speed and grace, glaring down at Carolus from the top of his branch. Upon realizing that he was dealing with one of the ‘Spirits of Smoke’ that he’d heard the Arabs speak about, Carolus outwitted the naïve Aixa, promising him knowledge if he would accompany him to battle.

To make an exceedingly long and boring story short, Aixa soon grew tired of his master’s charades. Although he did appreciate the education reform that Charlemagne started for those idiotic human children, he was bitter that he never received his end of the deal. Where was the knowledge Charlemagne had promised? He learned his second lesson in humanity; humans are thieving liars. So, stuck in a miserable position, the Djinn gave his master the simple disease of pleurisy. His master died a week later, and Aixa was released from the contract he’d been entered into.

Skip ahead five hundred years to 1379. It was during this time that he met a scrawny and enigmatic figure – someone hardly anyone paid much attention to, but would soon become one of the most famous writers in the world. Although Aixa and Geoffrey Chaucer were friends only for a few years, they were still friends. Chaucer was impressed by Aixa’s knowledge and open-but-polite disdain for the Church, and Aixa was smitten by the beautiful man’s beautiful words. But things change, as they often do, and the two friends separated. Aixa had granted several of Chaucer’s wishes – although they had been low-stakes wishes and nothing too outrageous. He never told the man he was anything but human, and Chaucer never asked.

Additional Medical Information: Allergic to salt.

[Ace McShane]

Accepted!