Editing Character:Mara Warren

===Background===
Mara's life began with death, and continued much the same. Her mother died during her birth. A rare enough event in this day and age, but not wholly unheard of. Mara came out just as lifeless as her cut open mother, umbilical cord strangling the infant neck.
But somehow, miraculously, six minutes after her removal, she breathed.<br><br>
Exactly what happened is hard to say. There were six deaths in those six minutes when she didn't breathe, each happening perfectly within a minute of each other. Perhaps she, somehow, caused them. Perhaps they caused her.<br><br>
Whatever the case, the newborn was somehow infused with the psychic energy of the dying, the energy that more normally produces ghosts. Her flesh became suffused with ectoplasm that those energies produced, making her not entirely normal in more ways than one.<br><br>
For a start, for her entire life, from the orphanage on up, she could see ghosts. Not only dead ghosts, but living ones, the ones inside people. You have to look them in the eyes to see them, and it lets them see yours... or, well, whatever exactly it is Mara has where hers should be. It freaks people out to see hers, so she doesn't do it often. People think she looks sketchy the way she's always avoiding eye contact.<br><br>
Life in foster homes wasn't as bad as it is in the media, but it wasn't great either. Adoptions tended to not last long, since people get weird about the kid who talks to their dead parents.<br><br>
The weirder thing, though, is that whenever she bled, whether it was a skinned knee or a paper cut, the ectoplasm in her surged. She became intangible, like a ghost. <br><br>
Yeah, that's not pleasant.<br>
<br>
'''Serious Trust Issues'''<br>
<br>
===Rising Conflict===
Yeah, it's probably not surprising that Mara ended up in a sanitarium. Or that she bit her own tongue to walk through the walls.<br><br>
She spent some years on the run, headed out of state, started a new life for herself. It wasn't easy for a fifteen year old on her own, but she wasn't entirely on her own. She had dead people there to help her all along the way. Not that dead people were always friendly. Most of the time they were pretty nasty, really, or else self-obsessed to the point where talking to them was impossible. But, if you did what they wanted, they tended to be grateful, and if you learnt how to play them you could get things you would never have anyways.<br><br>

'''Ghost Whisperer, and Shouter'''

===First Story===
Lucky Spook
A grown up Mara opens up a proper business. Well, 'proper'. She puts an ad out in the Miami Herald: <br>
<br>
Out of Options? Out of Clues? Try... <br>
<br>
DEADBEAT DETECTIVE AGENCY<br>
Call: 786-555-2187, ask for Mara Warren<br>
Reasonable prices. Cold cases a specialty.<br>
'Seances' upon request.<br>
<br>


And, shortly after, she's loosed on her first case. She's hired by a ghost who promises her his old safe full of valuables (heretofore unfound by anyone else), if he can find his actual killer. Problem is, he died in 1884. Who knew being a detective would involve so much history?<br><br>
Of course, things turned south real quick when the killer's ghost came back for her, and Mara found the whole spectral community counting on her to deal with a crazed ectomancer creating a full blown army of ectoplasmic monsters.<br><br>
The case had her running all over the city, and into the afterlife.<br><br>
Only, apparently, it wasn't the afterlife, but some weird other realm that other people call the Nevernever.<br><br>
And, weirdly, she has a house there. Apparently it's a ghost thing.<br><br>
And its in this strange spectral second home that she makes her last stand against Dr. Ivret's ectomantic ambitions.<br><br>

'''Second Home, Second Life'''


YYZ-MIA Crossover:
Things go from odd to weird when Mara gets contacted from beyond the grave by a ghost who says that her daughter is in deep trouble, and she isn't in the mood to negotiate. Being persistently haunted by a powerful ghost that keeps doing things ghosts don't do (weird stuff, magic stuff) is enough to get Mara on the case.
But, is this strange ghost really the mother of this young woman? And how does the ghost know this strange sorcerer? And what the Hell is making all the milk go off?

Aspect: 
Jude: Kindred Spirit
Upon helping and getting to know Jude some, Mara recognizes that they have a lot in common. Growing up with weird supernatural abilities, seeing shit no one else does, getting wrapped up in all kinds of crazy for no good reason.
Apparently Jude gets awesome magic powers out of the deal, rather than disappearing whenever hurt, but no similarities work forever. Still, it's nice to have someone to talk to and all that.
Invoke to: Help recover Jude's mental conditions, relate to Jude, protect Jude, etc.
Compel to: Get into trouble on Jude's behalf, being especially hurt by a fight with Jude, etc.


Crossover: Mac

The dead, Mara can deal with. They're annoying: sure. Dangerous: often. Crazy: certainly. Obsessive: abso-freakin'-lutely. But, you get used to them. You understand the way they think. The dead are understandable, ghosts can be dealt with.
But, the undead turn out to be another matter. When a zombie journalist named Dead Red shows up to interview Mara about her previous cases, she finds herself suddenly thrust into a world where ghosts aren't the only thing haunting the night. Before long she's neck deep in a vampire hunt with her old pal Pastor Mac.
All and all in went pretty well.
Up until she realized vampires read the tabloids, too.

Aspect:
Plastered on the Tabloids
Mara's not exactly a celebrity, but for some reason the bizarre low end tabloids that adore to print stories about bigfoot adore her just as much, and she tends to show up in them. Dead Red isn't bad about it, most of the time, since he puts her in a good light, but some of the others are just weird and creepy.
Invoke to: Have someone have heard of you before, have contacts in the low end of journalism, know something else that the tabloids brought to light, etc.
Compel to: Have enemies know a little too much about you, be pestered by journalists, have journalists in danger because of you, have no credibility whatsoever, be a laughing stock, etc.


'''Stats''':
<br>
Overworked Ectoplasm-Infused Detective<br>
Sole Employee of Deadbeat Detective Agency<br>
Serious Trust Issues<br>
Ghost Whisperer, and Shouter<br>
Second Home, Second Life<br>
<br>
'''Skills''':
<br>
'''Good''': Investigation * Conviction * Athletics * Alertness * Empathy <br>
'''Fair''': Contacts * Driving * Burglary * Discipline * Rapport * Deceit <br>
'''Average''': Lore * Scholarship * Craftsmanship * Presence * Stealth * Endurance * Fists * Performance <br>
<br>

'''Powers''':
<br>
Ghost Speaker -1<br>
Demesne -1<br>
Soulgaze -1<br>
Human Form (involuntary: Whenever she bleeds): +2, Affecting:<br>
Spirit Form -3<br>
Physical Immunity -8<br>
The Catch is Salt, Inherited Objects and Holy Objects +4 (+2 for easy to obtain, +2 for <br>
<br>
'''Stunts''':
<br>
I Know Just the Ghost (as I know Just the Guy)<br>
<br>
Refresh: 1
@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 '''Serious Trust Issues'''<br>
 <br>
-Other Crossovers:
-Seaton:
-Another day another crazy case.
-Also, freaking magic.
-Mara finds herself dragged into a bizarre mystery involving... faeries... yeah, faeries. What happened to the sane world?
-Specifically, she's brought in by one Mara Seaton (well, apparently, it once again has more to do with the mother than with Seaton herself, as she kept pushing the case and offering the coin) to talk to a dead sorcerer (yeah, another one).
-Mara's vague on the rest of the details, as the scumbag dead sorcerer kind of possessed her for the rest of the case.
-Spial
-TBD
-Oscela
-You know, tracking through a swamp looking for a stash of drug money was not part of the plan.
-It really, really wasn't.
-Mara was actually surveying the swamps to find the dead body of a cute little ghost girl who needed some closure. Well, that's the polite way of putting it. In reality, the ghost was a terribly annoying little spook, and Mara was willing to do anything for it.
-Somewhere in the swamps she got lost though, and turned to Justin for help. That help turned out to mainly be dragging her around another adventure entirely.
-Austin
-If there's anything worse than ghosts looking for their corpses, it's ghosts looking for their living bodies. See, since ghosts aren't actually the spirits of the dead, but are psychic manifestations created by the circumstances surrounding death, they can technically, though rarely, happen when one suffers tremendous trauma but does not entirely die. Most often, this means when someone enters a brain dead state but is later revived. Ghosts made this way tend to hate their living counterparts and haunt them mercilessly.
-And, when it becomes clear that a recent surge in these sort of ghosts has to do with the perfect breeding ground for them being made out of an underground and underregulated medical operation being run illegally in the city (organ trading a specialty), she starts poking around.
-She's more than a little surprised to run into a "patient" who doesn't even know what happened to her, and whose ghost causes more than a little mayhem.
 ===Rising Conflict===
 Yeah, it's probably not surprising that Mara ended up in a sanitarium. Or that she bit her own tongue to walk through the walls.<br><br>