[Enervation] Application

[socryptidshescryptic]

character application info

basic info

Name: Sarah Zellaby
Age: 22
Canon: InCryptid
History:

The InCryptid series takes place in what is essentially the modern world, but there are a whole lot of creatures out there that aren't cataloged by science. Those are the cryptids. There are a whole lot of different types, ranging from dragons to succubi to gorgons. Some of the cryptids aren't sentient, and some are. Some are mostly harmless or live as distant from humans as they can get, some of them are generally helpful, and some are threats to humans. Johrlac, or cuckoos, are the latter.

When facing the cuckoos, it is best to remember three things. One, that your life means nothing to them. Two, that they can—and will, given the slightest opportunity—make themselves the center of your world. And three, that they are not in any way human, no matter how human they may look, and they will not regret anything they choose to do to you.

Cuckoos are both projective and receptive telepaths. This wouldn't be such a problem if they didn't constantly project a field of "I belong here." A cuckoo who breaks into your home will be your sister, your husband, your parent, or your child in a matter of seconds. Angela Baker, one of our two resident experts on the species, says that this impulse can be controlled to a small degree, but will activate automatically if the cuckoo is stressed or frightened. Very few of them can control it. Very few ever bother to try.

Angela also confirms that cuckoos should be shot on sight. As she is a cuckoo, this is not a good sign for peaceful future relations.

The standard hunting pattern of the cuckoo is simple. They isolate their prey and become part of their lives, convincing their victims that they not only belong, they have always belonged. This accomplished, they will drain those victims of all resources, often causing intentional chaos immediately before leaving those victims to suffer the consequences. They don't eat human flesh, but in a very real way, they eat human lives.

Continued...

Fortunately for everyone involved, Sarah Zellaby has been raised a little different from the average cuckoo, indeed she has actually had her mind repaired from damage that is typical to cuckoos.

Sarah Zellaby loves math, comic books, bad procedural dramas, and drinking hot ketchup mixed with orange juice and honey. And that's about where her dating profile goes off the rails (not that she dates, really; who wants to go out with a cryptid telepath who just looks like a cute geek girl?).

Sarah is a cuckoo.

She's never met her biological parents. They left her on the front porch of the Zellaby family of Cincinnati, Ohio when she was less than a week old, and the Zellabys took her in, believing that she was theirs. That's how cuckoos work. They leave their young in other nests, letting other people handle all the difficult, awkward parts of raising a child, and only come back when their precious babies inevitably turn on their human parents. There are very rarely survivors. Sadly for the Zellabys, they didn't survive; they were killed in a car crash when Sarah was still a little girl, leaving her to fend for herself.

She could have found a new human family. She could have found the cuckoos. Instead, she found Angela Baker, maybe the only non-homicidal cuckoo in the world, and her salvation.

Sarah grew up knowing that murder was wrong, which puts her well ahead of most of the cuckoos in her generation. She grew up with a family that loved her, no matter what she was, and with a strong sense of purpose.

Let's see how long that survives contact with the real world...and how long it takes for the cuckoos to come looking for their own.
- Source

personality

Strengths:
Sarah has a decentralized nervous system with no heart (meaning she can sustain wounds in the normal places and keep on ticking), bleeds clear (and her blood works as a topical antibiotic and painkiller), and she's a pretty strong telepath. In her canon most people don't have mental defenses against her, and once she is familiar with someone's mind she has a range of about a quarter of a mile. She has both projective and receptive telepathy, and a non-telepath used to it can focus their thoughts enough to have a normal, entirely mental conversation with her, once she’s used to them.

As a natural defense mechanism she projects an aura of belonging that will make people assume she has the right to be wherever she is, and possibly not to remember her once she’s no longer in sight. She can make people think she’s paid a bill, that she should be wherever she is. She can pick up surface thoughts and emotions without really trying, and deeper thoughts if she concentrates on it (although she won’t do it without permission, provocation, or in self-defense). In extreme circumstances (not because it’s particularly hard to do for her but because she holds a moral opposition to it) she can convince people within a matter of seconds that she’s their wife, their best friend, their daughter, etc. She can also physically take over people’s bodies and control them, though that takes all of her attention and control.

While being nonhuman -- a cryptid -- is an important part of what Sarah is, who she is goes beyond that. Her passion is mathematics, and she spends a lot of her time being a college student. She has a study group, and she's very good about taking her own notes instead of just taking what she needs out of the other students' or professor's brains. Beyond that, she finds solace in the fact that while everything else might lie -- and as a telepath Sarah is particularly aware of the way that other people do -- numbers don't. Beyond liking mathematics, Sarah spends a fair amount of time online, both talking to an incubus -- Artie -- in California that she sort of has a thing for and using the internet as a form of telepathy that she doesn't have to feel guilty for.

Flaws:
Sarah's used to the mental white noise of having lots of people around, but being used to that has affected a few other things. The first is that it's much easier for her to get distracted than it is for most people as a natural self-defense mechanism to keep her from losing herself in all the noise of the city and the people around her. When she wants to stay focused she has to really work at it. The most immediate result of that is that she tends to leave the area she lives in a mess, because things like laundry and cleaning up after herself require way more mental effort than the results are usually worth.

Her telepathy has its limits. Anything involving a lot of mental effort (like searching an area for a specific person she’s not familiar with, or dealing with a lot of people and needing to change their perceptions in a major rather than minor way) tends to leave her with a severe migraine. In canon (at a point later than I’m taking her from) she majorly rewrites people’s perceptions of events in a way completely counter to reality, and that leaves her greatly mentally injured and impaired, to the point that she struggles with basic mathematical functions. It’s a long process of many months for her to recover from that use of her telepathy.

Beyond that, she's absolutely not a fighter. The only thing she can do is camouflage herself, hide, and wait for a threat to go away. She's also mildly allergic to most insecticides. In her canon, there aren anti-telepathy charms which work, and a few people have natural immunity.

The thing that scares Sarah most of all is the thought that her moral code might crumble, that she might become what almost all other cuckoos are, thinking only of her own amusement and nothing else. For that reason, she nearly always in the vicinity of some family, and that family has orders to kill her if she ever snaps. Even with a moral code, she’s a natural thief, and if she sees something she wants she’ll take it, unless there’s a specific reason not to.

Since they’re so used to using telepathy to identify people and relate to them, without it cuckoos like Sarah are faceblind, with little to no ability to tell individuals apart. As a result of usually having the telepathy, Sarah hasn’t developed most of the rest of her senses of perception.

Miscellaneous: Sarah isn’t human at all. While she looks human from the outside, her species has more biological similarities to insects. This extends to most aspects of her life, from what will kill her (which includes head trauma but not chest wounds) to what she eats. Sarah dislikes chocolate greatly, likes blueberry scones with steak sauce, and generally thinks ketchup goes great with everything (warm orange juice, milkshakes, etc). She’s spent a lot of time around humans and is familiar with a general human code of ethics that she tries to follow, but there are some things she doesn’t understand about them and that they couldn’t understand about her.

To Sarah, her family is the reason that she’s whole and that she’s good, and as a result she’s very close to them. Cuckoos tend to psychically damage their young, and her adoptive mother, Angela, repaired Sarah’s brain to make her a functional individual capable of some sense of moral judgement, and Sarah knows how much that means. She also knows that her family would kill her if she ever went supervillain, and she finds that very comforting.

Sarah and her cousin (by adoption, rather than blood, Sarah’s not actually biologically related to anyone in her family) Artie have a long-standing flirtation that neither of them is willing to admit is going on. Artie is half-incubus (the other half is human), and Sarah is one of the few people he feels he can talk to without fearing that his pheromones are affecting their relationship because she’s a telepath and immune. For Sarah’s part, she likes talking with Artie but doesn’t think it possible that he’d be interested in her like she is in him.

game plans

Starting Faction: Empress
Goals: I’d like to explore her moral codes and see what happens in putting her in a war. Her main power is telepathy and I want to play with that, but I’ll have a permission post that’ll clearly lists her powers and allows people to limit their effect on other characters and opt in to more dramatic consequences