Shuos Nija

> "*You mean you don't have enough former shoplifters working for you and you're desperate.*"
> ― Moroish Nija to Hexarch Shuos Mikodez
>
>

Agent **Shuos Nija**, born **Moroish Nija**, is a Mwennin woman from the planet Bonepyre. She appears in Raven Stratagem and Glass Cannon.

## Appearance and Personality

As a teenager, Nija had ivory-sallow skin and dressed in practical clothes and shoes, though she appreciated fine fabrics and complementary colors. She wore enamel clasps in her hair. Her school records were unremarkable, though they featured glowing conduct reports and perfect attendance. She liked traditional Mwennin food, especially lamb in yogurt sauce, but was an indifferent Mwennin otherwise. Her voice is a soprano and her command of Mwen-dal, including accents and invective, was retained into adulthood. The formality levels of her speech in the high language slip under stress, and she occasionally indulges in profanity, despite her father's chiding.

## Early Life

Nija spent her entire early life in the City of Hollow Processions, except for a couple of school trips, and longed for adventures off-planet. She only mouthed the Mwennin prayers and memorized the list of heretical calendar-saints to please her family, though her elders also emphasized the vital importance of externally observing the high calendar. She went to school with the son of Boherem Roni and used to successfully shoplift cheap jewelry, becoming skilled at vanishing into crowds, though she stopped out of guilt when her grandmother took sick. Her parents also lived in the City of Hollow Processions, and her grandfather had an oversized blue striped umbrella.

## Evacuation

When the Vidona began to round up the Mwennin on Bonepyre, Nija dropped her studies, though a test in discrete mathematics was coming up the next day. She watched news reports, including some of the executions, and entertained fantasies of sneaking onto Shuos Jedao's command moth and spacing him for dooming her people.

Separated from her parents and elders, Nija was in the initial hushed Shuos evacuation from the City of Hollow Processions, among the Mwennin being carefully directed to transports by brusque agents. After hearing that the Vidona had taken the Boherem family, Nija slipped out of the crowd and returned to the city with no clear goal in mind, ducking into a clothing store as the Meditation of Needle Tongues began and leaving once the remembrance was over.

On the street, she was stopped by an undercover Shuos agent, Shuos Feiyed, who manipulated social conventions to keep Nija with her while maintaining her cover until both were isolated in a hoverer. Once alone, Feiyed asked Nija how she had eluded the Shuos at the evacuation so easily, and Nija admitted to the shoplifting that had taught her to blend with a crowd. Delighted at the irony, Feiyed criticized Nija's judgment in returning to her dangerous home city, remarking that Shuos training might benefit her but that recruiting her would be complicated in the middle of smuggling her out of the system.

Uneasy with Feiyed but obliquely reassured by her callous professionalism, Nija learned that Hexarch Shuos Mikodez had not explained his faction's intervention in her people's fate, but an arbitrary lottery had selected the small number of Mwennin who could be rescued without drawing attention. Feiyed noted that with time, obscurity, and some compromises, the remaining Mwennin could repopulate by cautiously adopting others into their traditions, a practice Nija's grandfather had believed vital to their people's survival.

Though still furious at Ajewen Cheris for entering faction service and dooming the Mwennin, Nija found Feiyed sensible and warily agreed to consider the Shuos training that might allow her to "fight from within."

Nija ultimately chose to join the Shuos and was transported to the Citadel of Eyes. After the calendrical reset, Zehun brought Nija to Mikodez's office, where she was introduced to Cheris over a video link. Nija immediately cursed Cheris in fluent Mwen-dal, and explained that she had accepted the Shuos' recruitment offer "because your shitty life choices left me with so many options." Her behavior was not deferential; Zehun signed behind her back that she was the only teenager in the hexarchate who wasn't afraid of Mikodez, and Mikodez signed back to let him know if they found any more of her. As Mikodez and Cheris continued to confer, Zehun, wearing an "I thought I was done raising teenagers" expression, escorted Nija out.

Since she had not finished her pre-faction education, Nija believed she should take a curriculum of regular classes in addition to "all the Shuos refresher courses with 'deception' and 'murder' in the titles".

Over the next eleven years, Nija made a career as a Shuos agent and was assigned to the strike force tracking Cheris and Jedao after they fled Esrala. As her shadowmoths bombed their needlemoth upon its arrival at Avros Base, she answered Cheris's attempt to parlay with vicious irony and cutting allusions to the Mwennin people Cheris had left behind, deliberately baiting her and threatening death despite both knowing that Mikodez's orders would be paramount to her. Despite her efforts, several shadowmoths were destroyed and Cheris and Jedao eventually escaped.

## Trivia

* Nija was slated to appear in Revenant Gun, but there was no space for her in the book.
* Nija's career included becoming a modern-day jaihanar, although her abilities in this respect are not yet seen in canon.
* A significant elevation of Nija's rank and role among Shuos has been teased on the author's blog.

## References

1. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
2. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon
3. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
4. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16
5. ↑ Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27
6. ↑ Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon
7. ↑ Open Thread: Revenant Gun
8. ↑ Open Thread: Revenant Gun
9. ↑ Author's blog: "Inktober Day 9, again"