Kaiya Jeffery is the sort of person who hates that people sometimes think about Bob Marley when they hear her name, especially since the album Kaya is the exact opposite of her in basically every conceivable way. During the events of the first three volumes, she was living as normal a life as could be expected for a world in which the big banks don’t exist anymore, until her powers manifested one day seemingly at random.
But let’s back up a little. Born in August of 1946, a celebratory child into a world no longer ravaged by the war that had torn up not just the European continent but the whole world, she grew up to a very wealthy family on the Upper West Side, one which had access, privilege, and connections, although not a penthouse (something which her parents, ever keeping up with the Joneses, lamented until 9/11, at which point they were glad to be on a lower floor for extraordinarily callous reasons). Central Park West on the 80s has been a mainstay of financial success throughout periods of gentrification versus not, and this is the environment in which Kaiya was born, raised, and molded, going to elite private schools within 30 blocks or so of her parents’ spacious home in The Dakota and avoiding the race riots of Harlem, the violence within the Park, and the growing poverty (and later escalating market values) of the lower tip of the island.
Kaiya entered the world of global markets in the late 1960s, after earning a degree in Finance from Columbia. Being a woman in a male-dominated field, she was very used to having to use every single advantage to edge out the competition, and her cold upbringing made her a natural fit into this world. As she moved up the chain throughout the 1970s, she was sent to many different wealthy nations for securities negotiations and, by the 1980s, to impoverished ones for the sanctioned version of theft that arose in the quickly-globalizing world of neoliberal free market conquest. She was sent to Berlin quickly after the fall of the wall in 1990; she was sent to Red Square before they had opened their first McDonald’s. She was, as a result, never home for the children she had had in the 1970s, and as they grew, spoke of them only to applaud their achievements.
Having learned quickly and successfully to use her powers for professional gain, this translated well to the personal. Kaiya was, in a lucky turn, not present in Manhattan on that day in November, 2006. She was, instead, speculating for properties in Brooklyn Heights, the values of which had dipped dramatically after 9/11 and was threatening a massive boom for buyers. She was thankful for the sale having closed, as not only did she now have a place to live outside of the Upper West Side (and jaunts to such wealthy enclaves as Martha’s Vineyard and The Hamptons), but she could generate rental income from displaced peoples who suddenly needed a place to go.
Between 2006 and 2020, Kaiya was living as normal a life as can be expected for a former banking executive at the end of the world: playing the landlord, making new connections, and being generally really shady. While her wealth virtually disappeared as the world changed so dramatically, so did that of everyone else, and she was well-positioned to mold the new meanings of what wealth, access, and success are - and in this case, it was controlling not the global securities trade, not the means of production, but the very means of survival. She was largely indifferent to the whole “evolved” thing. Evolved people’s money was as green as anyone else’s, after all, figuratively speaking. As such, when the market crashed in ‘06, she bought a ton of property and rented them out under cover of an LLC, making useful connections along the way.
The firebombing of 2012 impacted this Manhattanite’s life as negligibly as possible with all things considered: her life and possessions gone, her properties literally liquidated. But she still had a job, so she returned to her half-retired life at a Certain Large Multinational Investment Banking Firm, in a new branch in Toronto, Canada. Kaiya continued living to those strengths while raking in the paychecks in the relative safety of her northern neighbors until people started trickling back to the Greatest City on Earth in 2015, and seeing the opportunity to increase rents for a higher quality of living all down the new Safe Zone, she returned very shortly after its establishment with deeds in hand (from a safety deposit box in a bank that somehow survived the catastrophe). Neither on the side of the Evolved nor the “regulars,” as she called them, she played the role of broker, of information and of property all the same. At this point, she teamed up with Wally Gage in a very serendipitous business arrangement: Gage acts as the building super for any needed services in the building, for a fee; Kaiya decides who stays and who goes based on desirable characteristics. Passive harassment is their collective middle name.
MRIs revealed in late 2020 she has a cyst on her frontal cortex which has led to a noticeable mood shift (lack of excitement about rewards, generally angrier affect, lowered impulse control) without a decline in cognitive ability. Meaning: Kaiya is still brilliant, but more prone to outbursts, which leads her to be a decent bouncer and less able to manipulate subprime mortgage holders into giving her their money. She is no longer satisfied with merely using her brain to be cunning and cheat people out of rewards. Sometimes, she just wants to blow things up. It is too new to have a prognosis for long-term outcomes, future personality changes, or whether it may continue to grow and evolve. She is, in short, a quasi Phineas Gage with some weird properties that may or may not break physics.
Kaiya’s new powers did not manifest until early in 2021. One day she woke up, read the newspaper, got angry, and accidentally blew up her French press with a beam of concentrated kinetic energy from her forehead. Having rushed to the mirror and seen nothing except eyes that turned from blue to brown for no apparent reason, she was glad such heat and power did not mar her complexion (one which she works very carefully to keep pristine and youthful) and, having seen this happen in people time and time again, recognized that she must now have those…whatchamacallems. Evolved abilities. And she was thrilled. Finally, after a life of numbers and brains and shady-ass corporate deals with more shoulderpads than women in the room, she could be the brainless muscle. Life adds up after all. She immediately sought out the d’Sarthe group, and the rest, as said by O'aka XXIII, is history. She does, however, wear blue contact lenses out of a sense of vanity; some things never change.
