Personality: Mariah is not normal. She wasn't normal before she was dead, and after dying, its gone beyond eerie and into genuinely supernatural territory.

There is a piercing, gripping coldness to her cynical gaze that seems to penetrate to the core of those subjected to it, and only the strong of heart have the strength to hold eye contact with her for any extended period of time. She has virtually no ability to conceal the emotions playing across her face, and while this might seem to make her easy to read, in reality it simply serves to highlight the depth of her unfathomable disgust for the human race.

So yeah, she is not a good person. At all. But neither is she a particularly cruel one. She does not destroy the happiness of others because she holds any particular ill-will towards them, but rather, because it is the primary function of her existence. At a fundamental level, she is not somebody who can stand by and allow illusions to continue to be, whether they're actualy harmful or just simple, happy little lies.

People like this disgust her. The same goes for the egotistical bastards of society, who draw up incredible, bombastic versions of themselves to present to and try to impress others. Filth. She doesn't consider herself much better than them, not especially at any rate, but that level of bottom-feeding garbage has no place in the real world. Politics make her physically ill. Pets are a waste of resources. Rain is damp, and uncomfortable. Sun is hot, and uncomfortable. Christmas is literally the worst.

Kids are alright, though.

For a reason Mariah can't really pin down, she seems to have something of a weak point for children. So naturally, she keeps as much distance between her and children as is humanly possible. Like any sane human being would, considering it is quite literally the only weakness in her otherwise flawless annoyance coverage.

Genuinely honest people might as well not exist in her mind, but when shes come across them in the wild before, her only response has been a combination of hurt, skepticism and affection that could only be described as "Hmph".

She has a sense of humour, maybe. Its kind of hard to tell.

Background & Death: Mariah is the ####### of two sisters born to a loving, single mother living in ###, who she remembers only as "blonde hair, blue eyes and a smile that could melt ice". So naturally, her life was miserable. Mariah learned at a young age that, the happier somebody pretends to be, the more horrible their pain had to be. It just made sense. But her mother was never happier than when she looked at #####, so Mariah figured that this happiness, at least, must have been true.

She doesn't quite ######## when things changed between the three of them. They had a good life, if you look only at the facts of the matter. In fact, adversity was conspicuously absent through the earlier part of Mariah's childhood. Probably because "adversity" in this case was busy drinking away his problems at one of local bars.

He came back eventually, though. He always came back. And when he came, she left.

She was, what, 19 at the time? It felt like it had been no time at all, but it all passed by so quickly. She has a part-time job at an office full of ##### and ###### that really bring out the colour of the walls. Turns out, its easy once you learn how to add "#### #########" to the start of your numbered list of skills. And just like that, she has a full time position, and a small apartment not even a block apart from her childhood home, and a car to drive to all of the exciting places she can think of. Like home. And work. Or maybe the coffee shop literally down the street. Or the ###.

One evening, while she was sipping her drink and imagining the infinite possible locations in time and space that she would rather be in at that precise moment, a man of reasonable looks approached her and began to ask her all sorts of obnoxious, probing personal questions like "Haven't you had enough to drink?" and "Do you need me to call you a taxi?"

She blew him off, paid her bill and walked out into the street, and found that she was in a place she didn't remember walking to, watching a scene that was curiously absent from her memory of the night the day after the fact. Not that refusing to remember it would un-do what the thing she saw may or may not have done, but it certainly saved her some sleep for the rest of her rapidly decreasing life.

That's about when she discovered she was pregnant. It was a joke. Twenty nine, and abstinent for the last ####### years of her life and just a little bit too much to drink one night and of course, something male had managed to plant his organic material inside of her womb. Just the thought of it terrified her, it sickened her, as if everything else in her life wasn't sickening enough.

And the most sickening part of all of it was that she kind of wanted to keep it.

Her body, probably surprised itself at the unusual show of decisiveness on the behalf of its cynical upper half, tentatively obliged. The baby kept. But, the bigger the curve of her belly became, the more she began to wonder if her memory of that night's events weren't just a little too intact up until a certain point to be the result of a drunken stupor.

It made logical sense. She had clear, distinct memories of the first part of the night, and as she got progressively more drunk, the qualities of the memories declined. But, at one point, and only at one point, her memories seemed to go blank. It wasn't like she was unconscious, it was like a phantom noise in the back of her head that was hiding these memories from her. Looking back at her life, she found that other, less crucial parts of her memory were also blank.

She was concerned at this point. Not because of the possibility of brain damage or repressed memory completely unbeknownst to herself up until now, but because something was happening to her body. It was breaking down. She knew that pregnancy could take its toll on any woman, but what she was experiencing was clearly abnormal.

She wasn't worried about the inconsistencies in the situation, but rather, if her body was taking poorly to the presence of new life growing within itself. Like her cynicism had somehow bled into her very flesh and blood, and was rejecting the child out of some blind, misplaced distaste.

Then she died.

"Died" is kind of an understatement by the way. More like, she was torn to bits and slowly eaten from the inside as something followed the one instinct it possessed and burrowed its way out from its expired host. There was definitely a lot of pain involved, but Mariah clearly remembers thinking at one point or another, probably right before the end, that she wanted to know if it was a boy or a girl.

It was a ###.



Personality: To call Sunny the polar opposite of Mariah is to give no justice to the sheer enormity of the gap between their personalities. It is quite literally the heat of the sun to the cold of the deep space between planets. Yet, at the same time, both possess vast integrity and devotion to honesty above all else. They just go about it in slightly different ways.

Sunny loves... pretty much everything that exists, just for being itself. Her adoration for Mariah goes a step beyond this and into "completely insane" territory, to the point where Mariah honestly has trouble separating her Memento Mori's attention from her long enough to actually add anything productive to the situation.

Sunny and Mariah make a surprising pair, because of the way their viewpoints contrast one another. Mariah sees everything negative about a situation, and only that, while Sunny seems to largely ignore the negative and instead see every positive facet a problem has to offer. When they put their minds together and take things logically instead of emotionally, something that Mariah is very good at, they can get a near perfect picture of the situation through the correlation of these vastly different perspectives.

Sunny, naturally, prefers the most pacifistic route possible when approaching a situation. She doesn't believe in needlessly hurting others. Unfortunately, she doesn't have much control over this matter, and more often than not ends up depressed no matter the outcome Mariah decides to arrive at. On the rare occasions she's allowed to "steer the ship" so to speak, Mariah pretty much always regrets it.

Things usually turn out alright in the end, though, a fact that Mariah begrudgingly accepts.


Beacon in the Darkness


Sunlit Embrace