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nomissingpersons[Warning: Contains mention of drug use, addiction, violence.]
User Name/Nick: Claire
User DW: n/a
AIM/IM: dbyumeaurora
E-mail: daybreak.sleepers@gmail.com
Other Characters: Pietro Maximoff, Dedicate Rosethorn
Character Name: Zinzi December
Series: Zoo City
Age: 32
From When?: At the end of Part One, where Zinzi hits the bottom of a downward spiral and falls off the recovering drug addict wagon in a bad way. It doesn’t kill her in canon, but it’s high-risk behavior, and an overdose is entirely plausible.
Inmate:
In Zinzi’s own opinion, the worst thing she’s ever done - the thing she carries the most guilt over and was actually incarcerated for - is arranging the carjacking that lead to her brother’s murder. But this incident is mostly a symptom of Zinzi’s bigger issues, especially as it was when she was in the deepest throes of her addiction and she was by no means at her most rational. We see glimpses here, of selfishness, recklessness, and a drive to put her own needs before the welfare of others. After all, she convinced her dealer to take her brother’s car in exchange for her drug debts, entirely ignoring the potential (and indeed fatal) consequences. But the evidence that these are ongoing issues comes later. Since Zinzi is clean through most of the narrative, and has been for years (she’s been through rehab and makes a concentrated effort to avoid her vices), it’s clear that her more destructive tendencies shown in the novel are not the result of chemical dependence alone. She only slips off the wagon and uses again shortly before her pull-point.
Zinzi’s drug debt didn’t go away with her incarceration, and the criminal organization (which she only calls the Company) that owns the debt has her drafting 419 phishing scam templates to work off what she owes. And she’s good at it, delving into current events to fabricate characters and scenarios that tug at people’s heartstrings. It’s clear she takes some pride in being effective at what she does - in reference to one of the other formats, she remarks that it’s “bog standard... that is to say, not one of mine.” While she’s aware her work manipulates people out of thousands of dollars that they often can’t afford, she takes a very cold attitude towards them, feeling that if they’re stupid enough to fall for a scam they deserve to get fleeced. She even shows annoyance when the marks e-mail her back directly instead of following instructions and contacting her handler.
While some of this is a case of internet anonymity allowing her to distance herself from the victims, she shows enough flickers of a guilty conscience that it’s clear she knows that she’s hurting real people. She deletes an e-mail from a journalist who wants to meet one of her fake personas because, as a former journalist herself, she can relate to him more than the usual victims. But that does nothing to stop her, overall. Eventually, Vuyo (her handler and contact for the Company) pressures her into playing one of the scam personas in person, where she meets a nice, older American couple about to hand over their pensions for fake government bonds.
It could’ve been a wakeup call. And she is conflicted. But she plays her part with gusto anyway, and notes that part of her gets off on watching them buy into her lies. She notes it was the same as it’d been back when she was wheedling her parents into lending her money for drugs; she gets a thrill out of manipulating people. This shows throughout the book, when her standard method of finding intel is consistently lying. She pretends to be from any number of magazines, or writing a book, or looking for a job, or pretty much anything except telling the truth, even in situations where being honest would work. And it’s not without consequence. A former coworker she uses for his connections nearly gets fired when Zinzi’s web of deception leads a woman she ‘interviewed’ to calling his boss.
Zinzi also has a poor grasp of where moral lines lie. Her first priority is always herself - staying alive and paying off her debts. And even there she takes the short view more often than not, paying little heed to what the long-term consequences are for her actions, and that can make her dangerously reckless - to herself and everyone around her. When she ignores her better judgement and takes the missing person’s case that makes up the main plot of the novel, she rather quickly amasses a lot of alarming information. The missing girl, Songweza, is part of a teen singing duo with her twin brother. But she appears to have left on her own accord, after being prescribed psych meds her guardian doesn’t know about and she doesn’t seem to have wanted. Her producer is extremely controlling, with a checkered history that includes abuse of former talent. Her ex-boyfriend “left her” under suspicious circumstances. It makes Zinzi uneasy, but when it comes down to the wire, she helps escort the girl back into her producer’s custody. Because he’s offering enough money to pay off all her outstanding debts, and then some.
In short, Zinzi’s self-serving recklessness and compulsive lying has already destroyed her life, but that didn’t actually break the pattern of behavior. She either doesn’t have the self-awareness to realize, or doesn’t want to look at her own actions closely enough to change. And while she still thinks and behaves as she does, she puts everyone she associates with at risk. Even the one person she has a positive, relatively normal relationship with - her lover, Benoît - is subjected to a fair bit of dishonesty, which eventually blows up in her face. It defines every relationship in her life, and more often than not, both sides wind up paying for it.
Abilities/Powers:
Sloth - Whenever someone in Zinzi’s world commits a heinous act that causes severe guilt, they become bound to an Animal that manifests from nothing. They are not, obviously, true animals. They’re more akin to familiars. And her world has as of yet not explained how or why this happens; the first cases of the phenomenon only appeared in the 80s, and it didn’t become widespread until close to the turn of the century. The act seems to most often be murder (first-hand or involvement in), but there’s implications that other crimes can result in Animals as well.
Zinzi’s Animal is a three-toed sloth (called, as all Animals are, simply by his species; Sloth). Animals are metaphysically bonded to their people, and while they can’t speak, seem to be highly intelligent. Sloth responds to complex situations and conversations as if he’s fully aware of what’s happening, and even performs tasks such as guiding Zinzi in dark areas by putting pressure on her shoulders. Animals also have an empathic bond with their host, but it’s one-way. While Sloth gets feedback from Zinzi’s pain (and is affected by drugs or alcohol she uses), she can’t feel his.
They also can’t go too far from each other without suffering extreme pain and separation anxiety. The distance is never addressed specifically in the book, but based on events in the book, I’ll assume a couple hundred meters is where it becomes unbearable. People die (or, well, are taken by the Undertow, to be explained shortly) immediately after their Animals do. Animals can survive for months after their humans die, but are never quite the same. As a side note, wounds inflicted by Animals sometimes fester in strange and awful ways, and their blood and body parts are extremely powerful magically, and there’s a black market for them among practitioners of traditional magic and medicine.
Mashavi - Whenever someone is animalled, they gain an ability alongside it. Science still struggles to explain what they are or how they work, so in South Africa people have taken to calling them shavi or mashavi (though the word can also refer to the Animal itself). Zinzi can find lost things. She sees visions of people’s lost items floating around them, and can follow the thread between a person and a lost thing. She can’t turn the ability off, but she can concentrate with Sloth’s help to get a clearer picture and better grip on the thread. All mashavi can be disrupted by infrasound - subsonic sound beneath the human range of hearing.
She cannot do anything about stolen objects - not her kind of magic - or lost people, although during the course of the novel, lost Animals contact her. Magically. Through e-mail. She hasn’t had the chance to explore these aspects of her power yet, and therefore they’re not very well explained, but it can be extrapolated that a magical entity that becomes ‘lost’ and is reasonably well connected to her can send her a metaphysical SOS. The internet just happens to be a convenient communication method.
This is the only thing that will be limited on-board. She’ll be unable to see lost objects at all until a warden returns the ability to her.
Undertow - Being an aposymbiote has more than just social consequences. As soon as the deed that causes an Animal to manifest is done, the Undertow is coming for them. Whether the Undertow is magic, an actual sentient entity, or a force of nature is unclear, but it is real. It manifests as shadows coagulating into a creeping blackness, the smell of burnt polyester, and an otherworldly howling, clicking, gnashing sound. The only thing that staves it off is the manifestation of an Animal. If an Animal dies, it returns to drag the human half of the pair into oblivion. Nothing remains except the lingering smell of it. It’s how almost all zoos will die, and there’s an almost universal terror the community shares of the phenomena. Zinzi herself has nightmares about it on occasion.
Other skills - Zinzi’s a writer and storyteller by nature. It means she has an eye for detail - particularly reading people’s tone and body language - and thinks on her feet. It also means she’s good at tweaking a situation to suit her, and isn’t shy about lying to get what she needs. She also has a knack for finding shortcuts.
Personality:
Zinzi December has had to grow up very quickly under harsh circumstances (of her own making, yes, but harsh nonetheless). The glimpses we get of her Former Life (what she calls FL), before Sloth, show an extremely self-possessed, reckless, overconfident, and ultimately immature young woman from a privileged background. As a teen, she was the ‘problem child,’ rebellious and delving into alcohol and drugs and sex. Constantly held up to her older brother’s golden boy standards. She became a lifestyle journalist, but had no interest in current events. She dressed in expensive designer labels and handed out business cards describing herself as a “Word Pimp.” She was already a partier and a drinker; the insider journalist culture in South Africa only drew her more into drugs and encouraged her risk-taking.
Zinzi on drugs or alcohol is not a pleasant person. She’s a mean drunk and pushes every button and crosses every line she can find. And her coke habit did nothing to curb her self-serving tendencies or her risk-taking streak. She even found she liked manipulating people, and got a rush every time her parents believed her about needing money for car repairs, or a degree program she’d never even applied to. It reached the point where she deliberately put her brother in a dangerous - and, as it turned out, fatal - situation because all she cared about was paying off her debts. Her short-term needs blind her to everything else when she’s at her worst, including the safety of those around her, and the long-term consequences she might face herself.
Her brother’s death is her deepest well of guilt - and also what brought Sloth into her life. As well as a prison sentence. After the trial was over, her parents turned their backs on her, and left her alone in a world behind bars that was anathema to the privileged, indulgent lifestyle she was used to. But she adapted, and impressively so. She’s clever and can read situations well, and despite having something of an attitude, between mandatory rehab and the culture shock, she learned to shut up and keep her head down. She stayed out of trouble. Learned how to posture and bluff convicts - a rather different sport than wheedling drug money out of her parents. She developed the patience to sit through lectures from missionaries attempting to “save the prisoners’ souls,” because they provided a proper three-course meal at the end. She developed a stony exterior in the face of the public that jeered every time they were herded into the yard for exercise.
In some ways, prison brought out some of her better qualities. She was always clever, but now she was using it. She was always stubborn and willful, but now those energies went towards getting off drugs and - after her release - staying off them. The strictly regimented days gave her more routine and direction than she’d been finding in her personal and professional life. She even confesses that she chose her crappy, condemned Hillbrow apartment partially because it “felt reassuringly like prison.”
But a lot of Zinzi’s social butterfly leanings vanished somewhere between her brother’s murder and getting out of prison. She’s got a polite relationship with her neighbors (the ones who stick around long enough to get to know), but tends to refer to them by their professions rather than names, and clearly keeps most at arm’s length. Excluding Sloth, the only person she has a positive, relatively normal relationship with is Benoît, her lover, and he went out of his way to work himself into her life. The anti-social, suspicious behavior comes from both being cut loose by everyone from FL, and from the personal and invasive nature of her mashavi. Simply put, being around too many people and their lost things gives her a brutal headache.
Generally, Zinzi presents herself aggressively and with a lot of attitude. In frightening or stressful situations, she copes with a combination of out-waiting others, staring them down, or running her mouth. The latter can get her into trouble - she’s somewhat of an expert on social faux pas - but it’s a nervous habit she’s never quite gotten ahold of. She’s not above violence, and can be pretty brutal about it when she has to be, but it’s typically her last resort.
But she has her vulnerable moments. When Benoît discovers his wife and children may be alive, and begins planning to leave South Africa to look for them, Zinzi is devastated. She clearly made an effort not to get too attached to him (refused to let him move in with her, didn’t want to talk about FL with him at all), the abandonment she experienced after her brother’s murder re-surfaces. She can’t bring herself to actively sabotage him, even when offered the opportunity, but it does spur her into making some hasty decisions - specifically a job of a nature she usually explicitly avoids - that look good short-term, but she she knows are suspect and will lead to problems down the line.
Said job, combined with the stress over the imminent loss Benoît and pressure from her drug debts, inevitably starts her spiraling. It starts small, lying and wheedling and pressuring people for information she needs. Impersonating a journalist. Dipping into her contacts from FL that bring back difficult memories and highlight how much she’s changed. Getting people into trouble when her lies start unraveling. Having a drink. Her short-term goals eclipse the welfare and safety of everyone around her, and even her own long-term well being. Even once she believes she’s finished the job, doubts gnaw at her about whether she’s left people involved in more danger than they were before. But the nail in the coffin is Benoît finding her e-mail full of evidence of exactly how she’s been paying back her debts. He dresses her down, pulling no punches when he tells her just how disappointed he is to find she’s profiting off of the naivety of others, and makes it clear that he finds her actions inexcusably selfish. Before, he’d been leaving on relatively good terms. Now, he wants nothing to do with her.
The guilt was always there - she wouldn’t have tried to hide her side-business from him otherwise - but she’d managed to tamp it down. Make excuses for herself, and wall herself off from the consequences. Until someone she cared for called her out on it.
In contrast to Zinzi, Sloth is a relatively simple creature, but he does have his own distinct personality. He’s extremely sensitive to people and situations, and is the first of the pair to act anxious or restless when pressure’s on. Unlike Zinzi, he shows some concern for strangers and acquaintances his human counterpart has walled herself off from, and he’s extremely easy to bribe with food. That being said, he’s opinionated. Whether he likes or dislikes someone is quite clear, and he’s usually a decent judge of character. He’s not too fond of men getting cozy with Zinzi, though, especially if he’s on her back, and he protests whenever she has a stroke. Anything harder makes him furious with her. But the pair care dearly for each other, and work well together, and Sloth will protect Zinzi however he’s able.
Barge Reactions:
Zinzi’s first reaction to the Barge will almost definitely be to wonder what the hell was in the drugs she’d taken the night before. Or, perhaps, that someone’s tried to poison her with muti. Again. Either way, strange drug-induced hallucinations. Once she admits that this is reality, she’ll actually settle in quite quickly. She’s nothing if not adaptable, and the shift from her world to the Barge isn’t much more jarring than her shift from upper-class lifestyle journalist to disenfranchised ex-convict Aposymbiote.
It helps that she’s from a modern world, so most of the technology on board will be familiar. And that magic exists where she’s from, and very poorly understood. Her world closely parallels the real world (Dr. Who and anime specifically exist in her media), so she’s been exposed to TV, movies, and fiction about parallel dimensions, wizards, and deep space travel, even though the genre isn’t exactly her cup of tea. The concepts will be easy to grasp, and although she’s skeptical of most people who practice magic back home (like the real world, there’s very little evidence any of it is more than smoke or mirrors, outside of the abilities the animalled have), she’s sensible enough to believe people have magic and superpowers once she sees evidence first-hand. She’ll be a lot more resistant to believing people are really fictional giants, though (Superman, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, etc.). Because that’s just a little too ridiculous.
Zinzi’s number one coping mechanism for difficult or uncomfortable situations is to wait them out. She’ll approach the less entertaining floods and ports as stoically as possible and try to keep her head down until they’re over. Of course, she’ll inevitably get dragged and/or guilted into participating. Probably by Sloth, who will (as usual) be infinitely more concerned about everything than she is. Breaches are difficult; there’s no doubt she’s a woman who enjoys escapism. To an unhealthy degree, even. In most cases, she may very well enjoy being another person for a while, without the constant dread of the Undertow or the weight of her past crimes on her mind. Assuming that her breach life isn’t just as terrible.
Path to Redemption:
Zinzi doesn’t want to be the bad guy. She doesn’t think of herself as a villain, and certainly doesn’t enjoy hurting people in any sort of sadistic way. She’s not especially violent or destructive, more avoidant than aggressive, and might cop an attitude towards authority figures, but not outright defy them. As such, she’ll probably come off as a relatively easy inmate. And in some ways, she will be - she’s unlikely to be involved in a bloodbath or destructive shenanigans unless under the influence of a Barge event.
But the issues that make Zinzi an inmate are deep-seated and insidious. She needs to reverse a lifelong bad habit of putting her own short-term needs ahead of everything (including her own long-term needs) and everyone else. She needs a purpose beyond trying to survive day to day and keep from drowning under an impossible burden of debt. She needs to forgive herself, and feel like a person again, instead of a walking sin. A mistake. Vermin.
The first roadblock to getting there is her stubbornness. She does what she does because it’s worked, so far, in a broad sense. She’s still alive and not in prison - or was, before the Barge. And she isn’t inclined to change any of that just because someone tells her she should - she doesn’t trust easy, doesn’t like most people, and is going to be extremely tight-lipped about her history and circumstances. She’s sat through plenty of evangelizing about how she needs to repent to save her soul, and the Barge doesn’t seem much different than the religious radicals who tried to ‘save’ convicts back in prison. Totally convinced of their own bullshit, annoying, but at least the food provided is good. She’ll deal with lecturing the same way she dealt with the missionaries back home; wait out the sermons, then keep doing exactly what she’s always done.
Which leads to the follow-up problem; why should she bother changing? Immediately before coming to the Barge, she’s hit rock bottom. She’s finished a job that leaves her with a bad taste in her mouth, and sitting uncomfortably with the hunch that she’s left a bunch of teenagers in a situation that’s much worse than it appears (spoilers: it is). The person she cares about more than anything has just found out about how she’s kept her drug debts paid, and he’s utterly disgusted by her willingness to manipulate people out of their life’s savings for her own gain. To the point where he no longer wants anything to do with her. A reunion with her former lover/coworker has gone massively, publically sour. She’s drinking again. Taking drugs again. Even Sloth is pissed with her.
There’s very little for her to go back to, and knowing she’s dead may only exacerbate her nastier habits. There’s a certain fatalistic attitude common to zoos - a combination of society treating them like dirt and the constant threat of the Undertow - and Zinzi is no exception. Why put the blood, sweat, and tears into changing herself when a holding pattern is so much easier? And, in the end, she’ll still be a zoo. Her world will still see her as a criminal, still discriminate against her and prevent her from succeeding in any meaningful way. She can’t even get housing outside of the slums, because respectable landlords don’t cater to “her kind.” That’s a lot of internalized self-loathing and societal pressure to work past.
The right warden will have to be patient, but not soft. Zinzi needs to be pushed, and she needs to be called on her crap without any sort of sugar-coating. They’ll have to put up with lies and wheedling and manipulation, and preferably be able to see through most of it. And they’ll need to respect that it’ll take time to earn her trust. Everyone else positive in her life has turned their back on her, and she has no reason to believe differently of the wardens.
History:
Zinzi’s childhood was relatively typical for a well-off South African family. Her father was a college professor and very much an academic, while her mother was much more traditional. She got along well enough with her older brother Thando, though was perhaps a little spoiled - when she went on a working holiday in England at 18, she gave up after a month and returned home to the creature comforts she was familiar with. She acted out, even as a teen, and dabbled in drugs and drinking and sleeping around. Her parents either couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with her behavior beyond telling her to act more like her brother, but she made it through adolescence relatively unscathed.
She finished a BA in journalism, and her first job was working with the Features Editor of Mach magazine. Sleeping with him, too. Also smoking crack with him - sometimes all at the same time. It was then that she started to spiral downwards, racking up debt with her dealer, finding new and exciting ways to trick her parents into giving her more money. They knew she had a problem, but they’d given up dealing with it. Only Thando, her brother, continued to try to keep her out of trouble and convince her to get clean. Thando also had a nice job, that came with a very nice, fully insured company vehicle. One valuable enough to pay off Zinzi’s drug debts. She figured it wouldn’t be a big deal; insurance would replace the vehicle, and she wouldn’t have her dealer breathing down her neck for a while.
She goes with the dealer to do the carjacking the evening of October 14, 2006. It might have gone smoothly, but she should’ve remembered that her brother is always the white knight. He tries to interfere, and her partner shoots Thando right there over their mother’s daisy bushes, and takes most of Zinzi’s left ear with it. It’s a head-shot, but it still takes him a while to die. The moment he does, Sloth manifests. And then there’s no lie that can save her from being implicated in the murder. Her parents don’t even come to the trial, where she’s convicted of accessory to murder and sentenced to ten years in Sun City prison.
She only served five, before she was released for good behavior in 2011. She was left to the mercy of an overburdened parole system that seems to have mostly forgotten she exists. She finds a crappy apartment in a condemned building in Hillbrow - colloquially known as the titular Zoo City for its high population of aposymbiotes - and tries to settle in. She posts fliers locally for her services locating lost things - no missing persons - for a small fee. She finds her drug debt has been bought out by a criminal organization that’s extremely keen on using her writing talents to draft 419 scam e-mails. Which she agrees to without fuss. She meets Benoît and lets him work his way into her life, taken by his charm and his willingness to avoid talking about Former Life, ever. It’s not a great life, but she does okay.
It’s March of 2011 when things start going pear-shaped. She gets an unusually big job, finding a pricey ring that an upper-class widow lost down a drain. But when she heads back to return it, she finds her employer brutally murdered. Two other zoos (she calls them by their Animals: a Maltese and a Maribou Stork) are on the scene, and conveniently offer her a job that will pay better than her usual fare; to find a missing girl. She refuses at the time, before she’s taken into questioning for the murder. As a zoo, she’s naturally at the top of the list of suspects, but they’ve got no solid evidence, so they release her when she refuses to confess and her background check verifies her story.
She returns home to find that her contact for her scam business wants her to do a job in person - pretending to be an ‘African princess’ from one of their templates for the benefit of the victims, who want to meet the woman they’ve been trying to help before they hand over their life’s savings. She protests, but eventually caves to Vuyo’s request, performing well despite how disgusted she is about the whole affair. And to top off an already bad day, when she meets with Benoît later, he breaks the news that he’s received notice that his wife and children may be alive in a refugee camp, and that he intends to leave to find them.
What does she have left to lose by taking that sketchy missing persons job? She contacts the pair who pitched it to her, and goes to meet the man in charge “just to talk.” Turns out, it’s the famous recluse Odi Huron, a big-shot music producer, and the missing girl is one half of his kwaito brother-sister duo. He needs to track Songweza down in a hurry, because he doesn’t want the media finding out, and offers Zinzi a sum of money that’s enough to buy her debt off from the Company that owns her.
She takes the job, and starts sniffing around. Interviewing the brother and his friends, the legal guardian, school friends and rehab staff and other professionals who’ve worked with the girl. She even convinces Vuyo to look into it (for a hefty fee, added to her already impossible debt), in case the girl might’ve wound up in a human trafficking ring the Company knows about. Or is involved with. She lies her way into most of these places, claiming to be a journalist working for various magazines. She tracks down Gio, her former co-worker and lover from Mach, to help her get into the inner circle of gossip surrounding these celebrities. She pieces together an odd story - an extremely controlling manager, rehab for minor offenses, a boyfriend who vanished under mysterious circumstances, psych medication that it seems like Song didn’t agree with having to take. It’s clear Song ran away, rather than being kidnapped or coerced. Things don’t add up, but she keeps going anyhow.
Vuyo sends her to a man - a sangoma, or traditional healer who can commune with spirits - implying that he may be able to help with her search. She doesn’t like it, being a skeptic herself, but she pays the man a visit anyway. He concocts a peculiar muti medicine for her, insisting on using some of Sloth’s own blood, and once he forces her to drink it she suffers from severe hallucinations and visions, of her own past, and of Song. Scared and angry, she disregards the whole experience as madness and him poisoning her, and leaves, though she keeps the bottle of cleansing muti his assistant gives her.
When she returns to her car, she finds her windows have been bashed in and her phone stolen. She suspects a group of street kids she noticed living in a nearby storm drain, and tries to confront them. She quickly winds up over her head - the leader of the three has a mutilated Porcupine that he’s sold a leg on the black market, and he threatens to do the same to Sloth. Zinzi fights her way past them and runs into the drains, getting lost in the maze of sewers and old mining tunnels under the city. Both her and Sloth come out of it drenched, scraped, and bruised badly, and barely miss getting hit by a train.
But she picks herself up. All the intel she’s gathered points her to a bar, owned by Odi himself, and a bouncer who was seen getting friendly with the girl. She convinces Gio to stage a fight with her in a particularly ill-advised, gin-fueled plan, hoping to gain the bouncer’s trust by playing victim. All it results in is a very pissed off Gio, and a very suspicious bouncer, but he does let slip that someone’s already been by asking questions about Song, and even beat him to keep his mouth shut. By now, she suspects the extremely sketchy Maltese and Maribou were responsible, and that they have more going on here than they’ve revealed.
Benoît works security sometimes, and she begs a favor from him - find where the bouncer (Ronaldo) lives while he’s still in town. Between his help and a photo of Song and S’bu’s parents, she tracks the girl to an apartment complex, only to be surprised by the Maltese and the Maribou, already there and collecting the girl. Song fights and screams, but the pair has a letter (and a bribe) explaining she’s off her medicine and not in her right mind, so security lets them pass. She’s informed she’ll still get paid - hush money more than for doing the job - but the scene leaves Zinzi on edge and unsettled, her conscience nagging at her.
When she gets home, she discovers that a pissed-off Gio has published an extremely nasty article about her, including explicit photos from five years ago, full of extremely intimate and graphic lies about their “zoo love affair.” She goes to find Benoît in his room, packing and looking furious. She assumes it’s the article at first, but no - he got a look at her laptop. He saw her scam e-mails. He’s livid that she’d take advantage of people, ruin lives for her own gain, that she’s more selfish than he realized. And also furious that at the kinds of stories she’s using to do it. One of her templates involves a boy being shot in the back by rebel soldiers; he reveals that he was a child soldier, and that he shot a friend in the back because he was forced to, and that he no longer wants her help, her money, to be around her.
She calls her pain at his words the death of hope.
That night, she falls off the wagon. Goes back to the bar where she met Ronaldo. Drinks. Finds the club dealer and samples his selection, even convincing him to indulge with her. She gets too high to care about anything, and he winds up in her bed by the end of it. In canon, she wakes up still in Zoo City in the morning. For the sake of the game, an overdose leaves her waking up on the Barge.
Sample Journal Entry:
Network-style exchange.
Sample RP:
Prose-style spam.
Special Notes:
I want to mention that I’m not ignoring apartheid, and it definitely happened in canon, but virtually nothing about how Zinzi’s life/family was affected by it is explicit in the book. They’re presented as a well-off black family, even when she was young. I’m going to assume that it’s a combination of her father being a college-level professor protecting their status somewhat, and the rise of Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism changing the course of events to a degree. For whatever reason, becoming animalled and the social/political issues surrounding that is a much larger influence on Zinzi’s life than apartheid.
User Name/Nick: Claire
User DW: n/a
AIM/IM: dbyumeaurora
E-mail: daybreak.sleepers@gmail.com
Other Characters: Pietro Maximoff, Dedicate Rosethorn
Character Name: Zinzi December
Series: Zoo City
Age: 32
From When?: At the end of Part One, where Zinzi hits the bottom of a downward spiral and falls off the recovering drug addict wagon in a bad way. It doesn’t kill her in canon, but it’s high-risk behavior, and an overdose is entirely plausible.
Inmate:
In Zinzi’s own opinion, the worst thing she’s ever done - the thing she carries the most guilt over and was actually incarcerated for - is arranging the carjacking that lead to her brother’s murder. But this incident is mostly a symptom of Zinzi’s bigger issues, especially as it was when she was in the deepest throes of her addiction and she was by no means at her most rational. We see glimpses here, of selfishness, recklessness, and a drive to put her own needs before the welfare of others. After all, she convinced her dealer to take her brother’s car in exchange for her drug debts, entirely ignoring the potential (and indeed fatal) consequences. But the evidence that these are ongoing issues comes later. Since Zinzi is clean through most of the narrative, and has been for years (she’s been through rehab and makes a concentrated effort to avoid her vices), it’s clear that her more destructive tendencies shown in the novel are not the result of chemical dependence alone. She only slips off the wagon and uses again shortly before her pull-point.
Zinzi’s drug debt didn’t go away with her incarceration, and the criminal organization (which she only calls the Company) that owns the debt has her drafting 419 phishing scam templates to work off what she owes. And she’s good at it, delving into current events to fabricate characters and scenarios that tug at people’s heartstrings. It’s clear she takes some pride in being effective at what she does - in reference to one of the other formats, she remarks that it’s “bog standard... that is to say, not one of mine.” While she’s aware her work manipulates people out of thousands of dollars that they often can’t afford, she takes a very cold attitude towards them, feeling that if they’re stupid enough to fall for a scam they deserve to get fleeced. She even shows annoyance when the marks e-mail her back directly instead of following instructions and contacting her handler.
While some of this is a case of internet anonymity allowing her to distance herself from the victims, she shows enough flickers of a guilty conscience that it’s clear she knows that she’s hurting real people. She deletes an e-mail from a journalist who wants to meet one of her fake personas because, as a former journalist herself, she can relate to him more than the usual victims. But that does nothing to stop her, overall. Eventually, Vuyo (her handler and contact for the Company) pressures her into playing one of the scam personas in person, where she meets a nice, older American couple about to hand over their pensions for fake government bonds.
It could’ve been a wakeup call. And she is conflicted. But she plays her part with gusto anyway, and notes that part of her gets off on watching them buy into her lies. She notes it was the same as it’d been back when she was wheedling her parents into lending her money for drugs; she gets a thrill out of manipulating people. This shows throughout the book, when her standard method of finding intel is consistently lying. She pretends to be from any number of magazines, or writing a book, or looking for a job, or pretty much anything except telling the truth, even in situations where being honest would work. And it’s not without consequence. A former coworker she uses for his connections nearly gets fired when Zinzi’s web of deception leads a woman she ‘interviewed’ to calling his boss.
Zinzi also has a poor grasp of where moral lines lie. Her first priority is always herself - staying alive and paying off her debts. And even there she takes the short view more often than not, paying little heed to what the long-term consequences are for her actions, and that can make her dangerously reckless - to herself and everyone around her. When she ignores her better judgement and takes the missing person’s case that makes up the main plot of the novel, she rather quickly amasses a lot of alarming information. The missing girl, Songweza, is part of a teen singing duo with her twin brother. But she appears to have left on her own accord, after being prescribed psych meds her guardian doesn’t know about and she doesn’t seem to have wanted. Her producer is extremely controlling, with a checkered history that includes abuse of former talent. Her ex-boyfriend “left her” under suspicious circumstances. It makes Zinzi uneasy, but when it comes down to the wire, she helps escort the girl back into her producer’s custody. Because he’s offering enough money to pay off all her outstanding debts, and then some.
In short, Zinzi’s self-serving recklessness and compulsive lying has already destroyed her life, but that didn’t actually break the pattern of behavior. She either doesn’t have the self-awareness to realize, or doesn’t want to look at her own actions closely enough to change. And while she still thinks and behaves as she does, she puts everyone she associates with at risk. Even the one person she has a positive, relatively normal relationship with - her lover, Benoît - is subjected to a fair bit of dishonesty, which eventually blows up in her face. It defines every relationship in her life, and more often than not, both sides wind up paying for it.
Abilities/Powers:
Sloth - Whenever someone in Zinzi’s world commits a heinous act that causes severe guilt, they become bound to an Animal that manifests from nothing. They are not, obviously, true animals. They’re more akin to familiars. And her world has as of yet not explained how or why this happens; the first cases of the phenomenon only appeared in the 80s, and it didn’t become widespread until close to the turn of the century. The act seems to most often be murder (first-hand or involvement in), but there’s implications that other crimes can result in Animals as well.
Zinzi’s Animal is a three-toed sloth (called, as all Animals are, simply by his species; Sloth). Animals are metaphysically bonded to their people, and while they can’t speak, seem to be highly intelligent. Sloth responds to complex situations and conversations as if he’s fully aware of what’s happening, and even performs tasks such as guiding Zinzi in dark areas by putting pressure on her shoulders. Animals also have an empathic bond with their host, but it’s one-way. While Sloth gets feedback from Zinzi’s pain (and is affected by drugs or alcohol she uses), she can’t feel his.
They also can’t go too far from each other without suffering extreme pain and separation anxiety. The distance is never addressed specifically in the book, but based on events in the book, I’ll assume a couple hundred meters is where it becomes unbearable. People die (or, well, are taken by the Undertow, to be explained shortly) immediately after their Animals do. Animals can survive for months after their humans die, but are never quite the same. As a side note, wounds inflicted by Animals sometimes fester in strange and awful ways, and their blood and body parts are extremely powerful magically, and there’s a black market for them among practitioners of traditional magic and medicine.
Mashavi - Whenever someone is animalled, they gain an ability alongside it. Science still struggles to explain what they are or how they work, so in South Africa people have taken to calling them shavi or mashavi (though the word can also refer to the Animal itself). Zinzi can find lost things. She sees visions of people’s lost items floating around them, and can follow the thread between a person and a lost thing. She can’t turn the ability off, but she can concentrate with Sloth’s help to get a clearer picture and better grip on the thread. All mashavi can be disrupted by infrasound - subsonic sound beneath the human range of hearing.
She cannot do anything about stolen objects - not her kind of magic - or lost people, although during the course of the novel, lost Animals contact her. Magically. Through e-mail. She hasn’t had the chance to explore these aspects of her power yet, and therefore they’re not very well explained, but it can be extrapolated that a magical entity that becomes ‘lost’ and is reasonably well connected to her can send her a metaphysical SOS. The internet just happens to be a convenient communication method.
This is the only thing that will be limited on-board. She’ll be unable to see lost objects at all until a warden returns the ability to her.
Undertow - Being an aposymbiote has more than just social consequences. As soon as the deed that causes an Animal to manifest is done, the Undertow is coming for them. Whether the Undertow is magic, an actual sentient entity, or a force of nature is unclear, but it is real. It manifests as shadows coagulating into a creeping blackness, the smell of burnt polyester, and an otherworldly howling, clicking, gnashing sound. The only thing that staves it off is the manifestation of an Animal. If an Animal dies, it returns to drag the human half of the pair into oblivion. Nothing remains except the lingering smell of it. It’s how almost all zoos will die, and there’s an almost universal terror the community shares of the phenomena. Zinzi herself has nightmares about it on occasion.
Other skills - Zinzi’s a writer and storyteller by nature. It means she has an eye for detail - particularly reading people’s tone and body language - and thinks on her feet. It also means she’s good at tweaking a situation to suit her, and isn’t shy about lying to get what she needs. She also has a knack for finding shortcuts.
Personality:
Zinzi December has had to grow up very quickly under harsh circumstances (of her own making, yes, but harsh nonetheless). The glimpses we get of her Former Life (what she calls FL), before Sloth, show an extremely self-possessed, reckless, overconfident, and ultimately immature young woman from a privileged background. As a teen, she was the ‘problem child,’ rebellious and delving into alcohol and drugs and sex. Constantly held up to her older brother’s golden boy standards. She became a lifestyle journalist, but had no interest in current events. She dressed in expensive designer labels and handed out business cards describing herself as a “Word Pimp.” She was already a partier and a drinker; the insider journalist culture in South Africa only drew her more into drugs and encouraged her risk-taking.
Zinzi on drugs or alcohol is not a pleasant person. She’s a mean drunk and pushes every button and crosses every line she can find. And her coke habit did nothing to curb her self-serving tendencies or her risk-taking streak. She even found she liked manipulating people, and got a rush every time her parents believed her about needing money for car repairs, or a degree program she’d never even applied to. It reached the point where she deliberately put her brother in a dangerous - and, as it turned out, fatal - situation because all she cared about was paying off her debts. Her short-term needs blind her to everything else when she’s at her worst, including the safety of those around her, and the long-term consequences she might face herself.
Her brother’s death is her deepest well of guilt - and also what brought Sloth into her life. As well as a prison sentence. After the trial was over, her parents turned their backs on her, and left her alone in a world behind bars that was anathema to the privileged, indulgent lifestyle she was used to. But she adapted, and impressively so. She’s clever and can read situations well, and despite having something of an attitude, between mandatory rehab and the culture shock, she learned to shut up and keep her head down. She stayed out of trouble. Learned how to posture and bluff convicts - a rather different sport than wheedling drug money out of her parents. She developed the patience to sit through lectures from missionaries attempting to “save the prisoners’ souls,” because they provided a proper three-course meal at the end. She developed a stony exterior in the face of the public that jeered every time they were herded into the yard for exercise.
In some ways, prison brought out some of her better qualities. She was always clever, but now she was using it. She was always stubborn and willful, but now those energies went towards getting off drugs and - after her release - staying off them. The strictly regimented days gave her more routine and direction than she’d been finding in her personal and professional life. She even confesses that she chose her crappy, condemned Hillbrow apartment partially because it “felt reassuringly like prison.”
But a lot of Zinzi’s social butterfly leanings vanished somewhere between her brother’s murder and getting out of prison. She’s got a polite relationship with her neighbors (the ones who stick around long enough to get to know), but tends to refer to them by their professions rather than names, and clearly keeps most at arm’s length. Excluding Sloth, the only person she has a positive, relatively normal relationship with is Benoît, her lover, and he went out of his way to work himself into her life. The anti-social, suspicious behavior comes from both being cut loose by everyone from FL, and from the personal and invasive nature of her mashavi. Simply put, being around too many people and their lost things gives her a brutal headache.
Generally, Zinzi presents herself aggressively and with a lot of attitude. In frightening or stressful situations, she copes with a combination of out-waiting others, staring them down, or running her mouth. The latter can get her into trouble - she’s somewhat of an expert on social faux pas - but it’s a nervous habit she’s never quite gotten ahold of. She’s not above violence, and can be pretty brutal about it when she has to be, but it’s typically her last resort.
But she has her vulnerable moments. When Benoît discovers his wife and children may be alive, and begins planning to leave South Africa to look for them, Zinzi is devastated. She clearly made an effort not to get too attached to him (refused to let him move in with her, didn’t want to talk about FL with him at all), the abandonment she experienced after her brother’s murder re-surfaces. She can’t bring herself to actively sabotage him, even when offered the opportunity, but it does spur her into making some hasty decisions - specifically a job of a nature she usually explicitly avoids - that look good short-term, but she she knows are suspect and will lead to problems down the line.
Said job, combined with the stress over the imminent loss Benoît and pressure from her drug debts, inevitably starts her spiraling. It starts small, lying and wheedling and pressuring people for information she needs. Impersonating a journalist. Dipping into her contacts from FL that bring back difficult memories and highlight how much she’s changed. Getting people into trouble when her lies start unraveling. Having a drink. Her short-term goals eclipse the welfare and safety of everyone around her, and even her own long-term well being. Even once she believes she’s finished the job, doubts gnaw at her about whether she’s left people involved in more danger than they were before. But the nail in the coffin is Benoît finding her e-mail full of evidence of exactly how she’s been paying back her debts. He dresses her down, pulling no punches when he tells her just how disappointed he is to find she’s profiting off of the naivety of others, and makes it clear that he finds her actions inexcusably selfish. Before, he’d been leaving on relatively good terms. Now, he wants nothing to do with her.
The guilt was always there - she wouldn’t have tried to hide her side-business from him otherwise - but she’d managed to tamp it down. Make excuses for herself, and wall herself off from the consequences. Until someone she cared for called her out on it.
In contrast to Zinzi, Sloth is a relatively simple creature, but he does have his own distinct personality. He’s extremely sensitive to people and situations, and is the first of the pair to act anxious or restless when pressure’s on. Unlike Zinzi, he shows some concern for strangers and acquaintances his human counterpart has walled herself off from, and he’s extremely easy to bribe with food. That being said, he’s opinionated. Whether he likes or dislikes someone is quite clear, and he’s usually a decent judge of character. He’s not too fond of men getting cozy with Zinzi, though, especially if he’s on her back, and he protests whenever she has a stroke. Anything harder makes him furious with her. But the pair care dearly for each other, and work well together, and Sloth will protect Zinzi however he’s able.
Barge Reactions:
Zinzi’s first reaction to the Barge will almost definitely be to wonder what the hell was in the drugs she’d taken the night before. Or, perhaps, that someone’s tried to poison her with muti. Again. Either way, strange drug-induced hallucinations. Once she admits that this is reality, she’ll actually settle in quite quickly. She’s nothing if not adaptable, and the shift from her world to the Barge isn’t much more jarring than her shift from upper-class lifestyle journalist to disenfranchised ex-convict Aposymbiote.
It helps that she’s from a modern world, so most of the technology on board will be familiar. And that magic exists where she’s from, and very poorly understood. Her world closely parallels the real world (Dr. Who and anime specifically exist in her media), so she’s been exposed to TV, movies, and fiction about parallel dimensions, wizards, and deep space travel, even though the genre isn’t exactly her cup of tea. The concepts will be easy to grasp, and although she’s skeptical of most people who practice magic back home (like the real world, there’s very little evidence any of it is more than smoke or mirrors, outside of the abilities the animalled have), she’s sensible enough to believe people have magic and superpowers once she sees evidence first-hand. She’ll be a lot more resistant to believing people are really fictional giants, though (Superman, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, etc.). Because that’s just a little too ridiculous.
Zinzi’s number one coping mechanism for difficult or uncomfortable situations is to wait them out. She’ll approach the less entertaining floods and ports as stoically as possible and try to keep her head down until they’re over. Of course, she’ll inevitably get dragged and/or guilted into participating. Probably by Sloth, who will (as usual) be infinitely more concerned about everything than she is. Breaches are difficult; there’s no doubt she’s a woman who enjoys escapism. To an unhealthy degree, even. In most cases, she may very well enjoy being another person for a while, without the constant dread of the Undertow or the weight of her past crimes on her mind. Assuming that her breach life isn’t just as terrible.
Path to Redemption:
Zinzi doesn’t want to be the bad guy. She doesn’t think of herself as a villain, and certainly doesn’t enjoy hurting people in any sort of sadistic way. She’s not especially violent or destructive, more avoidant than aggressive, and might cop an attitude towards authority figures, but not outright defy them. As such, she’ll probably come off as a relatively easy inmate. And in some ways, she will be - she’s unlikely to be involved in a bloodbath or destructive shenanigans unless under the influence of a Barge event.
But the issues that make Zinzi an inmate are deep-seated and insidious. She needs to reverse a lifelong bad habit of putting her own short-term needs ahead of everything (including her own long-term needs) and everyone else. She needs a purpose beyond trying to survive day to day and keep from drowning under an impossible burden of debt. She needs to forgive herself, and feel like a person again, instead of a walking sin. A mistake. Vermin.
The first roadblock to getting there is her stubbornness. She does what she does because it’s worked, so far, in a broad sense. She’s still alive and not in prison - or was, before the Barge. And she isn’t inclined to change any of that just because someone tells her she should - she doesn’t trust easy, doesn’t like most people, and is going to be extremely tight-lipped about her history and circumstances. She’s sat through plenty of evangelizing about how she needs to repent to save her soul, and the Barge doesn’t seem much different than the religious radicals who tried to ‘save’ convicts back in prison. Totally convinced of their own bullshit, annoying, but at least the food provided is good. She’ll deal with lecturing the same way she dealt with the missionaries back home; wait out the sermons, then keep doing exactly what she’s always done.
Which leads to the follow-up problem; why should she bother changing? Immediately before coming to the Barge, she’s hit rock bottom. She’s finished a job that leaves her with a bad taste in her mouth, and sitting uncomfortably with the hunch that she’s left a bunch of teenagers in a situation that’s much worse than it appears (spoilers: it is). The person she cares about more than anything has just found out about how she’s kept her drug debts paid, and he’s utterly disgusted by her willingness to manipulate people out of their life’s savings for her own gain. To the point where he no longer wants anything to do with her. A reunion with her former lover/coworker has gone massively, publically sour. She’s drinking again. Taking drugs again. Even Sloth is pissed with her.
There’s very little for her to go back to, and knowing she’s dead may only exacerbate her nastier habits. There’s a certain fatalistic attitude common to zoos - a combination of society treating them like dirt and the constant threat of the Undertow - and Zinzi is no exception. Why put the blood, sweat, and tears into changing herself when a holding pattern is so much easier? And, in the end, she’ll still be a zoo. Her world will still see her as a criminal, still discriminate against her and prevent her from succeeding in any meaningful way. She can’t even get housing outside of the slums, because respectable landlords don’t cater to “her kind.” That’s a lot of internalized self-loathing and societal pressure to work past.
The right warden will have to be patient, but not soft. Zinzi needs to be pushed, and she needs to be called on her crap without any sort of sugar-coating. They’ll have to put up with lies and wheedling and manipulation, and preferably be able to see through most of it. And they’ll need to respect that it’ll take time to earn her trust. Everyone else positive in her life has turned their back on her, and she has no reason to believe differently of the wardens.
History:
Zinzi’s childhood was relatively typical for a well-off South African family. Her father was a college professor and very much an academic, while her mother was much more traditional. She got along well enough with her older brother Thando, though was perhaps a little spoiled - when she went on a working holiday in England at 18, she gave up after a month and returned home to the creature comforts she was familiar with. She acted out, even as a teen, and dabbled in drugs and drinking and sleeping around. Her parents either couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with her behavior beyond telling her to act more like her brother, but she made it through adolescence relatively unscathed.
She finished a BA in journalism, and her first job was working with the Features Editor of Mach magazine. Sleeping with him, too. Also smoking crack with him - sometimes all at the same time. It was then that she started to spiral downwards, racking up debt with her dealer, finding new and exciting ways to trick her parents into giving her more money. They knew she had a problem, but they’d given up dealing with it. Only Thando, her brother, continued to try to keep her out of trouble and convince her to get clean. Thando also had a nice job, that came with a very nice, fully insured company vehicle. One valuable enough to pay off Zinzi’s drug debts. She figured it wouldn’t be a big deal; insurance would replace the vehicle, and she wouldn’t have her dealer breathing down her neck for a while.
She goes with the dealer to do the carjacking the evening of October 14, 2006. It might have gone smoothly, but she should’ve remembered that her brother is always the white knight. He tries to interfere, and her partner shoots Thando right there over their mother’s daisy bushes, and takes most of Zinzi’s left ear with it. It’s a head-shot, but it still takes him a while to die. The moment he does, Sloth manifests. And then there’s no lie that can save her from being implicated in the murder. Her parents don’t even come to the trial, where she’s convicted of accessory to murder and sentenced to ten years in Sun City prison.
She only served five, before she was released for good behavior in 2011. She was left to the mercy of an overburdened parole system that seems to have mostly forgotten she exists. She finds a crappy apartment in a condemned building in Hillbrow - colloquially known as the titular Zoo City for its high population of aposymbiotes - and tries to settle in. She posts fliers locally for her services locating lost things - no missing persons - for a small fee. She finds her drug debt has been bought out by a criminal organization that’s extremely keen on using her writing talents to draft 419 scam e-mails. Which she agrees to without fuss. She meets Benoît and lets him work his way into her life, taken by his charm and his willingness to avoid talking about Former Life, ever. It’s not a great life, but she does okay.
It’s March of 2011 when things start going pear-shaped. She gets an unusually big job, finding a pricey ring that an upper-class widow lost down a drain. But when she heads back to return it, she finds her employer brutally murdered. Two other zoos (she calls them by their Animals: a Maltese and a Maribou Stork) are on the scene, and conveniently offer her a job that will pay better than her usual fare; to find a missing girl. She refuses at the time, before she’s taken into questioning for the murder. As a zoo, she’s naturally at the top of the list of suspects, but they’ve got no solid evidence, so they release her when she refuses to confess and her background check verifies her story.
She returns home to find that her contact for her scam business wants her to do a job in person - pretending to be an ‘African princess’ from one of their templates for the benefit of the victims, who want to meet the woman they’ve been trying to help before they hand over their life’s savings. She protests, but eventually caves to Vuyo’s request, performing well despite how disgusted she is about the whole affair. And to top off an already bad day, when she meets with Benoît later, he breaks the news that he’s received notice that his wife and children may be alive in a refugee camp, and that he intends to leave to find them.
What does she have left to lose by taking that sketchy missing persons job? She contacts the pair who pitched it to her, and goes to meet the man in charge “just to talk.” Turns out, it’s the famous recluse Odi Huron, a big-shot music producer, and the missing girl is one half of his kwaito brother-sister duo. He needs to track Songweza down in a hurry, because he doesn’t want the media finding out, and offers Zinzi a sum of money that’s enough to buy her debt off from the Company that owns her.
She takes the job, and starts sniffing around. Interviewing the brother and his friends, the legal guardian, school friends and rehab staff and other professionals who’ve worked with the girl. She even convinces Vuyo to look into it (for a hefty fee, added to her already impossible debt), in case the girl might’ve wound up in a human trafficking ring the Company knows about. Or is involved with. She lies her way into most of these places, claiming to be a journalist working for various magazines. She tracks down Gio, her former co-worker and lover from Mach, to help her get into the inner circle of gossip surrounding these celebrities. She pieces together an odd story - an extremely controlling manager, rehab for minor offenses, a boyfriend who vanished under mysterious circumstances, psych medication that it seems like Song didn’t agree with having to take. It’s clear Song ran away, rather than being kidnapped or coerced. Things don’t add up, but she keeps going anyhow.
Vuyo sends her to a man - a sangoma, or traditional healer who can commune with spirits - implying that he may be able to help with her search. She doesn’t like it, being a skeptic herself, but she pays the man a visit anyway. He concocts a peculiar muti medicine for her, insisting on using some of Sloth’s own blood, and once he forces her to drink it she suffers from severe hallucinations and visions, of her own past, and of Song. Scared and angry, she disregards the whole experience as madness and him poisoning her, and leaves, though she keeps the bottle of cleansing muti his assistant gives her.
When she returns to her car, she finds her windows have been bashed in and her phone stolen. She suspects a group of street kids she noticed living in a nearby storm drain, and tries to confront them. She quickly winds up over her head - the leader of the three has a mutilated Porcupine that he’s sold a leg on the black market, and he threatens to do the same to Sloth. Zinzi fights her way past them and runs into the drains, getting lost in the maze of sewers and old mining tunnels under the city. Both her and Sloth come out of it drenched, scraped, and bruised badly, and barely miss getting hit by a train.
But she picks herself up. All the intel she’s gathered points her to a bar, owned by Odi himself, and a bouncer who was seen getting friendly with the girl. She convinces Gio to stage a fight with her in a particularly ill-advised, gin-fueled plan, hoping to gain the bouncer’s trust by playing victim. All it results in is a very pissed off Gio, and a very suspicious bouncer, but he does let slip that someone’s already been by asking questions about Song, and even beat him to keep his mouth shut. By now, she suspects the extremely sketchy Maltese and Maribou were responsible, and that they have more going on here than they’ve revealed.
Benoît works security sometimes, and she begs a favor from him - find where the bouncer (Ronaldo) lives while he’s still in town. Between his help and a photo of Song and S’bu’s parents, she tracks the girl to an apartment complex, only to be surprised by the Maltese and the Maribou, already there and collecting the girl. Song fights and screams, but the pair has a letter (and a bribe) explaining she’s off her medicine and not in her right mind, so security lets them pass. She’s informed she’ll still get paid - hush money more than for doing the job - but the scene leaves Zinzi on edge and unsettled, her conscience nagging at her.
When she gets home, she discovers that a pissed-off Gio has published an extremely nasty article about her, including explicit photos from five years ago, full of extremely intimate and graphic lies about their “zoo love affair.” She goes to find Benoît in his room, packing and looking furious. She assumes it’s the article at first, but no - he got a look at her laptop. He saw her scam e-mails. He’s livid that she’d take advantage of people, ruin lives for her own gain, that she’s more selfish than he realized. And also furious that at the kinds of stories she’s using to do it. One of her templates involves a boy being shot in the back by rebel soldiers; he reveals that he was a child soldier, and that he shot a friend in the back because he was forced to, and that he no longer wants her help, her money, to be around her.
She calls her pain at his words the death of hope.
That night, she falls off the wagon. Goes back to the bar where she met Ronaldo. Drinks. Finds the club dealer and samples his selection, even convincing him to indulge with her. She gets too high to care about anything, and he winds up in her bed by the end of it. In canon, she wakes up still in Zoo City in the morning. For the sake of the game, an overdose leaves her waking up on the Barge.
Sample Journal Entry:
Network-style exchange.
Sample RP:
Prose-style spam.
Special Notes:
I want to mention that I’m not ignoring apartheid, and it definitely happened in canon, but virtually nothing about how Zinzi’s life/family was affected by it is explicit in the book. They’re presented as a well-off black family, even when she was young. I’m going to assume that it’s a combination of her father being a college-level professor protecting their status somewhat, and the rise of Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism changing the course of events to a degree. For whatever reason, becoming animalled and the social/political issues surrounding that is a much larger influence on Zinzi’s life than apartheid.
