Efua Nwosu.

[scapula.]

Name. Efua Nwosu
Nickname(s). Granny Effie
Age. Seventy-eight
Gender. Female
Species. African Elephant

Appearance. As a human, Efua was a large-boned woman. Her height wasn't too tall, a maximum of five foot six, but she used her weight of nearly two hundred and eighty pounds to intimidate others. Her skin was wrinkled and a deep sepia, her hair faded to grey over the years, her black eyes always holding a twinkle of either mischief or malice. She walked with a walker or wheelchair, depending on the severity of the arthritic pain in her knees.
As an elephant, she stands nine feet tall, an average height. Weighing in at about seven thousand five hundred pounds, she is a force to be reckoned with. Her skin has the texture of asphalt and is creased and wrinkled in multiple different places. The hind left leg tends to drag against the ground because that knee is much worse than the other.

Personality. Efua isn't exactly what one would think of when thinking of a sweet old grandma. She has always been a loner, keeping to herself even as a young girl in her village home. Senility has set in through the years and it has followed her to Disengage, making her unpredictable. She may not remember someone that she met just yesterday. Efua, however, is not as senile as she acts. If she doesn't remember that person from yesterday, it's probably because she didn't like them in the first place and she's simply using her age as an excuse to ignore them as much as possible. If someone asks her something that she doesn't feel like answering, she'll simply pretend that her hearing is going and she didn't hear that person ask. If one must get her attention, they will get nowhere by calling her Efua, Mrs. (Miss?) Nwosu, or something more personal like Effie. She responds only to Granny, Grandma, Grammie, and, her personal favorite, Granny Effie.
She is hardly ever happy, seeing as she can't find anything to be happy about. It's much more easy for her to find things to complain about, so she'd rather do that than smile about the weather or something stupid and trivial. Efua has a grumpy grandmother feel about her. Her temper is quick to flare and burns strong for quite a while, and once she has made a grudge against someone, she's not likely to forget about it any time soon. She especially dislikes small children with their annoying whines and cries, teenagers, adults, the elderly... just about everyone and everything. The last thing she wants is for people to annoy her. Even in Disengage, she wants to be left alone. Becoming an elephant wasn't so bad for her. It was something new, something different from her everyday boring lifestyle.

History. Efua was born in Kenya, Africa. She came to life during the 1932 Generation Succession Ceremonies in Embu, but it did not affect her. Her family was extremely poor; her father paralyzed from the waist down from a freak accident, her mother was not permitted to work since she was a woman. Efua got along with few of her peers as a child. Most of them were well-off in terms of money, and they enjoyed tormenting her because she could never buy the things they had. Her family could hardly afford the house they lived in. The only reason they could have the house at all was because Efua worked for a wealthy family next door and the neighbors took pity on them. The torture from her peers made her hardened and full of anger inside, something she never left behind.

At the age of thirteen, she was bethrothed to the wealthy neighbor boy. She couldn't stand him. He was the ringleader of the kids who made fun of her; she couldn't fathom staying with him for the rest of her life, but she did so because she knew the family would give her father, mother, and three siblings money to live on. Efua stayed with her family for the next few years, dreading the day she would have to live with Chakide. Her seventeenth birthday came far too soon and she and Chakide moved into a nice building his family had bought for them. Efua by then had concocted a plan. She would have to be married to him, but that didn't mean she'd have to like him. She refused to bear him any children and basically ignored him.

Over the years, Efua grew larger and larger, due to her despair and annoyance with her new husband. She stayed out of the house as long as possible to stay away from him. This went on in this manner until Chakide complained to his parents. They suggested making her do what he wanted her to do, and he did. He succeeded in having one child with her, and he was nearly her master. Efua hated him with a burning passion, and eventually, her husband ended up hating her as well. He filed for divorce: something unheard of in those days, and Efua was finally free. Her parents had since then died; she herself was forty years old.

She raised her boy on her own. When he was grown, Ekundayo married into his own family, giving her plenty of grandchildren. As infants, she enjoyed them, but the older they got, the more they annoyed her. Finally, at the age of sixty-seven, her son and his wife made the decision to move Efua to an old folks' home. Her dementia was bad to the point where they could not live their lives. They came to visit her twice a week, but she was even more reclusive than she had been before, hardly talking when they arrived.

This went on for many years before Efua passed away in her sleep at the age of seventy-eight.