Momina Mahmoud (Mina)

## Basic information

Current year: 2023

Age: 20

watching the stars

Appearance: Mina is a tall willowy girl, with olive skin and a hooked nose that has a ring on the left side. Her hair is always tied up underneath a hijab and she puts a lot of effort into her "perfect" eyeliner (that's a quote from her exceptionally gay girlfriend) In ghost form, she wears a purple ballgown covered in silver stars.

## Background

### Childhood

**[TW suicide, abuse, rape]** Mina's parents came to England with a daughter already in their hands—when they had another they were at a loss. But Mina was a far easier child to manage than her older sister, and perhaps her parents were a little *too* open with their daughters about that. Basma found herself fostering a bitterness even she didn't understand towards her sister, and began to take it out on Mina early on. From a young age, Mina understood the constant insults, threats and injuries to be a normal occurence that her parents put down to the pair "fighting sometimes."

Mina became increasingly distressed about her sister's behaviour and her parent's perceived apathy until when she was nine, her sister held her under the bathwater too long and Mina lost consciousness. Horrified, thinking she'd killed her sister, Basma screamed for help and was more honest about the extent of her crime than she had been for maybe her entire life. Mina woke up a few minutes later, but her sister's confession combined with Mina's utter conviction that she was dead on awaking, made her parents suspicious enough that they began to separate the sisters more and more.

This didn't actually help the situation all that much. Basma's resentment continued to fester through their teenage years, and Mina's life didn't improve significantly. She struggled to fit in at school and make friends, and upon realising she was gay, struggled with keeping that secret. But at least her sister didn't get the opportunity to bully her anymore.

However, her parents became more lax. Nothing had happened for years, so they thought nothing of leaving the two girls alone for a weekend when Mina was fifteen. And to be fair to them, there was no nefarious plan for things to go wrong. Mina hid in her room while Basma invited her boyfriend around. Her boyfriend had different plans though, and broke into Mina's room to rape her. He hadn't considered the possibility that his current girlfriend would turn on him, which she did, throwing him out of the house. Mina was utterly shocked that her sister would save her from anything at all, and saw an opportunity to make up with her after the trauma of their childhood. But her sister still harboured all that resentment, blaming Mina for losing her boyfriend, and that night she did something utterly terrible.

No one ever talked about that night again.

It was after this that Mina really started to deteriorate, becoming more and more depressed and unstable, to the point that the rest of her family noticed and started to worry. The next few years she lived on a knife edge, coming dangerously close to killing herself several times, until she got into university. There she saw an opportunity to remove herself from her family and the sister who had ruined her, and decided she could give things another try.

### Adult life

University did not treat Mina as well as she'd hoped. It was easy to isolate herself and she found herself abandoned by everyone she'd been vaguely friendly with back home. She managed to make friends with one girl who lived with her, Hanna, but the stress became a lot for her and on top of the issues she already had, she developed an eating disorder. Through sheer force of will, she managed to pass her first year, but in second year she moved away from Hanna and things started getting worse yet again. Fortunately it was at this time that, dragged out by Hanna to meet her new boyfriend, she met a girl who was equally lonely. Spectacularly in love after one five minute conversation, Mina continued to seek her out until several months later, they kissed. The girl, Kat, was Mina's first ever partner, but despite Mina's deteriorating mental health, she was happier with her life than she ever had been.

Things went pear shaped again when she ended up in hospital and failed every exam for the year. The university agreed to recognise this as mitigating circumstances, but Mina was still in the state where she knew she couldn't go into the next year without taking some time to recover herself. This presented a tiny problem—she'd been living in university accomodation the past two years, and now had to find herself a house, until Kat suggested she come to live in her flat.

Living with her loving girlfriend, without the constant stress of university, a job that she loved and finally receiving psychological help, Mina really started to get better. Things were improving so much that it didn't even bother her when her sister announced she was getting married. It bothered her a little bit when she was told she had to go back home for an engagement party, but she decided it was two days that she could manage with her newfound mental stability.

She didn't even last twelve hours. Basma, afraid that Mina would spill the truth about that night to her fiancé, was yet again too rough with her little sister and pushed her into the river that ran by their house. Just like the time when she was nine, Mina woke up convinced that she was dead.

And this time, she was right.

Mina had never believed in the supernatural, but as her awareness came back to her, she realised she was a ghost, a spirit, something she'd refused to accept was real her whole life, and she was in America, invisible to a Kat she barely recognised from their relationship. This was a Kat who was angry and bitter and while insisting she'd never had a girlfriend, somehow managed to insult Mina in every other sentence. Left with no knowledge of how she became a ghost or what her purpose was in this situation, Mina has followed Kat and her friends, doing her best to protect them from the horrors of a zombie apocalypse until she can figure out why exactly she's still here, and exactly how much time she has left.

## Personality

Mina will only ever be rude to one person—her sister. With everyone else she tries her hardest to be as kind and understanding as possible. In particular, Mina makes a lot of effort to include people who are on the outside, or people who others find unapproachable or too much effort. She's empathetic to perhaps a pathological degree, which means some difficult conversations hit her harder than you'd expect, but she doesn't shy away from them. This isn't always good for her, and she gets depressed very easily as a result. Despite her amalgamation of issues, she's chronically bad at admitting anything's wrong at any given time, which can lead to some miscommunications. On the flipside, Mina can find the good in anything or anyone, which mean as easily as she can plunge into depression, it's not too hard to get back out. It's always safe to assume that even if you've sent her flying into a panic attack, Mina believes you're a good person and would probably die for you, if she wasn't already dead.

## Relationships

### Kat

Mina realised she was a lesbian when she was thirteen. She considered it one of her biggest faults that she fell in love too easily, with girls who were unavailable because of outside circumstances or simply Mina's own anxiety in talking to them. So when she met Kat, who was pretty in a way she couldn't articulate, whose personality was intriguing but also hugely anxiety-inducing already, Mina assumed this would happen the same way as usual, and she would end up being crushed once again. But still, she tried to talk to Kat, and to her surprise, a friendship formed.

Even though Kat had seven hundred layers of trust issues and hid herself away, talking to her was surprisingly *simple*. Her bluntness made it easy to know what was going on, and to Mina's overactive anxiety, this was a godsend. It was also a relief to have someone sober to talk to when she went out with Hanna, and after they'd started to talk more, Kat surprised her by recognising and actually helping her with one of her panic attacks that usually went unnoticed. In fact, when Mina ended up hugely oversharing some of her traumatic past, she was floored by how well Kat understood. Even though she didn't say as much, Mina realised Kat must have been through something similar and this intrigued her further.

But even though her gay little heart was soaring, Mina knew that this would end one of two ways—Kat would apologetically tell her she was straight, or she'd get a different partner. There was absolutely no way Mina would allow herself to hope, just because they'd had one seven hour conversation, just because they texted each other every day, just because all of Kat's friends were shocked at how close they'd become, there was definitely no way she could hope for a relationship.

Until a month or two later, when Kat asked if she could kiss her. And Mina couldn't believe her luck. She had a girlfriend! Nothing else was going right, but she had a girlfriend. As the rest of her life fell to pieces, Mina worried that Kat would get tired of her. But Kat became something of a constant presence in her life, and then she asked her to move in.

Moving in, Mina *really* started to worry that Kat would get tired of her. At the end of that summer though, it was Kat's turn to fall to pieces and Mina came to the realisation that the offer to live together had not solely been for her. Kat needed someone in the house too. And even though she'd been forced to drop out of university and felt useless, that knowledge made her feel at least a little needed.

It was after a few more months there that Mina realised something uncomfortable. She'd always been the one who was more enthusiastic about their relationship, while Kat was more muted. But Kat made it easy to know what was going on. Mina could tell that she was easing into their situation more and more, to the point where she was ready to actually make commitments. Which wasn't something either of them would have been comfortable doing before, and it was something Mina still wasn't sure about now.

It was weighing heavily on her mind when she said goodbye to Kat to spend the weekend at her parent's house for her sister's engagement. With her sister planning to get married, should she be doing the same? In the end it didn't matter anyway, because her sister murdered her before she had the chance to do anything about it.

The first thing Mina heard when she came back into existence was her girlfriend telling a friendly customs officer that she was straight. This was the first in a long line of lies that Mina would have to endure as she followed a grieving Kat along the coast and through an apocalyptic wasteland, each one somehow worse than the last. She'd seen Kat's capacity to be rude and bitter throughout their relationship, but it had never been this bad, and never aimed at her. Grief has shown Mina a very different side to the Kat she knew, and while she still loves her, she understands all too well how Kat ended up the lonely girl she met a year and a half ago, and can do very little to change it.