Cleo de Nile

Cleo de Nile is one of the main characters from the Monster High franchise.

Cleo is a mummy, though born human, and a student at Monster High. As royalty, Cleo is unsurprisingly the queen of the student body, though few know her confidence is not as solid as she makes it seem to be. Cleo has a difficult relation with both her father, Ramses, who demands the best of and for her, and her older sister, Nefera, who cannot handle Cleo having any successes over her and as such regularly works to sabotage Cleo's efforts and undermine her self-esteem. Her mother, Dedyet, is the only immediate kin she is on good terms with, but circumstances separated Dedyet from the family for millennia. Had it not been for the support of her friends from the Fear Squad, the loyalty of her BFF Ghoulia, and the comfort of her boyfriend Deuce's embrace, Cleo's crown would have been crushed a long time ago. Cleo is aware she is lucky to have found people around her that allow her to flourish and while not always the most tactful, she is very protective of her crew.

In the AWA fics, Cleo is a student at the AWA Academy.

Appearance
Cleo de Nile is in the possession of black and brown hair, which is commonly enhanced with golden highlights, although she also picks blue, teal, and/or purple as additional colors. She favors her hair to be long and hang loose, but she isn't hesitant to switch it up with a shoulder-length haircut. She has tan skin and blue eyes, always surrounded by thick black winged eyeliner, and wears a gem on her right cheek that is blue in most of her ensembles (it was red in Scaris). While Cleo can get creative with her look, there is one fashion rule she can't break: she always has to have at least one piece of burial wrapping on her, lest she disappears into dust. Cleo's Facebook profile Cleo de Nile's Gloom and Bloom diary Fortunately for her, she is allowed to apply the burial wrapping in whatever way suits her. Sometimes, she wears an entire jumpsuit with limb warmers made of the material. At other times, the burial wrappings are worked into a simple waist wrap easily forgotten among the rest of the look. In Frights Camera Action, however, no wrap is visible. Cleo's standard colors of choice to dress in are shades of yellow, including gold, which is her favorite color, and anything in the range blue-to-teal. She has also experimented with purple and red, but those are limited to specific periods. While not dress-shy, Cleo prefers to step into a pair of pants, usually as part of the aforementioned jumpsuit. As part of an Ancient Egyptian Royal Family, Cleo commonly works large gems into her look, as well as scarabs, lotusses, snakes, and triangles (pyramids).

Personality
Cleo is extremely royal, so she expects everyone to treat her like it. Usually, her attitude is selfish, arrogant, and sassy; she can't be entirely blamed for her behavior, because it's shown that she was raised to be like this. She is extremely competitive with other ghouls, especially Toralei Stripe. But deep down, Cleo's a very caring, kind, and thoughtful ghoul who cares about her friends.

As royalty, Cleo is unsurprisingly the Queen of the student body, though few know her confidence is not as solid as she makes it seem to be: she is easy to be taken by the insecurity of not being fit for leadership, had it not been for the support of her friends from the Fear Squad, the loyalty of her BFF Ghoulia, and the comfort of her boyfriend Deuce's embrace, Cleo's crown would have been crushed a long time ago. Cleo is aware she is lucky to have found people around her that allow her to flourish and while not always the most tactful, she is very protective of her crew.

She can work well with the others if they share a common goal, in which case she becomes the de facto leader of the ghouls. She's a highly effective organizer and a leader who will deviate between acting selfishly and selflessly, depending on her mood, which is easy to alter, as she is a tad tempered, when fueled, and violent if upset. Additionally, she is stubborn and will only follow her rules if she feels like it, and she lacks when it comes to learning from her mistakes, making the same mistakes of dodging responsibility and attempting to control others. It doesn't help she has access to limited amounts of magic, through her magical amulets. In the webisode seriesof Monster High, Cleo is mainly known as the Queen Bee at school, having self-proclaimed popularity which is not untrue despite being self-proclaimed. Despite Cleo's personality overall, one of her true personality traits is that she is kindhearted deep down with a true heart of gold, which is much more than what can be said about her sister Nefera, who, when asked about best friends in her profile bio, only said she "rule[s] alone". Cleo also solely goes by the name Cleo in the Monster High without the adding of the family name "de Nile" to not raise suspicion to her name resembling the Egyptian name Cleopatra and having a name that has to do with the river, the Nile, which is what her surname is based on. Though her full name is never actually said, as in, "Cleo de Nile", it is hinted at, especially when Brett Redding, calls her "Queen of de-Nile" as a pun on the river Nile and the word "denial", and her father is referred to as "Ram de Nile" in the beginning of the second book.

Trivia

 * The webisode "Hiss-teria" introduced Cleo's fear of spiders, which came up once more in "Escape From Skull Shores".
 * The hieroglyphs on Cleo's vanity translate to Klio, the first part of how the real-life Cleopatra's name was spelled. In Ancient Egyptian, there is no letter representing an "e"-sound and phonetically the "e" in "Cleopatra" was and is treated as an "i". Meanwhile, Ancient Egyptian had three letters for "k", one for the "c/k" sound, one for the "kh" sound, and one for the "q/k" sound. Cleopatra's name was spelled with the latter "k".
 * Despite the reboot being a prequel, Cleo is older in the reboot, with her age listed as 6000. This would make her at least 6001 years old in the pre-reboot seasons.