<div class="floatright">(http://assets5.pinimg.com/upload/15621929928284225_K2NMggfx_c.jpg)</div><strong>Name</strong>: Carey Parnassus Dalton<br/><strong>Nickname(s)</strong>: Kaleido Carey, Dr. Parnassus, The Dream Coat<br/><strong>Age</strong>: 23<br/><strong>Sexuality</strong>: Bi<br/><strong>Addictions</strong>: Cocaine, LSD, Meth, Pot, Caffeine, and Colorful Crap<br/><br/><strong>Group</strong>: Junkies<br/><br/><strong>Appearance</strong>:  A disheveled looking young woman with thick glasses, her thin body clothed in tye-dye patterns.  Her light brown hair is worn every different way, from braids and beads to rubber bands and twist ties.  Her brown eyes usually carry a faraway look, but every now and then they snap into an unexpected sharpness.  She doesn’t seem to care very much about her appearance, sometimes dressing in faded t-shirts and jeans, sometimes in sheets and 15 dollar tapestries.  But her skin is smooth and taunt, and people can usually tell that once, she was very beautiful.<br/><br/><strong>Personality</strong>:<br/>Carey’s personality is difficult to describe, since she is certifiably insane.  She was diagnosed schizophrenic, which today means that she experiences hallucinations, paranoia, very disorganized thoughts and extreme symptoms of bi-polar disorder.  She oscillates from fanatically needing others to be around her and becoming extremely paranoid, locking herself in a room and refusing to come out.  This, understandably, makes her a difficult person to live with.  However, she can be intelligent and even charming, in the right mindset.  The trouble is meeting her when she is there.<br/><br/>Carey is fairly sunny, but intense, due to her strong intellect constantly fighting for coherence.  Her medicine helps to mitigate the symptoms of her disorder somewhat, but she is still a creature of impulse rather than reason.  The medicine’s primary function, she will explain, is to line the two up more often.  She is very devoted to her ‘family,’ respecting the fact that she wouldn’t be alive without them.  As such, she tries to treat them whenever she can, and will irrationally keep any promise she makes to them.  When level, she is a deep thinker, and a survivor, who likes to challenge her brain with complicated ideas and plans.  She is bookish, and in spite of the artistic flair she is known for, her first love will always be science.  However, these moods never last, and she reverts to either a slightly child-like persona that is giddy to the point of vexatiousness, or she slips into her darker symptoms.<br/><br/>Carey often goes through phases where her words don't quite make sense, especially when stressed or thinking about her family.  She becomes easily frustrated in these states, sometimes breaking things as she tries to explain.  Some people know how to calm her down in the these moods, allowing her to revert to a calm, even playful demeanor, who is extremely quick on her feet but otherwise unintelligible.  Those closest to her can discern that she blames herself for her family's death, and for a host of other things.  Life in the Row is as much an act of penance for her as it is an act of acceptance.  She secretly misses her dreams, and her innocence.<br/><br/>Carey has little to no modesty, and is sometimes extremely prone to suggestion.  Apartment mates that playfully ask her for a lap dance often end up getting one.  She places little importance on sex, seeing it as a way to get money or to treat a friend.  This changes when there are ropes and LSD involved, at which point she becomes genuinely horny.<br/><br/><strong>Background</strong>:  She had what some would call an idyllic child hood, full of family vacations, opportunities, and money.  Carey dreamed of being a pharmacist, like her mother.  This broke apart when her father became a drug dealer to supplement his dwindling income.  Over three years, the household became full of verbal abuse, mostly between the parents, but it also applied to her and the increasingly unrealistic expectations of how she was to perform in school.  One night, her father convinced her to buy cocaine from him to study harder.  After that, any money she got from her mother went straight into the father’s pocket.  Under pressure, she was using at an addict’s pace before she recognized that she wanted the drug.  When she needed more, she began to offer herself to people at school.  One teacher took her virginity, as she recalls, and she was free game for the student body, who liked the novelty of the teacher’s pet on her knees.  She found that she enjoyed sex, in the sense that it was another drug to use, although she was sad that her image as a perfect girl was utterly tarnished.  Still, things calmed down at home.  Her grades were up, her father had money, and the mother was obliviously grateful.  Her happiest memory is of a beach trip the family took, literally hours before her mother discovered the drugs.  That was where she fell in love with tye-dye patterns.<br/><br/>Things had already spiraled in chaos before they even got home.  Carey was put in detox while her mother tried to divorce.  The detox program is a hazy memory of sex, suicide attempts, rage, and mental breakdowns.  It ended when the father was locked up, and Carey was withdrawn from the program by her mother.  After hearing about how easy it had been for other participants to assault her, her mother didn’t see the value.  The two moved to another state and began their lives again.  Carey began a struggle with anxiety, partly an after-effect of her scholastic pressures, and partly a genetic disposition that had gotten a kick-start from her drug use, and partly the inconclusive detox program.  Still, she attempted to reclaim herself, with some success.  She got medicated, resumed her studies, and graduated.  Her mental state continued to worsen as her mother remarried, to a mechanic.  He never molested her, or gave her drugs.  Instead, he was just totally ignorant of and insensitive to her condition.  He would yell at her and hit her when she was going through a depressive or anxious cycle, in a misguided attempt to make her a stronger person.  It backfired, and shortly before graduation she fell back into addiction.  Her step father’s approval of her stronger personality while on the drug reinforced her psychological bent for finding approval in substances.  The summer was a whirlwind of drugs, sex, music, and fake smiles, as she geared up to go to college.<br/><br/>She excelled in chemistry, which was what she had always wanted to do, running side projects to become more familiar with psychotropic drugs.  Her freshman year, she had a short but torrid romance with a fellow who introduced her to LSD.  She loved this drug initially, attracted to the hallucinations of color.  But on the third use it caused a meltdown that had her boy friend uneasy.  Her paranoia and past traumas prompted her to OD on cocaine, hospitalizing herself.  She asked that her parents not be told.  She would find that billing wasn’t so interested in her wishes, but for the time, she returned to college and kept working.  Her therapists gave her a stronger diagnosis to reflect the severity of her condition.  But Carey had truly loved the LSD, and would sometimes restrain herself by belts and ropes so she could trip without hurting herself.  This got her into the BDSM community, where she would offer to be tied up and used for sex, taking a tablet just before doing so.  At first, she had to pay to do this, but she met people who could refer her to clients that paid her large sums for the privilege.  Whether it was her constant use of LSD or the serial trauma of sex while under an acid trip, she started to experience hallucinations regularly, at which point she was diagnosed schizophrenic.<br/><br/>She was in her fourth semester when she was asked to come home.  At first, she refused, but a Dean approached her and told her she would be expelled if she didn’t get help.  Weighing her options between continuing her life style and chasing her wayward dreams, she decided to return home and try to start over once again.  She couldn’t have known that she would doom her family by doing so.  Her biological father had been released a month prior.  Unable to track his ex-wife, he went to the college that Carey had always wanted to go to, and found her there.  When she went home, her father followed, and unceremoniously killed both of her parents and himself, on the lawn of the house as they went to hug her.<br/><br/>Carey’s mind shattered.  The police found the corpses with tye-dye shirts on them, and found Carey moving her mother’s body to an easy chair in the living room.  They took her into custody, but after seeing what had happened, she was released, and forwarded to a half-way house.  Part of the conditions for her stay were that she remain clean, but she was unable to abide by that.  She left, falling into life on the streets.  It wasn’t so bad, she seemed to have been doing it all along.  Get money, buy drugs, and live as much as you could while you still felt good enough.  She tried her old tricks, and eventually made her way back to her college town and the pimps there.  These people seemed happy that she no longer had the option of a straight life to fall back on, and found clientele in other cities for her to enjoy.  She didn’t care.  Between the self-destruction, the grief, the addictions, the hallucinations, and a life-time of shattered dreams, she was content to float on whatever sick wind offered her escape, even to sadists.  She recalls being half awake on hospital beds more than once, sometimes hearing the word abortion, other times more complicated forms of damage.  She still didn’t care.<br/><br/>This life lasted almost a year, by which time she had gone from being the attractive but unstable young woman she had been in college, to an emaciated half-brain that was barely worth the cost of keeping alive.  She was told if she didn’t have at least 2 assignments per month, she would be killed: a pressure which only drove her further into what was left of herself.  It was on an assignment to the city that she was reintroduced to psychotropic drugs.  One of the don’s was actually a licensed psychiatrist, who started giving her the Lithium and other drugs she needed to retain any portion of her sanity.  A sadist in the worst sense of the word, he wanted to get her back to health before breaking her.  This brief moment of clarity was enough for her: she stole the medicines, took her money, and escaped into the city.<br/><br/>She had enough to live on for now, as she rented an apartment and began getting back into her chemistry, creating the compounds she would need to keep herself almost level.  Her body started to regain some of its vitality, but this wasn’t a long term fix.  Her mind was working as well as it ever would, which was just enough to know that if the pimp’s men didn’t kill her, she would either wind up in jail or commit suicide.  So, she started selling again, creating crystal meth and offering herself to BDSM lovers.  She would sometimes call the patrons and beg them to come and restrain her, holding herself back from self harm just long enough for them to get there, tie her up and fuck her into sleep.  It didn’t take long to get back the money she had stolen, which she left in a neat little pile next to a suicide note in her apartment.  Leaving it behind, she followed the customers.<br/><br/>She remembers nearing the Row, and seeing people in Support Services Badges jumping out at her, wanting to offer her a free meal and to keep her from going into the hive of crime and violence just before her.  She wound up screaming at them, tearing at her own skin and crying in rage and in panic.  She remembers how they moved away from her and found other people to offer their help to, as she hobbled unobstructed into the DR.  That sealed it for her.  This was where she belonged:  the place the world wanted her to be, and the only place she really knew how to survive.  She was taken in by a rough looking male, who found her curled into a ball by a dumpster, and while he and many others have come and gone, she still lives in that little apartment.  Bean bag chairs for comfort, ropes for safety.  A chemistry set to survive..<br/><br/>..And tye-dye everywhere.  To remember..<br/><br/><br/><div style="text-align: right;"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 6pt;">PrestaDGTation</span></div>