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Role: Matriarch of the Holden family.

Gender: Female.

Age: 500.

Apparent Age: 20.

Nicknames: She goes only by the name Mara, surprisingly, which has been picked up over the years as a sort of pet name. For this reason, most don't know her by her birth name.

Species: Vampire.

Birthplace: Buckley, Wales— though her accent's long-lost until she's had one glass of whiskey too many.

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Height: 5'6''

Build: Delicate, slender, almost fey. Quite obviously not as strong as most.

Hair Colour: Blonde.

Eye Colour: Blue.

Markings: Though they're long-faded, one could make out a good number of disappearing keloid scars on her shoulders and lower back. In part due to her nature and in part due to time, they're often tough to make out— though anyone dancing with her could feel where the lash bit into her shoulder. She isn't particularly sensitive about their origins and will tell anyone who asks straight-up that they're from her days as a nobleman's servant. They're one of the few reminders she has a of a girlhood she lost so many years ago, so she regards them with fondness rather than with angst or anything of the sort. To her, physical reprimand was a mundane truth, and she treats it with the shrug it deserves. Additionally, she has a chip on her left canine, callouses on the bottoms of her soles from walking around barefoot all the time, and a regular mishmash of tiny, healing, cat-scratch-like scabs all over her hands from various 'accidents' come upon while exploring or tweaking with things she shouldn't be tweaking. She's surprisingly tattoo-free; Mara's not a fan of needles or mistakes she'll have to carry with her for all eternity.

Clothing preference: Mara Holden is a surprisingly casual woman, throwing on whatever she can find (and returning in shame to find something more 'suitable' all too often upon getting disapproving stares from the family). She isn't much one for keeping up with the times, so her tastes can seem a bit odd— Converse and a 1920s soirée gown don't match up no matter how one tries to put it, but Mara will wear it. At times, she ends up looking clownish, but upon being brought to light of this fact she'll only blink as though she were only a naïve young girl and offer to go change. Her closet can range anywhere from 'particularly annoyed hobo' to Amish chic and back again to something stripper-esque. As she has almost no fashion sense, the daily outfit will likely be any eclectic combination of it all.

Face Claim: Elsa Hosk.

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Skills
Looking Lovely, My Dear. If it weren't obvious enough, Mara's overarching trait is her beauty. It's something that naturally comes to her, with well-formed features one would hardly expect from a Welsh village girl. Her looks have gotten her far in life even with her rather... strange sense of fashion. Tearing the eyes away from the striped pants paired with the red-and-black-checkered shirt may be tough, but dressed up properly with the help of a maid she's an ethereal beauty.

Glass Masks Hide It All. Paired with a constant expression of absolute wonder, Mara's looks would certainly lead the onlooker to believe her an airhead. Unfortunately, she's far from it. Though she's hardly the fighting type, weak and gentle-framed, Mara has a natural knack for tactics and calculation. It's hard to believe, considering that after so many years she's still unable to read, but her mind is a thousandfold sharper than her eyes would have one believe. There's a reason she's reached the matriarchal position in the Holden family, after all: she's naturally gifted in terms of metrics, balances, and logistics. Unfortunately, her skills for calculation extend from the chessboard to the battlefield to the world of wonder that awaits her hungry eyes but not to those who might stand right in front of her face. She's a terrible judge of character and doesn't quite seem to understand social conventions. Given her disheveled appearance and her eccentric nature, most find her too chaotic to take seriously even when she spouts the most brilliant thing said all day amid her nonsense. She's made a discreet name for herself in the world's upper echelon, collaborating and providing the major brainpower behind some of science's greatest advances throughout her time on Earth. That said, her train of thoughts may be the quickest in the room, but it doubtlessly derailed long, long ago.

Numbers, Numbers to Say it All. Though she can't read, numbers seem to come naturally to Mara. She can think about them for hours, going into an absentminded daze mulling over the latest pondrances of infinity somewhere deep inside her head. All the while, she'll have an absolutely airy smile to her face. The downside of going into such deep contemplation is that Mara can often be found wandering when she shouldn't, almost getting hit by the rays of the sun, at times and running into moving cars in the dead of night (the latter having landed her in a coma for a week after damaging her body enough to need to shut down in order to heal itself). When her inner gears are clicking, the lights are off outside— though the results can often prove after a long 'winter' of doubt why she's at the helm of the Holden family. Of course, the means by which she gets them still earns her the privilege of being sneered at, somewhat, as the family's dirty little secret.

Quirks
Illiteracy. Even after five hundred years, Mara has never bothered learning how to read. She can write and recognize basic things, such as her name and the numerical system, but as a whole, she's an extremely tactile person unused to words that seemingly have no physical presence. Because of her inability to read and write, she's lost a good deal of respect from those she knows she should be responsible for— it serves to make her seem all the more idiotic, really.

Unpredictable. It's nearly impossible to find Mara if she doesn't want to be found, yet so often she'll unwittingly be making a scene at dinner (how was she supposed to know those Roman candelabras shouldn't have been melted down for the lead? Alchemy's too fascinating to care about sentimental value!) or suddenly barring the windows and doors because she's calculated the coming of a massive UV flare hitting the Arctic Circle with all its fury. Though she's easily fooled in situations she can't logic her way out of, it's surprisingly tough to manipulate her due to her sheer erraticism. Despite her odd behavior, however, she's firm in her decisions and has never once been seen or heard of as being hysterical.

Likes:
- Wandering.
- Numbers, especially those of the Fibonacci Sequence.
- Biology and all other wonders of the natural world.
- Hearing tales of ancient empires long passed.
- Thinking.
- Violin music.
- Large, open spaces.
- Summer.
- Cliffs— how could she ever forget Wales?
- Overflowing greenery.
- Gardening. Unfortunately, every plant she's ever touched died of neglect.
- Children, provided they're intelligent and clean.

Dislikes:
- Having to memorize things.
- Being confined.
- When people don't 'get it.' Regardless of how strange and convoluted her explanation is.
- The flute.
- Things that glitter and shine.
- Makeup. She keeps poking herself in the eye with the mascara wand.
- Having to, ugh, explain things again.
- Poetry.
- Song.
- Music that's even slightly off-pitch.
- Asymmetry.
- The smells of smoke and sweat.
- Metaphysics, philosophy, and religion.
- Fur.

Fears:
- Being confined.
- Being ignored.
- Losing her mind.
- Dying.
- Getting into a situation that puts her at a disadvantage because she's physically weak.
- Being burned.
- Being buried alive.
- Going blind.

Written description: Though she's never quite there all the way, Mara is the woman with the plan. Granted, that plan might take months to make its way from her lips to her fingertips, but once she's set her mind to something, it's getting done. Mara can be remarkably unaware of surroundings that don't pertain to the matter at hand, but, conversely, she's not one to miss a detail when her current concentrations require it. Caught in the moment, she's a bit aloof and eccentric, but one who's known her for a good many years will know that something's always going on just beneath the surface. As mentioned before, Mara is virtually incapable of judging others' character, and as such she is easily lied to and led astray. That said, it's extremely hard to convince her to do something she isn't willing to do given the information she has. She'll gladly plot to rob a bank blind for a person who can speak sweetly enough to her, but tearing her away from her study as she's on the verge of discovering one of tin's latest chemical properties is something that not even the most gifted of sorcerers could do. Beneath her glassy-eyed mask, Mara is a surprisingly complex person able to map out a twining map of every possible course a situation could take. This ability to plan for everything makes her both an indispensable leader and an extremely erratic woman whose faiths can often lie unknown. As she'll always go for the easies route from Point A to Point B, Mara can be too quick to trust even at the warnings of others, and her insatiable curiosity routinely gets her into trouble that should easily be avoided. She's a veritable potpourri of contradictions and odd juxtapositions— much like her fashion sense, it seems— but when it comes down to it, she's the one with the right answers all along, and the Holden patriarch has made sure not to forget that.

History: WARNING: LONG! A quick summary: Born a servant in Wales, married young and to a rich man for her beauty. Never experienced love, got sick with mercury, had an affair with the vampire-doctor initially out of desperation but fell deeper and harder than she ever thought possible. The same could be said for him. She ends up carrying his child, a half-vampire, and to escape the wrath of her husband he fakes her death by giving her arsenic, but it ends up actually killing her. Her lover turns her. Eventually, she ends up separated from first her mentor/love and then her daughter. She scrapes by until she falls in with the Holdens.

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Relationship Status: Married but dazed enough to forget that, at times. Or perhaps it's all part of her brilliant master plan?

Family: Holden. Her parents, though she'll never forget them, were really quite the generic ones, and with three sisters and five brothers it's hard to keep in touch with biological family lines after a century.