Updated profile
Writer Info;
Writer Name/Handle: Angel
Are you (the Writer) 18 years of age or over?: Indeed

Character Info;
Town Opening: Tattoo & Piercing: Frequent Patron
Housing: Above the tattoo shop
Character Journal name: inkonstage
Character Name: Marta Flores. But (almost) everyone calls her Sunshine.
Character Age: 21
Character Played By: Emma Greenwell

Character Personality & History:

People call her Sunshine, and haha, isn't that a fucking riot. It started off as a joke, of course. Call the unhappy whore with the sharp smile "Sunshine" (because she won't tell you what her real name is) and see what sort of a rise you can get out of her. The answer is not much, other than an unimpressed angle of her over-lined eyes. Kohl caked at the corners along with the dim blanket of exhaustion. The one that no one so young should have. The one that never goes away, no matter how many hours of daylight sleep a girl gets.

She doesn't talk about where she came from, or how she arrived in Repose, in a trailer, on her back. Or her knees. Or over a handy piece of furniture (not that there's much in her trailer that can be considered furniture). She doesn't talk about much of anything, really. Nothing other than what's needed to conduct business. What do you want? This is how much. No, that's extra. Okay, if you've got the cash. No, I don't do that... how much? Yeah, okay, I'll fucking do it for that much.

There's obviously a story there, though. Some of it right there on her skin - tattoos that break up the expanse of pale and bruise. Anyone paying close enough attention might notice a theme to them… if anyone paid close enough attention. No one ever does. Tattoos and bruises and a scar - horizontal and low on her belly. Old enough to be healed and beginning to fade, but still with a pinkness that makes it noticeable. If it bothers the customers, they just flip her over and fuck her from behind.

That's Sunshine.

But Sunshine wasn't always Sunshine. No, for most of her life she was Marta. Born and raised in a city on the east coast, where the drugs were easy for her mother to get. Where there were men willing to take in a woman who had two children (a little boy and a little girl, not even a year apart), just as long as that woman willingly climbed into their bed in return. Marta and Philip (Lip, she called him) grew up moving from house to apartment, sleeping in corners of extra space and scrounging what they could for themselves. And Marta? She promised herself then that she'd never be like her mother. Would never rely on some man to take care of her. Would never be the mother who put a child into that situation. Would never be a mother to begin with. She would stand back to back with her brother and fight the world, if that's what it took. So while he made himself popular through sports and strength, she followed along, just slightly behind, always knowing where the good concerts were, what places wouldn't card, where a guy and a girl could go when they needed a few minutes of her on her knees.

If she went to her knees on her own, she didn't have to think of being put there by the men her mother brought home. And maybe not all of the men were awful. Maybe she even fell into young, silly love with one of the ones her mother brought into their lives. But eventually he was gone too, and she was left with ink under her skin and a disaster of a mother and no hope of anything good coming from that new man they'd moved in with. Lip (Flash by then, to everyone but her) had walked in on their mom's boyfriend crawling on top of Marta, and something had snapped for him - he'd beaten the hell out of the man and left him there, the bruises of his fingers still forming on Marta's skin.

She was only seventeen years old. Lip was barely eighteen. They refused to stay in that home any longer, but the military came for her brother. For the rage she'd seen seeping out from his skin, and he went with them. With no other place to go, she ran too. They shared a promise to keep in touch. To always find each other, if it came to that.

With Lip off in the military, he didn't need the money they'd been saving. Marta took it and crossed the country to Las Vegas, and she dragged herself onto a stripclub stage to support herself when it ran out. To pitch in her bit of cash for the apartment that she shared with a rotating group of people in as shitty of circumstances as she was in. And she was making it work. Maybe it wasn't ideal, but maybe she didn't know to hope for much better. She was alive and she wasn't on the street, and she was in charge of herself, and she thought that was all she'd needed. Even when she lost touch with Lip, when he stopped returning texts and calls, when she worried that he'd died in whatever hellhole the military sent him to, she pushed on as best she could.

And then she met him.

Seven was too attractive by far, and far too old for her. Decades older than she was, nearly twice her age, and fuck if she didn't care one fucking bit. His attitude was a challenge, rocky surface hiding something softer underneath, and she fell stupidly hard for him. Even with the age difference, there was something familiar in both of them - children that grew up broken and did what they needed to in order to survive. Like called to like, and that soft part of him drew her in, offered her protection from a world that wanted to break both of them even more. Offered her care that no one else had bothered to offer before. Against her better judgement, she moved in with him, and that just solidified how she felt about him. She was a goner for him.

Las Vegas changed back into New York, and she went with him. And found herself slipping out of her own room and into his more nights than she should have. And he never kicked her back out again. That was the problem. That was the dangerous part. Especially when one of those nights, with a miscalculation on her part, ended up with her pregnant and not knowing what to do about it. She tried to get rid of it and found that something inside of her mind couldn't go through with it. And when he found her trying to leave then, he stopped her. Kept her there. Promised that it would be okay.

And she believed him because she loved him. Maybe she was too young to be able to say that, but she did. She loved him, and she didn't know what to do with that. And somehow that love (and some foolish optimism on her part) convinced her that everything would be okay. She settled into a routine that didn't involved getting onstage to strip, a routine that was doctors' appointments and yoga classes and other things that rich pregnant women did. They got ready for the arrival of their baby (a girl!). And it was all okay. Until the moment when it all got fucked up.

The labor came too soon and filled with too much blood and emergency rooms and questions about her survival and the baby's. Somehow they both made it through, but something felt... different. As if that one thing had started an avalanche, Marta began to feel wrong. She couldn't care for the baby (Sawyer - they'd named her Sawyer and had called her Bean even before she'd been born). She could barely even be in the same room as the baby. Afraid that she would ruin this perfect little thing. And that was alright, because Seven had ended up being the perfect father. Attentive and caring and protective. Knowing what to do. And in those early morning/late night times, when she could wander past a room and see him cradling the tiny bundle close to himself, humming and talking in a low voice laced with comfort, she felt awful. Like she was interfering in a new family. Like she'd become her own mother - staying with a man, forcing him to support her, ruining the life of her own child.

She left for real, the second time around. Threw only a few things into her old bags and slipped out the door, avoiding their dogs, the alarm system, Seven's employees. She slipped away and out of the city, knowing that he'd try to find her (out of obligation, of course). So she stayed away from the places that people might look. She climbed into cars and trucks that pulled over for a girl hitchhiking on the highway. And if some of them required something in exchange? She found that the part of her that should have said no was too numb and too broken to care. (Maybe that little voice, the one that never said anything anymore - maybe that felt like the girl she'd been. Maybe it felt like Marta. ...Maybe that made it easy to become someone else.) And eventually, she had enough money to get on a Greyhound instead of climbing into the cab of a semi. The Greyhound took her as far as Repose and then left her there (taking Marta away with it, and leaving Sunshine behind).

It wasn't hard to find where she should be. Feet pointed north and west and over the train tracks, to a cluster of trailers and one that had so conveniently just been vacated. Don't ask why. It was easy to move herself in, to claim the trailer as her own, to claim the customers that knocked on that flimsy metal door as her own. She didn't smile except for those that needed a little extra incentive to fuck her. And Sunshine settled in, like she'd always been there, even though it's only been a few months now - a hooker with too much ink and too little life left in her eyes.

Update:

It's hard to keep living when everything in your life falls apart. Sunshine had stayed in Repose for a long while, barely living, chasing herself farther and farther down into a spiral with only black and drunk and nothing at the end. Giving herself to customers that didn't care for her safety. Pushing away the few people who could maybe someday become friends. Bruised and hurt more often than not, letting guilt and depression and lonliness eat away at her day by day. No lover, no baby, no big brother. Until the day she agreed to climb in a customer's truck cab when he left instead of staying in the trailer one more second. She rode with him for a while, fucking him when he wanted in exchange for the passenger's seat, food, and enough alcohol to keep her numb when she needed. She stayed with the trucker until he circled back around on his route, and instead of dropping her in Repose, he left her in the city.

In the Capital, things were different. The open road had at least cleared some of the apathy from her mind, but she arrived in the city without much more than a single backpack with some too-revealing clothes. Shelters provided a temporary place to sleep, even with the bedbugs that crawled their way into her things. She hooked on the street when she had to, stopping at the stripclubs she could find until one of them took pity on her and gave her a spot on the stage. Like she'd come full-circle. Her overly-made-up face, her tattoos, were put on a poster with other girls, hanging in the club's windows, and about a month later, the guy she was giving a lapdance to slipped her a business card along with the cash he tucked in her g-string. Easy money, he'd said, and she'd smiled as she rocked her ass against his lap.

The next day had her looking at the card though, for a production company based out of an office in a nondescript part of town. There was a woman at the front desk, a woman that sat her down, described the videos, the types of girls their customers liked. She pulled out a contract, outlined the rights that Sunshine had as an employee, showed her the pay scale, described the types of videos they did, the extra cash she could get doing cam work in her off hours. And then offered more - a temporary place to stay until she did her first work, got her first paycheck, and a computer she could use for the cam work. The woman asked her about boyfriends (none), health (surprisingly not awful, all things considered), about drinking, about drugs, and at Sunshine's hesitation, made her sign an agreement to stay sober while working. That was the hardest decision to make, but in the end it wasn't that hard at all.

She'd eventually find out that the woman was the owner, that she took care of her employees, that the company was successful because of it. Sunshine started to gain a few fans, those customers that were the first to download when a new video went up, those that were the first to log in when she was on cam. Sure some of them crossed a line that made her skin crawl, but the only people that ever actually touched her were the guys (and a few girls) that she fucked on film. And that? Was just fine with her. She saw a doctor when she regularly got tested (another point in her contract), and he listened when she allowed herself to open up just a little, provided enough care to get her on something to help balance out those lingering problems that threatened to overwhelm her. To her relief, it worked, and for the first time in a long time, it felt like she could breathe again.

And everything would've stayed exactly like that if she hadn't overheard two techs talking at one of the shoots - about mobsters and an alien. Something about ink. And her breath caught with the memory of the night Lip had beat the hell out of their mom's boyfriend. How many people could there be like that? Maybe her brother wasn't dead. And then came the memory of Repose - just a drive away - and the talk of military and science at the edge of town. It made sense... maybe. Or maybe she finally had enough of herself back to have hope again. Even though hope was a stupid thing to have, she knew she couldn't let it go. Repose was close enough to the city to go back and forth for shoots, and as long as she had internet, she could get on cam.

The Greyhound had brought her to Repose before, and it did again.

Town Connections;

Viewers: The production company hosts a website where discerning customers can view videos and livecams for a moderate monthly fee. Most of the girls are "alternative", but the offerings are widely varied.

Eighteen Wheels: The trucker that traded flesh for a spot in his cab.

Too-familiar Faces: Possibly unwanted blasts from the past - Las Vegas and New York. Even as far back as her childhood.