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marla charles ,
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felt it in my fists, in my feet, in the hollows of my eyelids,
shaking through my skull, through my spine and down through my ribs.
no more dreaming of the dead as if death itself was undone.
no more calling like a crow for a boy, for a body in the garden.
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<td style="width:150px; font-family: courier new; font-size: 11px; color: #343c21;">AGE</td>
<td style="width:150px; font-family: courier new; font-size: 11px; color: #343c21;">OCCUPATION</td>
<td style="width:150px; font-family: courier new; font-size: 11px; color: #343c21;">MEMBER GROUP</td>
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<td style="width:150px; font-family: verdana; font-style: italic; font-size: 10px; text-transform: lowercase; padding: 0px 8px; color: #b3afa8;">twenty-one</td>
<td style="width:150px; font-family: verdana; font-style: italic; font-size: 10px; text-transform: lowercase; padding: 0px 8px; color: #b3afa8;"> without</td>
<td style="width:150px; font-family: verdana;font-style: italic; font-size: 10px; text-transform: lowercase; padding: 0px 8px; color: #b3afa8;">witches/warlocks</td>
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<div style="color: #343c21; vertical-align: middle; text-align: center; font-style: italic; font-family: courier new; font-size: 11px; text-transform: uppercase;">NICKNAMES</div>
<div style="font-family: verdana; background-color: #1f1f1f; color: #b3afa8; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; padding: 5px;">none, really.</div>
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<div style="color: #343c21; text-align: center; font-style: italic; font-family: courier new; font-size: 11px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: middle;">LOCATION</div>
<div style="vertical-align: middle; font-family: verdana; background-color: #1f1f1f; color: #b3afa8; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; padding: 5px;">liverpudlian, born and raised. doesn’t have the scousiest of dialects, though.</div>
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<div style="color: #343c21; text-align: center; font-style: italic; font-family: courier new; font-size: 11px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: middle;">BIRTHDAY</div>
<div style="vertical-align: middle; font-family: verdana; background-color: #1f1f1f; color: #b3afa8; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; padding: 5px;">september 20</div>
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<div style="vertical-align: middle; font-family: verdana; background-color: #1f1f1f; color: #b3afa8; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; padding: 5px;">marlon monaghan</div>
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<div style="color: #343c21; text-align: center; font-style: italic; font-family: courier new; font-size: 11px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: middle;">PLAY BY</div>
<div style="vertical-align: middle; font-family: verdana; background-color: #1f1f1f; color: #b3afa8; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; padding: 5px;">ashley olsen. mary-kate if i’m feeling particularly bold.</div>
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<div style="color: #343c21; text-align: center; font-style: italic; font-family: courier new; font-size: 11px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: middle;">THE PLAYER</div>
<div style="vertical-align: middle; font-family: verdana; font-size: 10px; background-color: #1f1f1f; color: #b3afa8; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; padding: 5px;"> my name’s bravnes (more or less, or nearly), i’m 24 years old and from denmark, europe. am currently residing in england, though, with no real plans to move back home. i first started roleplaying when i was 18 years old, but have been on a bit of a hiatus for the last year or so. i warn you, i may be rusty. marles here is my first character on this site. While I may be open to mature roleplaying, she probably won’t be. found you guys on rpg. it’s a good place like that. </div>
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<option selected>I LIKE</option>
<option>marlon.</option>
<option>family.</option>
<option>whiskey.</option>
<option>cigarettes.</option>
<option>a job well done.</option>
<option>5.30 morning runs.</option>
<option>chocolate ice cream for breakfast.</option>
<option>her spellbooks.</option>
<option>sunglasses.</option>
<option>fist fights.</option>
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<form><select style="width: 400px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; background-color: #1f1f1f; color: #b3afa8; font-size: 10px; text-align: center; border: 0px;" >
<option selected>I DISLIKE</option>
<option>failure.</option>
<option>daylight.</option>
<option>interventions.</option>
<option>things getting in her way.</option>
<option>chat-up lines.</option>
<option>empty beds.</option>
<option>happy couples.</option>
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<form><select style="width: 400px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;background-color: #1f1f1f; color: #b3afa8; font-size: 10px; text-align: center; border: 0px;;" >
<option selected>MY STRENGTHS ARE</option>
<option>her intelligence. she’s smart.</option>
<option>her inventiveness. she can perform well under pressure.</option>
<option>her persistence. she does not give up easily.</option>
<option>she’s tough. she keeps going.</option>
<option>exorcisms. she knows her latin.</option>
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<option selected>MY WEAKNESSES ARE</option>
<option>her obsession with her mission. it could easily be used against her.</option>
<option>her codependence. there’s nothing she craves more than a simple, ******* hug.</option>
<option>her fear, mostly of failure. she’ll do just about anything to not fail.</option>
<option>her recklessness. she’ll throw herself into any situation she thinks can help her achieve her goal.</option>
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<option selected>I'M AFRAID OF</option>
<option>failure.</option>
<option>having to start over.</option>
<option>being possessed, yet she’s not protected her body from demons.</option>
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<option selected>I ASPIRE TO</option>
<option>once again be mrs. marlon monaghan. seriously, nothing else (right now, anyway).</option>
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<option selected>MY QUIRKS/HABITS ARE </option>
<option>5.30 morning runs.</option>
<option>usually stays in all day.</option>
<option>hasn’t got a single person in her contacts on her phone.</option>
<option>doesn’t respond to ‘marla’ half the time.</option>
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<option selected>MY POWERS IF ANY ARE </option>
<option>witchcraft (spellcasting and elemental (earth))</option>
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On an overall scale, she’s just lonely. Really, ******* lonely. She met a guy, she fell in love, they got married, and then he died, and as if that wasn’t bad enough in itself, she soon found out he was in Hell. Now, to the less observant onlooker, her trying to find a way to break him out may seem like a grand gesture, but really, it’s just pure selfishness – 98% at least – as she doesn’t know how she’s to function without him. She had a love, it consumed her, and then it was taken from her. Where others move on, this one was too scared to try and giving up now would be worse than not having tried at all. <p>

As a result, she’s become rather single-minded – she wants him back and at pretty much any price. She wasn’t like that to begin with, but as her theories are continuing to prove wrong, she’s getting more careless. She’s willing to sacrifice others for her cause if there’s even the slightest (or simply assumed) chance that it might work (as proved by the two possessed persons, whose bodies she bound the possessing demon to, hoping an exorcism of the demon would send the bodies themselves to Hell) and if it doesn’t, there’s no sorries, just moving on and coming up with the next best plan. It’s not just others she’s careless with, though, she’s also becoming rather reckless herself. If she needs information, she’ll find whoever has it and if they don’t give it up willingly, well, she’ll just have to make them, no matter their size, their powers, their strength. On occasion, okay, she might actually try to come up with a plan, but if it doesn’t form quickly enough, she’ll just go in, all guns a-blazing (occasionally leading to fleeing, all guns dropped (guns being an idiom, not actual items brought)). In that sense, she’s irrational. It’s a shame, because she used to be quite smart. <p>

In the midst of all this, she’s determined, though. That’s probably the only good thing (if ‘good’ is the word) that’s come out of all of this – she’s focussed alright. Having stuck only to to basics as far as magic goes from age young to age 17, she’s proper embraced it since the passing of her husband and the start of her mission. What used to be an obstacle in having a normal life with the man she loves is now the only thing she’s got that seems powerful enough to help her bring him back, and she spends the better part of her day reading and re-reading the spellbooks she nicked from her mum before she left town, learning all that she can from them on things magic and demonic, and what a lot of things she learned. But they’re not all-knowing, those books, and her hopeful person’s had plenty of room to fill in gaps with what ifs and maybe thens, and she continues to try and come up with new ones in order to keep her mind busy, as the second she doesn’t, that crushing emptiness in her chest strikes down upon her again, and more painful than last. <p>

And at the end of the day, that’s the problem at the core (perhaps even the core itself) – she’s lonely. She’s so lonely it hurts. And no amount of alcohol and (she’s convinced) company is going to make that go away. She’s willing to continue to give the former a chance, though. The latter – not so much, but she can be civil alright.
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If you ask her, she’ll tell you there’s no point in wasting time on the beginning. Nothing of great importance happened then. She was born, she grew up. No childhood drama, no nothing. She had a caring mum, a kind dad, a protective older sister, and a twin sister who wasn’t very different from herself. She knows people argue that twins are more different than you think, but really, that weren’t the case here – they were pretty much two halves of one whole. Until Marlon, anyway. <p>

She first saw him at church. She wasn’t devout in her belief, not like him, but she always did enjoy churches more than any other place. There’s a quietness there that you don’t find elsewhere, a sense of purpose. You can see it in the people that come and go, too, see they’re there for a reason. Marlon was no different. Not if you looked aside from his tormented expression, but anyone who knew him knows that that just wasn’t possible. It’s what drew her in to begin with. She’ll admit that. She assumes it’s only natural that when you’ve had an untroubled childhood you notice, more than anything else, the people who seem to not have had the same. She thought Marlon was like that, but he wasn’t. Later conversations taught her that his childhood had been as untraumatic as hers. Still, it wasn’t the feeling you’d get if you saw him around. He had this air of restlessness to him, almost a slight panic, and mystery, too. And he was beautiful. By God, more than anything, he was beautiful. She never realised just how much until that one day when he sat down next to her and took her hand, and it was strange only in the sense that it wasn’t. He had never talked to her, she had never talked to him. She could have sworn he’d never even noticed her in that church, yet when he sat down next to her and took her hand, it had felt like the most natural thing in the world. When he later got up to leave, she had followed without question. <p>

He was eighteen at the time. She was seventeen. Her parents didn’t dislike him, but had their concerns, mainly because it quickly became quite obvious to them that there were feelings there, and rather intense ones at that. To this day, she’s still convinced it frightened them. You may say, ‘frightened, really?’ She’ll tell you, ‘yes. Frightened, really’. She pretty much moved out overnight. Her parents weren’t the only ones who considered it rash. <p>

She married Marlon when she turned eighteen. She did so because she loved him more than she’d ever loved another person. That’s all anyone really needs to know. She couldn’t imagine ever going to sleep next to someone else, waking up next to someone else, spending any second of any day with anyone but him, she didn’t feel the need to. He was all she wanted from the world, it’s as simple as that. His life revolved around her, her life revolved around him. Her life was him. Those too thick to deduce that from mere observation gathered that much when she finally tried to end her own life two weeks after he lost his – having met him at seventeen and married him at eighteen, she lost him aged eighteen and a half. <p>

A tougher childhood might’ve helped prepare her for the blow that was his death. If not the pain itself, then at least how to go about handling it. As it was, she’d never experienced resistance, never felt unsafe, never been hardened. In that sense, Marlon’s death was a wake-up call. She learned – first figuratively speaking, but soon literally, too – that there was a big, bad world out there and no one was safe from it, not even Marlon, so very devout in his beliefs. Nineteen years of age when he died, she still wonders what his God has to say about that. <p>

If his death was a wake-up call, surviving her suicide attempt surely was, too. Waking up in the hospital with her mum by her side, she soon blamed the woman for her own still being here. Her mother was a witch and as the doctor described her survival as miraculous, she soon put her two and two together. Her sisters were, too, and she herself, though she’d quickly put it aside when Marlon entered her life. She’d been quite fine with normalcy. Her mother’d never seemed to see it the same way, which had been just about the only thing to ever cause friction between them: her mother seemed to want more for her, and she, herself, just wanted Marlon. If her mother had truly respected that fact, she wouldn’t have brought her back. And she wouldn’t have lied and said she didn’t. <p>

It was her parents, who took her home following her discharge. She didn’t want to go there, but they’d arrived before she had the chance to sneak out on her own, and as a result she spent the next two weeks in her old room, not speaking to anyone, not even the twin. She’d sleep all day, not leaving her room unless she had to. Even then, she tried to make it during the night so as not to run into anyone, and for a while, they let her. Eventually the twin sister caved, though. She called her selfish to her face, but our girl didn’t care much. Not until three days later when the twin took it further with the decision that they were going to talk about it, whether our girl wanted to or not. The row that followed eventually led to her pushing her sister aside and leaving house for the first time in thirteen days. <p>

She can’t really say it was intended, her looking up the medium. It was more the natural result of her getting on the tube, riding it until it felt too claustrophobic, then getting off, getting out, and seeing it right there, right in front of her, just across the street from the tube station. She’d been almost trance-like in her crossing of the street, noticing neither the car horns nor the tire screetches from floored brakes. She barely remembers entering the building itself, let alone being shown into the medium’s room, and, again, in there, hardly any of the conversation. Just those four words, those four little words, and then that’s it, she went home, trance-like still, until she stopped in front of her mum’s bookcase, spellbooks in sight, and her mind slowly started to pick up pace. <p>

She found a bag and put some clothes in, all the spellbooks and some candles. Then she walked out the door, took the subway to her and Marlon’s place, picked up a few final pieces of clothing from there and, because it felt too off to leave it there to be repainted, cut the bit of wallpaper he’d written their history on off, rolled it up and put a hairband around it, before grabbing her car keys, dropping it all in the back seat and taking off. <p>

Destination: who knows? <br>
Mission: to find a way to get to hell and back, and preferably with a person in tow. <p>

Is it possible? Probably not, but her mind’s not even considering that fact yet, it’s all just maybes and ifs in there, followed by loads of maybe thens. <p>

She’s put most of her faith, and theoretically quite rightly so, into exorcisms what with her knowing that that’s the way demons get there. Some part of her wants, wishes, yearns for it to present her with some kind of hitchhike opportunity, but the three demons she’s managed to successfully grab onto during an exorcism (there were four more over time, but they proved too violent for her to hold onto and she eventually had to just go ahead with the ritual, not the plan) have been duds. Black smoke emerging from possessed mouths soon proved ungraspable, and she moved onto theory number two: binding the demon to the body. A maybe if followed by a maybe then led her to believe that exorcising a demon bound to a physical body might just throw the possessed into hell along with the possessor, and a body was something to grab onto. <p>

She’s done it twice now, with the mark, bound a demon to a body. Both attempts proved her theory a failure, simply leading to no exorcism at all. Angered by that fact, she simply walked out, leaving, on both occasions, a demon tied to a chair under a devil’s trap. She’s now moved onto theory number three: binding by magic. She’s convinced herself that this is going to work – more out of wanting than actually believing. She knows she’s running low on theories after that. <p>

She’s spending the better part of her waking hours either repeatedly going over the information about the mark that binds a demon to its human vessel or reading and re-reading her mum’s spellbooks, before reading them again. She’s convinced the answer’s in there somewhere. <p>

She’s been at it for two and a half years now, somewhere down line jumping a plane to the States because a rumour said it was getting more out of control over there. Her main interest lies in tracking down demons. Still thinking they have to be the key, she needs one. <p>

Fun facts: <br>
#01. Her name’s Seraphina Perth Benjamin, Monaghan once married. <br>
She goes by Marla Charles, though, just in case. <br>
#02. Did Latin, amongst others, at A-level, but knew at least half of it already because her mum taught her beforehand. <br>
#03. Was accepted into Cambridge University to do a BA in Theology and Religious Studies, but then Marlon died and here we are.<p>

(As I said to Sully, I'm not really expecting her to get the husband back. It's just her main drive at the moment.)
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There’s an unimpressive crack as her feet break through the ice. That’s the last thing her mind fully processes before there’s nothing but the cold and the pain that comes with it. Her lips part instinctively as if to scream, but there’s just air going out and water coming in, thick and slimy against the roof of her mouth and she feels sick. Tries to spit it out, but can’t. All that comes of it is another intake of water and the sick rises to her throat. She feels the first stint of alarm. When she realises she can’t feel her fingers, she feels the first stint of panic. <p>

Some survival instinct kicks in. Her arms stretch upwards, numb hands trying to push back water, and her legs start kicking frantically. They do five kicks between them before she realises just what’s going on and she gasps. More water and this time she swallows it. <p>

She forces her arms and legs to stop moving, physically forces them, until, finally, it isn’t an option anymore. The feeling’s left her arms and feet, and the searing pain in her calves lets her know they’re next. Somewhere in the midst of it, she remembers the first sentence he wrote on the bedroom wall and she laughs, more water. <p>

It darkens around her as her body sinks towards the bottom.
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BANNER BY WHOEVER
<br>TEMPLATE BY FEDORA @ <a href=http://z10.invisionfree.com/CAUTIONTOTHEWIND/index.php?showuser=580808>CAUTION 2.0</a> AND <a href=http://z10.invisionfree.com/A_THOUSAND_FIREFLIES/index.php?showuser=2821>A THOUSAND FIREFLIES</a> Code Edited by Sully
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