Mallory. She's a really, uh, complex girl, to be entirely honest. To start with her appearance, she's a hybrid. She was born without her ears, her nose, and without any hair on her body. She's REALLY skinny, but apparently the doctor evaluations haven't found anything wrong with her metabolism, and as far as they can tell, her panels all come back clean and non-indicative of a medical issue. In other words, she looks underfed, but she isn't. Her eyes are big and deep, and remind me a lot of a seal or a sea lion. They're very pretty in the night. They reflect everything.

She's an artist. She is OBSESSED with painting. A lot of people already know that she likes painting, but I'm telling you, it's like her default state. If she's not doing any of the other weird things she's doing, she's painting something. Ordinarily, I wouldn't really care about her style, but there's a quality to it that I can't place that makes me like it. A type of depth, I guess. It's like when you've got two identical foods, but one of them is homemade and the other is store-bought, and there's a certain quality to that homemade thing that makes you like it more. She uses a lot of oranges and reds and yellows, and then contrasts it with really vivid blue spots. At first, her art looks like nothing but messy splotches of random paint, but if you actually take a second and think about what you're looking at, you can start seeing the forms and shapes that she put in. The colour and the shape, if you will. I'll leave you to decide what you can see. It's not something that a person can--or should--just say.

Now, what else does Mallory like to do? Well, she likes to explore. She's running around constantly around Burncastle, and it's almost always in a way that makes you want to rip your hair out in worry. I've found out before that she spent a few hours, for example, on the topmost floors of those old-ass factories down towards the south edge of town. By the way, there's no stairs up. They all fell out. I've been to those factories, and I'm no stranger to climbing, but the only way up is either jery-rigging something to go up where the stairs used to be, or doing crazy parkour from the intake-outtake pipes or what little remains of the fire escapes. I'm always afraid that, one day, there'll be a news headline talking about a cute wayward girl who got impaled on an bent iron pipe. She's good at what she does, though, so it's unlikely.

Mallory is... more complex than you think. Personality-wise, you know? She's really cute and almost comes off as a little dumb because of it, and maybe it's also because of her stutter, but even then. She's really good at making people fawn over her. Well, okay, maybe not 'making people', that makes her sound evil, but you get the idea. But, she's pretty damn astute. I learn a lot of words from her, even after all these years. She doesn't write poetry at all because she finds it "tedious", and that's HER quote saying that. Tedious.

Think about that for me, will you? Think about that cute face you know, and imagine her deriding something as "tedious". Maybe you can picture that, but a lot of people I know would laugh it off as a crazy hypothetical, like if a little kid started talking serious business about the stock market.

"Tedious"... she's smarter than you think, I bet. She's just smart enough to know instinctively that there's benefits to looking cute.