Character development | NPC Rival

Summary: The Flighty Genius

Enki-Iddinam is a kind and vivid mind with a foot in the autistic spectrum and the other moving across the gender spectrum. A spectrum collector, if you will.

They don’t always get social cues but are warm and gracious. A philosopher-mathematician investigating the concordance between bodies, cities, and stars, they prioritize knowledge but don’t always bother to explain their reasoning, so they can come across as a bit random and arbitrary.

Archetype: Obtuse Mathematician

Themes: Order / Discovery / Dogma

Inspirations:
King George (Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story): clearly neurodivergent, obsessed with astronomy as well as more down-to-earth forms of science but Enki is more functional around people, crowds and stressful situations.
Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory) but not that much of a jerk.
Entrapta (She-Ra): absorbed by her research, loves very small delicacies, lonely, probable ADHD on top of ASD but not that cheerful!
Historical:
Trans Saints: This is a more Christian reference, but we have numerous examples of people whose journey can be read as a trans one: Eugène-Eugénie, Matrôna-Babylas, Joseph-Hildegonde, Thècle of Iconium… All those people were « women » who lived as men for a time or until their death, their assigned birth gender sometimes discovered after their death. Those examples go as far back as the 1st century CE and are very distinct from opportunity cross-dressing, for example in order to avoid trouble during travels. This kind of non-binarity was accepted by the church and even rewarded, as long as it’d come with abstinence.
Galli: Another example of gender non-conforming can be found in the Galli, eunuch priests of the goddess Cybele (a piece of religion that was imported from the far east of the Empire), who presented themselves in « feminine » attire, breaking the gender norms of Rome.
Hypathia of Alexandria: While Hypathia was a woman whose gender was not debated, she’s a strong example of a non-male scientific/philosophic mind in the Roman Empire, as is the less-known Pandrosion of Alexandria.

Game Role

Enki-Iddinam is the most science-focused of the rivals, a seemingly detached mind governing an island that’s at least partly an experimental terrain to them. It should noted that their vision of science differs from ours: during this era, science and religion were interconnected: they were part of one single effort to explain the world all that happened in it in a systemic frame. Enki comes from this school of thought, but takes it further: they want to draw a paradigm making sense of what happens in the world at different levels: in the skies, in the bodies, and in the cities, all at once.

They’re essentially oblivious to the player’s presence and won’t be hostile unless much provoked. They can, however, be open to exchanging ideas and trading knowledge.

GOAL
Wants to gather lost knowledge and re-open a new imperial library.
Pursues Grand Universal Truths and the Harmonious Conjunction of Spheres
STRATEGY
Will ally with those who pursue technology.
Favours knowledge sharing. Will have the player share tech.
Their second priority is fire safety.
COSTS & ROADBLOCKS
Due to their relative lack of « common » social skills, and their tendency to hold others to unattainable standards, they struggle to make allies.

Characteristics:

Appreciates local musical tradition but you have the sense that it’s not really on the same level or way as everyone else: they hear maths in melodies.
Highly intelligent
Critical mind
Distracted by their research
May be obtuse, socially inept but doesn’t dwell on it.
Agender / genderfluid
Not aggressive, they have things to do.
Concerned chiefly with geometry, math, and astronomy.
They see the world as following a similar system on different scales. Veins as the roads of the body, roads as the veins of the city, and stellar pathways as the /roads of the sky.
Their vision of science roots in the Babylonian one, deeply ingrained in omens and auguries and entrail-related divination – but to them, that is gone past. Yes, roots from that but they’re eager to discover new things, to observe and induct new facts.
Definitely ace
A little whimsical
Offers the best sweets in the Empire
If you give them an animal as a gift, a good omen may come from it and give buffs
Other than that, knowledge-based items are the stuff they like.
Builds streets at 90°, loves order and systemic approach.
Bad at reading single people, quite good at reading crowds
Can design a new aqueduct system as well as a delicate water clock

Background:

Born to a rich Babylonian family, in the very eastern fringes of the Roman Empire. Only child of their parents, who tried and tried but couldn’t get pregnant again.

Tries on boy’s clothes during travels (this was a common tactic to ensure a little more safety to female-assigned people), doesn’t want to take them off.

Their parents’ position being threatened by the lack of legitimate heir for their property, they play along with what they perceive like cross-dressing, at least until find a suitable spouse for their child.

The freedom provided by the male attire and the now-ascertained position of their parents allows Enki to study the arts, maths, religion, sciences of the body… just ingest any piece of knowledge they can. By the time they’re 15, they speak 6 languages (7 if you count maths as a language, which they do) and never them to talk to people – they just wanted to read scrolls in their original language.

Their parents are now inclined to dress them back as a girl and betroth them, but Enki is not interested.

They make a friend of one of their parents’ acquaintances, a governor impressed with their understanding of hydraulic systems, and get him to take them to the City. There, their ambivalent gender expression is seen as no more than an Eastern oddity. Plus power and money come before gender transgression, then as now.

They charm Emperor Lucius with their apparent ease to read into stars as well as innards. Lucius is very interested in the future, for very different reasons than Enki ends up being this governor’s advisor a few years later, actually taking charge of most innovations in the province.

When he dies, Enki naturally takes his place. Lucius likes to exchange letters with them and move them around because they generally leave the provinces than they found them, which Enki is fine with as long as it allows them to pursue Knowledge and the building of their Theory of Spheres Conjunction.

Daily Life

• They usually rise quite late because they spent the night observing the skies
• But not that late because they don’t need that much sleep (or rather, their head buzzes with too many ideas)
• The baths of their city have a private part just for them, where they can go and refocus/dabble with ideas (as scientific research demands a measure of creativity)
• Sometimes pops by a school of rhetoric to see if any new ideas might be gleaned there
• Lectures servants and ambassadors about science indiscriminately
• Most of their time is spent on their research and experiments
• Every once in a while, they receive a missive from the Emperor, who requires them to draw a horoscope or to read their future in an animal’s entrails. This is annoying but also part of the price of the freedom they enjoy. Plus innards are really interesting if you want to learn more about circulation.

Quotes:

Voice is quite low-pitched for a woman – or quite high-pitched for a man, something in-between. Casting should think of speech therapy some trans people go through in order to alter their voices, but this character should have gone only halfway through.

Trigger	Line	Comment
Sample dialogue	The moon’s position shows it can be no other way.	Arbitrary, dogmatic, knowledge of the Heavens
War declared	Can’t you see the stars do not promise you a swift victory? I’ve studied your street paths. You see, a door resembles a liver. And right now, I wouldn’t put either of yours on trial…	Disappointed, eager to get this over with, has better things to do
Trade rights granted	Let us see what we can learn from each other.	Cautious, gives you a chance to impress them.

Visual detail:

This character is admittedly trans / a non-binary person. We’re working with the assumption that they would have been assigned female at birth, and while not every person has to be androgynous, we would like them to be as gender ambiguous as possible. Breasts should be, if not entirely strapped, remain reasonably flat under their (masculine) clothes.

Their hair is extremely dark, thick and curly.