Hattie

• Housekeeping - Need your house / apartment / office / whatever cleaned? Awesome. She has an ad on Friendzone and in the Gazette. Promise, no stealing from (most) clients.

• The Asylum - Yep, she was locked up in that place from 1999-2006. She might have a slightly different take on it that some former patients, though...

• Yeah, She Steals Stuff - It's not like kleptomania or anything. She's just capable of doing it, and so sometimes she just does it.

• Commercials? - Between the ages of 2-8, she was in a dozen or so commercials. For cereal, cleaning products, candy, all kinds of crap. They're on YouTube. She's by no means famous, though. Like, not even a little bit.

Housekeeping isn't exactly most little girls' dream job. Hattie wanted to be an actress, and actually scored a couple of commercials when she was a kid. Seriously, they're on YouTube and everything, but it's not like she was a household name. Her mom carted her around Hollywood, from casting call to casting call. Everyone assumed that's why she wound up... y'know... cracking up.

It came on her fast when she was nine years old. Hattie was getting too old to play the little kids that most commercials wanted, and she was too young to play an adolescent. The jobs and local plays and everything just evaporated. Her mother was so despondent. Her dad... enh, he worked for the phone company, climbing power poles, at night. Overnight work paid better, and they were a family of five - Hattie and four younger siblings - living off a single income. Because Hattie's mom was so wrapped up in trying to line up the job that would be Hattie's big break!

What wound up breaking was the kid.

She snapped in the hot, LA sun. She clapped her hands over her ears and crumpled to the sidewalk, desperate to make it stop, make it stop! Flooded with her mother's anxiety and pressure and frustration and worries, the little girl drown in them. She thrashed and cried, suffered from nightmares that left her battered and bleeding, and nothing seemed to work. Specialist after specialist... At one point, there were even people murmuring that Hattie's mother was probably doing something to the girl. You know, like the lady in the Sixth Sense?

Finally, they got a referral to a Doctor Montgomery Marshall in upstate Washington. And that was the last time Hattie saw her family.

She was eleven years old when she went to the Facility. There, she would stay until she was eighteen, when she signed herself out. The intervening years are a tumble of darkness and confusion. She recalls pain, and she recalls the haze of drugs. But she also recalls moments of tenderness and caring. She remembers some of her fellow patients, who were like she was - special, somehow, but broken. And she remembers doctors shushing her when the drugs went into her arm, whispering that this would bring easy dreams, not the hated nightmares. Slowly, over those long years, she learned how to temper her abilities, how to turn the faucet off so she didn't drown.

That was 2006. Hattie had no money, no family, no skills. She was in Seattle with a few hundred dollars given to her by Doctor Marshall. It was a wonder she didn't just drop off the face of the Earth at that point, but she somehow found work waiting tables. What followed were years of odd, dead-end jobs, moving from one town to another. Sometimes, she'd move with a "friend" and sometimes alone. Get another shitty job. Hang around a while. She could pick a pocket when she was desperate, or break into an empty house to crash for a night or two. It wasn't glamorous, but she was surviving. And she actually got to where she kind of liked the stealing bits.

It's not a compulsion or anything. It's just fun sometimes.

Eventually, she wound up in Vegas, and got a job as a hotel maid. It was actually a pretty decent gig, since people in Vegas are usually stupid-drunk and easy to rob. But she got too greedy, and her boss got wise, so it was time to blow town again. She wound up straggling her way back toward the Pacific Northwest, feeling a tug to return to that gray, dull place.

Large, strikingly pale blue eyes dominate Hattie's features. She's an attractive woman overall, with long brown hair, fair skin, and a curved build, standing about five-foot-eight. But it's the eyes that steal the show. They're a pale, silvery blue, with a darker, steel-gray ring to fringe her irises. Long, dark lashes (mascara is wonderful) call further attention to them. The rest of her features are fine, but unremarkable by comparison, though her smile is quite pretty - her teeth are the kind of perfect that only great dental work can achieve. Her attire is usually casual: jeans, sneakers, t-shirts, oversized cardigans.