unmakes | + application (hadriel)

PLAYER
PLAYER NAME: trace
CONTACT:

watchtower
CHARACTERS CURRENTLY IN-GAME: none, also applying for zelos wilder this round

CHARACTER
NAME: sally malik
AGE: ahaha that's complicated (physically 23, technically 28, unless you count her time spent pre-canonupdate in her last game which means she's lived a total of approximately 30 years now oh my god sally you old woman)
CANON: being human (us)
CANONPOINT: s4e8, just after being scratched by josh ( + pastgame memories)

HISTORY: right here. i wish i could tell you somebody got drunk and edited that wiki but no, that is actually her life

PERSONALITY:
❕ an important note ❕

By now, Sally has been in a horror jamjar for 21 straight months. This personality section is going to outline "canon Sally", but she has developed quite a bit since then, which you'll see in the CR AU section. So... yeah, that's a thing to keep in mind going forward here, when the samples don't 100% line up with where canon left her. c:

☑ 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 pretty much 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 months 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 and a half 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. Which makes sense, considering she's repressing the knowledge of who exactly killed her. She achieves the revelation that it was Danny midway through the season, and worse - he's not even sorry. He said some really awful shit, tried (and succeeded) to get with Sally's former best friend, even tried to have Sally 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 and sincerely regretting she couldn't have finished the job. 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, Sally 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.

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 true to the junkie metaphor, 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. He's explained in her history wiki so I'll skip past most of that, but essentially: 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 ends up having her eyes opened to that, and immediately elects to shred herself and send herself to Limbo in a fit of desperation to avoid going ghost-crazy and hurting anyone else.

Fast-forward to post-Limbo, to waking up in her old body, 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 most of the rest of her app. Being dead did horrible stuff to her psyche even on the good days, and Josh and Nora's efforts 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. Season 3 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 one of 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 looking for dead babies' SSNs, and what does he do? He 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, hell yes is she accepting that one. 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. Except the old man balls.

She gets a little dodgy again once she realizes she's rotting and has to eat live animals, because that's not really something you tell people over dinner, but all in all her personality stays about the same throughout season three. You can see the definite changes in her from the last season, though: In the second season, she let herself fall into self-gratification via possession, and here she is in the third season refusing to hurt people even when it's necessary to sustain herself. In fact, she chooses to die a horrible rotting death and hand her soul to the witch rather than hurting people, which is an incredible step in the right direction.

Fast-forward to season four, in which she's back as a ghost with black magic - thanks a ton, Donna. While she's clearly demonstrated that she's matured enough not to blatantly hurt people for personal gain, this season reveals an even greater flaw: Sally is so desperate to help people that she can't leave well enough alone and oftentimes pretty much nukes an otherwise only mildly bad situation. She destroys herself with black magic to try and help Josh's sad sister Emily, to help Nora, to even help Josh himself, despite that she goes god-knows-where for longer and longer each time. It's legitimately dangerous for her, but she's tossing that aside in favor of "but it could help someone". The trouble is, it doesn't always help as planned. Josh flat-out tells her to her face at one point that she pretty much ruins everything she touches, and that's even in the regular timeline - the one where everyone loves each other etc. This season on Sally's part is pretty much a constant desperate attempt to undo bad things with sketchy magic, and it gets her stuck in the past in a semi-permanent way.

You'd think shit would just get better from there, right? Like, it's Sally. She's seen this movie before. You never fuck with time-space, it's like the most basic movie lesson known to man besides 'don't pick up the hitchhiker in the jumpsuit'. But no, instead of leaving well-enough alone, she tries to re-create the past as it ~should have been~. As if she's got a cheat-sheet to make everything perfect without considering the fact that all of the hard times they went through were what brought them together in the first place. She fucks that all up, needless to say, and thus we've arrived at her canonpoint just after she gets scratched by wolfy Josh.

☑ 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 newer friends she meets in her jamjar adventures.

As mentioned 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 through shared interests/hobbies/whatever, though, she puts a ton of emphasis on the value 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 just to try and chill shit out in a subtle way.

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.

As of her canonpoint she and Aidan were basically as much of a thing as can possibly be. Those feelings linger like any kind of love tends to do, but she's versatile as shit and the life she led with Josh and Aidan back in Boston has since become No Longer Her Life thanks to jamjar life. More on that later, of course.

☑ secretly insecure as fuck

It's actually kind of a surprise for anyone who's met her, but underneath everything, she actually has some serious self-esteem issues. Sally was in an emotionally and borderline physically abusive relationship with Danny for years pre-canon, and that kind of instilled in her head a really warped sense of self-worth. Like, her current closest CR (see: 'pastgame cr') was already pretty decent friends with her but basically won the title of Will Never Get Rid Of Her just by saying she never deserved to be murdered. That's theoretically kind of a given, but nobody's ever said that to her before, and somewhere in the back of her mind part of her wonders if she did deserve it.

This means that she's actually really super easy to win over. And it's not even like she's naive, she can usually identify manipulative efforts, but at the same time she also like fundamentally wants to believe that the nice/positive shit people say is genuine - and when she finds someone who does genuinely say and believe nice shit about her, she kind of desperately clings to them for it, albeit in a somewhat subtle way usually.

Meanwhile, as of this last season and how many times she's been informed that she Ruins Everything (Zoe legit uses "Sally things up" as a verb for fucking up), she's actually fully received the reality check that she ruins pretty much everything, as much as she sometimes hides it. Except it's rough for her because she doesn't go into something like 'ok I'm about to ruin this big time', she goes into it thinking she's about to do a great thing or fix something or help someone and it all just blows up. So now when she sticks her neck out for someone, she's kind of bracing for some kind of rebuke in the aftermath.

☑ 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 was when Aidan got the virus that wiped out most of the other vampires, and thus has like three or four days to live, back in the third season), 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. Another example is in the end of the third season 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.

Even before she died the first time, 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 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 died and became a ghost, she spent the first season 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, in season 3, was 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. NOT TO MENTION all the jamjar deaths. Dying is so five minutes ago. This means that you won't often find her paralyzed by fear... Which I guess means that Fear will have to get a bit more creative.

☑ 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 in season 3, 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. Not to mention the cannibalistic tendencies, that almost ended horribly.

Time to take a look at season 4, in which the theme of the season (for her) is trying her guts out to help make people/things better but making them worse instead. See: the entire alternate universe she created. Nora and Josh not being together, Bridget dying...

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 bail you out of that mess just to land you right into another mess. 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 everyday emotions/mindsets. Plus, in this latest season especially, she tries way way way too hard to fix what's not necessarily broken in the first place. Like 'oh, your pencil broke?? LET ME USE MAGIC AND FIX THAT, oh whoops now it's in your eye'.

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 do her favors in Hadriel, 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.

INVENTORY: sally has a backpack and a duffel bag on her at her canonpoint. they attempted to send the bags after her, but game-canon said it was hit or miss. i'm adding them here in case it's kosher to keep them.

backpack contents include:

3 changes of clothes
this sweater
journal entitled 'the gospel according to biff', with a protection charm bracelet & a pressed flower between the end pages
silver wolf-killing blade
nail gun + small box of nails
spare ace bandage to wrap around wolf scars if current one gets bloody
a tiny electronic violin which, if you press the button, plays a sorrowful song

duffel bag contents include:
legit just 5 bottles of different booze (blame seth)
reconstructed dubstep gun (inherited thirdhand)
a small but functional chocolate fountain + small supply of chocolate
a bag full of roughly a gajillion pieces of bellybutton jewelry (she isn't even pierced, idek why she kept them)

SKILLS & ABILITIES: this is running on the assumption that her supernatural garbage works as it did in her last game: She's got a body, she dies, she's a ghost for a while, she either gets ghost-destroyed or shreds herself, and she respawns like anyone else. If that's not the case, I can totally adjust all this!

alive, werewolf:
At her current canonpoint, Sally is her world's version of a werewolf. This means that one night per month (on the full moon - so potentially more than one if there are two full moons or any kind of eclipse), she turns into a big angry uncanny-valley motherfucker who could tear her own family apart without a second thought until she turns back sometime the next morning. Her wolf is smaller than Josh's and Nora's, and seems to have its shit together a lot less steadily, being new and all. In the couple of days before the turn, her senses heighten and so does her-... well for a guy I'd call it testosterone, but. Y'know, let's just use that: She gets kind of testosterone-y, more prone to rash decisions or intense actions. She gets wolfy, is what it's called. So apologies ahead to anyone she either hatebangs or complains about because they reek.

She has very limited abilities/talents to speak of, 90% of the time. A knowledge of the supernatural and the general ways they should handle their conditions is something she does have - in the alternate timeline, she created a sort of care package for Josh to take when he wolfs out. She's totally comfortable talking to and dealing with all varieties of supernatural being (though the ones she's unfamiliar with will get a lot of questions), and she isn't terribly scared of them despite being totally corporeal now.

There are a few skills she's learned in her first jamjar experience, but that'll go in the CR AU section.

dead, ghost:
When she dies as a human, Sally lingers on as a ghost until she's ghost-killed in some way (via in-game horrors of some kind, exorcism, or just shredding herself). As a ghost at her current canonpoint, after getting swallowed up by, breaking out of, and then temporarily being imprisoned by the black-magic witch Donna, tl;dr she has a huge fragment of Donna's magic left inside her from the number of times they've accidentally been inside one another in one capacity or the other. Without Donna's spellbook, her repertoire is extremely limited, but on a few occasions she's shown to be able to pull various incantations from somewhere deep in her memory banks, despite never really ~learning~ them. It's a weird case of conveniently knowing the right spell for an occasion, but it doesn't always work and also she manages to botch it almost every time, ahaha... ha. As an example, Josh's sister Emily was super bummed so Sally, standing behind her as she talked to herself in a mirror, tried an incantation to let Emily see her so she could pep-talk Em personally. It seemed to fail, but in fact it was more 'successful' than anyone realized: Downstairs, Kenny (who - basically he's all deformed as shit and uses his vampire compulsion to look totally normal to others) loses his glamour thanks to Sally's spell, intended to reveal the unseen, and a huge chaotic fight goes down.

Also, whenever she uses black magic in any capacity, her ghost self disappears for an increasing length of time. In canon, she disappears into the past. In Hadriel, we can either just say she has no idea where she goes and that it's all black or something, or you mods could decide where she goes and make it as fucked up as you'd like!

FLAWS:

This was mostly outlined out in the personality section (or will be in CR AU), but to recap: Selfish without even realizing, fails to think of others as long as they aren't immediately relevant to her (like the doctor's girlfriend who got really fucked up thanks to her possession in s2), envious, sometimes passive-aggressive, vengeful, impulsive, inconsiderate, not to mention the time she got so fucked up she split-personality'd a grim reaper hallucination to keep her company and hide the fact that she was ghost-killing all of her friends.

Oh, and there's also the part where she turns into a ruthless beast one night a month, plus even when she's dead she lingers around as an increasingly fucked-up black magic ghost.

tbh her existence in general is just chaos personified, anymore.

CR AU
PREVIOUS GAME & TIME SPENT THERE: The Box, from January of 2014 to September of 2015 (approximately 21 months).
PREVIOUS DEVELOPMENT:

⑇ mental-emotional development ⇢

( as can be expected from nearly two years in a horror jamjar, her time in The Box has really kind of fucked her up. most of these are various facets of that, though a few aren't. )

though the fear was there in a lesser way in canon, her time in Box has really kind of instilled a sort of paranoia that none of this is real - that the life she thinks she's living trapped somewhere far from Boston is actually just an extremely elaborate limbo meant to occupy her. especially since that iiisn't exactly unprecedented even in canon. really, it just would make so much more sense if none of it were real, as much as she hates to admit it. she's seen and experienced so many things that should've been totally impossible, revival from death time after time, hideous monsters, the world itself coming apart under the wrath of dissatisfied gods... except weirdly enough, that's not the part that actually gets to her. like sure, in a sort of general sense, but what keeps her up at night is the much more pressing notion that when nobody's there touching her or even just talking to her, she doesn't really have proof in her own head that she's real. (talk about supernatural existential crises, man)

another symptom of horror jamjar life? she's lost a shit-ton of people. like that's the thing, she's Seen Some Shit, a lot more shit than plenty of the people she talks to in a game, but up until she showed up in box, she'd never actually lost anyone she was super close to. back home, by the time anyone she cared about (her mom) died, sally was already dead so death was no longer an abyss into which you lose the people you love. just like in box - death wasn't the end. but people didn't just die: they disappeared without a trace. and this was fine at first, like it sucks bad but you can deal with it to a point, but by the end (in which she'd tried and failed to stop keeping track), she'd list twenty-seven people close enough to her that she would've sincerely risked life and limb for them. twenty-seven people who may not have been best friends of hers, but whose losses were each an ache in her chest. over time, it got harder to pull her shit back together after each one, so she's progressively gotten more and more careful about getting close to people (which never works but it's the thought that counts) and also more and more attached to the people she's retained all this time. see: "important cr"

she's a bit more easily influenced these days. like, her beliefs and morals and all that are more flexible than they used to be, on account of the fact that so many other ~cold hard truths~ of life are busted to pieces in a place like box, and also on account of the fact that most of the people who care about her the most are actually kind of shady as hell - which means that by proxy she becomes shady as hell just via assimilation.

sally is actually way darker as a person right now?? god where did that even start - like, at first it was a byproduct of all the loss and the misery the game threw at her, but then there was this heart to heart with one of her primary CR (who is actually a bit unstable and also a really unconventional person in general) where he asked in detail how good it felt to shred the ghost of her abusive ex and everything just kind of gradually snowballed from there. she really needs to stop befriending serial killers?? but like, then after that talk, the closest she had to an enemy in that game broke into their house while her people were dead and was like wearing their clothes and going through her shit and she just kind of snapped, gave him one warning threat, and then started shooting. it wasn't fatal, but it was still the first time she'd ever shot anyone. then fast-forward a couple of months and there was this massive fight where a bunch of enemy dudes needed to die or the entire player-character group was gonna be annihilated, and instead of doing what she would've done a year ago and running scouting or recon (she was a ghost at the time), she teamed up with an even worse serial killer, possessed enemy soldiers, and brought them back to him to gut one by one. which actually isn't the worst thing she'd done recently, because about a week prior someone had shot that same murdery friend in the shoulder so she possessed them and slit their throat with their own knife. the worst part is, she honestly doesn't even realize she's changed so much. she just... adapted to the life that's most easily sustainable, in a horror game.

okay time for a positive development: she's actually more responsible now? like, she fucks up plenty still, but she also ran a bar for almost a full year and managed to keep it functioning and not getting destroyed, and that was more responsibility than she'd had in a long while.

⑇ important cr ⇢
( see the note at the bottom of the pastgame info section for how all this is gonna be handled in a new game where the characters might have different players etc )
richie gecko. aka pretty much her lifeline to relative sanity right now, because he's the one person who's never once disappeared or gone home on her, and he was there for the last year of her stay all the way up through endgame. richie's far from her usual type of friend, being more reserved and iffy at making friends and by most people's standards a bit of a stick-in-the-mud or jerk, but they met when he volunteered to let ghost!sally haunt him and that was the nicest thing anyone in box had offered her thus far. their friendship kicked off with a lot of bonding over her being dead and him being fascinated, but then shit happened and it turned out that they both gave enough of a shit to risk life and limb for one another in a fight - a fight she died in, leading to the amazing revelation that he still wanted to hang with her even when she wasn't a neato ghost. the friendship just developed from there over the course of a year, occasionally dipping into something more than friendship but never in a way that overshadowed the fact that she was One Of Them now first and foremost ('them' being the geckos, richie and the soon-to-be-mentioned seth). he sat with her head in his lap while she rotted to death the final time. he's the one who got her rough goodbyes in endgame, and the concept of forgetting him and his brother if she left was almost unacceptable enough to hang around for the end of the world.
seth gecko. richie's older brother, and the only person sally can trust to give more of a shit about richie than she does. they started off rough, mostly because she met seth and had a pretty deep heart-to-heart with him under a blanket while she tried not to freeze to death - a talk in which she admitted some seriously deep shit that she didn't really tell much of anyone - right before he disappeared, returning a month or so later with no memory of it. it was like starting over at ground zero. and even worse than losing the talk, she lost the trust. the seth she talked to that day had decided he unquestionably trusted her, after seeing her give up her ghost life to keep the baddies off his brother... and then he disappears, comes back without memories, and didn't trust her even a quarter as far as he could throw her. which sucked, because after everything, seth was kind of someone she Really Needed To Like Her. which happened eventually, but not after some head-butting and stand-offs. in fact, richie had to tell her to come home a few times because she bailed the fuck out to give seth the space he ~obviously wanted~, but it turned out well. by the end she was by no means a gecko but she was as close to an honorary one as somebody could come, and that's coming from seth too, not just richie. and in return, he had become just as much 'family' as richie had - one of the people she couldn't really bear to lose, not that she had much choice.
reggie winters. he disappeared quite a bit before endgame, but that doesn't change the fact that outside of her adoptive pseudofam, reggie's singlehandedly the person she misses the most. he was essentially a giant ball of sunshine and it was enough of a contrast from the entire rest of her life that being around him was almost low-key addicting. like, she's usually the one who has to be a giant ball of sunshine, so the fact that he did it instead meant she was off the hook to just... breathe. there was some weird blood between them for a bit - he was super in love with her in the month-long suburban dreamscape and that pretty much got him murdered (it was her fault, just assume this kind of shit's her fault as a general rule), and then a month or so after that was all resolved, she was all kinds of fucked up over iirc a fight with richie and he said some super sweet shit and she kissed him and he was like whoa bro i like dudes, so that was awkward as hell considering she's like 0% used to rejection, but they worked through it. they always did. he was her go-to person when shit got real and that meant a ton to her.
biff. tl;dr dude she almost dated in her early box months. though she never knew him nearly as well as the geckos or reggie, he still stands out in her mind for a couple of reasons: firstly, he stuck with giving a shit about her even when she was an invisible ghost who couldn't even really communicate, which the others may have been willing to do but never had to try - not to mention the fact that the first time she rotted to death, right up until maybe a half hour before full organ failure he stuck with her, sitting on the opposite side of the door with his fingers linked with hers. she'd never rotted to death before, and she was scared as shit to do it alone, but thanks to him she didn't have to. and the second reason he stands out is that he's one of only two that ever came back to her - it was over a full year later, but that doesn't even matter, it still happened and they got an adorable reunion and it was gross.
mia allen. the troubled chick richie kind of adopted, and if richie could actually tolerate her, sally was more than ready to keep her around. she pretty quickly developed a sort of protectiveness over mia, urging her to do shit like check on her repeatedly when hell broke loose on various occasions and actually try to talk using non-hostile sentences when mia tried to comfort her after the failure of three of her close friends to make it onto the migratory train. they could've been spectacular friends, given a little more time and a little less death.

⑇ skill and ability development ⇢
( none of these are like ~sudden magic~ or anything, so they should translate decently well into a new setting )
a talking cat (don't ask) taught her how to make herself visible, audible, and even briefly physically tangible to normal non-supernaturals when she's a ghost. however, this was before she canon-updated, and she hasn't been a ghost again since to find out it actually won't work anymore without a looot of work. this is because a huge key point of the method she was taught is being able to fully understand and conceptualize every facet of her physical body, and now that she's a wolf rather than what may as well be a zombie, she no longer has that necessary understanding. not yet, and not for a while, because the wolf is so much more difficult to understand.

though she doesn't have actual skill yet, she's gotten somewhat more comfortable handling knives & wielding a nail gun just through necessary self-defense.

she's gotten pretty fuckin decent at bartending and mixing drinks by eye and all that. looots of practice.

⑇ physical development ⇢
( not that it makes a huge difference anyway, but this is just for reference )
surprise surprise, she has quite a few scars. about a month after she arrived, vines a la The Ruins started crawling under everyone's skin, and she had to cut a few of them out, which left her with three or four different entry scars (her chest, her arm, and her leg) and a decent handful of mostly cleaner scars from where she had to cut them all out with a steak knife and a shaky hand. she also had the word 'MONSTER' carved into her back like a tramp stamp in july of '15, which was since covered up by a tattoo. the only other scar i can think of is the big stupid one across her gut from these shitty mannequin-faced doll people in the legit cabin in the woods.

like i mentioned, she now has a pretty bitchin' tattoo on her lower back. the best example i can find is like this but not quite as bold in color, where it basically looks like the skin there was torn away. it was tj the tattoo buddy's idea, but it was also kind of ironic after how much she kind of wanted to claw the scars off before the tatt covered them.

❕ as a note, i'm taking her from endgame and box endgame canon leaves it ambiguous how successful their return home was, how much they remember (supposedly they'll remember nothing but the technicians made it clear that there's no guarantee on any of it), etc, so that's what i'll be using as an excuse if she has pastgame CR with someone but they're in hadriel by a different player. i'll just say she doesn't 100% remember them, just hazy familiarity and an urge to want to know them to figure out why. ❕

SAMPLES
ACTION LOG SAMPLE:

❰ with each minute spent in the dark, it's harder and harder to reconcile the fact that at some point, sally had thought this was a good idea. i mean - to be fair, when your senses are on fire and you feel that telltale pained clench in your chest, your stomach, your limbs, your throat - at that point, any plan in which you get away from anyone who could get caught up in becoming collateral damage seems like a perfect plan.

but now she's in the tunnels, deep deep in the tunnels, and her phone's all kinds of dead so she's flying by feel, and every part of her's screaming to just stop and strip and let the wolf take over but at the same time, she's too borderline-scared to try. if she's already panicked out here in the dark with at the very least some sense of why she's come all this way, imagine how panicked her wolf will be without a single clue. will her eyes be able to see in this darkness? will she flee toward the city, or away from it? all questions she can't answer. she's only done this shit, what, like four times now? not nearly enough times to try it this far out in the dark and lonely recesses of a godforsaken cave.

what the hell was she thinking?

finally abandoning her staggering pace, sally backs up the few steps it takes to find the tunnel wall with her palms and she slides down it into a curled heap on the floor. ❱

Hey - ❰ she calls, a little weakly. it echoes down the tunnel in each direction. a little louder this time: ❱ Hey, can anybody hear me?! ❰ more echoing, and sally bites her lip, dropping her forehead into her knees and humming an anxious half-assed rhythm with the occasional rhythmic 'shit shit shiiit' thrown in under her breath. nobody answered her shouting - that's a good thing. it means nobody's in mauling range. it's a good thing.

and yet she can't help but pull out her phone, mashing down the power button until the screen flickers to life with an immediate low-battery warning. ❱

if i'm notb ack tmrw i

❰ aaaand there it goes, dead again. she shoves it back into her pocket, just in time for the wolf to finally begin to shove its way out of her chest ❱