History:
At the tender age of three, Maya Marks began to learn the map of the United States. From her home in Northeastern Massachusetts, Maya pointed at California and said "I want to go there". Thus began Maya's lifelong obsession with the state. With a second-generation Nepalese mother (her parents having left the country shortly after its borders opened in 1950), Anil and Medha Singh originally settled in Jersey City with their daughter, and there the family remained until said daughter chose to attend college in Ohio. Why Ohio, they wondered, but four years later, Kamala left Ohio State with a teaching degree and a fiance. Kamala and Joshua Marks had met at the most stereotypical of college events: free pizza during finals week. It turned out Josh had taken a gen ed requirement Kamala was struggling with a few semesters before, and he offered to help tutor her. She still had to retake the class, but she did get a boyfriend out of the deal - a pretty good trade, if she admitted it to herself.

The pair moved to Boston for Joshua to take a job with a marketing firm while he also worked on his MBA and Kamala found a job with Boston Public Schools, teaching high school math. The two lived quite well like this, but when Kamala became pregnant, they did the appropriate thing: they bought a nice house in the suburbs so their child would have a yard to play in and a dog to cuddle (that wouldn't piss off their condo association). Maya Joanne Marks was born, and their life was never quite the same after that.

Maya's brain was always working just a little bit differently than anyone else's, but her parents encouraged her creativity. Who cared if her imaginary friend happened to be Dorothy, "the ghost of a non-witch who died in Salem"? The girl was learning history at the same time, albeit the watered-down childhood version that held no real weight to anything. Maya continued to keep this girl as one of her friends longer than anyone should, but no one really said anything. It wasn't affecting her schoolwork, after all.

Maya mostly coasted through school on her halfway decent grades and popularity that her looks made her more "exotic and cute" than "weird". (She still hates those phrases til today. Don't use them. Ever.) All the while, though, Maya's sights were still set on her ultimate goal of California. UC Davis was her first choice, and when she got in, she was over the moon. As much as she'd always loved the state, her parents had never taken her to visit, focusing instead on "educational" vacations. This would be her first time in the state she'd been obsessed with for a decade and a half. Part of her was very concerned that it would fall short of her expectations.

It didn't.

The land was so beautiful, everything was just so perfect, Maya knew she didn't want to leave. Her parents kind of figured, so they'd made arrangements. Maya's mom's friend from high school was a realtor out here now, and after she graduated with her degree in Communications, she found a small apartment in Sacramento as well as a job doing group ticket sales for the Kings. It wasn't lucrative, and it wasn't what she loved, and she didn't love the city, either. She wanted her wilderness back; one trip to the Sierra Nevadas on a sorority trip once and she knew she wanted to be with nature. She'd always connected well with nature and loved the outdoors (despite what her allergies told her). Eventually, after a few years, she was frugal enough to save for a down payment on a new house in what almost felt like the middle of nowhere: Truckee, California. What she found was a two-unit house, and she lived in one side and rented the other. It was enough to cover most of her expenses for the property, and she covered the rest with her Tarot service.

Reading Tarot was something that had almost started as a joke in college. Maya had been discussing something with her college roommate when she had a deep, uneasy feeling in her stomach and mentioned to her roommate that something catastrophic was happening. Her roommate shook it off, but Maya couldn't; it turned out the next morning that one of their mutual friends from orientation had committed suicide. Maya tried to pass it off as coincidence but she couldn't help but wonder if there was something to this whole thing. She went out to buy some meditation incense and picked up a tarot deck on impulse. She went home and asked her deck if she'd pass her math quiz. It said no. She laughed, and was ready to return the deck. After all, she'd studied really hard.

The next day, she got a 40.

While she still wasn't convinced, her friends started hearing that she had a tarot deck and would ask her to read their cards and ask questions. More often than not, she was right. Whether it was intuition or what because she was friends with these people, she wasn't sure, but it sure was fun. Eventually, she started getting people who had heard about her from friends of friends, and she was still doing okay prediction-wise. Word of mouth had gotten her no pay, but a lot of publicity.

Maya kept this up, but didn't feel the need to charge a lot like some psychics. Miss Cleo? Total fraud. Honestly, how expensive did you have to be before it became less a service and more a business? Even after moving out on her own, Maya still chose to support herself through other endeavors and just read tarots as a (very cheap) favor. Buy her a coffee, ask a question. It kept her pretty well-fed, but after a few years she was starting to get bored. She liked cards, she was now living close to Reno...casino dealing was obviously the correct answer. After a training class (which she didn't need, but she wanted, just because it had always been easier for her to learn by going to school), she went to a few auditions and eventually ended up at the Atlantis Casino as a blackjack dealer. It was a nice supplement to her income, and for the past six years, that's been her status quo.

It wasn't until the past month or so that things started happening. Brush fires were always a worry since she wasn't quite inside the city, and it wasn't a worry that was ever too far from her mind but it had also not directly affected her until now. Some stupid teenagers got high and had an illegal fire, and Maya's forest oasis home was put under a mandatory evacuation order thanks to said dumbass teenagers. Her tenant moved out completely, back to his parents' house in Vegas. Maya, with nowhere to go, first took a leave from work and moved inland to Nevada City for the moment. She's not sure what to expect, but the cards have told her not to get her hopes up.

Personality:
Positive Traits:
•Enthusiastic: Maya puts 100% into everything she does, as long as she's doing it on her own volition.
•Artistic: She's never quite been good at expressing herself through her painting in a way that anyone else can truly comprehend, but she sure loves to do it.
•Altruistic: She doesn't read cards for the money. She really doesn't. She does it because when she gets something right and can help someone, it makes her feel good inside - plus, it's a lot easier a thing to do than being in medicine, law enforcement, or some other "helper" profession she never would have been smart enough to deal with.
•Personable: Part of why she's been so good at her past jobs is because of her personality. She doesn't know if it's because she "reads" people so well, but she has a knack to strike up conversations wherever she goes and make a good impression. This worked out well in sales, where she was paid based on commissions and client relationships, and also at the blackjack table, where she had to not be a wet noodle to make a decent night's tips.
•Optimistic: Easily one to fall in love with the concept of things and always looking for the good in whatever she runs into to try and not let herself stress too much, it's very difficult for Maya to not find love for at least one facet of a person. It makes her a bit more emotional when it comes to relationships which can bite her in the ass (and it has), but she still tries to stay positive.
•Organized: For as flighty as she seems in most of her life, her pantry is alphabetized, her closet is color-coded, and she gets antsy if something is out of its place. She just tries to hide that anxiety from others.

Negative Traits:
•Unreliable: Maya's recently-developed "devil may care" attitude she's adopted since moving out of Sacramento may make her less stressed, but unless it's work she's always at least twenty minutes late for anything. Plan accordingly.
•Naive: Maya's rose-colored glasses have gotten her into trouble on more than one occasion because she's awful at seeing anything but the best in people, and it's burned her more than once.
•Stubborn: Normally, this trait would make someone tenacious. Maya's stubbornness pushes way beyond that point and doesn't look back, to the point where she thinks she's open-minded about so many things but because of that tends to be intolerant of others' opinions and doesn't necessarily grasp that concept. Also see: naive. She won't change her worldview despite having had problems being so trusting of others for so long.
•Mindful: This one doesn't sound so awful on its head either, but Maya's brand of mindfulness tends to breed her head-in-the-clouds and/or selfish attitude, which can sometimes make her come off as either uninterested or a thoughtless dick - or both.
•Patronizing: This especially gets bad with her Tarot clients. If they don't listen to her advice, and then what she said was going to happen happens, Maya's tendency to "I told you!" them to death can make her fairly insufferable to be around.
•Overemotional: She doesn't know if this is the vibes she picks up on, but Maya is extremely sensitive to the moods of others and the general "feeling" of a situation, and she doesn't process them well. This makes her moods extreme and the reason no one wants to be near her when she's sad. She doesn't just pick up on those vibes, she projects them too and can feed off the good energy of others if she's in a bad mood.

Relationships