Ladli Nadia Zahir

Basic Information
Current year: 2023

Age: 17

Music

 * Bubblegum Bitch - Marina and the Diamonds
 * The Lament of Eustace Scrubb - The Oh Hellos

Background
[TW violence, death] Her parents were ever so excited to be having twins. Right up until the last moment, they planned for their two new babies, only for their little girl to strangle her brother on the way out.

The ghost of her twin seemed to follow Ladli all through her childhood. She became unshakably attached to her family and friends and experienced some hardcore separation anxiety, particularly with her older brother, Mamun. And while she was undoubtedly clever, Ladli retained a very childlike worldview even as she became a teenager. But this was solvable, and Ladli was sweet-natured. It was never meant to turn into a real problem.

But when Ladli was thirteen, while sitting in her grandparents' kitchen, her mother burst through the door and dropped dead in front of their faces. Even worse than this crushing loss, was her family's assertion that her beloved older brother, now missing, had done the deed. She didn't believe it for even a second, but couldn't rationalize what was really going on. Why would her family lie? And on a farm in the middle of nowhere, who could have killed her mother like that anyway?

Over the next few years, the family of three struggled to cope with the hole left by the two who were missing. Ladli's father had always been a gentle soul, and her younger brother seemed to have inherited this with a generous dose of sensitivity, so it was during this time that Ladli became her family's self-appointed protector, slowly becoming more and more aggressive towards any perceived threats. Her father expressed his disapproval about this, so she stopped talking about it. But in her mind, she was still the single thing that could keep her from losing her family again.

The other thing her and her father disagreed on was communication with her grandparents and extended family. For reasons he hadn't fully explained to Ladli, he was unwilling to see them again. But Ladli loved her family, and when she was turning seventeen, she decided for this one important birthday she would defy her father and go to their farm to see them again.

But her naive trust in them landed her in trouble. Alone, without any of her family there to help her, she was held down with a knife over her and told the truth about what happened to her mother—her family, the people she had trusted, were the ones who'd killed her and blamed Mamun for it. And now they were going to do the same to her.

She was lucky. Her prodigal brother arrived just in time to save her, and with the scars on his face to prove their story true. And when they saw that, her extended family were ready to let the two of them leave. But they hadn't counted on exactly how much of a storm had been brewing inside Ladli in the three years since their last crime.

She'd trusted them. Even if she'd never believed what they said about Mamun, she'd believed in their intentions just as she had done since she was a child. And they'd betrayed her.

So she killed them all.

After that, she dragged her brother home with her, thrilled to have him back. It took time for him to adjust back into the family but that was okay, they had time. At least until the zombie apocalypse hit. Still, even then they were in a safe zone, and if she had her family, she would be fine.

Not that there weren't problems. Such a dire situation tends to bring out the worst in people, and those people might be a threat, but you could say that Ladli's got a taste for blood since her seventeenth birthday, and now the threat of death is all around, she's far less willing to compromise on when she takes her bloody revenge, so much so that the string of mysterious murders in the safe zone has earned her a nickname. But no one suspects that the sweet, polite Ladli could ever be the culprit. At least, no one except her older brother...