Mariah Point
Age: Twenty Nine
Nationality: American
Mariah is quite... ordinary looking, at a first glance. She's perhaps a little tall for a woman, standing at about five feet and seven inches in American measurements, but all in all she is a decisively typical human specimen for her time period. Sure, there are details. Wide hips, the figure of a woman with a healthy upbringing and decent genetics to back it up. Wavy, shoulder-length brown hair. Lips, not so far in either fullness or thinness to set them apart from others.
Even her eyes, which she considers to be her most defining physical feature, are a plain blue that (while increasingly rare these days) are still nothing particularly beyond the ordinary. She puts no effort into distinguishing herself with her clothing, and wears no identifying jewelry or accessories beyond a simple, practical headband during physical labour.
And yet, having established all of this... 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 ###.
The Sunlit Lady
Represents: Unconditional Love, Motherhood
With long, golden hair that is seemingly always afloat and sun-kissed, the Sunlit Lady is close to what you would describe as a genuine "Guardian Angel". She has no wings, but floats amidst pure white garments suspended and entwined around Mariah's body.
She has no legs, her body simply ending tastefully in the folds of her clothes just past the curve of her hips. Her eyes are a radiant, sparkling blue, reminiscent of the clear depths of tropical oceans and untouched springs.
I think you get the picture. 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.
Abilities:
Beacon in the DarknessSunny has a presence, like an aura, that penetrates the hearts of those who are lost, confused, or beyond human reason and cements Sunny's will in them. It is an all-encompassing love that directly targets things that are inhuman, or out of control, but not true animals or entities entirely lacking wills or thoughts of their own.
To call it "attraction" is to be Sunny, always looking at the bright side of things no matter how foolish it is. The more accurate term would be Mariah's interpretation. "Mind Rape". It is a search-and-destroy style power that seeks out local mental instability and targets it directly with concentrated mental interference, getting into the heads of the affected and steering them towards Sunny's (and by extension, Mariah's) location. Once in direct proximity to Sunny, the affected victim is essentially brainwashed and rebranded into a perfectly content, and most importantly, tame servant to Sunny's will.
One completely tamed, the newly packaged servant is permanently, and completely under the control of Sunny, acting as an extension of her affection and allowing the incorporeal entity serving Mariah to interact with the physical world, in a sense.
If Mariah deems it necessary, Sunny can attack the minds of mentally stable foes to attempt to destabilize them, but the effectiveness of this maneuver varies and directly goes against Sunny's moral stance on the subject. Mariah thinks this is kind of absurd, but prefers to abide rather than make her powerful guardian spirit constantly depressed. Its just a matter of efficiency, and definitely not because Mariah harbours any affection towards Sunny whatsoever.
The more ingrained in an individual's head Beacon in the Darkness is, the more visible Sunny is to the affected, regardless of their inherent spirit sensing capabilities. Those who can already see spirits are, marginally, less resistant to its effects as well.
Sunlit Embrace Sunny's primary means of actually, directly helping Mariah not die, Sunlit Embrace is a potent, rapid-healing power that soaks a target in warm, healing force that tenderly cares for and heals injuries to the extent they would be healed with the most capable and absolute care the wounds could receive, in an absurd fraction of the time. This power automatically spreads to anybody the recipient is touching, and can further chain together to any individuals they in turn touch, indefinitely. The effectiveness of the healing halves for each individual healed, however, so the potency of the ability rapidly declines as more recipients are added.
There are two, major drawbacks to Sunlit Embrace. For one, it requires perfect focus on Sunny's part. This doesn't seem that hard for an incorporeal being to accomplish, but Sunny is simply so obsessed with Mariah that if Mariah herself takes any action whatsoever, or is stressed but not in any immediate danger, Sunny simply can't pay attention long enough to channel the healing energies.
Secondly, the cost. Yes, all of that healing can't just come from nowhere. Sunny's power to restore life, conversely requires burning life to do so. Souls, to be more precise. This process is incredibly efficient, even a tenth of a human soul, if burned conservatively, can easily heal a human from the brink of death to a typical, lethal wound a human might encounter. But supernatural injuries? Actual death? These are not so easily cured, and naturally necessitate significantly steeper costs.
She can use the souls of others, but they must be provided voluntarily.
Fish of Oblivion