* -- extraordinary machine

[sonja maly]

SONJAREBECKAHMALY



if there was a better way to go, then it would find me,
i can’t help it – the road just rose up behind me,
be kind to me, or treatin’ me mean,
i’ll make the most of it – i’m an extraordinary machine.

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• FULL NAME, sonja rebeckah maly.
• NICKNAMES, there are not a lot of fun nicknames you can squeeze out of “sonja,” but some people have managed. her father used to call her sonja begonia because it’s a universal truth that dads love silly rhyming nicknames for their daughters. on a less adorable note, she also earned “sonny with no chance” after an epic breakup with her now-ex carlisle.
• DATE OF BIRTH, april 30^th, 1985.
• GENDER, lady.
• ETHNICITY, although the etymology of her name likes to take all the credit, she’s only half polish. the other half’s italian.
• RELIGION, pastafarianism.
• SEXUALITY, heterosexual, although she does have a girl-crush on nichelle nichols.
• OCCUPATION, she’s an instructor at the yogalicious (not the most “super serious business” name in the biz, but it’s still adorable and catchy, so there). in an attempt that’s been unsuccessful so far, she’s been aiming to make her yoga classes more like the incredible ones she took while on vacation in india; less about a competition of who the hell is more spiritual or limber or toned in the class, and more about personal satisfaction. instead, the not-so-like-minded students are kind of crushing her dreams with their orange pants with “om” embroidered on the butt.

luckily, she has something she’s much more passionate about anyway; acting. not so luckily, she’s the one standing in the way of achieving that goal – although she apparently wants it more than anything in the world, she’s been too lazy or too afraid to actually make the trip over to vancouver after being stranded in montréal for a spell.
• MEMBER GROUP, tourist.

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• HEIGHT & WEIGHT, five foot nine (without heels, fuck yeah!) and a hundred and thirty-six pounds of muscle.
• PIERCINGS & TATTOOS, she’s got her ears pierced and there’s this tiny little hole on her nose (which can easily be mistaken as a large pore, thank god) where a nose ring used to go. i’m going to pause for a minute so you can fully absorb that mental image. done yet? good. as far as tats go, well… she doesn’t have any.
• FASHION SENSE, sonja looks like she’s kind of meticulous about the way she dresses, but, as with most things she does, she doesn’t like to put that much effort into styling if she doesn’t have to. she exerts most of her energy while she’s shopping so that later she can just put anything together and it looks awesome. while she mostly goes for classic pieces so that it’s easy to mix-and-match, she has a soft spot for badass accessories. she’s got a small collection of leather knee-high boots and doc martens; her black sequined berets and headbands are pretty epic; and her super hardcore sunglasses take up half her face. to compliment, she favors smoky eyes, huge eyelashes, and dousing herself in a spritz of lavender perfume.
• DISTINGUISHING FEATURES, though she’s a woman of many distinguishing features (statuesque, spry figure; big eyes; plump, shapely lips; perfectly imperfect tousled hair), when she smirks, heads turn. aside from having a charming, natural grin, there’s also just the plain old uniqueness of it. Her two front teeth are large, but not necessarily buck-toothed. it’s a quirky feature that sort of disarms her appearance and prevents her from being ~*~pretty~*~. because who wants to be pretty when you could be beautiful? she can sometimes be a little insecure about this, though; i mean, who wouldn’t be when a drunk stranger on street goes, “whoa, man, your fukken’ teeth are fukken’ huge. i could crack a beer open with ’em.”
• PLAYED BY, yvonne strahovski.

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• LIKES,

• breakfast in bed.
  
• dogs, especially hers. she wasn’t allowed her own as a child, as her father’s apartment building didn’t allow them and her mother was deathly allergic, and even though she didn’t plan on staying long, once she saw chester she kinda couldn’t say no.
  
• don’t tell anyone, but she finds plucking her eyebrows to be therapeutically soothing.
  
• getting her ass slapped in public.
  
• her father.
  
• learning foreign languages (she can speak french and polish fluently, and is learning spanish in a night class at mcgill).
  
• nutella. on everything.
  
• speaking of food, oatmeal with walnuts, maple syrup (the kind that’s actually from maple trees), and sliced bananas.
  
• spooning.
  
• star trek. the original series is most definitely her favorite (or is it favourite?) because come on.
  
• the song “le freak” by chic.
  
• watching people who can’t do the vulcan hand greeting. it’s like their fingers are completely retarded.
  
• winning at poker.
  
• yoga. duh.

• DISLIKES,

• awkward dates, because if a date is going badly, whatever sonja does to amend it usually ends up making it even worse.
  
• being ignored. well, everyone dislikes this (hopefully), but sonja’s dislike of this is tilted toward more of a hate degree.
  
• being pestered about getting something done.
  
• being hot. not, you know, attractive, because everyone likes that, but she can’t stand being too warm.
  
• bottle blondes. especially those who don’t show a little bit of root – it looks like a frakkin’ ho wig.
  
• cigars, but not for lack of trying on the part of her half-sister, pepper.
  
• getting her ass pinched in public.
  
• having to ask her mother and stepfather for monetary favors.
  
• her mother in general.
  
• losing her keys, or the remote, or… anything.
  
• olives.
  
• people disrupting the vibe of her yoga class.
  
• people mocking her accent.
  
• sandra bullock movies, minus speed.
  
• sarcastic french cooks who can’t dislodge their head from their own ass. wait, was that too specific?
  
• tans – in part because she can’t get one and… well, mostly because she can’t get one.
  
• time travel used as a plot device.

• TURN-ONS,

• a good slap of the ass.
  
• curly hair. you’d be surprised how hard this is to find in a man, and how hard it is for it to look remotely not awkward.
  
• flexibility.
  
• humor.
  
• non-judgmental-ness.

• FEARS,

• falling into the toilet.
  
• heights.
  
• mannequins.
  
• men in speedos.
  
• vomiting.

• SECRETS,

• she’s pretty blunt and has a don’t ask, don’t tell policy on more sensitive subjects in her life (and there are many), but she’s a bit hesitant to share her love of star trek with the world. she keeps her blu-ray discs of all three seasons behind her other movies.

• HABITS/QUIRKS,

• after a long, tender kiss, she usually plants on a second, quick one, like a signature.
  
• brushes her teeth after every single meal; she carries a tooth brush with her everywhere she goes.
  
• cleans her apartment only when something is bothering her terribly.
  
• constantly shifting her weight from the balls of her feet to her heels when she’s bored.
  
• giving her boyfriends adorable/weird nicknames.
  
• smiles when she’s upset, as a sort of defense mechanism.
  
• when she’s doing her makeup in the morning, she wrinkles her nose the entire time.

• PERSONALITY,

Sonja’s cultivated quite an awkward personality, which makes a lot of sense given her sporadic upbringing. The most prevalent of these traits is her tremendous moodiness. Or rather, not that she changes moods on a dime (although, like most anybody with two x chromosomes, she can if she so chooses), but that she feels her emotions so strongly. Most of the time, she’s quite enthusiastic and bubbly – sometimes overwhelmingly so. Even though she and most people would consider herself an optimist and generally happy person most of the time, when she does fall into a bad mood, they are downright frightening. When she’s angry, she’s actually aggressive, and doesn’t shy away from confrontations.

Although she has many aspirations and goals, she’s not very big on making any of them happen. For example, she’d love to be an actress, but tends to spend most of her time actively avoiding going to any auditions, or doing any other work, for that matter. The fact that she has a job in yoga is due in part to the fact that it doesn’t really feel like a job to her and in another part that her stepfather is loaded and was a great influence in her acquiring her own business. It’s something that she’s quite ashamed of, seeing as most of the work for the studio was done by Marcus and not herself, but she simply is not that great at making an effort, and “can’t bloody help it.”

She can come off as a bit nosy sometimes, but it isn’t because she likes to involve herself in other people’s lives when it isn’t her problem. Actually… that’s kinda exactly the reason. She uses the outlet of solving other people’s problems as a means of avoiding her own. See, Sonja has a distinct stubbornness to not involve other people in solving her own problems. No matter how deep the shit she’s thread in is, she will refuse any and all help. Most people just assume her pride is simply on steroids, but this isn’t really the case. She just hates disappointing people by doing something wrong, by not being good enough already. She cares deeply about what people think of her, which is part of the reason why she’s cautious in obtaining romantic relationships; she’s afraid that if they see her for who she really is, that they wouldn’t care for her nearly as much as they do.

As a person who’s felt quite ignored for the better part of her life (actually, it was the worse part of her life, but took up the more time), Sonja seeks, more than anything, to be loved and understood for who she is – and everybody does, to some degree. But she also seems to have a noticeable lack of it, in her family and the people she tries to date. She gets the impression that people look at her and expect something better, classier than what she’s capable of. And it breaks her heart.

Speaking of, she can also get quite sentimental – take her dog, Chester, for instance. She got him from a shelter a few months ago. “He’s been here for a while,” the owner of the shelter, said, pointing him out, “this is his last day.”

“Oh,” Sonja said, “Did he get an owner?”

“No.”

“Oh, so where’s he going?”

“Heaven.”

“A gay club?” Sonja snorted.

“No, we euthanize them.”

Chester came home with her that second. She bestows most of her love and attention (although her little sister Lily probably beats him out) upon Chester, and, yes, she talks to him in a ridiculously high pitched voice. I mean, letting your dog sleep in your bathtub and tolerate taking showers with it takes a special kind of love.

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• HOMETOWN, sydney, australia.
• PARENTS,


harvey richard casablancas, 51, professonal poker player • father
(gary cole)


marcus hamilton york, 46, hotel chain owner • stepfather
(adrian pasdar)


izolda “izzy” natalya york [nee maly]. 44, i ain’t sayin’ she a golddigger • mother
(joely richardson)

• SIBLINGS,


pepper lee casablancas, 28, owns a cigar shop in sydney, australia • paternal half-sister
(katee sackoff)


leona york, 18 at time of death, beverly hills high student • maternal half-sister
(elisabeth harnois)


lily serena york, 19, fashion design student at mcgill • maternal half-sister
(hayden panettiere)

• OTHER SIGNIFICANT PEOPLE,


lilah maureen casablancas, 74, retired nurse • paternal grandmother
(lois smith)


oscar “skip” burt guarino, 39, detective • the what-was-i-thinking-don’t-even-ask
(adam baldwin)


carlisle “carly” jon scarborough, 25, chef/owner of scarborough’s • ex-boyfriend
(christ pine)


adrian “casserole” caroselli, 24 at time of death, balloonist (no, really!) • ex-boyfriend
(matthew bomer)


chester, 2, sleeping in sonja’s bathtub • doggy
(the dog clinging to sonja’s side [sort of])

• HISTORY,

“Full house!”

With that, the four other men – looking almost identical with giant aviator sunglasses obscuring any unique facial features – offered scowls containing varying degrees of sourness, slapping their useless cards against the table and sliding over stacks of chips to Harvey Casablancas’s sector. From behind him, a blonde entwined her slender arms around his chest, whispering something in his ear that made him grin, then surrender to a nasally laugh. It was probably a pretty good thing that the comment was out of earshot, otherwise the other players at the table would’ve known that they were just ripped off of several thousand dollars.

Such was the life of Harvey and his “good luck charm,” Izzy Maly. Their particular partnership’s commercial success lay not in any kind of genius on either of their parts, but rather that they were particularly good at convincing stupid, rich people to play poker with Harvey. They’d been globetrotting for the past few years, experiencing a wild and purely adult side of life most people simply didn’t allow themselves to have. Settling down seemed out of the question; life’s first attempt to pin Harvey down – his daughter, Pepper – was easily solved by the girl staying with Harvey’s mother in a quiet Sydney suburb. It certainly seemed to be just as easily solvable when Izzy’s womb got a case of the preggers. However, Harvey wasn’t quite counting on Izzy’s insistence that he totally man up.

Well, not totally.

They still ran their poker scam out of a more local venue – Sydney – and added card counting to their arsenal. Pepper even made their duo a trio (even if she did so at the expensive of everyone’s sanity, as hyperactive three-year-olds are wont to do). So, it wasn’t technically settling down, but it was as close as Harvey ever wanted to get. It was livable, but things didn’t always go his way; Izzy’s hunch that Harvey could only make girl sperm was affirmed when they discovered their child had a vagina. He also didn’t get much of a say in the naming of the girl in question; if he had it his way, Sonja Maly would’ve been Marcie Casablancas.

The rest of her life, for the most part, was completely in his hands. After deciding to go straight after the newborn Sonja came home, he lost most of the fledgling family’s small fortune in an actual poker tournament. Unable to cope with the loss of status and unable to accept the fact that she might actually have to work, Izzy bailed to God knows where. So Harvey and the girls moved from the apartment with the view of the opera house to his mother’s house with a view of the elderly neighbors’ frequent sexual activities. Harvey went from counting cards to pushing pencils and, for all intents and purposes, should’ve been miserable. But he had his girls, and that was enough.

It’s really too bad, but not even the sweetest story of redemption convinces an American jury that Harvey didn’t rip off a casino in Atlantic City, as what happened when the casino’s goons finally tracked him down and smuggled him to America so he could be properly jailed. This should’ve spelled the end, in neon all caps letters to Pepper and Sonja’s nineteen- and fifteen-year-old (respectively) dreams. But conveniently enough, a week after their father was acquitted, a letter came in the mailbox from – of all places – Montreal, Canada. A letter from her absentee mother, it kind of came all of fifteen years too late for Sonja. It consisted of half insincere apology (something even Sonja’s bright-eyed, naïve sensibility could somehow comprehend through a letter) and half exposition. Izzy had found a new squeeze and since he’d managed to bring in a steady income, she squeezed out and raised two daughters – her half-sisters, Sonja supposed – in return. The only relevant part was that Izzy’s way of apologizing was in currency. It was the first of many monthly payments – kind of a voluntary child support with a kick. The money was more than good enough to live on, and luckily Grannie Casablancas had the good sense to convince Sonja to invest it wisely. Half it went to Pepper, seeing as she actually suffered directly at the hands of Izzy, and the other half went to a crazy scheme to get Sonja an education in America.

Sonja was accepted at University of California – Los Angeles, and her grandmother, growing senile and forgetting these sensitive issues, thought it’d be a great idea to call the number listed on the latest payment letter and inform her former almost-daughter-in-law of the great news. Thus, when Sonja arrived in LAX in an oversized UCLA hoodie and with all of her worldly possessions in tow, her mother and two younger half-sisters were there to welcome her to North America. In spite of all the, well, spite that had been building inside her all these years, she couldn’t bring herself to blow up in their faces like she’d envisioned doing since the letter arrived. And, besides, she couldn’t ever hate Lily, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t get the memo that pigtails grow out of appropriateness at the age of eight. “Oh my God your accent is so flippin’ cool,” Lily would bleat in her own Canadian one. It was better than she expected – to be honest, she wasn’t expecting anything at all, but still – and was actually a little sad when she hugged her younger sisters goodbye and was left to the mercy of her roommate, Iggy.

A few weeks later, though, it wasn’t the sisters she’d just met that she was lonely for; it was definitely a case of real, true-blue homesickness. She even missed Pepper blowing cigar smoke in her face. Which was probably the only reason why she didn’t punch through Adrian Caroselli’s head when two jets of cigarette smoke issued from his nostrils and into her face as she was studying on a park bench on the quad. In fact, it was the only thing that prompted her to look up and notice the handsome devil – from the ultra badass cigarette tucked between his index and middle fingers to his messy, curly black hair. “You look like a senior several times over,” she observed bluntly. Instead of offering the traditional, “fuck you,” the observation should’ve warranted, he instead said, “Guilty as charged,” with a heart-melting smile.

As it turned out, Adrian was there on his parents’ tab; as with Sonja’s non-jailed-or-Australian family, it seemed tuition was their only outlet of affection. He stuck around, slowly building up enough credits for a philosophy degree, but his only real passion… well, it was in something, he just wouldn’t tell her what.

“Maybe you can find out on a date,” he offered cheekily.

That Friday, Adrian showed up at her dorm with a blindfold. “If your talent is kinky sex, I’m kind of excited,” she joked. “Just put it on,” he only half-scoffed.

They drove. And drove. Sonja was getting anxious as the drive continued to not stop, and that somehow every time she attempted to remove the blindfold, Adrian would see it in the peripheral. “Nuh-uh, Aussie!” he’d snap playfully. Once they pulled up to their apparent destination – which looked a lot like it could be labeled “the middle of nowhere” – there was a hot-air balloon waiting for them. “Welcome to my secret shame,” he swept his arm toward it, not sounding in the least bit ashamed.

It became increasingly apparent in the following years that Adrian was kind of perfect for her. He withstood her constant mood-swings (often improving them), always had a good date on schedule, and loved that she loved to act. In fact, he had front-row tickets to the first show of the first theatre production in which she was starring; in Twelfth Night as Viola. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he told her the morning of the first show, over lattes, “I just have one pair of newlyweds that wanna see a real view of California.”

It was the last view of anything that the groom, bride, or Adrian would ever see.

When, from stage, Sonja noticed his seat conspicuously empty, she was already less heartbroken than completely petrified. By the time a pair of police detectives came up to her backstage, she knew exactly what they were there for.

Sonja was devastated, to say the least. Attempting to complete school was almost completely out of the question; every inch of campus contained some sort of memory of her high-flying boyfriend. It didn’t help that the pity fuck she’d participated in with one of the detectives investigating the accident wasn’t leaving her alone, either. She wanted so desperately to leave the city and she got her wish, just not quite in the form that she or anyone else wanted.

The body of one of her sisters, Leona York, was found on the roadside a few miles outside of Montreal. She was apparently the victim of a hit-and-run… fresh out of a graduation party. In spite of everything, though, attending the funeral helped; it was a relief to be surrounded by people who were feeling to exact same way she was. Shockingly, the person she was most anxious to see didn’t seem to be feeling anything at all. Lily, the bubbly girl who was always smiling and spouting questions, seemed to be utterly lifeless and catatonic.

She took a break from life by taking an impromptu trip to India using two of her “child support” payments. Sonja normally wouldn’t have possessed the drive to actually plan a trip, but the Yorks’ travel agent was pretty awesome and did pretty much all the work for you. She returned to Los Angeles, deciding to finish up her Theatre and Drama degree, but all the while making her plan to escape. Thinking that she’d just go for auditions when she went to Vancouver – Canada’s Hollywood and, more importantly, not the real one – she decided instead to make money by becoming a yoga instructor, inspired by her trip.

Eventually, not even Sonja could dawdle around in LA any longer; she quit her job, lined up an audition at the Vancouver playhouse, and bought an airplane ticket. Sonja being Sonja, though, was late to the check-in at LAX, and had to sprint through the terminal to make it. In the process, she crashed into the ticket-checker lady. The woman, who sympathized and was attempting to sort through the tickets piled on the floor, let her on the plane. Unfortunately, though, it was the wrong plane. A few hours later, an absolutely confused Sonja landed in Montreal.

Too lazy (and partially, too scared) to reschedule the flight to Vancouver, Sonja’s been dawdling in Montreal. Although she insists that she’s still gonna move there and become a world-famous actress, she hasn’t made much of a move to suggest otherwise. She still lives in a hotel, a year and a half after she arrived, but has made several moves permanent residency; acquiring a dog, Chester, and getting a job at Montreal’s premiere yoga studio, Yogalicious. But, seriously! She’s going to Vancouver.

Someday.

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• NAME/ALIAS, lauren.
• OTHER CHARACTERS, topher, julian, joel, & cleo.• ROLEPLAY SAMPLE,

”yo, carly!” sonja called out, “don’t let the door hit you in the vagina on the way out!”

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