Naja's timeline is.... difficult. We know somethings. We know that when she was little she and her dad were basically homeless vagabonds, always in debt, often on the run from people who wanted to hunt her father down. He taught bitty Najaran a lot during those years, like how she should never use her cards against non-Cepters, and his own personal code of honor. What little we see of him shows him to be a good man and a good father in a bad situation.
Naja at some point winds up with Master Horowitz on Gilman Island, and it is said she is there for ten years. But nothing says when she is brought there, or what happened to her father. Her mother is NEVER mentioned in canon at all.
We get a flashback to her on Gilman island in which she looks signifgantly younger than she was with her father, just to make things more confusing.
In this flashback, a young Najaran was playing in the attic, where she found a man headed staff that was dormant. She began gnawing on it (not sure if this was teething making her even younger than she looked, or just evidence that Najaran's insane appetite was always a thing) and it came to life. This was Gooligan. Gooligan had no clue who or what he was, and Master Horowitz didn't know either. From that day on, he was Najaran's closest companion, and often the only adult in the room in oh so many ways whenever Master Horowitz left. He's, in a lot of ways, Jiminy to her Pinocchio (even though he is the one seemingly made of wood)
We don't get much in the ten years she's there other than that one flashback.
The story begins with Master Horowitz returning from one of his many trips abroad with news. A group of Cepters - yes that's right a group - calling themselves the Black Cepters are on the move, but no matter what he does, they always seem a step ahead. So he asks Najaran to help him out, and to give her a chance to see the outside world for the first time in ten years.
Najaran is sent, with Gooligan, to Soron, a desert town that used to be a harbor town. It is one of the few places that accept and even welcomes Cepters, because ever since the water dried up, their only real revenue is the tourist trade of the annual Cepter tournament they hold.
She was told to keep a low profile and investigate, but after losing her temper at a competitor who was harassing the staff at the inn where she was eating, she winds up in the tournament herself.
The tournament is interrupted when a reckless person called Zeneth the Dragon-eyed shows up and attacks, seemingly at random. The lord of Soron, instead of calling his guards out on this intruder who nearly killed half of the spectators invites him to join the remainder of the tournament. For reasons known only to himself, he agrees.
During the first part of the tournament, Najaran had impressed many people. Most importantly to her in the moment is the Innkeeper who feeds her a lot to celebrate her wins and to thank her, but more important plot wise are Sir Owen who broke up the fight between her and the rude customer, and the rude customer himself, Chimino. During her battle against Chimino, she was brought up short by the fact that his cards loved him, even when he treated them horribly, and she refused to keep fighting. She won, but he wound up rethinking a lot of things, and ended up giving her the card that saved her life later on, Cait Sith. The other important connection was Sir Owen who had broken up the bar fight, and was impressed enough with her that he sought to ensure that Zeneth would not kill her - and half the town - in their duel the next day. To that end he ambushed Zeneth for one major purpose. He his a trap in Zeneth's most deadly spell, Tempest, shattering it when he next used it. He almost died doing this. Between him and Najaran, Zeneth didn't wind up destroying Soron.
Naja was declared the winner of the Tournament, and was invited to a feast in her honor thrown by the lord of Soron. At that feast she met another Man0headed Cane who said that Gooligan was a traitor who forgot his true mission. And she was almost the main course of the feast, being served up to Beelezebub, Lord of Flies. Beelezebub is an "anti-creature" created by Balteas, one of the gods. Beelezebub is one of the four Elemental Lords that were meant to destroy this world so that Balteas could use the power of the Culdcept to remake the world as he wished it.
Zeneth showed up as she was about to be eaten, ticked off that they didn't get their battle finished properly. He didn't care what else was going on, he just wanted her to admit that he was the best, even offered to save her if she said as much. The Lord of flies decided to destroy Zeneth as well, which was an insult he couldn't leave unanswered, so he attacked. Najaran, ticked off now at pretty much everyone, decided to EAT the bindings that had immobilized her. Just... let us please take a moment to realize that Naja was bound by a trap card that wrapped her and Gooligan in thick leather straps that were held together with metal. And she ATE HER WAY FREE because she was ticked off. Okay. Moving on.
She then proceeds to blunt force wail on Beelesebub and Zeneth both with Gooligan before getting her emergency card from inside his... mouth...? Seriously, where did he hide that, he was talking! (This is also where she learns never to leave her deck behind, even if she wants to let her cards rest at the Inn). She summons Eidolon (picture the Craving creature from the old honeycombs commercials) which chews through a chain to drop a chandelier on one of the Black Cepters. The Black Cepters decide to nope out and teleport away with Beelzebub because keeping him safe is their number one priority. (The whole Tournament, it turns out, was to feed powerful Cepters to him so he could regain his strength)
With the Lord of Flies gone, it begins to rain. Salt water. And fish. The ocean is back. Soron is saved. Njaran is hailed as a hero, though no one knows the details. Zeneth, ticked, swears his revenge while she tucks into a seafood feast.
Naja went back to the isle to report to Master Horowitz, who had a fit about her sticking with Gooligan after what she learned. She insisted that the war of the gods was all mythology and he was blowing things out of proportion, so he sent her on a quest to peer through an artifact he had hidden deep within a mountain that shared the crater the island sat in. She found the Dragon eye and through it saw the war of the gods as remembered by the dragon who fight in it, and was the one who trained Master Horowitz and his friend way back when.
She came to in her own bed, a day later, filled with the sadness of the Dragons who saw their kind die out. Somehow Master Horowitz was now fine with Gooligan again. She asked about the dragon's other eye, and Horowitz said that it might have been destroyed in fire.
Horowitz sent Najaran and Gooligan to his friend Grubel in the Bistream forest. He told her to bring a gift then sent her off via a transportation circle. Najaran, unaware of how meticulously the Dimension Door spell had to be calculated didn't realize that having snuck extra food would mess up the spell until they were already falling within it. (Dimension Door is a spell card, just to add to the oddness of how things fail to make sense in this series.) She dumped the extra food, and they fell out of the spell somewhere in the forest, where a carnivorous plant immediately tried to eat Najaran. She wound up eating it instead and a week later found the only human con trolled village in Bistream.
The village had a lot os "searchers". Treasure hunters trying to find the treasures locked within the forest, but they weren't doing well because of a powerful guardian who didn't want the humans to succeed. The Guardian sent a card creature, Gargoyle, to give the humans a warning that they needed to leave. Gargoyle attacked and Najaran ran to aid the injured, summoning Knight. She saved the people and as thanks they arrested her and took her cards. She gained some sympathy for Zeneth, guessing he'd been treated like this a lot, and some deeper understanding of the troubles her father endured.
Najaran was "saved" by a searcher named Alta and Alta's crew, who hoped to use Najaran to het past the Guardian Cepter to claim the treasure of Bistream. She was given the choice between joining them or staying there to deal with the repercussions of what they did to break her out. They had her cards. She went with them. the trip to the first gate was... not smooth. Najaran accidentally attacked some Woodfolk thinking they were trees, Alta had swapped her cards for playing cards which almost got them killed, and over all the team... did not work well together or trust each other.
They were nearly to the land of the nymphs and the gates they guard, when another group of searchers attacked them. Najaran refused to draw her cards against humans, even ones that were trying to kill her, if they weren't Cepters, and they weren't. They would have been lost and killed except that the guardian sent her Gargoyle to attack them all, because humans at the threshold of the gates were not to be tolerated. We are told that her power was over 40,00 so she couldn't possibly be human according to Gooligan. She destroyed the group of searchers that had attacked Alta's group, because their leader offered a huge reward for the Guardian's head. Their leader retreated, leaving his injured people behind. Najaran raced in, even being told that winning was impossible, and used her cards to defend against the Gargoyle.
She yelled at the other searcher for leaving his people then yelled at the Guardian for continuing to attack them once they were helpless. The Guardian (I'm just going to use her name - Kigi- from here on out) nearly killed Najaran, but she listened to Alta, and more, she listened to the forest. She decided to give Alta's small group one chance to test the gates themselves. When she found evidence that the Forest was in danger, Kigi took away their choice and used Fly and her Gargoyle to send them to the first gate.
The first test was a sealed room with odd walls. On the floor were the skeletons of people who had died in that room, their torsos twisted, jaws unhinged. Old corpses and new mixed together. Then mushrooms grew from the skeletons. Suddenly everything seemed ridiculous and silly, and they all began to laugh. The alchemist of the group found the reason in his book, the mushroom spores make people laugh themselves to death. And they were all starting to fall pray to it. worse, every time they were attacked, more grew, son that either they'd die of laughter or be smothered. Najaran, in true Najaran fashion, decided that the mushrooms that were killing them all looked yummy. She started to eat, then realized it wasn't fair to be the only one enjoying. So she summoned all her creatures and together they ate the mushrooms even faster than they could reproduce. Then they found the main mushroom and she and Knight went after it. It grew so much that it smothered itself and the room opened with the words "You passed the first hate. No matter hoe adaptable a species is... ... no species can survive by itself forever."
Resting between gates... so Najaran could eat... they were attacked by a corrupted Woodfolk. Working together as a team, perhaps for the first time, they were able to purge the flowers that had infected the woodfolk, freeing them from the corruption, saving them.
They finally found the second gate, and the challenge was to catch a specific dryad, but grabbing the wrong one turned them into trees. Najaran figured out which was the right one because "I can always tell the yummy vegetables from the not-so-yummy!" Since the second Gate was a tree that wasn't so healthy, the least healthy or "yummy" dryad had to be the right one... Najaran almost had her, but she got away and Najaran became a carnivorous plant. But the woodfolk helped the last member of the team, in thanks for saving them.
Kigi declared this cheating until she realized how much the Woodfolk cared for them. If the creatures of the forest cared for them, she would hold her arrows and allow them to take the test of the third gate.
The third test was to deal with a zombie dragon. (This is where we are told that Najaran is forbidden to use Spell cards, despite there being no issue with that in book one, as another place where the canon contradicts itself.) Naja, having seen the war throgh the Dragon's Eye realizes that the dragon they face doesn't know that it is dead,. that the war is over. Naja was talked into using a spell - Wind Cutter, and nearly killed them all. What was left of the zombie kept trying to fight, but Najran spoke to it, thanked it, told it that humans were stronger now and didn't need his protection any more, that his spirit should join hi friends before he became something too far from what he had been. She set his spirit free, turning the test of power into another test of heart, after all. She used one more Spell card, Fly, to help his spirit ascend.
Kiji thanked Najaran for setting free the spirit of an old friend and letting him be at peace. Then she told them of the legand of the Mistrals, the ones the Nymphs were waiting for to destroy Balteas and save the forest.
They made it into the city of Bistream and were seperated from Kigi. When they came to her again, she had been taken over by darkness and was ruthlessly slaying the searchers who had followed Alta's crew. Najaran and Kigi wound up in a Cepter battle. Alta's crew jumped in, despite not being Cepters, to help as they could. (At one point wee are told that Kigi is down to about 37,000 magic points, and Najaran at about 500. But that still doesn't tell us where Najaran started... or what these numbers mean in a practical sense. They do not line up with the game's math, which makes it really really hard to gauge her power.) (also this is where Kigi stips referring to her kind as Nymphs and uses the word Elves.)
After beating Kigi, Kigi explained more about the mistrals and the curse on the elves of Bisteam and then opened the final gate for them. Najaran declared that she and the dying Kigi should be friends and survive together and cook nymph food together. Because Najaran has her priorities.
Part 2 of 4
Personal History:
Naja's timeline is.... difficult. We know somethings. We know that when she was little she and her dad were basically homeless vagabonds, always in debt, often on the run from people who wanted to hunt her father down. He taught bitty Najaran a lot during those years, like how she should never use her cards against non-Cepters, and his own personal code of honor. What little we see of him shows him to be a good man and a good father in a bad situation.
Naja at some point winds up with Master Horowitz on Gilman Island, and it is said she is there for ten years. But nothing says when she is brought there, or what happened to her father. Her mother is NEVER mentioned in canon at all.
We get a flashback to her on Gilman island in which she looks signifgantly younger than she was with her father, just to make things more confusing.
In this flashback, a young Najaran was playing in the attic, where she found a man headed staff that was dormant. She began gnawing on it (not sure if this was teething making her even younger than she looked, or just evidence that Najaran's insane appetite was always a thing) and it came to life. This was Gooligan. Gooligan had no clue who or what he was, and Master Horowitz didn't know either. From that day on, he was Najaran's closest companion, and often the only adult in the room in oh so many ways whenever Master Horowitz left. He's, in a lot of ways, Jiminy to her Pinocchio (even though he is the one seemingly made of wood)
We don't get much in the ten years she's there other than that one flashback.
The story begins with Master Horowitz returning from one of his many trips abroad with news. A group of Cepters - yes that's right a group - calling themselves the Black Cepters are on the move, but no matter what he does, they always seem a step ahead. So he asks Najaran to help him out, and to give her a chance to see the outside world for the first time in ten years.
Najaran is sent, with Gooligan, to Soron, a desert town that used to be a harbor town. It is one of the few places that accept and even welcomes Cepters, because ever since the water dried up, their only real revenue is the tourist trade of the annual Cepter tournament they hold.
She was told to keep a low profile and investigate, but after losing her temper at a competitor who was harassing the staff at the inn where she was eating, she winds up in the tournament herself.
The tournament is interrupted when a reckless person called Zeneth the Dragon-eyed shows up and attacks, seemingly at random. The lord of Soron, instead of calling his guards out on this intruder who nearly killed half of the spectators invites him to join the remainder of the tournament. For reasons known only to himself, he agrees.
During the first part of the tournament, Najaran had impressed many people. Most importantly to her in the moment is the Innkeeper who feeds her a lot to celebrate her wins and to thank her, but more important plot wise are Sir Owen who broke up the fight between her and the rude customer, and the rude customer himself, Chimino. During her battle against Chimino, she was brought up short by the fact that his cards loved him, even when he treated them horribly, and she refused to keep fighting. She won, but he wound up rethinking a lot of things, and ended up giving her the card that saved her life later on, Cait Sith. The other important connection was Sir Owen who had broken up the bar fight, and was impressed enough with her that he sought to ensure that Zeneth would not kill her - and half the town - in their duel the next day. To that end he ambushed Zeneth for one major purpose. He his a trap in Zeneth's most deadly spell, Tempest, shattering it when he next used it. He almost died doing this. Between him and Najaran, Zeneth didn't wind up destroying Soron.
Naja was declared the winner of the Tournament, and was invited to a feast in her honor thrown by the lord of Soron. At that feast she met another Man0headed Cane who said that Gooligan was a traitor who forgot his true mission. And she was almost the main course of the feast, being served up to Beelezebub, Lord of Flies. Beelezebub is an "anti-creature" created by Balteas, one of the gods. Beelezebub is one of the four Elemental Lords that were meant to destroy this world so that Balteas could use the power of the Culdcept to remake the world as he wished it.
Zeneth showed up as she was about to be eaten, ticked off that they didn't get their battle finished properly. He didn't care what else was going on, he just wanted her to admit that he was the best, even offered to save her if she said as much. The Lord of flies decided to destroy Zeneth as well, which was an insult he couldn't leave unanswered, so he attacked. Najaran, ticked off now at pretty much everyone, decided to EAT the bindings that had immobilized her. Just... let us please take a moment to realize that Naja was bound by a trap card that wrapped her and Gooligan in thick leather straps that were held together with metal. And she ATE HER WAY FREE because she was ticked off. Okay. Moving on.
She then proceeds to blunt force wail on Beelesebub and Zeneth both with Gooligan before getting her emergency card from inside his... mouth...? Seriously, where did he hide that, he was talking! (This is also where she learns never to leave her deck behind, even if she wants to let her cards rest at the Inn). She summons Eidolon (picture the Craving creature from the old honeycombs commercials) which chews through a chain to drop a chandelier on one of the Black Cepters. The Black Cepters decide to nope out and teleport away with Beelzebub because keeping him safe is their number one priority. (The whole Tournament, it turns out, was to feed powerful Cepters to him so he could regain his strength)
With the Lord of Flies gone, it begins to rain. Salt water. And fish. The ocean is back. Soron is saved. Njaran is hailed as a hero, though no one knows the details. Zeneth, ticked, swears his revenge while she tucks into a seafood feast.
Naja went back to the isle to report to Master Horowitz, who had a fit about her sticking with Gooligan after what she learned. She insisted that the war of the gods was all mythology and he was blowing things out of proportion, so he sent her on a quest to peer through an artifact he had hidden deep within a mountain that shared the crater the island sat in. She found the Dragon eye and through it saw the war of the gods as remembered by the dragon who fight in it, and was the one who trained Master Horowitz and his friend way back when.
She came to in her own bed, a day later, filled with the sadness of the Dragons who saw their kind die out. Somehow Master Horowitz was now fine with Gooligan again. She asked about the dragon's other eye, and Horowitz said that it might have been destroyed in fire.
Horowitz sent Najaran and Gooligan to his friend Grubel in the Bistream forest. He told her to bring a gift then sent her off via a transportation circle. Najaran, unaware of how meticulously the Dimension Door spell had to be calculated didn't realize that having snuck extra food would mess up the spell until they were already falling within it. (Dimension Door is a spell card, just to add to the oddness of how things fail to make sense in this series.) She dumped the extra food, and they fell out of the spell somewhere in the forest, where a carnivorous plant immediately tried to eat Najaran. She wound up eating it instead and a week later found the only human con trolled village in Bistream.
The village had a lot os "searchers". Treasure hunters trying to find the treasures locked within the forest, but they weren't doing well because of a powerful guardian who didn't want the humans to succeed. The Guardian sent a card creature, Gargoyle, to give the humans a warning that they needed to leave. Gargoyle attacked and Najaran ran to aid the injured, summoning Knight. She saved the people and as thanks they arrested her and took her cards. She gained some sympathy for Zeneth, guessing he'd been treated like this a lot, and some deeper understanding of the troubles her father endured.
Najaran was "saved" by a searcher named Alta and Alta's crew, who hoped to use Najaran to het past the Guardian Cepter to claim the treasure of Bistream. She was given the choice between joining them or staying there to deal with the repercussions of what they did to break her out. They had her cards. She went with them. the trip to the first gate was... not smooth. Najaran accidentally attacked some Woodfolk thinking they were trees, Alta had swapped her cards for playing cards which almost got them killed, and over all the team... did not work well together or trust each other.
They were nearly to the land of the nymphs and the gates they guard, when another group of searchers attacked them. Najaran refused to draw her cards against humans, even ones that were trying to kill her, if they weren't Cepters, and they weren't. They would have been lost and killed except that the guardian sent her Gargoyle to attack them all, because humans at the threshold of the gates were not to be tolerated. We are told that her power was over 40,00 so she couldn't possibly be human according to Gooligan. She destroyed the group of searchers that had attacked Alta's group, because their leader offered a huge reward for the Guardian's head. Their leader retreated, leaving his injured people behind. Najaran raced in, even being told that winning was impossible, and used her cards to defend against the Gargoyle.
She yelled at the other searcher for leaving his people then yelled at the Guardian for continuing to attack them once they were helpless. The Guardian (I'm just going to use her name - Kigi- from here on out) nearly killed Najaran, but she listened to Alta, and more, she listened to the forest. She decided to give Alta's small group one chance to test the gates themselves. When she found evidence that the Forest was in danger, Kigi took away their choice and used Fly and her Gargoyle to send them to the first gate.
The first test was a sealed room with odd walls. On the floor were the skeletons of people who had died in that room, their torsos twisted, jaws unhinged. Old corpses and new mixed together. Then mushrooms grew from the skeletons. Suddenly everything seemed ridiculous and silly, and they all began to laugh. The alchemist of the group found the reason in his book, the mushroom spores make people laugh themselves to death. And they were all starting to fall pray to it. worse, every time they were attacked, more grew, son that either they'd die of laughter or be smothered. Najaran, in true Najaran fashion, decided that the mushrooms that were killing them all looked yummy. She started to eat, then realized it wasn't fair to be the only one enjoying. So she summoned all her creatures and together they ate the mushrooms even faster than they could reproduce. Then they found the main mushroom and she and Knight went after it. It grew so much that it smothered itself and the room opened with the words "You passed the first hate. No matter hoe adaptable a species is... ... no species can survive by itself forever."
Resting between gates... so Najaran could eat... they were attacked by a corrupted Woodfolk. Working together as a team, perhaps for the first time, they were able to purge the flowers that had infected the woodfolk, freeing them from the corruption, saving them.
They finally found the second gate, and the challenge was to catch a specific dryad, but grabbing the wrong one turned them into trees. Najaran figured out which was the right one because "I can always tell the yummy vegetables from the not-so-yummy!" Since the second Gate was a tree that wasn't so healthy, the least healthy or "yummy" dryad had to be the right one... Najaran almost had her, but she got away and Najaran became a carnivorous plant. But the woodfolk helped the last member of the team, in thanks for saving them.
Kigi declared this cheating until she realized how much the Woodfolk cared for them. If the creatures of the forest cared for them, she would hold her arrows and allow them to take the test of the third gate.
The third test was to deal with a zombie dragon. (This is where we are told that Najaran is forbidden to use Spell cards, despite there being no issue with that in book one, as another place where the canon contradicts itself.) Naja, having seen the war throgh the Dragon's Eye realizes that the dragon they face doesn't know that it is dead,. that the war is over. Naja was talked into using a spell - Wind Cutter, and nearly killed them all. What was left of the zombie kept trying to fight, but Najran spoke to it, thanked it, told it that humans were stronger now and didn't need his protection any more, that his spirit should join hi friends before he became something too far from what he had been. She set his spirit free, turning the test of power into another test of heart, after all. She used one more Spell card, Fly, to help his spirit ascend.
Kiji thanked Najaran for setting free the spirit of an old friend and letting him be at peace. Then she told them of the legand of the Mistrals, the ones the Nymphs were waiting for to destroy Balteas and save the forest.
They made it into the city of Bistream and were seperated from Kigi. When they came to her again, she had been taken over by darkness and was ruthlessly slaying the searchers who had followed Alta's crew. Najaran and Kigi wound up in a Cepter battle. Alta's crew jumped in, despite not being Cepters, to help as they could. (At one point wee are told that Kigi is down to about 37,000 magic points, and Najaran at about 500. But that still doesn't tell us where Najaran started... or what these numbers mean in a practical sense. They do not line up with the game's math, which makes it really really hard to gauge her power.) (also this is where Kigi stips referring to her kind as Nymphs and uses the word Elves.)
After beating Kigi, Kigi explained more about the mistrals and the curse on the elves of Bisteam and then opened the final gate for them. Najaran declared that she and the dying Kigi should be friends and survive together and cook nymph food together. Because Najaran has her priorities.