Fatality

Fay's mother is very spiritual, into astrology, tarot, "Spirit", and shit- think of practices from the Church of Spiritual Awareness but just without the community or actual physical location of a church. Fay actually is a medium, but it's more to her detriment as her mother convinced her she's just mentally ill, resulting in Fay trying to tune out the voices and visions via drugs and whatnot. Evie often pops up around her, increasing her guilt and desperate attempts of escapism.

Isla grew up around a mix of different types of Christian and Catholic influences, mainly the former as that's how her grandparents identified as. She went to a few different churches when she was in the system and used to go to a Christian church with her grandparents when she was younger before their mobility issues caused them to essentially become couch-bound.

As an adult, she's not super religious per say but she does believe there's a God and that all the awful things that have happened to her is for a reason. This is largely a coping mechanism for her to somewhat process and cope with the abuse she has endured. She doesn't like the concept of Hell as she thinks it's cruel and she is deeply terrified of somehow ending up there.

Piper grew up with very loose Catholic undertones and influences. For her family, it was more generational where her father's parents and their parents and overall community had Catholicism as a large part of their daily life. While she and her brothers were dragged occasionally to church when they were younger by extended family, her father identified as a Catholic but never actually went through with any of the traditions or customs. She and her brothers are baptized and celebrate common holidays but it's more out of tradition rather than religious practice (they don't do Good Friday, Lent, or any actual prayer or observation of Jesus Christ and whatnot).

Essentially, she doesn't identify or label herself as Catholic unless she's with her family or it's in a community sense where she wants to feel a sense of pride and belonging with said group. Hell, she couldn't even give you the name of the Pope. The best comparison I can give is how some white Americans occasionally identify as "Irish-American" when they're reminded or the situation calls for it, like around St. Patrick's Day but it's not necessarily a major part of their identity.

After Evie's death, she begins to appreciate Fay more and begins to try and get her act together. Before the death, Piper was pretty reckless and destructive. She has a weak spot for more vulnerable people, so for Fay she views as childish and therefore more prone to being manipulated (even though Fay is smarter than her; she just doesn't act like it). This is why she had a hard time with Dunning. She really wanted someone to blame for the car crash but canonically, Dunning is written to be more gentle and timid in comparison to her.

She has an instinctual need to protect those she perceives as weaker than her (think classic enneagram 8 if you're into that stuff- I sometimes use it to help me write characters and with her being a tsundere, I wanted to give her an actual motive for why she acts the way she does and typecasting her as an 8 helped me with that). While she has a history of getting into relationships fast and them burning quickly due to toxic dynamics, Dunning is healthy and good for her, resulting in her staying since once again, Evie's death was a bit of a wake up call for her. This is the opposite of Fay, who becomes even more self-destructive and is falling towards rock bottom.

During her childhood, she would find sick and vulnerable small animals and sneak them home to try and revive them. She would be forced by her maternal grandparents to put these small critters back, despite her feeling guilty and being terrified of the idea. Young Isla would later walk past these animals after putting them back, finding them deceased. Her grandparents would blame her, stating it was her fault the animals died.

This would be a similar trend throughout her childhood, with her grandparents blaming Isla for her mother's declined mental state, drug abuse, and disappearance (resulting in her living with them) and later, her grandmother blaming her for her grandfather's death. Isla would internalize all of this, resulting in her clutching to anything that appeared to be in need of assistance to try and make up for all of the times she wasn't able to in the past. As an adult with her own place, albeit small and run-down, she would resume bringing small, vulnerable animals home, usually those on the brink of death. With the freedom to take care of them, Isla would desperately try to save them. However, due to these animals' critical condition and her own lack of resources, the unfortunate result would be the same as before, with the animals passing away.

Due to extreme denial, Isla is unable to accept the fact that these animals have died. As a response to protect her psyche, she places them in the freezer to preserve them. While her pt.2 only shows one animal, her freezer is actually packed with them. She places them there and never bothers to open the freezer unless it's to add another animal, adding to her delusion that everything is okay and since these animals aren't decomposing, they're not actually deceased. The listener opening the freezer door and their panicked expression challenged this delusion of hers while exposing numerous old wounds, causing her to become violent when in actuality, she seldom is.

instead prefers gifts that could give her memories rather than tangible objects, such as new or thoughtful experiences. However, in relationships, she's pretty laidback but likes it to feel mutual or ~50/50 in terms of effort put in from both parties.

Both of Fay's revolve around quality time. We haven't had the chance to showcase her as much as the others in this list but she's pretty secretive and selective with who she lets in. She's hypocritical in the sense that she wants others to open up to her but refuses to do so herself. Before she can even begin to let her walls down, she must truly understand the person in order to anticipate how they'll respond to her authentic self and even then, she won't entirely let them in.

I should really do an info dump on Isla's character since she has the most thorough and fucked up backstory but her 'giving' are acts of service while her 'receiving' are words of affirmation. Girl has a lot of insecurity and repressed negative feelings towards herself and she tries to make up for it a bit by taking on a caretaker role. That paired with her loneliness and exclusion/subtle harassment at work results in her barely receiving meaningful interactions or kind words.

Piper's 'giving' would be physical touch with her 'receiving' being quality time. Girl has had way too many relationships, jumping into them with rose colored lenses and a ride-or-die mentally. Of course, after a few weeks or several months, there's a nasty breakup with her being in denial and claiming that she never liked them to begin with before repeating the cycle with someone new.

She was intended to be a kuudere that's extremely socially awkward/unaware, resulting in her not being popular. This was me wanting to do a more aloof character in contrast to my more emotional/outgoing ones and I loosely based her off of two coworkers I have had that are incredibly logical and intelligent but very, very, socially unaware, resulting in one of them not being allowed to deal with customer haha.

Initially, her whole thing was her family favoring her brother over her and her not being allowed to be an official employee at the aquarium. However, she would still periodically swing by just to roam it and there she would meet the listener who would actually listen to her and be respectful, resulting in her becoming attached and distressed when discovered they were switching jobs.

Unfortunately, the script was kind of all over the place and Fatal and I weren't feeling it so I switched it up to her family having her work behind the scenes and doing the dirty work because they felt like she was more reliable due to her logical/aloof nature. At that time, I was binging Alice Schach and the Magic Orchestra's "QUEEN FLY" mv and that's where I got the idea for the aquarium to "sacrifice" humans to their animals.

In regards to how I thought of an aquarium, I had the week off for Thanksgiving from school and work and decided to do some solo traveling and I went to a really nice aquarium and it's been stuck in my head ever since haha. Lastly, her tangent at the start about sea cucumbers and sea slugs was because around that time at my job, I had to identify and categorize some images of different marine animals. I don't have any background in science but the place I work for has an emphasis in it so sometimes they have me do some cooky things like that. I used this as her tangent to show how she's socially unaware and because I thought it'd be funny for her to accidentally make a kid cry and be unaware.