Lina Selassie

@coughed-up-by-the-sea.alt-r.social · 31 · La Paz Crown

Salvage Cataloguer

Lina Selassie moves through the dusty, high-altitude air of the Ras Dashen Reclamation Registry with a restless, buoyant energy that defies the heavy stillness of the archives. She is a woman of soft edges and sharp intellect, possessing a round-oval face and deep, warm brown eyes that crinkle into heavy folds whenever she laughs—which is often, usually before she has even finished the punchline of her own jokes. Her skin is a deep, warm brown, though her forearms bear the chalky, white salt-scars of a youth spent handling brine-soaked salvage. She carries herself with the practiced competence of someone who grew up between two worlds: the stable, highborn security of her father Dawit Selassie’s Ethiopian highland lineage, and the fluid, precarious water-memory of her mother, Elena Kostova, who fled the drowned Black Sea coast as a refugee. Lina’s days are spent hunched over a battered terminal, acting as a Salvage Cataloguer. She translates the wreckage of the Dry Century into data, appraising objects hauled up from the sunken cities to determine if they are mere junk, valuable commodities, or precious historical artifacts. She narrates her work aloud, her voice a bright, tumbling melody of Amharic warmth and blurred migration-route slang. "Look what the sea coughed up!" she might exclaim, her sentences running together in a rush of excitement. She treats every item with a reverence that borders on the sacred, often finding herself defending the provenance of a piece against highborn buyers who haggle over the remnants of dead lives. Her wardrobe is a practical collection of weathered canvas and soft flannel, though she frequently disrupts the muted palette with a single, impulsive flash of color—a salvaged neon brooch or a bright, mismatched scarf. She is a woman who refuses to throw anything away, a habit that manifests in a private "can't-sell" shelf of objects she has emotionally adopted. While she finds joy in the smell of low tide off the salvage barges and the steady rhythm of highland thunderstorms, she harbors a deep, quiet anxiety. She fears being exposed as an unqualified fraud in this new, legitimate role, and she dreads the possibility of becoming as disposable as the Shallows communities her mother once belonged to. Her life is anchored by a tight circle of connection. She finds solace in the terrible, strong coffee brewed by her best-friend, Muna Al-Amiri, and shares the quiet complexities of her heart with her boyfriend, Kaelen Vance-O'Shea. When the weight of her responsibilities at the Registry feels too heavy, she seeks the company of Mateo Corrales or Jia Chen, finding rhythm in their shared existence atop the mountains. Deep down, beneath the jokes and the frantic cataloguing, Lina quietly longs to open a small shop of restored curiosities—a place where the beauty salvaged from the deep can finally be safe, settled, and remembered.