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maladicta ☀ discworld ☀ 3/3

[deshabille]

CANON PERSONALITY:

Mal is first and foremost an outsider. This is a quality that permeates pretty much all of her social interactions and one that she deliberately reinforces, in large part for her own safety. She has had to cultivate a taste for being an outsider because, while she had no place in vampire society (because of her sobriety and her extreme distaste for the traditional gender roles enforced within the culture), she was also very wary about her ability to function within the confines of human society. As such she pulled herself mostly out of vampire culture and dipped her toes into humanity, but initially tried to keep herself aloof enough that she would not be close enough to be in danger of retaliation should something go horribly wrong. Her most significant change throughout the course of canon, and one she is very much in the middle of by the end of canon and will continue to work on while on the Barge, is that she is learning to fully immerse herself in her little motley crew of people and find a home.

One of the things that is fundamentally different about Mal is that she isn't human. She looks human enough, but her baseline for violence and need for control are both much higher than an ordinary human's would be. The violence is easily explainable: vampires are an exclusively predatory species, so her natural instinct is to respond to a challenge with force. She repeatedly threatens and physically assaults people she sees as threats to herself or her regiment and seems to see absolutely zero problem with doing so.

Again related to that whole vampire thing, Mal seeks control. Because she can no longer control people by feeding, she looks to control other avenues of her life - for example, by constantly questioning authority (particularly useful in Borogravia, where authority tends to have its head up itself).

Her desire for control over her environment expresses itself in an intense curiosity about anything and everything that could be useful to her. While she doesn't mean anything bad by this curiosity, it can quickly shift from harmless curiosity to invasiveness. She is incredibly nosy and doesn't back off from things that interest her, and is highly likely to fixate on one or more people who strike her as particularly fascinating. These very special people, whom more well-adjusted individuals would probably call friends, are the people who Mal pushes. If she sees potential in someone or finds them interesting, she essentially provokes them into pushing back - in other words, she's best able to relate to people in a contentious, back-and-forth relationship in which both parties are challenged.

Ultimately, Mal's greatest desire is control over herself. Canonically, she is actually very terrible at this. She acts like she has complete control, in part because that's just how vampires act and in part because it keeps her safe from those who would suspect the worst from her. However, she's impulsive as hell and has a tendency to run into dangerous situations with a) no backup and b) no plan. The most prominent example of this is the fact that, unlike many of her Black Ribboner peers, Mal not only chose a substance (coffee) rather than an abstract (politics, photography, police work) to substitute for her desire for blood, she proceeded to join the army - which tends to travel through a whole lot of coffee-less areas. It was an idea that was pretty much doomed to failure, but truthfully Mal relies on chance and used bluster to appear more directed than she actually is. The fact that Mal only starts thinking about solutions to this huge hole in her clever plan after she's already gone through withdrawals and almost been staked through the heart indicates a ridiculous lack of forethought, even about the most crucial things in her life.

That being said, she does learn from her mistakes. Furthermore, she's sufficiently stubborn that when she puts her mind to something, whether it be improving herself, protecting a friend, or fighting for a cause, she digs her teeth in and doesn't let go. Sometimes her stubbornness eclipses her intelligence, in fact; she'll pursue something that she believes in whether or not it's a good idea in the long-term (see also: "what is forethought?" above).

Mal is haughty with a dash of charm by default. In fact, the main character repeatedly "objects to [her] permanent expression of effortless superiority," which she maintains at all times except when she is going through coffee withdrawals. Part of this is genuine and part is a defense mechanism. Mal does consider herself smarter than her peers and makes an effort to know things about them that give her an advantage. She may use such an advantage if it's helpful to her. However, she also comes from a family in which her skills and intelligence were ignored; upon arriving in the army, she immediately establishes herself as cleverer, faster, and stronger than the other recruits to establish herself as valuable.

She is almost always sarcastic, sardonic, or otherwise disingenuine. It would be a pretty bad idea to take her word at face value, because nine times out of ten she's testing the person she's speaking to - or just plain teasing them. While this is just kind of how Mal is, there is an element of defense mechanism to this as well. She conceals her motivations and particularly her emotions, which is hypocritical given that she spends so much of canon investigating other people that more than one character comments on her external rather than internal focus. Because of her semi-self-imposed outsider status, she sees too much sharing and exposure of vulnerabilty as equivalent to weakness, and while she isn't openly distrustful, she can be standoffish on first acquaintance.

However, when Mal clicks with a person - or a group of people, as she does during her time in the Ins-and-Outs - she bonds incredibly quickly. Her regiment becomes, in essence, her family during her time with them, supplanting her ties to vampire culture and making her feel more, though by no means completely, secure with people. While the majority of the recruits move on after peace is declared, Mal isn't quite able to do it, because home, to her, is where her people are. That's why she comes back to the regiment in the end: to follow that sense of belonging.

Finally, while Mal does hold a very high opinion of herself, she has no illusions about how dangerous she could be if she lost control. During the course of her withdrawals in Monstrous Regiment, she conceals her worry until the very last minute, at which point she insists that her friends put a stake through her heart to ensure their own safety. What this means is: no matter how haughty she acts, no matter how cruel she can be, and no matter how impulsive she is at times, there is something bigger than herself that she wholeheartedly believes in, and that is her people.

ABILITIES:

Mal is a goddamn vampire, and "on the Disc, all the world's vampire legends are true, even the contradictory ones. They just aren't all true for the same vampire." As stated above, Mal is a Black Ribboner and does not drink blood, having substituted the addictive properties of coffee. Once again, however, a lack of coffee will lead to delusions, hallucinations, and delirium tremens.

Mal is apparently not a created vampire but a genetic one, i.e. her parents are both vampires. The rules of immortality for vampires are not explicitly stated within the novels, but it's fair to assume that genetic vampires age more slowly than humans while following the same basic physical growth trajectory. She's never questioned about her age when she signs up for the army, which implies she visually passes for a late-teenaged human; therefore I estimated her apparent age at 19 and her actual age at 124.

Mal can change into bats (not one bat but a swarm of them), although it's difficult for her and she ends up naked when she changes back (because female vampires must always be sexy). She tolerates sunlight but does not enjoy it (it tingles). She can levitate and fly for short distances but finds it difficult and physically draining. She's supernaturally strong and fast, with fantastic hearing and a really excellent sense of smell, especially if you're bleeding. She can see in the daaaaark. She can punch you through a wall. Like a boss. If you want to kill her you pretty much have to stake her in the heart. Otherwise she'll just heal and look smug at you.

In the Discworld, vampires don't exactly drink blood for sustenance; they're addicted to it like a drug. In fact, the Überwald League of Temperance, or Black Ribboners, is a group analogous to Alcoholics Anonymous, which encourages its members to abstain from blood. Many vampires choose to simply replace one addiction with another. Mal's new addiction is coffee. When she doesn't have any in canon, as happens while the regiment is on the move, she reverts back to her original addiction and craves blood. When she reverts her cravings are so intense that she can't control herself; however, she is self-aware enough to realize that she's a danger to others. In the interim period while the effects of the coffee are wearing off, she becomes completely unaware of her surroundings and experiences "flashsides," or flashes of alternate realities. In Monstrous Regiment, she gets flashsides of the Vietnam War. During flashsides, Mal is entirely unaware that her original reality ever existed.

Other skills include looking fantastically yet carelessly dressed, being smug, avoiding mobs, and sort of knowing how to fight with a pike. Skills do not include technology or flush toilets.

INVENTORY; One Ins-And-Outs corporal's uniform, one shako, one Black Ribbon, one saber, one coffee engine, several bags of ground coffee.

ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? I still love you.

S A M P L E S;

FIRST PERSON: Dean Winchester is a terrigreat friend, and Hannibal Lecter is a bad influence.

THIRD PERSON: Introspection around your sergeant is never not awkward.