Sarah here is a telepath. Her species is commonly called cuckoos for reasons that relate to them leaving their children for human parents to raise (and then once they’ve grown up the children ruin the parents lives and lead to their deaths and it’s not a great situation for anyone but the cuckoo). Sarah does have ethics (unlike other cuckoos) but I also want to lay out the possibilities for her telepathy and for other characters to engage in it.

Therefore, if you would fill out her permission post, I'd be quite grateful! (To note, in canon there is someone with natural immunity but no particular abilities that would have made her immunity something that could be predicted. She’s affected by the don’t-look-here and surface thought reading, but nothing more. Basically whatever you oocly want to happen, we can work with to make it make ic sense.)

<b>Will her don't-look-here telepathic field work?</b> <b>Can she pick up on surface thoughts?</b> <b>How about more active telepathy?</b> <b>Anything you particularly do or don't want her to pick up?</b> <b>How do you feel about memory manipulation?</b> <b>Anything else?</b>

Will her don't-look-here telepathic field work?
Sarah projects a general sense that she belongs where she is, as well as something that makes people not realize the ways in which she's not human. It's a passive ability, rather than something she actively has to project, and it's not going to change the way your character thinks, just what they observe about her. It means they may tend to forget her once she’s out of sight if they don’t have a significant conversation. It offers limited protection.

Can she pick up on surface thoughts?
Sarah can read minds. You can limit this if you want, no never and yes always aren't the only options, although they are both options. If you want her to just be able to pick up on emotions or only read thoughts if your character interacts with her when they're tired, or just give me a heads up at the beginning of any interaction, that's perfectly fine!

How about more active telepathy?
Generally Sarah won’t go delving deeper into someone’s mind without permission, provocation, or because she needs to for self-defense, so it should be pretty easy to avoid icly if this is a concern. She can also reach out to people over a distance to have a conversation with up to a quarter mile of distance between them, once she’s gotten used to their mind.

Anything you particularly do or don't want her to pick up?
She's pretty nosy. She does have a moral code that govern her telepathy, but it's something she's imposing on herself because she knows objectively she should have one, rather than feeling the boundaries people might.

How do you feel about memory manipulation?
Sarah is capable of convincing people that they’ve known her their whole lives, that she’s their wife or their sister or their best friend. It’s very much not something she’d do casually and I include it here more as a potential plotting option than something that would happen without us talking about it beforehand.

Anything else?

☆ Character - - -

( Character's Name ) : Sarah Zellaby
( Character's Age ) : 22
( Series ) : InCryptid Series
( Canon Point ) : Post Discount Armageddon

( 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.

Cryptid, noun:
1. Any creature whose existence has been suggested but not proven scientifically. Term officially coined by cryptozoologist John E. Wall in 1983.
2. That thing that's getting ready to eat your head.
3. See also: "monster."
- Source

There are a whole lot of different types, ranging from dragons to succubi to intelligent mice for whom the majority of their existence centers around an elaborate calendar of holidays and observances. 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 ) :
The fact that Sarah's a cuckoo causes a fair amount of complication in her life. The main thing this means is that she's a telepath. She can hear other people's thoughts and she can make them see her how she wants. Her telepathy doesn't make her a more sympathetic person -- that ability to get in other people's heads tends to simply mix with a natural cuckoo tendency to take what they want. Fortunately she does have a sense of ethics, it's just one given to her by Babylon 5 via Angela Baker, the only other non-homicidal cuckoo out there. As a result of this influence, Sarah doesn't use her telepathic powers to kill people or steal bank accounts or husbands, which are the usual cuckoo activities. While she still doesn't live entirely by what might be human standards of morality -- she uses her powers to benefit herself all the time -- she instead sets up her own behavior of what is acceptable and what isn't. She doesn't steal from individuals, but she'll regularly take advantage of corporations. When she buys coffee at Starbucks, for example, she tips the barrista but she won't pay the actual bill. She lives in fancy hotels because she prefers them, and she behaves similarly there. There's a distinct difference for her between stealing from an individual and stealing from a corporate entity.

While she lives in fancy hotels and occasionally accompanies Verity, her cousin -- by adoption, not blood -- to clubs when Verity's on the case of something she could use telepathic backup for, Sarah doesn't look too much like the socialite she pretends to be. While she has the body for it she prefers shapeless sweaters and longer skirts. Sarah dresses mostly for comfort -- she can, after all, make people believe she's wearing whatever she wants. When she's spending most of her time in her own hotel room the mental effort is less than the physical. When she does go to a club, then she will dress up, but only because she needs to be able to spare her mental powers for being in the club.

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.

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.

( Strengths/Weaknesses ) :
Sarah's 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 she's a pretty strong telepath. (Which I would absolutely have a permission post for, and which will be mitigated by the effects of the coral. Her telepathy is also tempered in its use by her own sense of ethics.) 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.

Beyond that, she's absolutely not a fighter. The only thing she can do is camouflage herself and wait for a threat to go away. She's also mildly allergic to most insecticides.

( Other Important Facts ) :

( Sample ) :
For most people -- those without any sort of telepathic defense -- the girl at the fountain would look completely dry, and well-dressed beyond that. They wouldn't see the water dripping from her, or the way that she looked about as miserable as she felt. She wrapped the towel tighter around her, reaching out her mind to feel for anyone at all that she knew. There was nothing -- no Verity, no Tanya, no professor Hines. Sarah could feel people, at least, and minds that weren't quite people at all, but no one she knew.

Being a telepath meant never having to be lonely, until the moment that she was actually, physically and completely, alone.

Sarah sat in front of the fountain, mentally pushing away anyone who came near her and letting her mind to be open to the people that were around, trying to get a feel for this new city without actually plunging herself into anyone in particular's mind, for a very long moment.

In the end, the situation was it was, and if there was one thing a cuckoo was supposed to know how to do it was create a life, to make herself fit in places she was sure she didn't belong. Sarah might try to fight her biology a lot, but that, at least, she could make use of. It was better than being trapped here without any control over her surroundings at all.

( Questions? Comments? Concerns? ) :