Name: Casara "Cas" Talbot (pseudonym: Castor Mallory)
Age: 19
Attire/Appearance: Casaya is a tall young lady, easily the equal in height of the average male human. Her rough childhood and active lifestyle have made her a lean, wiry woman, and genetics have been sparing with their usual gifts: her hips are narrow and her bust small. Her features are androgynous, though on the rough side, and she is a far cry from what most would call beautiful. She falls somewhere between mildly cute and unremarkably plain. She keeps her dirty blond hair cropped to a short bob, and even when she's not disguising herself as Castor Mallory, she comes across as a bit boyish. When she's at home, Cas likes wearing longer skirts that don't hinder her movement, and looser blouses. She also has a few hair clips that she is fond of. For her job as a courier, and most of the time when she goes out, she dresses in close-fitting attire, generally slacks and long sleeved shirts. Fingerless gloves, a hat, sturdy shoes, and of course her bag round out the outfit.
Race: human
Gender: female
Occupation: courier
Location: South End, but she moves around the East and West Ends as well.
Brief History: Casara was born in the South End, the second child of a couple that were reasonably well-off, at least in terms of what a human could achieve. Her father owned a shoe store, and her mother would sometimes make things from excess material. When the girl was five, her older brother was taken by monsters. He never returned, and Cas believes he is dead.
Shortly after her eleventh birthday, members of a small cult grabbed both her and her parents. They ritually tortured and killed the two adults in front of their daughter, forcing her to watch. As they approached her, she passed out, and when she came to she was the only one left alive, for those in robes had been slaughtered.
Cas wasn't sure what had happened, but she knew her parents were now dead. She fled the building, eventually finding her way back to familiar streets, and she made her way to where her aunt and uncle lived. A couple days later, she woke to find them lying dead in the kitchen, ripped apart. A neighbor she knew found her huddled at the other end of the house the next day, unable to bring herself to come close enough to the bodies to reach the door. That neighbor took her in, though he was unable to get the girl to tell him or his wife what happened.
That night was disturbed only by nightmares, but the next, when the neighbor's wife tucked the child into bed and blew out the light, a shadow rose beside her and sliced open the woman's throat. The dead woman's husband came running at Cas's screams, to find the girl knocked off the bed and the small knife her uncle had given her lying across the room after she'd tried to stab the shadow with it. Calling the girl cursed, he demanded she leave -- fortunately for him, from outside the shade's effective range. Having no choice, she left.
Over the next few days, Cas found herself having nightmares while awake, seeing destruction and bloody horrors in the shadows, and hearing chilling whispers. When the gang of street urchins found her, the girl was doubting herself and her sanity. She didn't know if the thing she'd seen at the neighbor's house was real or not. She couldn't rest, save when she could find somewhere during the day that was well-lit but out of the way. Nights were spent trying to ignore the voices and visions that tormented her. The other children thought her more than a little odd, but they took her in anyhow, letting her sleep in the farthest corner of the building they'd appropriated, and letting her keep a lantern lit as a nightlight, to keep the worst of the terrors away.
For three whole months, the girl's curse claimed no lives. She learned from the others where the best spots were to find food scraps that others might have thrown out, how and what to steal, and how to make the most of everything. But one evening, worn out from a close call and a narrow escape, nobody remembered to check that the lantern would last through the night.
Cas woke to screaming, and again she saw the awful shadow creature. It was clearer this time, as it tore into the panicking children. The girl grabbed the empty lantern and ran. Maybe she was crazy, but it seemed the man had been right -- she was also cursed. The next four years she spent on her own, only daring to get anywhere near other people while the sun was in the sky, and even then she avoided interaction.
A lone girl is not particularly safe, and eventually what little luck she had ran out. A band of unsavory ruffians caught her by surprise, and though she managed to win free of them, she was badly injured in the scuffle. Cas ran from them, but the group was determined, partially because she'd scored a knee to the groin of their leader. Realizing it was a choice between their deaths and hers, she found an alley that lay in shadow, and there she stopped. She kept herself from looking away as the shadow that haunted her ripped the two closest apart, and frightened the rest away.
The girl lost track of things for a while, and when she regained awareness, she found the worst of her injuries had been roughly seen to. Still weak, Cas dragged herself a short ways to somewhere a little more sheltered than in plain view of anyone passing the alley. She wasn't strong enough to make her way back to where she now made her home, but at least she had some supplies, mostly what she'd stolen that day before things got messy. The weapons the gang used were none to clean, and several of the injuries they inflicted became infected.
When she recovered from her fever, her surroundings had changed. The man there said she was lucky some shadowy person had grabbed him and dragged him into the alley, or he wouldn't have found her. At first Cas didn't really understand how the sequence of events he relayed could have come to pass, but eventually comprehension dawned. When Terrence left to run on errands, she grabbed her knife and hauled herself off to find somewhere dark. Addressing her murderous shadow for the first time, she gave it an ultimatum: stop slaughtering everyone that came near, or she would destroy something it valued -- herself.
Things improved after that, though her years of avoiding darkness and people have left Cas a very different person. She is not very fond of people, especially crowds, and it took a long time before her fear of the dark ceased to be debilitating. She tries to keep people away by covering her shyness with a rough attitude and a stern expression, but she's not been as successful at this as she would like, as her nature tends to be more friendly. Between that and her work, Cas is on good terms with a number of people, though she acknowledges only a small number as actually being friends. One of these is Terrence, the doctor that saved her life. Her appearance has changed significantly as well, so that even in a dress she bears little resemblance to the demon-summoning child that rumors would claim she was. She continues to use the name Cas Mallory and deliberately present herself as a boy. Her relationship with the creature in her shadow has improved somewhat, mostly because while it does still deliberately torment her on occasion, it is no longer a constant thing.
Other: The shadowy Shakti is bound to Cas, able to manifest in shadows near her.
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