Maria [Finished]

Agitated: Almost constantly Maria is angry, or at least irritated. She's a typical grumpy cat, upon first glance, but she has her reasons. For example, if you bad-mouth someone, even by accident, she'll jump on you and demand the "victim" get an apology. She scolds people for wandering into territories that were not their own, even if it's not hers. She's that annoying by-passer that has to point out everything negative.

Stubborn: Maria stands by what she believes and refuses to be swayed by opinions. To a much more petty degree, she'll lie down where someone else was just about to if there's an argument just to annoy them and be the upper hand in the spat.

Intelligent: Maria is witty, quick-thinking, and can talk her way out of almost anything. Unless it comes to personal feelings, that is. She'll fall back on her personal opinions, but she'll become childish and often just book it. When it comes to herself, she's smart enough to leave marks personal to her to keep a territory or common pathways "lit up" for herself. She doesn't claim any territory by scent-markings, so these personal clues keep her in her usual homes. This prevents fights, and she can always claim she's just passing by.

Inquisitive: Like all cats, Maria is curious about, well, everything! She loves to chew on things to get familiar with them, but she's smart enough to know if something might be poisonous, at least. When she finds a new item that wasn't there before the tornado, she'll hoard it and examine it for days until she can name it after some researching or stash it if she can't make a discovery.

Soft-spots: For anyone sick, Maria has true sympathy. She'll give them advice, and if they're too sick she will even try to help them. A wounded cat will be dropped a few scraps of meat, and kittens will be given a nod in the right direction to an area with many other cats that will be able to help them better than she herself, so young, could offer. She has a hard outer shell, but Maria is deep down a good-hearted feline.

Maria is the only survivor of her mother's first and only litter. Her two sisters were stillborn, and she wasn't exactly the picture of health in their wake. Her mother was able to bring Maria's strength up, and the two were inseparable. Maria was wily and often got into trouble, but her mother was always there to help her out of it, often having to apologize for her daughter's actions.

After a year or so, Maria ran into a tom that she got along with, and it turned out it had been her mother's way of getting an "okay" for the tom being her new father. Her mother was soon pregnant, but when the kittens were born, none were alive. The queen fell apart, and she became mortally ill. Perhaps the grief of losing a second litter was too much for her. It was true that Maria had survived, but the black-pelted queen was getting ready to move on with her own life, so she had lost it all. Maria stayed with her mother for a long while to try and help reverse that feeling, helping her eat and get to water sources, but she withered away all the same, and Maria was left on her own. Realizing she wasn't ready for this, and feeling somehow responsible for not being able to save her mother, her personality went sour. She was badly wounded by a papck of dogs just after her mother passed, reminding her how unprepared she was for a life alone, but she managed to pull through and returned to the alleys she'd always called home.