Marla McCarthy

Registry of the Evolved Database

File #18 Nov 2008 03:35

Summary

Name Marla McCarthy Aliases Status Unregistered Evolved Ability Invisibility Gender Female Race/Eth. Canadian Birthdate 1976 Age 32 Height 5'8" Build Slender Eyes Brown Hair Dark Residence Ontario, Canada Employment Unknown Parents Siblings Melvin McCarthy Marital Status Single Children First Seen The Beginning of Something Troublesome Last Seen What the Grapevine Spilled Profile A transplant from Canada, Marla is a thief, looter, and 'ghost' whose single motivation in life seems to be self-entertainment. She has an on-and-off working relationship with The Linderman Group, though usually she's content to pull ridiculous shenanigans by herself. Marla is back in Ontario in order to avoid all the anti-Evolved dramallamas in the US, and especially in NYC.

portrayed by Shannyn Sossamon

Background

The elder of two fraternal twins, respectively a girl and a boy, Marla began her life in rural Ontario. In most respects, she was a pretty ordinary kid, though lack of active parenting caused her to decide as a small child that all authority was overrated. Under what was mostly her bad influence, she and her brother Melvin grew up shattering windows, egging houses, and generally causing the worst of mayhem in a close-knit, six-thousand-population town that was hardly used to such trouble. Their parents were confronted, but they in turn did little but give their kids slaps on the wrist. They weren't neglectful in the material sense of the word - they made sure the house was more than an empty nest in terms of stacking necessities - but as far as actually raising their kids went, they were happy as long as hell, their two offspring stayed out of jail.

This began to change when Marla's father took a new job and relocated his family to the States. In a huge city like New York, it was suddenly much easier for Marla, now fourteen, to find mischief in places that had no guarantee to be as "tolerant" as her old town. Concerned mostly about safety, the mother realized this, sending Marla and Melvin to separate high schools as a start to try and reduce the former's terrible influence on the latter. In that sense it worked: in those four years, brother and sister drifted apart as each formed their own separate circles of friends and interests. Marla, however, found plenty of new ways to get into trouble all by her lonesome. Thanks to the types of people she hung around at school, this could mean anything from vandalism to shoplifting to drug-sampling. Luckily, the last of these didn't stick, as she accidentally overdosed on crack in her first exposure, and the subsequent hospital visit and talking-to she received ensured she'd never purposely try anything like that mess again. Not to mention crack was gross anyway.

In her senior year, she pulled it together and scraped decent enough grades to land herself in a small local college. Sucked into the "drugs to help me stay awake, then drugs to help me sleep" cycle, she built up an incredible tolerance for caffeine during these years - as well as a completely unintentional addiction to OxyContin, which she got over only with some trouble. It was also during that same year (not long after she broke the OxyContin habit) that she accidentally discovered something else about herself. She had the power to make herself, apparently, not visible. The first time this happened she didn't think much of it, since it happened in the company of rather drunk friends, but after a while it dawned on her that she had a problem: she couldn't make herself visible again. Oh, no. Her friends, when they sobered up somewhat, also realized that one from their number was missing and rang up the cops after conducting a private search.

All her disembodied yells of "I'm right here, just invisible", however, eventually just caused those friends to grow very irritated as far as becoming convinced she was just playing a stupid game or prank. They knew it wouldn't have been beyond her personality. Left alone, Marla stole back into her dorm at night to collect some money, cards, and clothes before disappearing- this time for real- to work out her own problems. Namely, the Help I'm A Ghost one, though in the meantime - hey, it couldn't be so bad, right? She could have some fun with her newfound trick before going back.

…Or so she thought. Days became weeks in the blur of city life, and weeks drew on into months. Still she didn't try rejoining the rest of society again; she found she was having too much fun with what she could do, namely in various forms of petty thievery and unrelentful pranking. It actually wasn't long before she figured out how to twist the "on" switch and become visible to other people again, though the first couple switches thereafter were a little rough, especially when they happened at inopportune times - say, when she was in the middle of nonchalantly hauling an armful of items she wanted out of a busy store. Times got better, though. As her control over her ability solidified over time, her confidence accordingly shot way up. The world was her oyster as long as she used her head and wasn't too stupid or obvious.

After the bomb went off, Marla found herself briefly reshuffling priorities. Little brother, where art thou? Though she spent a decent amount of energy looking, it was an unmercifully short time before she got sidetracked - if he was still alive, she could always find him later (she'd been out of contact since high school anyway), and in the meantime, there was all this lovely stuff that would be all gone if she didn't join the rush to ransack empty buildings now. It was this activity that eventually caught the attention of representatives from the Linderman Group. She became involved with them off and on, accepting payments for burglaries and odd jobs that took advantage of her special gift for stealth. Though she never got to the point of calling herself a regular employee, she did build ties with a number of the group who were. To this date, they remain one of the few people who really know how to get ahold of her when she's wanted; otherwise, she's just a shadow among the millions of other people living in New York City. A shadow with sticky fingers.

Psych Profile

In short? Jerk. Though she does run the mill of normal human emotions, Marla doesn't give a damn about what social settings tend to expect, and as a consequence she's honest, vulgar-mouthed, and often irritatingly careless. She also tends to be kind of overreact-y, sometimes kicking up drama where none is really needed.

Just about everything Marla does is for her own profit, whether "profit" means payment in the traditional sense or just self-entertainment. She values her own skin above everybody else's, and for this reason, it isn't often that she'll take risks that will possibly subject her to consequences that are way above her head (such as murder). Beyond this reflexive selfishness, however, she really doesn't have any behavioral compunctions. At all. If it enters her head, it's game. Morality is about as far off the boat as one can expect: she takes things when she feels like it, pulls pranks when she feels like it, and doesn't really care at all about how those actions affect other people. She's the type who'll push over a little kid on the street just for the fun of it.

Laws and Marla seem like they innately don't get along, a relationship that is partly in thanks to her power - in a sense, she feels herself to be superior to how the rest of the world lives because she can distance herself from most of it (by turning invisible) anytime she chooses to. A large part of it, however, is simply naturally in her personality. Authority in general makes her "feel weird", and her tolerance for those who abuse it is low indeed. As far as religion goes, she is nonreligious at best and rudely snarky at worst.

Evolved Ability

In technical terms, Marla can force her body to take on the same refractive index as air, rendering her invisible to normal sight. Since using her power has been such a regular habit, it takes little effort to either switch between or stay in either of the two modes as long as she likes, though she'll go visible automatically if she loses consciousness for more than about a second. It's possible to extend her invisibility to other people and objects, though she must be touching it to work, and she can generally only handle up to one or two other people at a time. Other people who share her ability, as well as those who can view light outside of the visible spectrum, will still be able to see her.

Appendices

Skills

(Plus a few duds, too.)

[Lockpicking] Because this is something she practices quite a lot, especially in situations where it's undesirable to have a forced entry be completely obvious, Marla is pretty good at this. Thanks to experience with the Linderman Group, she's even better. She does have a partial set of real(!) lockpicks (she lost the rest of the set years ago), though she normally keeps a few tricks of the trade lying around for improvised use: a drill bit, a bolt cutter, a hydraulic jack, hairpins. Occasionally, she actually picks locks recreationally as another way to relieve boredom.

[Hotwiring] Marla can do this! She's better at older models of vehicles, such as those from the mid-80's or before, since that was what she learned on. But she can do the new kind, too, given an appropriate amount of time. Failing that? She still knows how to brute-force her way through by smashing and bypassing the ignition lock that way.

[Shoplifting] Maybe she's not part of the organized shoplifting mafia that has taken root in larger cities, but if shoplifting has its own skillset (and it does), then Marla has it. Granted, it's probably cheating in her case since she can just turn invisible and stroll in. But she's coordinated enough to roll clothing items tightly with one hand while keeping it on the hanger and pretending to rifle through a shelf with the other hand, for instance. She also knows enough to be constantly be working around cameras, one-way mirrors, and those pesky little alarm devices hidden in a lot of expensive clothing.

[Driving] Suffice to say there will probably always be honks and middle fingers surrounding her car everywhere she goes. Laaaaalala.

[Forgery] By no stretch of the imagination is Marla a professional, but she's had an interest in forging things for a long time - first innocent things like parent signatures in elementary school, then… absence release notes. Doctor signatures. Etc. Most of the nuances she is familiar with in this area come straight from a textbook in handwriting analysis she once read.

[Guns] Hahaha wut. This is an anti-skill. Marla has never been the type for armed robberies or upfront crimes of that nature. She has very bad aim with a gun. Ridiculously bad. If she's toting one around, you're probably in just as much danger even if you're not the target, and maybe especially if you're not the target.

[Knives] She does know her way around these, though! They're shiny. —No butterfly knives or machetes or surgical scalpels, though. Just the relatively small and utilitarian types. She's especially handy with pocketknives, with various types of survival knives and electrician's knives (the kind used to cut electrical wiring) also on the list.

Relationships

Just Business

	This man intimidates Marla a little. Not gonna lie. She'll take the money, of course, but aside from that she mostly prefers to keep away from him— too much heavy, scary backing behind a single authority figure.
	Squint, squint. This guy is a kind of mysterious and iffy, as far as if she actually wants to stay hanging around him. As long as he provides a steady source of entertainment, though? Oh, what the hell.
	Seems like a nifty type of gal. Very possibly someone Marla can look forward to working with in the future.

Cool Beans

	Blurb.

I Did What Now?

	Human root canal omfg. It was mostly Marla's own fault, but Marla ended up accidentally spilling a few crime-related confessions in front of what happened to be a cop. Blunderblunder derpderp.

Others

	Originally, Felix thought that he was maybe schizophrenic or something due to hearing voices (read: Marla). Thanks to Elisabeth, that illusion has sadly been dispelled. She's taken time to stalk him around, wander around his apartment uninvited, etc. What? He's an interesting- if slightly scary- guy.

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Trivia and Notes

• [Claustrophobia] - Marla's number one fear? Dying from lack of air, or just having a lack of air in general. She thus avoids enclosed spaces whenever at all possible, invisible or not.
• [Little Children] - Hates them. Sometimes kicks them on the street.
• [Accent] - Thanks to living in Canada for most of her young life, Marla still speaks with an accent regional to southern Ontario. The most noticeable feature about hers is that her words have a 'clipped' sound to them, almost as if they're not-quite British. If she says 'eh', it's on purpose, mind you.
• [Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?] - Like so many others, Marla lost contact with Melvin after The Big Apple's big boom. She currently has no idea where he is, or if he's even still alive (to her credit, she did search and ask around. Just not for very long). If you have an interest in adopting Melvin, contact via @mail or page.
• [Pack Rat] Where is Marla's accumulated stash of stolen crap? SHE'S NOT TELLING.