Kaia Arahanga
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| Makaia Arahanga | |
|---|---|
| Biographical Information | |
| Born | 28 June 1985, 32 |
| City of Birth | Kakanui, New Zealand |
| Current City | London |
| Blood status | Half-blood |
| Also known as | Kaia |
| Physical Information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Eye Colour | Dark Brown |
| Magical Characteristics | |
| Wand(s) | |
| |
| Animagus Form | Kea |
| Special Abilities | Animagus |
| Education | |
| School | Other School |
| Class of | 2003 |
| Occupation | |
| |
| Character Information | |
| Playby | Keisha Castle-Hughes |
| Sparky | |
Originally from New Zealand, Kaia Arahanga came to the United Kingdom to continue her studies in astrophysics at Cambridge University while pulling double duty and working on Level Nine. She is insatiably curious, with a strong desire to learn more about the mysteries all around her.
Wand
Kauri wood, with a core made out of a ponaturi claw. It is approximately eleven and a quarter inches long, and has an intricate ridged, spiraling design carved around it from base to tip. The wand is capable of complicated spellwork, though it works best at night.
Physical Description
At first glance, Kaia looks like she packs a compact punch. Her shoulder-length, natural dark hair is lively with curls and waves, often tending towards frizzy when the weather is too dry. Her dark brown eyes are set slightly wide, and they are constantly dancing and laughing. Her tawny beige skin, once made much darker by the sun when she was a child, has paled over the past few years that she’s spent mostly indoors.
Kaia stands around average height for a woman, about 5’3”. She tends to dress a little lazily, being much more interested in comfort than style, and has been known to cycle through the same few outfits week after week.
Those who meet her are likely to note her distinct accent. To a British ear, it sounds a bit as if she’s displacing every vowel: the short “i” becomes an “uh” sound, and “ah” transposes to “eh.” Those who haven’t traveled much might peg it as Australian or South African, although Kaia is always quick to correct this assumption.
Personality Description
Although she may seem laid back and relaxed at first impression, Kaia has an insatiable curiosity to know about the world around her. She is fascinated by problems, and one of the surest ways to capture her help is to pose a conundrum to her and imply that her assistance is needed in solving it. She has been known to needle over a riddle for hours or days, coming back to it again and again until she has discovered a solution. The thought of leaving something unknown or unsaid drives her mad, and she thinks little of the consequences when in pursuit of discovering something new.
This same curiosity drives Kaia to dive deeply into subjects that catch her attention. When a topic strikes her interest, she throws herself into it close to the point of obsession. As a child with a keen memory, she could name every constellation and match her brother in rattling off the scientific name of every bird. She is quick to question assertions and unfair assumptions, which can sometimes come off as abrupt or aggressive when the recipient isn't expecting to be quizzed.
Kaia is also decidedly not a morning person. She does her best thinking late at night, whether or not others are around. She struggles to drag herself to early meetings or classes, and has been known to say cruel things that she doesn’t mean when caught too early in the morning.
History
Makaia Arahanga came into the world a full sixteen minutes before her fraternal twin brother, one stormy, wind-struck night in northeastern Otago on New Zealand’s South Island.
From the beginning, the Arahanga family was a delightful fusion of interwoven traditions: magic and mundane, Maori and pākehā. The twins’ parents, Rawiri and Marama Arahanga, formed a solid partnership together. Their jobs often required that one or the other was often traveling, and so they commonly took turns staying at home with the twins for extended periods. When their father, Rawiri, was home, he was constantly sharing stories and finding ways to turn mundane tasks into an adventure. Rawiri was from a large Maori family with magical roots, although he couldn’t cast any spells himself, and he worked in the conservation of magical species, so he was always bursting with exciting stories about exotic flora and fauna. Their mother, Marama, was a well-known magical researcher, with a British witch mother and a Muggle Kiwi as a father. She traveled all over Oceania lending her expertise to various projects. Whenever Marama was home with the twins, she’d encourage their constant questions, helping them to spend hours investigating the ‘why’ to their wonders.
Those early years were full of love and laughter. Whenever Marama or Rawiri came home from a journey, it was always cause for joy. To celebrate the first night with everyone back home, the small family would build a fort behind their house and spend the night inside it. Makaia came to love those nights most of all, making up stories together under the night sky and staying up late to learn the names of all the stars.
When Kaia and her brother Ihaka were five, the Arahanga family moved to Wellington. Marama had gotten a high-level job at Victoria University’s Centre for Magical Studies, involved in some sort of highly secretive research. The move uprooted the small family from their quiet community on the South Island and deposited them into New Zealand’s bustling, windy capital city, tucked next to Mount Victoria.
It was a hard transition in many ways. Marama’s new position required her to work even longer hours than before. She would often be gone for days or weeks on end, working on special projects or traveling. This left Rawiri to take care of their young children alone. The January following their move, Kaia and Ikala started to attend a standard Muggle primary school during the day. Once a week in the evening, their father took them to special classes inside a giant tree on Mount Victoria, where they began to learn about magical spells and traditions. And every night, after their father tucked them into bed, the two children would fall asleep listening as he wove them stories under the moonlight: exciting tales about magic and monsters, heroes and adventures far afield to unknown places.
Soon after Kaia and Ikala turned eight, their mother vanished. Marama had been on one of her extended work trips, expected back by her family any day. But one day after school, Rawiri Arahanga had solemnly sat his children down after they got home and told them, his voice breaking, that their mother wouldn’t be coming home again. The moon, he said, had stolen her away.
The sudden loss was hard on both children. Neither Kaia or Ikala were able to make sense of why their mother would leave them, especially when Rawiri never seemed to want to talk about his wife’s departure. At first, the story seemed terrifying: that the moon could be so cruel to take their mother from her family. Kaia often alternated between trying to scold it for being so awful or wanting to hide away from it, so that it couldn’t take her or her brother as well. Their father stopped telling them stories at bedtime, and it became common for the twins to fall asleep huddled safely under the covers, hidden away out of sight of the moon.
As the twins grew older, they began to think that their father’s story about the moon was stupid. Kaia and her brother dreamed up all kinds of more believable reasons as to why their mother might have disappeared: that she was working on a top secret project for the government and couldn’t return, that she’d gone off exploring the universe but couldn’t find her way back again, that she’d been kidnapped by a dark wizard, that she’d died in some horrific accident. They whispered the stories to each other late at night, still tucked under the covers so their father couldn’t hear. When they turned thirteen, Kaia and Ikala finally decided that their mother must have gotten sick of her family life and simply left. This conclusion left both of the twins with a bitter taste, and the time they spent wondering about their mother’s disappearance dwindled down to almost nothing.
When Makaia and Ikala turned fourteen, their father got a job working for a new magical conservation group, and so the three of them moved back to the South Island. Unlike many other countries, New Zealand didn’t have a tradition of one large, national magical school: most magical children learned magic from their families, or attended small classes at small local schools in the evening or during summers. As a result, the twins continued to live with their father, attending mundane classes during the day and taking on additional magical studies at the local Whare Rākaunui in the evening. They spent their winters in Oamaru, where their father helped implement a conservation plan to protect a family of taniwha that had infiltrated a local penguin colony. In the summer over the December holidays, they traveled to Arthur’s Pass and Mount Cook, where their father negotiated with mountain ogres and advised villages trying to conserve the native Antipodean Opaleye dragon.
Ikala was fascinated by all of the magical creatures hidden so close to the mundane. He became their father’s shadow, volunteering with the taniwha colony and learning as much as he could about all of the creatures all around them. Makaia, in turn, found distractions by immersing herself in whatever she could. She jumped from project to project, throwing herself into whatever might capture her interest. She spent days learning to surf along the Otago coast, or taking up a new hobby, or entering a science fair. But nights were always saved for her one consistent passion: stargazing, just like she had as a child.
Soon after the twins turned seventeen, Kaia hit upon a project that interested both of them: becoming an Animagus. It was a feat of magic more complicated than anything they’d tried before, but it resonated with Ikala’s love of animals and Kaia’s fierce desire to master new things. It took them over a year to gather the materials and successfully cast the spell. They had to start over twice, most dramatically after Ikala accidentally swallowed the mandrake leaf by mistake, but they were finally both able to transform during a lightning storm not long after their eighteenth birthday.
After finishing Grade 13 in November 2004, Kaia was left to wrestle with what she wanted to do next. Her brother had taken on an apprenticeship position working with their father, but Kaia didn’t feel quite ready to give up her studies. Instead, she decided to move to Christchurch and attend the University of Canterbury to study the stars. For three years, she took classes on astronomy and astrophysics alongside other non-magical undergraduates. At night, she traveled to special underground classrooms under the city streets for nighttime courses on magical astronomy.
In 2007, Kaia graduated with her Bachelor of Science degree. Soon after, she enrolled at the Victoria University of Wellington to study for a Master of Science degree in astrophysics. Now back in the capital, she spent the next two years studying for her degree and working in Victoria University’s Centre for Magical Studies, exploring astrophysics and the universe from a melded mundane-magical perspective. She soon found herself working along some of the same researchers that her mother had, once upon a time, though none of them were able to shed any light on how or why she had left.
As she got close to finishing her Master’s degree, Kaia once again decided to seek out a new challenge. She loved the academic life, and still constantly craved learning. In the mundane world, the natural next step was for her to enter a doctoral program. Kaia was accepted to Cavendish Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, where she started in October 2010. Faced with moving to the United Kingdom, she also applied for a new position at the United Kingdom’s Ministry for Magic, working on Level Nine as an Unspeakable.
In 2012 Kaia had been in London for a little over a year, going to school and working in the Ministry. Although she enjoys the duel challenges of her new job and her studies, she still misses home, and writes to her brother frequently.
Career
Kaia is currently working as an Unspeakable within the Department of Mysteries. Her specific realm of study lies in the Space Chamber, using concepts related to astrophysics to study how the universe works and how different celestial bodies move and interact with each other. However, she is always curious and eager to dabble in other projects as opportunities arise.
Kaia is also working towards a PhD in astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. Because of her unique dual role, the Ministry of Magic gave her special permission to check out a Time Turner for the duration of her studies. Her use of it is extremely regulated, and she must take it in to the Time Turner Office for regular inspections to make sure that it is working properly and not being abused. Once she finishes her studies, it will be relinquished to the Ministry.
Kaia has an advanced Muggle degree in astrophysics, and spent three years working in a magical lab at Victoria University of Wellington studying similar topics.
