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Blessed moon, forgive me for what I'm about to do. I vow that whatever it takes, these monsters will not take everyone. I will not just watch while we fall. No, I intend to go... In harm's way.
The displaced and utterly broken protagonist of While We Fall. Supposedly, an amnesiac modern-day human trans woman transplanted to Mantle under ambiguous circumstances, who, through a series of twists of fate, eventually becomes Professor Polendina's bodyguard-maid/personal assistant, though it's clear from the very moment she wakes up on the tundra that there's a great deal more to her story than meets the eye. She's the product of a Fusion Dance of two completely different women, one born in the first timeline of Remnant and the other born in an earth with a case of Alternate History. In the rewrite, this is made clear from the very first chapter, and the bulk of the story shows how she reacts to it.
Sarah's Iconic Weapon for While We Fall is Amour, which initially appeared as a Chiappa Rhino 60DS, but in the rewrite, it was later Retconned to be an older-model Remnant equivalent manufactured by Beowolf Arms Company. In both versions of the story, she implies she believes it to be one of a pair, together called Amour et Guerre, but she only had Amour on awakening. Both of these weapons are later revealed have been sentient Legendary Magitek "Omni-Weapons" in a bifurcated form all along.
- Adaptational Skill: While she was always dealing with Amnesiac Resonance and occasionally showed off brief flashes of skill, the rewrite's Action Prologue makes it a lot more obvious from the get-go that Sarah is not starting at the level of a normal civilian.
- Afraid of Their Own Strength: During Act 2 when she's speaking to Pietro about committing to him with a longer-term contract and requesting a servant uniform, she makes it clear that she knows something's wrong with her and she doesn't want to even risk a Heel–Face Turn. She might be potentially justified here, as her "evil" half is apparently derived from the mind of the woman that eventually became Bellona, who appeared in the opening chapter and was implied to have ultimately killed God.
- The Alcoholic: During While We Fall, she slowly decays into this but remains largely functional.
- Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Downplayed. She's got a dark Hime Cut and is deeply reserved most of the time, but it's a very thin façade.
- Always Someone Better: Her Aura Strength potential, given in The Girl Friday was put at somewhere between 9 and 12, and at the time, Pietro says that she'd be low-tier at an Academy. Downplayed later when he explains that Sarah would be low-tier "for a Huntress".
- Ambiguously Trained: At a few points, she notes some evidence pointing to at least a few levels of badass having been taken that she doesn't remember, including muscle growth and possibly laser eye surgery. Made less ambiguous during The Pretender, where at least one of the selves that made her was explicitly depicted as brawling a fellow soldier during Basic Training.
- Amnesiac Hero: She has no idea how she arrived in Remnant, and her memory is extremely fragmented of what happened prior to her arrival.
- In the rewritten version, she starts off knowing basically nothing, with a lot of her knowledge fragmented and buried beneath her psychosis. Thankfully, her "mothers" thought of this and gave her a hastily-scribbled down notepad filled with what they thought she needed to know, which apparently also included the results of all the Vytal Festival matches, and advice on how to bet on them. Unfortunately, she only reads the part about going to Mantle and meeting Pietro after deciding to lone wolf it and go in the exact opposite direction.
- Amnesiac Resonance: Constantly, and in the moments where her forgotten/suppressed heritage takes over, she seems to demonstrate both Improbable Aiming Skills and possibly some degree of Waif-Fu.
- Ascended Fangirl: Watching the copies of RWBY she had conveniently on her phone helps her recover her memories. She was explicitly a fan of RWBY before entering Remnant, on top of at least partially originating from there. In both versions of the story, she displays knowledge of Anime tropes, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, and others.
- Audience Surrogate: Often. While she's familiar with RWBY, the details of the alternate universe she's made her home in often have to be explained to her and it's clear that her knowledge of the world is lacking in many respects, making her effectively an insert for the reader, learning details about the world as she does.
- Badass in a Nice Suit: Instead of buying something normal for her first Remnan outfit, she goes straight to picking up an off-the-rack work suit, tailored slightly to fit her better. Justified, due to her cover story as Pietro's assistant, but her dialogue with the aforementioned tailor hints that she just likes the look.Sarah: My, how aggressively bisexual I'm going to look.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Why she chooses to not pursue a potential career as a Huntress to be by Pietro's side as his secretary and maid instead, mixed with a side of Afraid of Their Own Strength.Sarah: You saved my life, sir. And so it is yours to wield.
- Changeling Fantasy: Deconstructed. While [[spoiler:she's technically a Fusion Dance of the so-called "Heart of Bellona" and "Jackal of Time", two Deities of Human Origin, she's been driven utterly insane because of two consecutive lifetimes of memories locked in her head, and she has no actual connection to the Remnant she's actually found herself in.
- Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story: Courtesy of being able to replace the trans daughter of a former associate of Pietro's.
- Crazy-Prepared: One of the first traits she displays during her intro chapter is this. She's surprisingly well-equipped and even armed upon entering Remnant. While this is mostly thanks to her divine parents giving her what she needed to survive, she later demonstrates crazy-preparedness herself.
- Covert Pervert: Implied as early as the first chapter, even in the original draft of WWF. Her backup weapon is named La Petite Mort.
- Dark Is Evil: While she's normally Dark Is Not Evil, in a few important moments she comes across as a downright Vamp, and is decidedly an Unscrupulous Hero.
- Dark Is Not Evil: She's usually moral, compassionate, and even downright friendly sometimes, but you wouldn't know it from her Aura color, dour personality and general aesthetic.
- Deadpan Snarker: Constantly, and constantly lampshaded.Pietro: Do love my country, but Atlesian traditions are awful staid and chafin'. Dunno why ya'd willingly subject yourself to 'em.
Sarah: Well, I am staid and chafing. You have to admit, it's on-brand for me. - Dead Person Impersonation: Early on in the events of While We Fall, for survival, she pretends to be and at least partially is the deceased trans daughter of one of Pietro's old friends, and the general irony of the situation is not lost on her.Sarah: So, you're going to make me a fake woman who's the dead-but-not-actually-dead daughter of a dead woman, wearing another dead woman's clothes.
- Dented Iron: In the rewrite, she actually arrives on Pietro's doorstep with broken ribs and a ton of other wounds, including burn scars and claw marks. Her wounded state is explained to have been the product of starting off going in the opposite direction the original Sarah went in.
- While she mostly heals up from this, even gaining a Healing Factor, courtesy of Gram to make sure future damage isn't as much of an issue, Her wounds including losing a limb and her ichor sickness ultimately end up taking her toll, and her Aura ends up almost 1/3rd of the strength it should have been.
- Determinator: Her defining characteristic, which comes hand-in-hand with her Fatal Flaw. With a Resolve statistic of 16, she's implied to be nearly unbreakable mentally; though it's somewhat deconstructed in that while she doesn't completely break, stress still takes a toll on her mind, and she deals with it through a case of Split Personality that has its own downsides.
- Distracted by the Sexy: Constantly, as a product of her Extreme Libido.
- Emergency Transformation: Over the month leading up to the Fall of Beacon, she undergoes Bio-Augmentation to become a Valkyrie, mostly because she'd otherwise be dead before the Fall even occurs. Even that only buys her about a year, but there's the hope of being fully cured with a grueling "Stage 4" where she'll actually become a Winged Humanoid. Unfortunately, her parents only gave her the data she needed for the first three stages, and she doesn't have the knowledge, technology, or even time to finish the job. Yet.
- Extreme Libido: Present in the more explicit rewrite and implied to be an aspect of her addictive personality. When she starts to realize this about herself, she immediately begins to shame herself for it. While both of her component selves were very lustful, her status as a pure-blooded Einheri Stjórnandi is strongly implied to have made it even worse.
- First-Episode Resurrection: She's the product of a Fusion Dance between two deceased separate alternate selves, and her waking up on the tundra in Chapter 1 was her very first moment of consciousness.
-
Fixer Sue: Explicitly stated by WolfPrincessSarah in her author's commentary to be a written as a deconstruction of the archetype. - Girl Friday: Works full-time as Pietro Polendina's live-in assistant, as of the events of Breaking Point, but the details were actually only ironed out in a contract signed during The Girl Friday. Though it was later explained to be a temporary contract, and in a longer arc later, Sarah commits to Pietro for a year of protection and service, drawing up a new contract in the process.
- Gun Nut: Her approach to combat can basically be summed up as "More Guns", and most of them are civilian standard-issue ones. In her character profile, this is partially justified due to Remnant's status as a Crapsack World allowing her to, with the right licenses, open a catalog and order a light machine gun if she wanted.
- Hime Cut: Described as having this sort of haircut, which is a trait shared with both of her component selves.
- Hopeless with Tech: Justified. Her Earth-native half was apparently clever enough to have recovered from her Dark and Troubled Past by getting an engineering degree albeit paid for with contract killing, but she's having to more or less re-learn everything from scratch and Remnan technology has a bit of a steep learning curve. Justified a little further in that the half of her that actually was a native Remnan was a Huntress and a mercenary, not a technician.Sarah: I'm figuring this crap out as I go!
Au.R.A.: I wasn't judging! - Human Subspecies: She's later revealed to be related to a supposedly-extinct species of enhanced humanoid. Some of the signs of this are obvious in the rewritten prologue, including abnormal muscle density and astrange scent coming off of her. Specifically, she's Einheri, a Servant Race that predates Remnant, explained to be distantly related to modern Faunus and humans, but incapable of breeding with either of them.
- Identical Stranger: Presumably looks close enough to the real daughter of Ariana Sable that she could plausibly be a post-transition version of her. Later Justified as a convoluted case of Alternate Self, with the reveal that she's a Fusion Dance between an "old version" of the daughter she's replacing and an Alternate Self of the ''current'' one.
- Incurable Cough of Death: Towards the end of the prologue, she hacks up blood onto her pillow, and it's implied to be a product of something she inhaled on the tundra, possibly the dust of the Albatross she killed.
- Keeping Secrets Sucks: The burden of knowing what's about to happen to the main characters and the world as a whole and not being able to do anything about it due to a large number of reasons takes an emotional toll. Not being able to even tell Pietro about what's about to happen to Penny particularly weighs heavily on her for the entirety of While We Fall.
- Lady in a Power Suit
- Like a Fish Takes to Water: She adapts surprisingly well to living in Remnant, and finds great pleasure in learning about their alternate technologies as well as the Grimm. She takes the cold climate of Atlas and dealing with the military in particular very well, having been a Military Brat from a cold, mountainous region.
- The rewrite is up-front about her Fusion Dance nature, and the new version is more about her... struggling with the combined weight of two lifetimes of memories.
- I Call It "Vera": Names literally all of her weapons, even though they're mundane and not terribly special compared to actual Huntsmen weapons.
- She starts off her story with two guns:
- Amour, a Beowolf HMR-10 Raging Claw with custom engravings, which, Sarah believes was one of a pair with an identical pistol called Guerre. It's later revealed that neither of these weapons are actually what they appeared to be.
- La Petite Mort, a Sig Sauer "M17A1C" with an ammunition counter) she carried as a backup weapon.
- Later on, she picks up her first Remnan weapon, a holdout energy blaster she nicknames Original Sin.
- She starts off her story with two guns:
- The Night Owl: She prefers being awake at night, which makes her newfound day job a little tough to get used to. In her character profile, she's explained to need to take vitamin supplements and has light sensitivity problems because of it, but as a result her night vision is pretty good for a human, if unimpressive compared to Faunus. Until she basically becomes a faunus herself.
- Old Friend, New Gender: Part of her fake backstory, in that when she was in Atlas before she was living as her assigned gender, and now that she's returned she's supposedly post-transition. Thankfully, she doesn't bump into anybody that knew her original self.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: She starts off While We Fall with a trace Aura and by the time of The Girl Friday after about 20 days of being in Remnant, it's only around 1.5 in broad daylight. When asked how many hits she could take from an Atlesian rifle:Pietro: Yeah, your aura would break after one.
Sarah (Hopefully.): One magazine?
Pietro: One shot. - One-Woman Army: At first, she's talented, but not that impressive physically. By the end of While We Fall, taking place over a single month, she's taken over a dozen lives and has unlocked
Game-Breaker level powers and technology from her cosmic heritage, on top of improving her Aura somewhat and unlocking her Semblance through constant meditation and effort. It's stated from the beginning, however, that she's not the biggest player on the board by a long shot and keeping her head down while her power and skills grow is going to be crucial to her survival. Those gifts from the past also all generally border on Awesome, but Impractical or Blessed with Suck. - Perception Filter: According to her character profile, her passive ability ("Aspect") is apparently a subtle and very imperfect form of this, but there's a downside in that she doesn't have the usual Super-Strength and/or Super-Reflexes package that other characters get.
- Perky Goth: Downplayed—she's still pretty dark, superficially emotionless and sour, but apart from some significant mental issues, she's actually reasonably well adjusted. Most of the time. "Heart", her upbeat Split Personality takes this up a notch but it's pretty clear she's a Stepford Smiler.
- Pinball Protagonist: For a healthy chunk of While We Fall, she doesn't make significant choices that alter the outcome of the story. She's more or less dragged along the Doctor's side as he generously helps establish herself for his own reasons. She dithers over the possibility of trying to change the story, with the knowledge she has from the show weighing down on her from the moment she remembers who she is and where she is. This changes dramatically during the events of Boiler's Edge, where she finally makes her Big First Choice.
- Meta Girl: Justified, due to her partial origins as a fan of the show from another world.
- Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: Defied, despite her buying a suit as her Iconic Outfit, she quickly asks Pietro for a maid's uniform (explicitly with a skirt) to wear around the house while she's seeing to housekeeping and in other settings where a suit would be less optimal.
- Religious Bruiser: For the standards of her Earth, she's quite strong and a capable fighter, and believes devoutly in the powers of the night sky and the moon, drawing strength and courage from her faith.
- Over the course of While We Fall and Penumbra, she slowly converts to being a Lacunite, which is tangentially related to Arisianism (worshipping Remnant's shattered moon), but includes star worship and an even stronger tradition of community defense.
- Restraining Bolt: Being Einheri apparantly means that she has a built-in biological one that's meant to render her docile and compliant in seconds. It's triggered by squeezing her neck or pinning her down.
- Her amulet, in a reference to InuYasha, is designed to relentlessly exploit this while trapping her in place. Unlike Inuyasha's beads, it can be used by anyone that knows the command word.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: Decon-Recon Switch with her. Her main weapons tend to be revolvers, but she often pairs them with semi-automatic backups to make up for their shortcomings.
- Sanity Slippage: On the surface, it seems she's taking being Trapped in Another World pretty well, but the façade starts to crack as the story goes on, she remembers more about her past, and the stressors start to add up.
- Inverted in the rewritten opening. She starts off as a headcase and undergoes Sanity Strengthening as she suppresses almost all the memories belonging to her Remnan half and downright self-Orwellian Retcons a few of the more traumatic ones of her Earth half. Then the crazy comes back later as the stress starts to get to her again.
- The Sacred Darkness: Both halves of her had some form of night worship as a part of their belief systems. Her Remnant half had tribal beliefs that loosely aligned with Arisianism, and her Earth counterpart followed some sort of home-grown shamanism. Sarah later takes aspects of both into herself, and slowly converts to Arisianism herself, if initially only as a part of her cover identity.
- Split-Personality Team: See Sub-Characters, below. She's a trans woman that's eventually diagnosed in-universe with Dissociative Identity Disorder. She starts off the story with one main personality, Kintsugi, as well as three others that all have their own experiences and specializations, on top of complicated internal dynamics and their own unique traumas. Then, The Undertaker is added to the roster, who's later revealed to be his own Split-Personality Team, and this is followed by an Enemy Within in the form of The Jackal. She's basically a one-woman Huntsman Team, eventually gaining the power to match.
- Super-Reflexes: She's depicted in the opening to be a preternatural gunslinger on top of being The Berserker, and she's later revealed to have a "Jackal Time" ability from her Einheri heritage that allows her to move as fast as a person with Aura can. A big downside is that, much like her berserk state, she's risking a heart attack every time she uses it.
- Statuesque Stunner: Somewhat downplayed, but also justified due to her status as a trans woman. On her identification card, her height is given as 1.8 meters, or around 5'10" tall.
- Starter Equipment: She starts off the story with basic weapons from her old life in a Crapsack World and some basic survival gear, not to mention Volumes 1-7 of RWBY loaded on her old phone, along with a notepad explaining who she is and how all those items ended up with her.
- Tangled Family Tree: In the rewrite, it's made explicit from the beginning that she's not quite a natural-born person, but the extent of her and her divine soul's bizarre origins puts her in this category.
- Tomato in the Mirror: She's an artificial creation between two alternate versions of her, at least one of whom was presumably a Deity of Human Origin. She has the memories of both of them locked inside of her, but a lot of it is fragmented, blurs together, and really is a general damper on her sanity. She starts off with a Split Personality just to stay functional.
- Transhuman: She starts off as an Artificial Human and eventually is able to take advantage of Brain Uploading, courtesy of some advanced technology from her past lives. To save her life, she has to use her mothers' last gift to her: a Bio-Augmentation package to become a Valkyrie.
- Upbringing Makes the Hero: What primarily differentiates her from her Evil Twin, Scion, is that she was taken in and protected by a Cool Old Guy with a moral compass, Pietro. Scion, by contrast, was taken in and protected by Jacques Schnee.
- Unknown Relative: Her character profile explains that the trans woman whose shoes she's stepped into is somehow Arthur Watts' niece by way of his fraternal twin sister.
- Unscrupulous Hero: On her character profile, her character alignment is given as Renegon, implying she falls under this, and some of her actions and the way she speaks hints at this, but in the beginning of While We Fall, this trait isn't obvious and she seems like a Nice Girl. That lasts about midway through Part 2, when she fully reveals her hidden Manipulative Bitch tendencies.
- With This Herring: Despite having a small starting kit and instructions on what to do, she's otherwise left to fend for herself and her basic firearms with the exception of Amour aren't going to to get her very far. Luckily, she gets rescued by Atlesian soldiers out in the tundra and taken to Pietro Polendina.
- Worthless Foreign Degree: Half of her was technically a robotics technician and would presumably know at least a little bit of programming and electromechanical skill, but can't even use the basic features of a Scroll without messing it up. Justified due to the fact she's way out of her depth in terms of technology and basically has to re-learn everything from scratch. Luckily, she's paired up with a lot of old men that really like to explain things.
- Your Days Are Numbered: She's later revealed to be dying from something analogous to lung cancer caused by inhaling Grimm Dust, and by the time it's discovered, it's already too late. She buys about a year with an Emergency Transformation, but it comes with what's strongly implied to be a Deal with the Devil.
Sub-Characters
Being a deeply unstable woman, Sarah struggles with her mental illnesses, which are made manifest in dreams as well as other voices in her mind. As such, there are four distinct sub-characters that often either try to force their will onto her, help her... Or in the Undertaker's case a little of both. The "core" Sarah is eventually referred to internally as Kintsugi.
Kintsugi
- Take one look at me and see what I've become!
- I Am Not a Gun: As she learns just how screwed up her backstory is along with the reveal she's been Secretly Dying for the bulk of the story she eventually clings to Twitch and her faunus identity, rejecting her half-heritage as a former Omnicidal Maniac. While this pisses off Shadow and Heart, she draws strength from being The Fettered and Twitch's experience and knowledge is arguably more useful.Kintsugi: "I'm a woman, not a weapon."
- Mood-Swinger: As Kintsugi's the most even hybrid between both of the women that made Sarah up, her emotional range wobbles from unhinged psychotic rage to gentle compassion, sometimes at the drop of a hat. She's often only barely held back by Twitch. Occasionally Played for Laughs, but usually played seriously.
Twitch/Sarah Sable
- My bullets are strong, my eyes are stronger! So let's see how you handle a Hunter, puta!
The non-binary Team Mom of the group. Unlike the other two, they often speak a different language, Chirola and are sort of faunus. Whenever they show up, they usually bring intrusive memories of another version of Sarah that was a Remnan native and was a Huntress in their own right, on the same team as Robyn, May, and Ada. The memories actually belong to Sarah Sable, Sarah's original-timeline iteration. Later revealed to identify as a non-binary trans woman.
- Defusing the Tyke-Bomb: Plays this role on more than one occasion, and truly wants Kintsugi to be more than the scatterbrained Living Weapon she was born as. They're actually the first to make use of the Restraining Bolt built into Sarah's Amulet.
- Girly Bruiser: Played for Laughs in the rewritten prologue. Twitch's not mad about taking hits and getting scars, they're more pissed that their hair got singed.
- Painting the Medium: Twitch's words are printed in blue, and often set off to the left, contrasting Shadow's who is towards the right and in red.
- Pragmatic Hero: Despite being much nicer than most of Sarah, Twitch is definitely an ardent pragmatist. It's implied that the trans woman who most of their memories come from was like this too. The fact that they're likely responsible for Sarah having a built-in Restraining Bolt and knew how to trigger it also points to this.
- Split-Personality Switch Trigger: Their first real appearance seemed to be triggered by meeting Antigua DeSante, whose Valencian accent is seemingly similar enough to their clan's Chirola language to draw them out.
- Team Mom: Even addressed by Kintsugi as "Twitchmomma" on occasion. They're very doting and it's implied that their previous self was responsible for making sure Sarah started off with a warm packed lunch in the Action Prologue.
- Twofer Token Minority: While canonically Sarah is a trans woman, this version of her is both faunus and proudly trans. Them using their native language (based on Catalan) and the other parts of Sarah repeatedly not understanding them is a Running Gag.
- What the Hell, Hero?: The most prone to calling Kintsugi out when she crosses certain lines. They have a strong sense of morality and are unambiguously The Fettered.
Heart/Bella
A fourth voice that crops up from time to time, and is somehow even more unstable than the red-eyed one. Sometimes, she's just a Good Bad Girl, and sometimes she's an Ax-Crazy Psychopathic Manchild. Usually, when Sarah's eyes turn red, that's just a slightly more bitchy version of her. When her eyes turn pink, it could go literally either way. Most of the time, when she's not in combat, she's actually very sweet.
- Cute and Psycho: Her bizarrely erotic bubbliness is a breath of fresh hair compared to Sarah's usual dour façade, and she can be downright extraverted. Unfortunately, on top of her actual lust, she has a problem with bloodlust too.
- Establishing Character Moment: A two-sided one. Twitch gets annoyed when she can't open the door to a Huntsman Outpost with presumably supplies and shelter, and she slumps to the ground, unwilling to break the law just for safety. Heart then switches in, finds a crowbar and smashes a window because she was hungry and needed to pee.
- The Heart: It's in her name. When the other aspects of Sarah drift too far out of their normal comfort zone, mostly Shadow, she's quick to reel them back in as best she can.
- The Hedonist: Out of all of Sarah's sub-aspects, she's definitely the most libidinous and impulsive. Bear in mind, the rest of her sets a high standard already.
- Mistaken Nationality: Towards Twitch. For one, Heart's not even from Remnant, but in Heart's manic state, she mistakes Twitch's accent that's based on Catalan for Spanish. She eventually learns the difference.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: Her Establishing Character Moment in the rewrite also consists of her pouring cool water over some burn wounds oddly sensually, visibly getting a little addled from the pain.
- Genius Ditz: She's better at problem solving and logic than her other aspects, assuming you can get her to focus for more than two seconds.
- Warrior Poet: In a somewhat black comedy way. Both her and Bellona end up often singing sometimes hastily-improvised variations on union-aligned songs from the Civil War and a other triumphant war songs. Neither of them are any good at it.
Shadow/Bellona
- Enemy Within: Implied. During Shadow's appearance in Bare Your Fangs, Sarah's narration turns much more vicious and it urges Sarah to "punish" the person she had overpowered.
- Made far less implicit during the rewrite, but it's depicted as a little less of an enemy and more of a defensive creature that's capable of using violence and brutality most her are loathe to pull off.
- Green-Eyed Monster: It's strongly implied later on that it seriously resents how much its role's been eclipsed by Twitch in the eyes of Kintsugi, who it initially sees as its Bella, the part of her it was supposed to protect. It gets better when she gets closer to Heart, who actually is closer to the original "Bella" than Kintsigi is and balances Shadow's darker impulses out.
- The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Shadow tends to have an antagonistic relationship at best with the much more even-keel and thoughtful Twitch, and the gentler Kintsugi. There's literally an all-out fistfight between it and Kintsugi later on, after Shadow commits a contract killing to pay their debts off to Pietro, crossing a line and breaking a promise they made to him.
- Lighter and Softer: Despite being partially descended from Bellona, for now Shadow's mostly just a Token Evil Teammate, and it's implied in the background that it's softened up quite a lot mostly due to the presence of Heart. Or maybe because all of her more psychotic, self-destructive impulses have ended up in The Jackal.
- Oh, Crap!: Though the voice appeared a few times and there was a brief flash where she seemingly lost control of her body for a moment, the second time Sarah loses time to her "Crazy", she's visibly shaken and decides to stop for the day, because it was legitimately a gap in memory where she was Not Herself.
- Painting the Medium: Shadow's influence is generally colored red in the text and their words are often set off to the right side.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: When she takes more direct control during the events of The Pretender, Shadow's presence is advertised by Sarah's eyes turning red, similar to Yang's rage and Klein Sieben. It's explained in WolfPrincessSarah's author's commentary that many mental illnesses have soul presence, which often results in emotional or dissociative shifts having visible effects, the most common being eye color changes.
- It also presents in the new prologue with red eyes, brutally beating to death a small Grimm modeled after an Albatross in what seems to be an unhinged berserk state.
- Sour Supporter: They were always begrudging and hostile at best, but they become much more bitter and resentful after Kintsugi chooses to completely reject her past as the Heart of Bellona and become a faunus, but Eventually, through a lot of forgiveness and spending more time in the back of their mind around Heart, Shadow softens up somewhat.
- The Vamp: Seems to flip-flop between being and a swear-happy Ladette persona, and it's not clear which one of them is the mask.
- Warrior Poet: Both her and Heart end up often singing sometimes hastily-improvised variations on union-aligned songs from the Civil War and a other triumphant war songs. Neither of them are any good at it.
"The Undertaker"/Garmr
- Names are a mortal trapping. But death is my business, and my currency. If you must call me something, you may call me the undertaker.
- A Chat with Satan: Almost every scene he shows up in is like this. He seems to represent Sarah's darker impulses, and chats with her more as her Sanity Slippage progresses. He's also the first of her alters to make an appearance in the real world, even seeming to light her cigar for her.
- Ambiguously Evil: It's left deliberately unclear whether he's The Corruptor or legitimately helping Sarah out.
- Character Tic: Almost never seen without a cigarette, and he offers Sarah one a few times, calling her a 'liar' when she says she doesn't smoke.
- Then, later on he offers her a smoke one final time, after Sarah blatantly lies to Pietro and manipulates him into going to Vale with her. Because of the lines she's already crossed, and her stress level she accepts this time, proving him right.
- The Grim Reaper: Sort of has this aesthetic, being a well-dressed African man with a love of card games.
- The Gambler: On occasion, he's depicted as playing games of chance with Sarah in the dream state, and his general schtick is equal parts Psychopomp and embodiment of fate. Many of the game elements in While We Fall are strongly implied to be him painting the odds of Sarah's success on the page itself.
- Humanoid Abomination: Comes and goes depending on Sarah's current level of sanity, and first comes up during one of Sarah's most anti-heroic moments, where he casually sprouts a third arm to smoke and shuffle his cards at the same time.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: As with most things regarding Sarah psychologically, it's left vague as to whether he's simply a product of her Sanity Slippage, or something that's actually real. The fact that he's completely different from the other dissociations seems to imply he may be something else entirely.
- Confirmed in his own words, when he himself learns that he's not "of Sarah", and something more akin to a symbiote or a parasite.
- Tarot Motifs: Tends to break out a tarot deck alongside his trademark cigarettes to represent various people or desires in Sarah's life as well as the impossible choices being literally laid down in front of her. Sometimes he just makes up new cards on the spot.
The Jackal
- Threats must be met with threats. Is this... not our way?
A potential fifth alter of Sarah's that emerges midway through While We Fall. While Shadow is mostly sane compared to the original Bellona and even reasonable at times, The Jackal is strongly implied to be Kintsugi's own Enemy Within. While it only appears on occasion, it's never a good thing.
- Beneath the Mask: It's really not clear if The Jackal is a case of this for Kintsugi or not.
- History Repeats: The Earth-native Sarah had a toxic Jekyll & Hyde dynamic too. At some point, her Hyde won out. Jury's out on this one, though.
- Ironic Name: When she shows up, she pushes people away and isolates herself from the people around her. But she's named after Jackals, who are more effective when they hunt in mated pairs.
- Jekyll & Hyde: Unlike the other alters who are external from Kintsugi and play genuine roles in the narrative, The Jackal never speaks on her own, and instead directly intrudes on Kintsugi, the main personality. The others in her head are always alarmed by the sudden switch in her.
- Not Herself: The Jackal initially manifested as a presence within Kintsugi rather than being another voice.
- Painting the Medium: The Jackal's influence is colored a deeper maroon compared to Shadow, and explicitly compared to the color of blood. A lot of what Kintsugi says under the influence of her is also often glitchy or out of sorts, making it clear that it's more disjointed than her usual thought processes.
- Psycho Supporter: The Jackal seems to be drawn out in the presence of threats, or when things get too friendly for Kintsugi's comfort, and seems to at least slightly care about her "other half"'s well-being in her own twisted way. In her first appearance, The Jackal straight-up threatens to out Au.R.A. to the world, which could very well result in her being shut down or worse.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Jackal has a much darker shade of red in her eyes, and while Shadow is generally able to be talked out of doing bad things, when the Jackal's around,
- Spell My Name with a "The": Never just Jackal, always The Jackal.
- Token Evil Teammate: Shadow softens up considerably after its initial appearance and settles into a more token anti-hero role, but throughout While We Fall, there's the occasional appearance of a darker shade of red in the text. Whereas Shadow was generally more of a Sour Supporter, The Jackal
