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Entry tags:
application for box!
Player Information
Player name: Trace!
Contact: smoke signals and carrier pigeons
Are you over 18: y
Characters in The Box Already: Shepard, Tom, Clementine.
Character Information
Character Name: Sally Malik
Canon: Being Human (US)
Canon Point:
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive: It's Complicated (uhhhh undead?? maybe?)
History: Wiki.
Personality:
☑ first impressions
Sally is... well, okay, she's stunning, but she is also a great big ball of energy. It's worse with her friends, but even if you're a stranger, she has no trouble being loud or ridiculous or having a good time. She is grinning like 50% of the time anymore (okay, not true, but it seems like it), and she always has something witty and often painfully blunt to interject into a conversation. Sally lights up the room, sometimes on purpose but sometimes just by virtue of her presence. However, all of the above means that sometimes, the first impression she gives is 'this girl is too much to handle'. Her roomie/co-BFF Josh has come to adore her, but he's the uptight and OCD sort and when they met in season one, she drove him straight up the walls.
☑ extrovert x100
Man, Sally is... basically the ultimate extrovert. She thrives when she's around people - I honestly have no idea how she didn't go crazy before Josh and Aidan came along, stuck in that house for weeks as a ghost that nobody could see or hear. That's one of the best parts about having an actual physical body now, is the ability to go out to a bar or a coffee-shop or something and just enjoy... people.
Without even meaning to, Sally owns whatever space she's in. It's not in a bad way - I guess it's more that she thoroughly occupies it rather than owns it. She has a sort of youthful energy to her, and can be found skipping down stairs or sitting cross-legged on counter-tops or otherwise being super tactile with her environment in ways that most grown women aren't. On top of just her environment, though, she's super tactile with people too. When she comforts someone, even someone she isn't super close to, she's touching them somehow. There's physical contact involved when she flirts, too, but more on her romance/love life later. Sally has zero problems hugging someone or otherwise invading their personal space, once she knows them and would consider them 'a friend'. Like, she will flop on you on the couch, consider yourself warned.
Sally also is pretty boss at connecting with people. She I guess knows she's cool shit or doesn't give a fuck if she isn't, and it means she has very few social inhibitions. She has no fear of approaching someone for conversation, no fear of flirting, no fear of what she should say to ~impress someone~. She actually has next to zero tact most of the time, so thank god she's a pretty nice person, because it could be disastrous if she weren't. (Examples of this lack of tact include calling Aidan out on getting laid and asking questions like "Why are you dressed like a douche?" - those are just off the top off my head).
When she's in a good mood (which is most of the time - more often than the other two, anyway), she's in a perpetual state of snarking and witty jokes and often dancing of some kind of other physical manifestation of said good mood.
☑ supernatural... things idek
Okay, so this is going to be a bit of 'Sally over time'. A lot of who she is now has been shaped by the events of the last three seasons and the supernatural goings-ons thereof.
From the top: We meet Sally as a ghost. A ghost with a lot of baggage she has no idea how to handle. She couldn't touch the physical world (though she learned over time), and yet whenever her anxiety was high, the house would shake. She was outgoing Sally, but with that underlying haunted edge. And haunted she was: See, her ex-fiancee Danny killed her. Pushed her down the stairs, hence ghost. Midway through the season, the appearance of her old engagement ring dispels her mysteriousrepression amnesia, and Sally realizes the ex-fiancee she's been pining over was the one who put her in that position. And worse - he's not even sorry. He said some really shitty shit, tried (and succeeded) to get with Sally's former best friend, even tried to have her exorcised. Really, Danny was a pretty shitty guy. She wasn't just haunted by the murder - Danny was abusive long before that, and even in the flashbacks, you see her living sort of anxiously in the midst of his arbitrary rages.
The realization that Danny straight-up didn't feel bad at all for killing her pushes Sally over an edge she never realized she had. She does what she can to be nice to people, but when you screw with her, jfc you'd better run. I'd say this was at least 50% a direct result of being a ghost, as it's mentioned a few times that ghosts who stick around like Sally end up losing their minds somehow, but... she basically went on a vengeance spirit rampage. It was obsessive, and entirely too much of her time was spent thinking of ways to make Danny suffer like he made her suffer. She did a variety of awful stuff, from trashing his apartment in a huge way (and leaving the engagement ring as a calling card) to making him nick himself while shaving so he bled down the front of his throat. Aidan and Josh thought he was a dick but wanted her to let it go, because they could see how it was changing her... But when Danny brought in a woman to exorcise her, that was the final straw, at least for Aidan. He beat Danny the fuck up, damn near killed him, but in that moment of truth, she realized that age-old trope: She Wasn't Going To Sink To His Level. Killing him would make her no better than he was. She didn't want to be That Person.
Eventually Aidan's ready to kill him for her but she realizes that having him do so would make her just like Danny. A killer. That knocked some sense back into her, and she instead forced him to admit to the police that he killed her, which sent him off to prison. Through this experience with Danny, Sally found a darkness inside her that she never knew she had, but one that she had to find and work through in order to be okay, if that even makes sense.
In season 2, she's a lot more outgoing. The weight of her unhealthy relationship with Danny is finally done weighing her down, so she's free to be her own person... Except wait. She's still a ghost that 90% of the world can't see. Which means even though Danny no longer has her on any kind of emotional leash, she's still walled off from all of the awesome fun shit that a young single lady would like to go out and do. Shopping, going out for drinks, even catching a bite with friends in which she can actually eat the food - all a no-go. However, she met up with a group of ghost dudes who had found a way to cheat a little.
Thus Sally learned how to possess people, and entered into her second downward spiral within a year. Because suddenly, wow, all she has to do is dive into some live-person's spinal column and she can feel, taste, talk to other living people - albeit using the body of the person she's possessing to do so. It's... addicting, to say the least. There's a whole support group for it, Possession-Addicts Anonymous but without the catchy name, run by a spirit medium sort of woman who does reincarnation at the local hospital (which, for the record, Sally didn't qualify for). Sally hits the point where she only feels alive when she's inhabiting someone's body - most commonly the body of the girlfriend of a hot doctor at the hospital, which eventually drives that poor woman insane with unexplained amnesia and memories that aren't hers. And yet ghost!Sally in't looking much better. It gets harder and harder to pull herself out of the woman's body, and she looks paler and sicker each time. Josh and Aidan really start to worry, but Sally brushes them off.
It fucks her up enough that without even realizing, a piece of her splits off into a hallucinatory split-personality, who introduces himself as the Reaper and says that she either has to let him reap her or take his job. The various miscreant ghosts would tip the status quo if someone didn't reap them before they could, etc etc. Apparently, getting your door to the happy afterlife isn't the only way out. Ghosts can get shredded, literally torn apart from the inside, and sent to a sort of purgatory limbo, not that she has any idea where they're going quite yet. This Reaper does some awful shit, shreds a few of her friends and really sincerely fucks with her head, without Sally having any clue that it's really a part of her - a hallucination of sorts. She only has her eyes opened to it near the second season finale, when something fucks with the moon and all of the shredded ghosts re-appear. This included Danny, which was a mind-fuck that she was now 200% strong enough to handle (she was so scared of him before, even if he couldn't really hurt her again), but the real mindfuck was Nick, an old friend of hers who... seemed terrified of her. He didn't want her to shred him again. She had no idea what he meant by that, but then the real memories came back. She realized she was turning into a monster, and elected to shred herself into the same limbo she sent her friends to.
She's stuck there for god-knows-how-long, constantly cycling the same routine: she rescues each of her friends from their death-loop, then drags them to the limbo version of her old house in Boston, hoping that this time the front door would open when she turned the knob. Every time in the past, it just reset the cycle. Meanwhile in the real world, Josh and his girlfriend Nora had found a witch doctor to bring Sally back to life! ....In her old corpse. Using the heart of a man Josh killed with his bare hands. It was pretty disgusting overall, but back in limbo, that door opened! And Sally of course forced her two buddies through too, so poor Josh had to go dig up two more corpses that night.
Aaaand suddenly Sally's alive!! AND THRILLED. Like, she was always a sweetheart (mostly) but now she's this giant ball of ecstatic energy as described in the rest of the app. Being dead did horrible stuff to her psyche even on the good days, and Josh gave her a second chance at life! She is instantly all about going out into the world and doing STUFF and THINGS and WEARING CLOTHES besides that awful sweater-leggings pajama set and awful frizzy hair and idk just trust me, this is A+ for Sally. Even in the little ways. Like, as tactile as she is with people, imagine finally being able to hug Aidan when she sees him again after so long, or touch someone's hand or shoulder when they're sad. Usually Aidan's. This season has mad Aidan-Sally UST, it's ridiculous.
However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. One condition of her reanimation is that she can't see anyone she knew before she died. She learns this by... disregarding Josh's repeated warning and taking home an old acquaintance she runs into at a bar. Whoops, the next morning she finds out that he never made it home last night, he just went out and died in his car instead. Way to go, Sally. You really fucked that one up. She feels awful about it, and she tries to go to the funeral home to make it right with him, which is where she meets Max (the funeral home director) who becomes probably the most understanding normal dudes she has ever met. Like, she comes off totally nuts repeatedly and then breaks in later to go through his files, and what does he do? Says what amounts to 'oh, so you're trying to find an identity to steal because you don't have one? How about you work here, I can pay you in cash.' WELP, that was a definite yes. It's not like corpses really got to Sally anymore, at that point. I mean, she can still see all of the ghosts (and get petitioned for help like 30 times a day) but she handles that pretty well.
Things only get hairy when her brother accidentally sees her when he visits the house to pretend he owns the place now that Sally and Danny are both dead (really it's Sally's dad who does), so she runs off to the witch doctor to fix it before her brother dies. The witch doctor basically fucks her and Josh both up, but eventually agrees to lift the 'nobody from Sally's past' rule, on one condition... And Sally agrees, promising the woman her soul as soon as she dies. Which is basically the worst end-goal ever but at least now she doesn't have to be afraid to leave her house.
Unfortunately, there's another catch to this little deal they've made - a catch that she discovers a few days later, with a large open sore on her scalp. She is basically rotting away, which is scary as shit and she tries to steal wax make-up (made for corpses) from the funeral home but Max catches her and she has to come out with her secret, with how she died and was brought back and whoops, she's rotting like an actual literal zombie and it's disgusting. He takes off, he can't handle it, but later he shows up with this huge dead-person make-up kit bigger than Sally's actual make-up kit and he covers the sores up like they were never there to start with. But hiding them doesn't mean they aren't there. What could be causing them? Sally finds out later on, when (in one of her many fits of ravenous hunger these days) she eats a package of raw beef... and it actually makes her feel a little less rotten. A poor-decision live-mouse meal later, she heads off to Nick's house to see if all of this was just her. It's not - live flesh is the only way to stave off the decomposition.
That's basically her canon-point, after that talk and the subsequent window-shopping at the pet store in which she realizes how badly her hunger for any and all living things truly disgusts her, but it's relevant to a full picture of her personality to note that even if it'll keep her alive (and keep her soul from the witch doctor), she refuses to eat people. The entire rest of the season she's rotting away, even locking herself in her room to make sure she can't eat anyone in a fit of poor self-control. She may make shitty horrible no-good choices a lot of the time, but there's a level of low that she is no longer willing to stoop if she ever was.
☑ love and connections
Sally loves people. Just... people. She loves being around them, loves talking to them, loves connecting with them, flirting with them, awful amazing UST, she just loves everything. But honestly, the thing she loves most are her two BFFs and roomies, Josh and Aidan. They are her family, more than her actual family ever was, and she actually had a great family growing up so that's saying something. She would die for either of them in an instant, no matter what kind of afterlife she'd end up in. In fact, she could've 'gone into the light' at the end of the first season, it was sitting there waiting for her, but she chose to go make sure Aidan was safe first. She passed it up for her friends. These three go above and beyond a normal friendship, in the sense that they risk life and limb for one another on a weekly basis. That's just how they are, and that's what friendship means to Sally. There are friends, the kind she can hang out with and chat with and all that, then there are friends. The kind she can talk to about anything, and who accept her for who/what she is. Those friends have her whole heart, whether it's Josh and Aidan or new friends she meets in an RP world.
As said in the 'extrovert' section, Sally can make friends with just about anyone. It is incredibly hard to deter her when she's determined to get through to someone. A lot of the time, she wins them over grudgingly (like Josh) rather than making a terribly great case in her first impression. More so than making friends, though, she puts a lot more emphasis than most on importance of sticking together and making connections through adversity. When shit's going down, she'll be the one on the network making deliberately less-serious posts (one I have in mind is a massive game of Never Have I Ever on the network, to get to know people).
Sally craves a romantic connection aside from just platonic ones, and falls easily into nearly any flirtation ritual offered by an attractive guy. Flirting Sally is a slightly different Sally - she quiets down a lot, and you can tell she's thinking a lot more about the words she's saying, almost like she's trying them out to see what he'll do. Lots of eye contact, but not the creepy kind. When she's found someone to be in a relationship with, she opens back up to her energetic self, albeit with a distinctly flirtatious edge to it.
☑ has her shit together
It's hard to honestly and truly shake Sally, anymore. Part of this is because she's realized how much harder it is to get through tough shit if you actually treat it like tough shit. You are what scares you, and you are what you let that fear turn you into. She still gets scared, but she chooses to stay in control, and because of that, she's so much stronger now than she was in the first season. On top of that, when something gets her down, it rarely keeps her down. She can hear incredibly bad news (an example right near her canonpoint is that Aidan got the virus that wiped out most of the other vampires, and thus has like three or four days to live), and after the initial dismay or misery, she can pull her shit together and act at least somewhat cheery, even if she's still hurting on the inside. An example past her canonpoint is when she realizes she's dying (unless she eats people, which she refuses to do). She can be seen making witty/joking comments right up to the end of her rotting existence in canon, which is after her canonpoint but an excellent example nonetheless.
Even before she died, her shit was firmly 'together'. She was going to go to grad school, maybe even work in the UN. What stopped her? She fell in love with Danny, and part of her heart was still set on the role of the doting housewife, that perfect mother and father and 2.5 kids family in the cute little fixer-upper house. Still, her ducks were all in a row up until that point, and once she's a ghost, she's constantly taking the initiative to force herself to be better, to be able to do more. Through determination, she learned to touch the physical environment around her (before, Josh had to turn the pages of her book for her) and to be able to leave the house for a little while.
On top of all of that, Sally has very few things that she's truly afraid of anymore. Losing her friends is one of them. So is the possibility that she becomes a cannibalistic monster. Dying, however, is not. At all. At this point, she's died, then her ghost has died again, then she was brought back to die again. Dying is so five minutes ago. This means that you won't often find her paralyzed by fear... Which means the Man Downstairs will have to be a little more creative in motivating her.
☑ does not have her shit together
Every season, there's something huge fucking with this normally-well-adjusted chick's head. In the first season, Danny sends her off the deep end into this violent vindictive rage. In the second season, the show reminds us that it's really just one big addiction metaphor and gets her hooked on possessing live people, selfishly eating away at their life force and sanity, and that gets to her bad enough that she has to make a whole new split personality to cope with the bad shit she's done.
Then here we are in season 3, in which she made poor Josh and Nora dig up the heart of a dude they killed a year ago and graverob Sally's own body just to slather goo on it and hope she comes back to life. Then she thanks them by utterly ignoring Josh's warnings not to talk to people she used to know, which gets this guy Trent killed because he recognized her and she really wanted to bang him. Then if that's not warning enough, she comes home at the wrong time and almost gets her brother killed, at which point she hurries off to sell her soul so he'll live, because that totally won't bite her in the ass.
The list goes on, seriously, it's not pretty. Sally deserves a really big You Tried star, not quite as big as Aidan's but he's had 270 years to earn his. She never means to fuck stuff up, she just has trouble thinking through the consequences of doing something she really wants to do. In discussing the show with a friend a while back, we arrived at the metaphor that the three of them are like a family: Aidan's the absentee dad with the good heart, Josh is the overprotective mom who shakes and pees like a chihuahua when things start to get sketchy, and Sally is their kid who is adorable and sweet but really really needs adult supervision. Whoops.
☑ basically way too much trouble
Jesus fuck, this girl is so much more trouble than she's worth. Sure, she will bail you out of just about any mess you can get yourself into, but the odds are just as high that she'll get you into a mess too. I already talked about a lot of the mistakes she's made and why, but it's not all just negligence. Of the three roommates, the other two tend to have one or two major flaws, while hers are smaller but all over the board. She's selfish, envious, wrathful, lustful, and god knows how many of the other deadly sins. Not all at once, obviously, but those are all very much within her range of normal emotions/mindsets.
On top of that, much like the family child in the above metaphor, she has no trouble exploiting how adorable she is. She pesters Josh into buying pizza, for example, with a huge grin and slow nod, like 'you know you want this shit'. This will translate to... using the sheer force of her ability to be cute to convince others to make supply runs for her, or even to convince them to come over because her room's empty and cold. Man, that's another thing - she has to look nice, it's a burning need. She will scrounge for the absolute best clothes available and will not stop until she finds something sufficiently trendy. Sob.
Also, she unironically says shit like "Holla at yo' boy!" That... is a whole problem in and of itself.
Items on your character at canon point:
Her purse, which has such things as a couple of pens, her cell phone, gum, mints, her wallet with money/cards/ID, a few spare accessories or make-up items. Probably some kind of candy, she has a sweet tooth.
Abilities, Strengths and Weaknesses:
As a reanimated human, her only real 'ability' is.... to rot. sob. That and her ability to see other ghosts, but that only matters in canon, since the other ghosts here are basically all visible. She can also consume ungodly amounts of food, so hide your leftovers.
As a ghost, her range of skills is much more diverse. She can dissipate and re-appear elsewhere (often used to appear in the kitchen from her bedroom in the morning, which she later lamented being unable to do), she can affect the physical realm intentionally (like by reaching out and touching it) or unintentionally (sometimes when she gets upset/anxious, shit happens like the furniture or pipes shaking). When she's poltergeisting like she did with Danny, she accrues a lot more destructive force, able to basically create a whirlwind of flying shit and bust up the contents of a room/apartment. Worse yet, when she had that Reaper personality branch, she was haunting herself in ways she never quite realized she could. For example, knives would fly off the counters and lodge in the walls near her head. It wouldn't have hurt her, but it's an example of something that can happen when she gets fucked up in the head.
As a ghost, she can also possess people, which looks a lot like diving into their spinal column. This allows her to speak through a person, feel what they're feeling... She basically is them as long as she's in their body. They don't remember it afterward, and usually feel tired as fuck. Sally herself starts to look and act... well, like a junkie, after too much of it. She tries to avoid possessing people whenever humanely possible. In an RP context, this wouldn't be done without working it out prior to the thread.
Her weaknesses... The rotting, definitely a weakness. She's hungry all the time, and this is a setting with limited resources, so she's going to have to learn to hunt or find someone to hunt for her. As a ghost, her weaknesses include being incorporeal (and unable to be seen by most of the population, which she'll seek to fix ASAP) and iron. She can be dissipated by iron, being stabbed with it or having it swung through her. It makes her disappear and then reappear in the spot that she died.
Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample:
Okay, hi. So I know everyone's still completely on edge from Mister Axe-Crazy, but you guys are just going to have to take a deep breath or something, because here's what we're doing.
There's this game back home, it's called Never Have I Ever. It's... actually pretty stupid, like for frat guys or thirteen-year-olds who found their dad's stash, but humor me here. Basically, someone starts off like 'Never have I ever blah blah blah'. Never have I ever ~ridden a bike~, never have I ever... I don't know, jumped off a cliff. Anyway, everyone who has done the Never-Have-I-Ever has to take a shot. Or a sip, or a raincheck for when you do have booze, or even just drink juice or something - it doesn't matter, that's not the point.
The point is, I know pretty much nobody - just Josh, who also knows pretty much nobody but that's just Josh - and I know I'm not the only one. Why not actually get to know some people? Like, what's the worst that can happen? You forget to be an angry douche for like five seconds?
Anyway, let's tear this shit up!
I can start, this one's easy:
Never have I ever lived anywhere but the city I was born.
Prose Log Sample: (converting my test drive thread starter into prose format)
It takes all of five seconds of sitting up and picking dead leaves out of her hair for Sally to get the distinct impression that she is most definitely not the one who should be waking up in the woods. That is securely someone else's job - J-something. J...ustin? Jake? John? A friend of hers, right? This is something she should remember. Maybe she's in limbo again.
At least she's not naked.
She's not sure why that's a thing, or why she'd be friends with Mystery Joe who wakes up naked in the woods, but Sally has enough faith in her judge of character not to worry about that one all that much.
All things considered, the snarling dog are much more urgent right now.
Sally's on her feet right quick, whirling to face the pack of hounds and holding her hands out a little.
"Gooooood doggie," she says, her voice low. Okay clearly that is not working--
"I know I smell like prime rib extra-rare, but trust me when I say that you do not want a piece of this."
One of them snarls again, lunging forward a little, and she stumbles backward. No matter what she says, she's apparently one big Scooby Snack either way, so here goes nothing! She slowly leans down to pick up a branch off the floor, slooooowly, then HURLS IT AT THE LEAD DOG and turns to take off in the other direction. She's always been quick - she ran track for a couple of years back in high school - but the only time running through the forest is easy is if you have four legs and sharp reflexes. And, y'know, some way to pry yourself out of three or four heavy bracelet... things?
Anyone want to give a girl a hand?
Player name: Trace!
Contact: smoke signals and carrier pigeons
Are you over 18: y
Characters in The Box Already: Shepard, Tom, Clementine.
Character Information
Character Name: Sally Malik
Canon: Being Human (US)
Canon Point:
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive: It's Complicated (uhhhh undead?? maybe?)
History: Wiki.
Personality:
☑ first impressions
Sally is... well, okay, she's stunning, but she is also a great big ball of energy. It's worse with her friends, but even if you're a stranger, she has no trouble being loud or ridiculous or having a good time. She is grinning like 50% of the time anymore (okay, not true, but it seems like it), and she always has something witty and often painfully blunt to interject into a conversation. Sally lights up the room, sometimes on purpose but sometimes just by virtue of her presence. However, all of the above means that sometimes, the first impression she gives is 'this girl is too much to handle'. Her roomie/co-BFF Josh has come to adore her, but he's the uptight and OCD sort and when they met in season one, she drove him straight up the walls.
☑ extrovert x100
Man, Sally is... basically the ultimate extrovert. She thrives when she's around people - I honestly have no idea how she didn't go crazy before Josh and Aidan came along, stuck in that house for weeks as a ghost that nobody could see or hear. That's one of the best parts about having an actual physical body now, is the ability to go out to a bar or a coffee-shop or something and just enjoy... people.
Without even meaning to, Sally owns whatever space she's in. It's not in a bad way - I guess it's more that she thoroughly occupies it rather than owns it. She has a sort of youthful energy to her, and can be found skipping down stairs or sitting cross-legged on counter-tops or otherwise being super tactile with her environment in ways that most grown women aren't. On top of just her environment, though, she's super tactile with people too. When she comforts someone, even someone she isn't super close to, she's touching them somehow. There's physical contact involved when she flirts, too, but more on her romance/love life later. Sally has zero problems hugging someone or otherwise invading their personal space, once she knows them and would consider them 'a friend'. Like, she will flop on you on the couch, consider yourself warned.
Sally also is pretty boss at connecting with people. She I guess knows she's cool shit or doesn't give a fuck if she isn't, and it means she has very few social inhibitions. She has no fear of approaching someone for conversation, no fear of flirting, no fear of what she should say to ~impress someone~. She actually has next to zero tact most of the time, so thank god she's a pretty nice person, because it could be disastrous if she weren't. (Examples of this lack of tact include calling Aidan out on getting laid and asking questions like "Why are you dressed like a douche?" - those are just off the top off my head).
When she's in a good mood (which is most of the time - more often than the other two, anyway), she's in a perpetual state of snarking and witty jokes and often dancing of some kind of other physical manifestation of said good mood.
☑ supernatural... things idek
Okay, so this is going to be a bit of 'Sally over time'. A lot of who she is now has been shaped by the events of the last three seasons and the supernatural goings-ons thereof.
From the top: We meet Sally as a ghost. A ghost with a lot of baggage she has no idea how to handle. She couldn't touch the physical world (though she learned over time), and yet whenever her anxiety was high, the house would shake. She was outgoing Sally, but with that underlying haunted edge. And haunted she was: See, her ex-fiancee Danny killed her. Pushed her down the stairs, hence ghost. Midway through the season, the appearance of her old engagement ring dispels her mysterious
The realization that Danny straight-up didn't feel bad at all for killing her pushes Sally over an edge she never realized she had. She does what she can to be nice to people, but when you screw with her, jfc you'd better run. I'd say this was at least 50% a direct result of being a ghost, as it's mentioned a few times that ghosts who stick around like Sally end up losing their minds somehow, but... she basically went on a vengeance spirit rampage. It was obsessive, and entirely too much of her time was spent thinking of ways to make Danny suffer like he made her suffer. She did a variety of awful stuff, from trashing his apartment in a huge way (and leaving the engagement ring as a calling card) to making him nick himself while shaving so he bled down the front of his throat. Aidan and Josh thought he was a dick but wanted her to let it go, because they could see how it was changing her... But when Danny brought in a woman to exorcise her, that was the final straw, at least for Aidan. He beat Danny the fuck up, damn near killed him, but in that moment of truth, she realized that age-old trope: She Wasn't Going To Sink To His Level. Killing him would make her no better than he was. She didn't want to be That Person.
Eventually Aidan's ready to kill him for her but she realizes that having him do so would make her just like Danny. A killer. That knocked some sense back into her, and she instead forced him to admit to the police that he killed her, which sent him off to prison. Through this experience with Danny, Sally found a darkness inside her that she never knew she had, but one that she had to find and work through in order to be okay, if that even makes sense.
In season 2, she's a lot more outgoing. The weight of her unhealthy relationship with Danny is finally done weighing her down, so she's free to be her own person... Except wait. She's still a ghost that 90% of the world can't see. Which means even though Danny no longer has her on any kind of emotional leash, she's still walled off from all of the awesome fun shit that a young single lady would like to go out and do. Shopping, going out for drinks, even catching a bite with friends in which she can actually eat the food - all a no-go. However, she met up with a group of ghost dudes who had found a way to cheat a little.
Thus Sally learned how to possess people, and entered into her second downward spiral within a year. Because suddenly, wow, all she has to do is dive into some live-person's spinal column and she can feel, taste, talk to other living people - albeit using the body of the person she's possessing to do so. It's... addicting, to say the least. There's a whole support group for it, Possession-Addicts Anonymous but without the catchy name, run by a spirit medium sort of woman who does reincarnation at the local hospital (which, for the record, Sally didn't qualify for). Sally hits the point where she only feels alive when she's inhabiting someone's body - most commonly the body of the girlfriend of a hot doctor at the hospital, which eventually drives that poor woman insane with unexplained amnesia and memories that aren't hers. And yet ghost!Sally in't looking much better. It gets harder and harder to pull herself out of the woman's body, and she looks paler and sicker each time. Josh and Aidan really start to worry, but Sally brushes them off.
It fucks her up enough that without even realizing, a piece of her splits off into a hallucinatory split-personality, who introduces himself as the Reaper and says that she either has to let him reap her or take his job. The various miscreant ghosts would tip the status quo if someone didn't reap them before they could, etc etc. Apparently, getting your door to the happy afterlife isn't the only way out. Ghosts can get shredded, literally torn apart from the inside, and sent to a sort of purgatory limbo, not that she has any idea where they're going quite yet. This Reaper does some awful shit, shreds a few of her friends and really sincerely fucks with her head, without Sally having any clue that it's really a part of her - a hallucination of sorts. She only has her eyes opened to it near the second season finale, when something fucks with the moon and all of the shredded ghosts re-appear. This included Danny, which was a mind-fuck that she was now 200% strong enough to handle (she was so scared of him before, even if he couldn't really hurt her again), but the real mindfuck was Nick, an old friend of hers who... seemed terrified of her. He didn't want her to shred him again. She had no idea what he meant by that, but then the real memories came back. She realized she was turning into a monster, and elected to shred herself into the same limbo she sent her friends to.
She's stuck there for god-knows-how-long, constantly cycling the same routine: she rescues each of her friends from their death-loop, then drags them to the limbo version of her old house in Boston, hoping that this time the front door would open when she turned the knob. Every time in the past, it just reset the cycle. Meanwhile in the real world, Josh and his girlfriend Nora had found a witch doctor to bring Sally back to life! ....In her old corpse. Using the heart of a man Josh killed with his bare hands. It was pretty disgusting overall, but back in limbo, that door opened! And Sally of course forced her two buddies through too, so poor Josh had to go dig up two more corpses that night.
Aaaand suddenly Sally's alive!! AND THRILLED. Like, she was always a sweetheart (mostly) but now she's this giant ball of ecstatic energy as described in the rest of the app. Being dead did horrible stuff to her psyche even on the good days, and Josh gave her a second chance at life! She is instantly all about going out into the world and doing STUFF and THINGS and WEARING CLOTHES besides that awful sweater-leggings pajama set and awful frizzy hair and idk just trust me, this is A+ for Sally. Even in the little ways. Like, as tactile as she is with people, imagine finally being able to hug Aidan when she sees him again after so long, or touch someone's hand or shoulder when they're sad. Usually Aidan's. This season has mad Aidan-Sally UST, it's ridiculous.
However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. One condition of her reanimation is that she can't see anyone she knew before she died. She learns this by... disregarding Josh's repeated warning and taking home an old acquaintance she runs into at a bar. Whoops, the next morning she finds out that he never made it home last night, he just went out and died in his car instead. Way to go, Sally. You really fucked that one up. She feels awful about it, and she tries to go to the funeral home to make it right with him, which is where she meets Max (the funeral home director) who becomes probably the most understanding normal dudes she has ever met. Like, she comes off totally nuts repeatedly and then breaks in later to go through his files, and what does he do? Says what amounts to 'oh, so you're trying to find an identity to steal because you don't have one? How about you work here, I can pay you in cash.' WELP, that was a definite yes. It's not like corpses really got to Sally anymore, at that point. I mean, she can still see all of the ghosts (and get petitioned for help like 30 times a day) but she handles that pretty well.
Things only get hairy when her brother accidentally sees her when he visits the house to pretend he owns the place now that Sally and Danny are both dead (really it's Sally's dad who does), so she runs off to the witch doctor to fix it before her brother dies. The witch doctor basically fucks her and Josh both up, but eventually agrees to lift the 'nobody from Sally's past' rule, on one condition... And Sally agrees, promising the woman her soul as soon as she dies. Which is basically the worst end-goal ever but at least now she doesn't have to be afraid to leave her house.
Unfortunately, there's another catch to this little deal they've made - a catch that she discovers a few days later, with a large open sore on her scalp. She is basically rotting away, which is scary as shit and she tries to steal wax make-up (made for corpses) from the funeral home but Max catches her and she has to come out with her secret, with how she died and was brought back and whoops, she's rotting like an actual literal zombie and it's disgusting. He takes off, he can't handle it, but later he shows up with this huge dead-person make-up kit bigger than Sally's actual make-up kit and he covers the sores up like they were never there to start with. But hiding them doesn't mean they aren't there. What could be causing them? Sally finds out later on, when (in one of her many fits of ravenous hunger these days) she eats a package of raw beef... and it actually makes her feel a little less rotten. A poor-decision live-mouse meal later, she heads off to Nick's house to see if all of this was just her. It's not - live flesh is the only way to stave off the decomposition.
That's basically her canon-point, after that talk and the subsequent window-shopping at the pet store in which she realizes how badly her hunger for any and all living things truly disgusts her, but it's relevant to a full picture of her personality to note that even if it'll keep her alive (and keep her soul from the witch doctor), she refuses to eat people. The entire rest of the season she's rotting away, even locking herself in her room to make sure she can't eat anyone in a fit of poor self-control. She may make shitty horrible no-good choices a lot of the time, but there's a level of low that she is no longer willing to stoop if she ever was.
☑ love and connections
Sally loves people. Just... people. She loves being around them, loves talking to them, loves connecting with them, flirting with them, awful amazing UST, she just loves everything. But honestly, the thing she loves most are her two BFFs and roomies, Josh and Aidan. They are her family, more than her actual family ever was, and she actually had a great family growing up so that's saying something. She would die for either of them in an instant, no matter what kind of afterlife she'd end up in. In fact, she could've 'gone into the light' at the end of the first season, it was sitting there waiting for her, but she chose to go make sure Aidan was safe first. She passed it up for her friends. These three go above and beyond a normal friendship, in the sense that they risk life and limb for one another on a weekly basis. That's just how they are, and that's what friendship means to Sally. There are friends, the kind she can hang out with and chat with and all that, then there are friends. The kind she can talk to about anything, and who accept her for who/what she is. Those friends have her whole heart, whether it's Josh and Aidan or new friends she meets in an RP world.
As said in the 'extrovert' section, Sally can make friends with just about anyone. It is incredibly hard to deter her when she's determined to get through to someone. A lot of the time, she wins them over grudgingly (like Josh) rather than making a terribly great case in her first impression. More so than making friends, though, she puts a lot more emphasis than most on importance of sticking together and making connections through adversity. When shit's going down, she'll be the one on the network making deliberately less-serious posts (one I have in mind is a massive game of Never Have I Ever on the network, to get to know people).
Sally craves a romantic connection aside from just platonic ones, and falls easily into nearly any flirtation ritual offered by an attractive guy. Flirting Sally is a slightly different Sally - she quiets down a lot, and you can tell she's thinking a lot more about the words she's saying, almost like she's trying them out to see what he'll do. Lots of eye contact, but not the creepy kind. When she's found someone to be in a relationship with, she opens back up to her energetic self, albeit with a distinctly flirtatious edge to it.
☑ has her shit together
It's hard to honestly and truly shake Sally, anymore. Part of this is because she's realized how much harder it is to get through tough shit if you actually treat it like tough shit. You are what scares you, and you are what you let that fear turn you into. She still gets scared, but she chooses to stay in control, and because of that, she's so much stronger now than she was in the first season. On top of that, when something gets her down, it rarely keeps her down. She can hear incredibly bad news (an example right near her canonpoint is that Aidan got the virus that wiped out most of the other vampires, and thus has like three or four days to live), and after the initial dismay or misery, she can pull her shit together and act at least somewhat cheery, even if she's still hurting on the inside. An example past her canonpoint is when she realizes she's dying (unless she eats people, which she refuses to do). She can be seen making witty/joking comments right up to the end of her rotting existence in canon, which is after her canonpoint but an excellent example nonetheless.
Even before she died, her shit was firmly 'together'. She was going to go to grad school, maybe even work in the UN. What stopped her? She fell in love with Danny, and part of her heart was still set on the role of the doting housewife, that perfect mother and father and 2.5 kids family in the cute little fixer-upper house. Still, her ducks were all in a row up until that point, and once she's a ghost, she's constantly taking the initiative to force herself to be better, to be able to do more. Through determination, she learned to touch the physical environment around her (before, Josh had to turn the pages of her book for her) and to be able to leave the house for a little while.
On top of all of that, Sally has very few things that she's truly afraid of anymore. Losing her friends is one of them. So is the possibility that she becomes a cannibalistic monster. Dying, however, is not. At all. At this point, she's died, then her ghost has died again, then she was brought back to die again. Dying is so five minutes ago. This means that you won't often find her paralyzed by fear... Which means the Man Downstairs will have to be a little more creative in motivating her.
☑ does not have her shit together
Every season, there's something huge fucking with this normally-well-adjusted chick's head. In the first season, Danny sends her off the deep end into this violent vindictive rage. In the second season, the show reminds us that it's really just one big addiction metaphor and gets her hooked on possessing live people, selfishly eating away at their life force and sanity, and that gets to her bad enough that she has to make a whole new split personality to cope with the bad shit she's done.
Then here we are in season 3, in which she made poor Josh and Nora dig up the heart of a dude they killed a year ago and graverob Sally's own body just to slather goo on it and hope she comes back to life. Then she thanks them by utterly ignoring Josh's warnings not to talk to people she used to know, which gets this guy Trent killed because he recognized her and she really wanted to bang him. Then if that's not warning enough, she comes home at the wrong time and almost gets her brother killed, at which point she hurries off to sell her soul so he'll live, because that totally won't bite her in the ass.
The list goes on, seriously, it's not pretty. Sally deserves a really big You Tried star, not quite as big as Aidan's but he's had 270 years to earn his. She never means to fuck stuff up, she just has trouble thinking through the consequences of doing something she really wants to do. In discussing the show with a friend a while back, we arrived at the metaphor that the three of them are like a family: Aidan's the absentee dad with the good heart, Josh is the overprotective mom who shakes and pees like a chihuahua when things start to get sketchy, and Sally is their kid who is adorable and sweet but really really needs adult supervision. Whoops.
☑ basically way too much trouble
Jesus fuck, this girl is so much more trouble than she's worth. Sure, she will bail you out of just about any mess you can get yourself into, but the odds are just as high that she'll get you into a mess too. I already talked about a lot of the mistakes she's made and why, but it's not all just negligence. Of the three roommates, the other two tend to have one or two major flaws, while hers are smaller but all over the board. She's selfish, envious, wrathful, lustful, and god knows how many of the other deadly sins. Not all at once, obviously, but those are all very much within her range of normal emotions/mindsets.
On top of that, much like the family child in the above metaphor, she has no trouble exploiting how adorable she is. She pesters Josh into buying pizza, for example, with a huge grin and slow nod, like 'you know you want this shit'. This will translate to... using the sheer force of her ability to be cute to convince others to make supply runs for her, or even to convince them to come over because her room's empty and cold. Man, that's another thing - she has to look nice, it's a burning need. She will scrounge for the absolute best clothes available and will not stop until she finds something sufficiently trendy. Sob.
Also, she unironically says shit like "Holla at yo' boy!" That... is a whole problem in and of itself.
Items on your character at canon point:
Her purse, which has such things as a couple of pens, her cell phone, gum, mints, her wallet with money/cards/ID, a few spare accessories or make-up items. Probably some kind of candy, she has a sweet tooth.
Abilities, Strengths and Weaknesses:
As a reanimated human, her only real 'ability' is.... to rot. sob. That and her ability to see other ghosts, but that only matters in canon, since the other ghosts here are basically all visible. She can also consume ungodly amounts of food, so hide your leftovers.
As a ghost, her range of skills is much more diverse. She can dissipate and re-appear elsewhere (often used to appear in the kitchen from her bedroom in the morning, which she later lamented being unable to do), she can affect the physical realm intentionally (like by reaching out and touching it) or unintentionally (sometimes when she gets upset/anxious, shit happens like the furniture or pipes shaking). When she's poltergeisting like she did with Danny, she accrues a lot more destructive force, able to basically create a whirlwind of flying shit and bust up the contents of a room/apartment. Worse yet, when she had that Reaper personality branch, she was haunting herself in ways she never quite realized she could. For example, knives would fly off the counters and lodge in the walls near her head. It wouldn't have hurt her, but it's an example of something that can happen when she gets fucked up in the head.
As a ghost, she can also possess people, which looks a lot like diving into their spinal column. This allows her to speak through a person, feel what they're feeling... She basically is them as long as she's in their body. They don't remember it afterward, and usually feel tired as fuck. Sally herself starts to look and act... well, like a junkie, after too much of it. She tries to avoid possessing people whenever humanely possible. In an RP context, this wouldn't be done without working it out prior to the thread.
Her weaknesses... The rotting, definitely a weakness. She's hungry all the time, and this is a setting with limited resources, so she's going to have to learn to hunt or find someone to hunt for her. As a ghost, her weaknesses include being incorporeal (and unable to be seen by most of the population, which she'll seek to fix ASAP) and iron. She can be dissipated by iron, being stabbed with it or having it swung through her. It makes her disappear and then reappear in the spot that she died.
Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample:
Okay, hi. So I know everyone's still completely on edge from Mister Axe-Crazy, but you guys are just going to have to take a deep breath or something, because here's what we're doing.
There's this game back home, it's called Never Have I Ever. It's... actually pretty stupid, like for frat guys or thirteen-year-olds who found their dad's stash, but humor me here. Basically, someone starts off like 'Never have I ever blah blah blah'. Never have I ever ~ridden a bike~, never have I ever... I don't know, jumped off a cliff. Anyway, everyone who has done the Never-Have-I-Ever has to take a shot. Or a sip, or a raincheck for when you do have booze, or even just drink juice or something - it doesn't matter, that's not the point.
The point is, I know pretty much nobody - just Josh, who also knows pretty much nobody but that's just Josh - and I know I'm not the only one. Why not actually get to know some people? Like, what's the worst that can happen? You forget to be an angry douche for like five seconds?
Anyway, let's tear this shit up!
I can start, this one's easy:
Never have I ever lived anywhere but the city I was born.
Prose Log Sample: (converting my test drive thread starter into prose format)
It takes all of five seconds of sitting up and picking dead leaves out of her hair for Sally to get the distinct impression that she is most definitely not the one who should be waking up in the woods. That is securely someone else's job - J-something. J...ustin? Jake? John? A friend of hers, right? This is something she should remember. Maybe she's in limbo again.
At least she's not naked.
She's not sure why that's a thing, or why she'd be friends with Mystery Joe who wakes up naked in the woods, but Sally has enough faith in her judge of character not to worry about that one all that much.
All things considered, the snarling dog are much more urgent right now.
Sally's on her feet right quick, whirling to face the pack of hounds and holding her hands out a little.
"Gooooood doggie," she says, her voice low. Okay clearly that is not working--
"I know I smell like prime rib extra-rare, but trust me when I say that you do not want a piece of this."
One of them snarls again, lunging forward a little, and she stumbles backward. No matter what she says, she's apparently one big Scooby Snack either way, so here goes nothing! She slowly leans down to pick up a branch off the floor, slooooowly, then HURLS IT AT THE LEAD DOG and turns to take off in the other direction. She's always been quick - she ran track for a couple of years back in high school - but the only time running through the forest is easy is if you have four legs and sharp reflexes. And, y'know, some way to pry yourself out of three or four heavy bracelet... things?
Anyone want to give a girl a hand?