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C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: sally malik
Canon: being human (us)
Original or Alternate Universe: original
Canon Point: season 4, episode 8 - right after she's scratched by josh
Number: rng her one c:
Setting: wiki link!
History:
Let me preface this by saying I am so sorry for how stupidly ridiculous this canon is. Like, Sally? Is an ex-ghost-turned-zombie ghost with an introductory pyro deal and the ability to witness child murder in other dimensions haunting a newly-werewolf'd version of her own body in an alternate universe. y e p.
But okay, from the top!
Sally Malik came from a decently-functional nuclear family. I mean, they had their issues - her mom was in love with some other guy (though Sally only found out after her mom died and met the guy in the afterlife, that was a lovely surprise) and her brother was a notorious skeezeball looking to make a buck, but her life was definitely far from a sob story. She had dreams, kind of. She was thinking of working at the UN, or at least going to grad school and finishing her education, but Sally didn't quite get that far. She met Danny in college and they fell in love fast, getting engaged right after graduation and buying a house together in Boston where they grew up. Sally's grad school dreams were kind of crushed by that, but she'd fallen hard and fast into a new dream, the romanticized ideal of a housewife with a doting husband, which is likely part of what got her into the mess she was in when canon started.
You see, when the show opens up, Sally's a ghost. Not only that, but Josh and Aidan (as a wolf and a vampire respectively) are the only two people who've been able to see her since she died six months ago. Needless to say, she's been going a little crazy. She's lonely, she's confused, and on top of that she misses the love of her life, her ex-fiancee Danny. But whoops, he's actually pretty much the last person she should be missing, because when her ring slipped down the sink drain one evening, he pushed her down the stairs in a fit of rage. Danny was the one who'd killed her, and she'd spent so long in denial of the fact that he was dangerous, spent so long hoping things would calm down and their lives would be perfect again when he was less stressed, that even in death it took Danny making moves on Sally's best friend for her to realize (via flashback) what it was he'd done.
Throughout the first season, Sally learned to grow into herself as a person again rather than that nervous house-shaking pipe-busting spirit lurking around the house being miserable. I mean don't get me wrong, she totally goes dark and nearly cuts Danny's throat in the process, but when it comes down to the wire and Aidan's ready to kill Danny in her honor, she calls him off and forces Danny to confess and go to jail instead. Which brings me to another huge development in season one: Her friends. Pre-death she had Danny and she had Bridget, and it's hard not to feel like Danny kind of owned the both of them even before Sally died (all of the pictures have Danny with his arms over both of them, and Bridget came to him for comfort when Sally died, which I don't think would've happened if she were just Sally's best friend). Overall, it was a hugely unhealthy situation. Now she has two amazing best friends, and I mean yeah, both of them have huge issues which more often than not lead to the bodily harm or death of others, but they kind of have a mutual understanding that they're all fucked up and have each other's backs despite that, and Sally had never had that kind of friendship before. It was enough that, when she got her Door (her shot at ~moving on~) at the end of the season, she chose to stay and make sure Josh and Aidan were okay instead. After trying to find her Door all season, she gave up that chance for them.
Oh right: Somewhere in that mess, she also made contact with Bridget, who was totally open to hearing her but Danny shut that down right fast and proceeded to try and violently exorcise Sally, so. Yeah, that was a thing.
The second season is a pretty dark arc for Sally. Though she's now got a solid friend group (now including Josh's newly-wolfed girlfriend Nora and a couple of ghosts she's met) and no longer struggles to interact with the physical world (albeit in a limited way), she can't help but push boundaries and that, naturally, gets her in big trouble. It starts off simple, with a tip-off from ghost-friend Suicide Stevie that ghosts can't sleep but can dream. Sally falls into a dream of her own that evening, and voila, there's her door - except when she opens it, rather than your typical blinding light, a dark shadow rushes out and through her.
Sally tells Josh and Aidan about the shadow, but they dismiss it as a dream so that kind of goes on the back-burner for a while. In the meantime, Stevie and a couple of other ghosts teach her something Sally seriously is not enough of a mature adult to have any right knowing: How to possess the living. All of a sudden, she can climb into someone's body and feel and taste and smell and interact with the world around her, fuck yes, holla, etc. So she does so, but another ghost-possessed-human decides she's hot and he wants her and Stevie has to jump to her defense. Which leads Sally to Bad Ideas Lesson #2: Shredding. Apparently, if a ghost sticks their hands in another ghost and pulls in opposite directions, it tears them apart - permanently. Sends them god-knows-where. So that's just fantastic, a real buzz-kill, not to mention poor Stevie is traumatized with guilt over what he did.
But somehow, how badly that outing bombed wasn't enough to put her off of possession. Sally actually spent a good chunk of the second season possessing the poor girlfriend of this doctor she had the hots for, which was not only incredibly selfish and destructive to the girlfriend (it eventually put her in the psych ward at the hospital) but also very self-destructive for Sally. Each time she'd crawl back out of that woman's body, she'd be more and more exhausted and beaten-down. Bags under her eyes, foul mood, etc. An addiction metaphor, much like preeeeetty much everything else Being Human has to offer. And Aidan and Josh tried to talk to her, to help her, but all that did was get Sally to shut them out because she needed it and they just didn't understand. In the meantime, while Sally broke herself down more and more, that shadow from her dream made it clearer and clearer that he was definitely still hanging around. He started haunting her, quietly at first but before long he was rearranging furniture and hurling sharp cutlery at the walls and all kinds of shit. When he finally shows himself, it turns out that he's the Reaper. That much she'd figured out already, but what she hadn't predicted was that according to the Reaper, she needed to be reaped. She was upsetting the balance, so to speak. Apparently, the only way to escape being shredded by the Reaper was to take his job - become the new Grim Reaper. His argument in favor of the job had a lot of collateral damage, shredding not just Stevie but ex-boyfriend Nick and at least a dozen others in the process in demonstration of what she'd have to do, but she eventually agreed because she just plain couldn't handle whatever happens when you ghost-die.
She only has her eyes opened to the truth 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. The Reaper wasn't really a Reaper, but rather, a split version of herself - a hallucination to help her cope with what she was becoming and doing. 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.
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.
One fateful morning, she runs into her brother Robbie, who's filling in for their dad as the owner of the house. This is pretty much the only death that would be Totally Not Okay with her, so she runs off to Donna the Soup Kitchen Witch and demands that Donna lift the nobody-from-Sally's-past rule. Donna pretty much choke-slams Sally and Josh both, but agrees on the condition that she owns Sally's soul when Sally dies. It's worth it, so Sally makes the deal. Little does she know that her remaining life isn't actually measured in years, but in months. See, the curse keeping her corpse alive has to be sustained somehow, and if it's not via the souls of those she kills by proxy, she has to feed it in some other way or it starts to fade. She learns this in the form of a huge rot-spot on her scalp, followed by her toothbrush going right the fuck through her cheek. Through disgusting experimentation and giving into nauseating carnal urges, she realizes that raw meat heals the rot. That is to say, flesh sustains the curse. Except raw hamburger just won't cut it for long, and she has to graduate to mice, then bigger and bigger animals. All the while she's keeping this a secret from everyone, even Josh and Aidan. They've got their own issues, after all.
The first to find out is Nick. She reveals to him that she ate a mouse, and he's massively relieved - he's been eating local cats for the same reason. She feels a little better about it after this. I mean, she's got a second chance at life, what's eating a few small animals in the process? But later that day, while window-shopping at a pet shop and salivating heavily, she realizes her appetite extends to the little boy standing nearby. Welcome to a new all-time low. Sally is utterly disgusted with herself and hurries home.
It all goes downhill kind of fast from there. Sally reveals the cravings to Aidan, but he barely has time to respond before Nick's girlfriend calls. She had to kill him because he tried to eat her. Josh and Sally help bury Nick, then rush to check on Stevie. Stevie's totally chill, living with his parents in a totally nice neighborhood, nothing to worry about there... Except that's a total lie, the mailman's arm is in his bread cupboard and as it turns out, he only ate the mailman after he finished both of his parents. Josh has to kill him, but when a resigned Sally says it's obviously her turn next, he refuses. She hasn't eaten anyone yet, hasn't even tried, and as long as it stays like that there's hope for her. So they go home and she pretty much locks herself in her room 24/7 to make sure she doesn't try to eat anyone while she rots to death. She is super bummed about this, mostly the fact that she's not going to be able to see Josh and Nora's wedding, but her friends are all really supportive and try to help out where they can. Eventually she dies and she, Aidan, and Josh all head through the door that appears, which they've realized by now is Donna's door. It leads them straight to the witch, and after a series of mind-games and overpowered endbosses, Aidan manages to light Sally's heart on fire (the heart having been used as a part of the spell), lighting Donna on fire as the source of the magic the heart is tied to. Donna quickly tosses her magic to Sally, which means Sally is the one burning now, but not for long. Donna proceeds to eat Sally's soul before the fire even goes out. Weh weh, everyone's sad, but wait! Sally busts her way back out of Donna with the very magic Donna gave her. The witch is defeated, everyone's happy, Sally gets to see the wedding, etc etc. But a few days later, when Sally's home alone, Donna busts out of Sally's death spot at the bottom of the stairs and drags her to hell, thus ending season three.
As it turns out, hell is actually a lot like a day spa. Sally and Donna are somehow gal pals in this hell day spa, don't even ask me how. Donna casually reveals that she's keeping them both there until she can help them move on for good, but then Sally realizes she has control over the day spa hell and fractures it and the walls start raining blood and it's cray and she eventually busts back out... To find herself hanging by the neck from the ceiling of the grocery store, still a ghost obviously. But that's better than nothing, she gets down and goes to find Aidan. The two of them visit Josh, who is basically a wolf in a cage now that he got scratched by a purebred and can only be human one night per month, and she realizes what a huge fucking mess their lives still are.
This season is kind of convoluted and has lots of filler, so I'll stick with the main Sally thread. After discovering (through a pyrokinetic flare-up and the resulting teleportation into a child-sacrifice ritual decades prior) that she's still got Donna's magic, she does what Sally does best and meddles in shit she shouldn't meddle in. She tries to speak to Josh's regular-human sister via magic, she heals Nora's scars, and she even tears human-Josh right the hell out of the wolf he's trapped inside - each of which is directly followed by a longer and longer period spent trapped in a flashback closer and closer to the present-day. But Josh and Aidan are getting worried about her, rightfully so considering her last stint in the past lasted (for her, at least) literal weeks, so they convince her to swear off of Donna's magic. She agrees, but this goes awry the second her brother (who declared that he's fixing the house up so they can sell it - sorry guys, eviction notice) electrocutes himself in the basement. She's going to bring him back to life somehow or another, and Donna's pretty much sick of this drama and volunteers that Sally use Donna's soul to bring her brother back to life. Robbie says no the fuck way and he disappears before she can do it, so Sally just releases Donna's soul through her death spot instead, disappearing into the past yet again right after.
But this particular flashback is excruciatingly familiar. She's watching Danny yell at her in the bathroom about a certain ring down the drain, and she knows that in just 30 seconds, she's going to watch herself die. So Sally possesses herself, tells Danny off, knees him in the groin, and saves her own life. Unfortunately, by the time she's satisfied with the situation enough to leave it, she can't climb back out of her own body. She's stuck there... permanently.
The next episode or two timeskip a lot, mostly just showing ways in which she changes and ultimately fucks up how things are supposed to be. Notable changes:
- She survives, obviously.
- Danny goes on to date Bridget, and Bridget gets killed by his temper instead.
- She hooks Josh and Nora up, but walks in on a crucial moment and breaks them up by accident.
- She prevents Aidan from killing Rebecca and running back to Bishop, basically saving him from himself, and they get into a pretty serious relationship...
- But that relationship, among other things, pushes Josh away and back into the arms of Ray, his asshole wolf-dad. In the original 'verse, Josh had Sally and Aidan to help him realize Ray's a dick, but in this 'verse he and Aidan's friendship is basically wrecked. Sally changed enough that they didn't bond like they should have.
- Because Sally's helping Josh with wolf stuff rather than Aidan, she's the one who has to show him the locked room under the hospital to turn in... and gets scratched in the process, making her a werewolf herself.
More horrible shit goes down, it's really just a giant train-wreck, but I'm taking her from this alternate 'verse just after she becomes a wolf so the rest kind of doesn't much matter yet.
Personality:
(The interactions I mention between her, Josh, and Aidan refer to the original 'verse unless otherwise stated! Just noting that for clarity.)
☑ 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. Which makes sense, considering she's repressing the knowledge of who exactly killed her. She realizes that 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 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. I mentioned him in the history section so I'll skip most of that here, 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.
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 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.
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 just 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 makes a situation so much worse. 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 'verse - the one where everyone loves each other etc. This season is pretty much a constant desperate attempt to undo bad things with sketchy magic, and it gets her stuck in the past in a 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 was what brought them together in the first place. She fucks that all up, needless to say, and thus we've arrived at her canonpoint.
It's to be noted that she's just been scratched by a werewolf, meaning she too is a wolf at the next full moon. Canon timeskips past most of her first werewolf experiences, but all in all, Sally's been around Josh and Nora for long enough that she kind of knows what to expect. She's... well okay, she's definitely scared, but more scared of the potential for hurting people than she is scared of the unknown. She's likely not going to tell anyone, if she can help it.
☑ 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.
As of her canonpoint she and Aidan are basically as much of a thing as can possibly be, but that is going to screech to a halt the instant she realizes he's regular-verse Aidan. She's still going to have the same feelings, but that's way too much of a mess to spring on anyone, and she'll play it cool by continuing to do her flirt thing with whoever. Even if it's a little more half-hearted now.
☑ 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 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, 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. Dying is so five minutes ago. This means that you won't often find her paralyzed by fear... Which means Smiley will have to be a little more creative in motivating her. (Is Smiley even still a thing? I haven't been in Ax in forever, jfc)
☑ 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 emotions/mindsets. Plus, in this 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 Ax, 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.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
Despite having been a black-magic ghost, she can't benefit from that at all at her current canonpoint. Her ghost-self is fused with her alternate-timeline body, so all of the ghost abilities and all of the magic Donna gave her are absolutely inaccessible. Which I would consider a weakness in this case, because she kind of fucked herself over on that one.
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 'verse, 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.
She is, however, a werewolf now. This means that one night per month, she turns into a big angry uncanny-valley motherfucker who could tear her own family apart without a second thought until she turns back the next morning, both a strength and a weakness depending on how you look at it. 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. Because it's so far beyond her conscious control, the wolf itself is a definite weakness (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) but the heightened senses and whatnot beforehand would be considered an ability.
Her mental/emotional weaknesses are largely listed above in the personality section, but they boil down to 'she's kind of a mess'.
Inventory: Her clothes, her purse with a few assorted useless items (wallet, pack of gum, candy bar, a couple of useless DVDs she meant to return).
Appearance: see all of her icons.
Age: It's Complicated (like 24? do you count her physical body age or her soul age or what)
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
Wow, so Sally has literally never coughed this much in her life. Before she can even really process what the hell that was in her throat, it's gone and she's on the floor with all of the grace and unwelcome goop of a baby cow. Still coughing, by the way. Like, that was seriously uncalled for and she actually feels super violated right now - and that's before the coughing fades a little and she realizes she's absolutely naked.
In a giant sci-fi goo-pod chamber full of equally naked individuals, what the actual -
At that point her indignation's already fading (because let's face it, there are definitely worse things you could wake up with jammed down your throat - don't think too hard on that one), replaced instead by an emotion equal parts confusion and denial. Spa hell, she can handle spa hell. Time-traveling into ancient child-murder rituals with the chanting and the symbols, even that right there is within her ability to wrap her mind around. This, though? This is about as nope as it gets.
There's a long pause in which she looks around, trying to figure out what to even think while she covers herself vaguely with her arms crossed over her chest. Then she asks the room in general, "Are you freaking kidding me right now?" Followed by a quieter and more plaintive, "I totally didn't even do it this time." The magic. This is obviously the future, and time bullshit only happens with magic, right?
Comms Sample:
Right, so first things first: Hi, I'm Sally. [ A grin, a wave! ] So I know everyone's totally still reeling from that whole sci-fi jello-bath but you're just going to have to take a deep breath or something, because we're totally doing this.
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 just... shut up and 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 rain-check 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 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 left the planet Earth.
...Also, Josh? Holla at your girl and tell me you are not living off in the woods or something.