Ahmed
Ahmed Nasir ibn Fadil
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Portrayed By Johnathan Adhout
Gender Male
Date of Birth 09/02/1997
Age 15
Zodiac Sign Virgo
Aliases Rakshasa
Place of Birth Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Current Location Xavier Academy
Occupation Student
Known Relatives Samir al Nasir ibn Fadil (Father), Aaliyah Nasir (Mother), Kadisa Nasir (Sister)
Significant Other None
Identity Secret
Known Abilities Ectoplasmic Generation & Manipulation
First Appearance November 21st, 2011

My powers are like my life. Annoying, often times disgusting, and mainly awkward… with little points of absolute beauty to them.

History

Me. As told by… well… Me.

My parents always like to tell me the story of how they met. It was over a small… and probably very illegal showing of the Lion King about six months after it came out, in a small room in the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Mom was a veterinary student in her second year, with a minor in Persian language, and Dad was there with his family visiting for his second cousin whatever’s graduation with a Masters in Geology.

Yeah, they love to get into little details like that. Of course everyone here knows the story. How dad went to mom’s father and grandfather to ask permission to see her, their first date in Mashhad’s totally boring library. Sure it’s only one of the oldest libraries on the planet with manuscripts going back at least six centuries, but c’mon. A LIBRARY?! They talk like it was the coolest thing since sliced bread and Twitter, but to me it sounds like boring. Raw, unadulterated boring.

Being a Kurd isn’t the easiest thing in the world. For one thing, you’re Muslim, but you’re not, because you look like a Caucasian infidel godless dog. Then you heap on top of that that we’re also Jewish, one of the most persecuted and vilified religions on the planet.

Unless you’re a Muslim.

Yeah. Irony.

I’m not saying I’m unhappy with how I grew up. Far from it. Mom and Dad wanted nothing but the best for me. That’s why he plied the Canadian government for a visa for mom, then they got married here, and started with making me. I don’t want to get into the details… there’s some things you don’t want to picture, chief of which is your parents doing ANYTHING sexual. Dad took on a job working in accounting for a local grocery chain owned within the community. And by community I mean the small enclave of Kurds and Muslims in Victoria that sprung up in the suburbs of the city. Mom had her degree in vet science that got her on as an assistant in a place that treated horses ridden by the RCMP. That meant they had enough to send me to… wait for it…

A Catholic School.

So, yeah, here I am at the tender age of five looking like every other Canadian kid on the block, but from a Muslim community, practicing Judaism, and walking through the doors of a Christian school. Could I BE any more out of place? Nah. Getting along is just part of the game. It’s a competitive school I was supposed to be going to for like twelve years and would lead to getting into a good American university. At least that seemed to be the goal of every parent there. We were all going to be doctors, lawyers, politicians, or the ‘next big thing’. And if you weren’t, well… you could always become an athlete. A room full of the children of parents who wanted to turn us into chronic overachievers, and all we cared about was what was for lunch.

I was a good student though. I did well in all my courses, because I wanted to please my family, to show them that their cost was worth it. Dad had long hours though, and half the time Mom ended up having to leave the city and sometimes the province for one thing or another which meant I was left home alone with aunt most nights. But she smelled like stale spices, and was trying to get me to go with her to her other older friend’s houses to play things like bridge and scrabble. There’s only so much scrabble you can take when you’re six before you look for something… ANYTHING… to get away from it. My refuge became the kitchen, and my first escape was a box of brownies that I was asked to bake while I was in there. The great thing about baking is that it’s easy. Everything is laid out so easily, that unless you walk about blind with both thumbs up your butt, you can’t get it wrong.

Except that I did. Of course. But not that any of those old ladies actually said anything about it.

So I started doing homework and making dinner and snacks for Aunt Bhija and her crew of clucking hens every night that Dad couldn’t make it home, or Mom had to take off someplace. At least mom brought back pictures and things. She even got to show me how to ride. I’m not sure what dad could teach me except how to count how many heads of lettuce per crate equals whatever. It’s not that he’s boring, it’s just that he’s really good at a boring job, and it’s not something we can talk about when everyone asks me what he does.

Where was I? Oh yeah… sorry.

Cooking became a sort of habit for me, despite my age, cookbooks from the local bookstore, both western mainstream and tastes of home for the local flavor started taking up space next to fantasy novels from the young adult section and my growing collection of schoolbooks. I don’t know why, but I started trying to have things ready for my parents when they came home, so there was always something there for them to welcome them home. They were both so impressed that I was so gifted in the kitchen so young, on top of everything else. I wasn’t really gifted, I was bored, and I couldn’t tell them the only reason I was learning was to keep out from under theAunts.

It was around seven that cooking stopped being my only joy and distraction. It was a Sunday and we’d come back from temple. Dad was flipping channels and went across this cartoon I’d never seen before called Silverwing. A story of talking bats and their adventures in a forest in a far away land. I only say about half the episode, but from right there I wanted more. I went through some of the old VHS stuff my parents had, the changeover to DVD not having completed itself as of yet, and I found a copy of the Lion King. And I watched that.

Again.

And again.

And again.

At least my parents didn’t mind me watching it. They thought it was sweet that I watched the film they fell in love over.

When I wasn’t doing homework, I had a television on the kitchen table and was watching whatever I could. Disney became a wonderful source of filling this itch I wasn’t aware that I had, almost distracting me into several stove-top disasters. It wasn’t until I came across something at random on a library computer that I ever learned the term ‘furry’.

But once I found furry, I didn’t want to let it go.

By the time I was ten, Mom and Dad finally got us a home computer and I became certain about three things in my life. I actually enjoyed cooking, I loved snow leopards because of their roots in my parent’s homeland, and I was a furry. The parents didn’t question my odd taste in decoration because I kept my grades up, and plied them with homemade desserts and mom’s favorite spice treats from home. I avoided the whole plushy thing, but poster prints of great cats were all over my walls, and my blanket was patterned like a snow leopard. I was now also helping take care of my four year old sister Kadisa, which meant dinner wasn’t just whatever I came up with. I had to start making things that would make Mom happy that her little star in the night sky would love.

I still don’t get why she thinks Mac and cheese out of the box tastes better than the good baked stuff.

The first time this… thing… manifested was when I was twelve. I was in the middle of my fencing class… yes, I got to take fencing… and we were doing work on a stage-fight when I started to feel wet. Someone else pointed out that I looked soaked. I looked down and I was wet, head to toe, like I’d been dunked in a bucket of water. Going off to try and clean it off, I watched as the stuff just evaporated off of me.

It happened again a few days later, and then a week after that, and I was beginning to think that someone was playing a practical joke on me. But I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I tried to watch out for someone with a bucket, or with a spray, but nothing happened. It began to not happen again, and so I just put it off as a practical joke. I got back to being focused on the cooking, the fencing team, getting good grades, and a beginning hobby of online role-playing.

Then I woke up in a spherical bubble of clear gel, and thought I was going to drown.

It popped, and I was laying there in an evaporating cloud of junk that tasted like something I couldn’t describe when I realized that those weird episodes weren’t anything but me. I didn’t understand what it was, or why it was happening. I couldn’t tell anyone at the time because no one would believe me. So I ended up getting a rep for having a weird sweat problem at school. I was cool with it… after all, I still got good grades, I didn’t get in any fights at school, and my teachers generally liked me… so it was nothing my parents could throw a fit about. Believe me, you don’t know what a fit is until you have two Jewish parents laying into you. In three languages.

With my Bar Mitzvah fast approaching, I had settled my life into a routine between school, food, fencing classes, and my nightly excursions online when I wasn’t busy being someone’s favorite little chef or babysitting Kadira. At this point my parents were pimping me out to events in the neighborhood and for temple events to help make things. Sure I was always willing, I mean these are our people here, but still I could always tell when people were coming by to get Ahmed the Cook, and not to just have a conversation. About the only problem my parents saw was that I didn’t really have any friends they knew. Well of course not… for one, the few guys I hung out with at school would feel uncomfortable around us, and two, most of my real friends were online.

When it happened, it was because of everything going on. The Bar Mitzvah was being planned, and I was supposed to do all of these things for it, to prove that I was a man. Suddenly I was the center of attention of the family, and everyone else was looking at me too. I couldn’t get any time online at nights, I was too busy suddenly with girls being thrown at me because I was going to be ‘of age’ and I should start looking for a good wife. Caught between worlds when all I really wanted was to be left alone.

So I was laying there, staring up at one of my nicer snow leopard posters, and suddenly the goo started bubbling up. This time instead of panicking, I decided to just let it. Maybe I could drown or something and this would all be over. I just wanted to sleep without being bothered, I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to be like the cat I was staring at and not have a care in the world.

I woke up to a scream.

It was my father screaming. I couldn’t figure out why. I got up on my paws and started to stretch out, shaking out my fur, and taking a look around the room when I realized that the world was in a kind of black and white overtone. That was the first clue, but I didn’t think too much of it in my tired state. So instead I padded off the bed and tried to see what the problem was.

The broom whacking me on the nose came out of left field. Apparently mom was a crack shot with a stick too.

It surprised me so much that the form of the snow leopard I’d become burst into clear goop that covered the hallway, and I was left laying there and panting. But I was changed too. It was like I’d been in a cocoon and came out a moth. Not a butterfly… those are just lame.

I thought the spots and the hair were cool, honestly. I looked really kickass in my own opinion, kinda like that old Thundercats cartoon. Even the hair. I didn’t look old, just exotic. It didn’t impress my parents one lick. Instead I was made to put on a butt-ton of makeup, hair dye, and a pair of colored contacts to make me look as close to normal as possible. It became a topic we didn’t TALK about.

They pulled me out of school, out of my LIFE, and pretty much made it clear I wasn’t to let anyone see me as I was. Overnight I went from pampered to pariah. About the only life I had that was still worth anything was online. So I sorta walked away from it all. I stopped going out, I stopped really doing anything except living in a fantasy world, where what I was was normal… and not stared at like I was a freak by the people who supposedly loved me.

I was the one who found out about the Xavier school, and I was the one who sent them the emails, and the only reason I’m getting out of this taxi right about now to walk into the school is because I decided that enough was enough. I could wallow, or I could get on with it.

I’m a guy who makes goo and can turn into a big cat. How much weirder could life BE.

Powers

Ectoplasm is a psycho-reactive substance, meaning that it is often shaped by the moods and motivations of the person wielding it, or the spiritual energy of a place, which has interesting implications for a young man who's primary ability is to generate this substance on a constant basis.

This substance is constantly generated out of Ahmed's pores, which creates a constant low-level scent of corpse ash around him that only those with an enhanced sense of smell can detect, but can also manifest as blue, oily bubbles in water.

Timeline

  • Ahmed has arrived at school, been given a roommate, and already met the biggest jerk on campus.
  • He has been placed in detention once for wrecking the recreation room.
  • After being attacked by Dire Wolves during the Dracula attack on the school, Ahmed has a permanent scar on his neck.
  • Sometime just before Christmas, and just after the Sentinel attack, Ahmed become fully anthromorphic.

Quotes

  • "Did you just ask me to say something… Jewish? Oi."
  • "The thing about food is… it's the one thing we all know we have in common that we LIKE."
  • "No, it's true… Furries DO ruin everything!"
  • About Wolverine, "…he smells…"

Trivia

  • Ahmed collects Legos, Skylanders, and general furry-related stuff.
  • He thinks comic book fans are weird.
  • Ahmed actively played World of Warcraft, until recently. Now he's into Guild Wars 2.
  • Will often times be found around campus in his cat form.
  • When Ahmed naps, he tends to end up in positions to make some gymnasts jealous.

Gallery

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