MIRABELLE

Mirabelle was raised in a fairly regular home in the suburbs of Lynxon. While she lived in a poorer neighborhood, her parents did their best to give her as much of a normal life as they could. Despite their best efforts, Mirabelle would become a victim to childhood depression fairly early on, starting in about 5th grade.

She's always done her best to be a positive force to other people, but sadly wasn't able to uplift herself as easily as she seemed to be able to do for others. In both an attempt to help others further, and to maybe understand herself as well, Mirabelle took up an interest in psychiatry, which eventually led to interest in other sciences, and eventually learning in general. She couldn't shake the permanent cloud that hovered in her mind, but she could forget about it for a few moments getting caught up in the excitement of learning something new about the world. While her main interest would always be psychiatry at heart, she would become an avid collector of educational books of any sort.

In her later years of high school, her skill at reading others, built up from her experiences helping others and her education, led to her also enjoying using it like a party trick, using psychological tricks to get amusing results from friends around her. She was VERY good at it, and if she had wanted, could have used this negatively, but that never was her goal, she just wanted to make others around her smile.

After high school though, in an attempt to raise money for college so she could become a psychiatrist like she wanted to, she began getting into gambling, particularly poker, where she found her skill in reading others to become very useful for catching others tells. Losses for her were rare, and as she gained notoriety for her skill, she would take extra precaution to not get sucked into something she couldn't come back from. Despite her precautions, her parents, whom she'd still been living with at the time, caught wind of how she was raising money, and disapproved greatly. They didn't want to hurt their child, but they couldn't allow this in their own home, and said she either had to stop, or had to move out. Given Mirabelle's failure in trying to raise money through normal means at a pace that would actually get her to where she wanted to be, she chose to move out, using her normal job to pay bills while her 'side gig' paid for food and her savings.

She always played safe, making sure to have a budget whenever she went gambling, and if she ran out for the day, then she was done, made easier by the fact that she won more often than she lost. Once she reached an amount where she began to worry about losing the money, she'd quit for the night. This worked great for a few years, and she was extremely lucky to have never lost anything major. But after a scare with some... less than lawful people, she realized doing this was unsustainable, and the pace she was going at wouldn't get her to the work she wanted to do in a timely manner.

The stress as well led her depression to spiral again, nearing dangerous territory more than once, but she managed to push through, and she also could not live in this apartment anymore with her current wages if she was to stop gambling. Her relationship with her parents was more estranged now, while she could have returned home, it would have been awkward to do so, but on a whim, partially from the desire to experience something new, and partially from the fear that got struck into her, she decided she would simply move again, choosing to move to a whole new planet named Portan, a smaller one, with cheaper homes and a more relaxed society overall. As she lived there, she stopped with the gambling for the most part, instead only offering 'for fun' matches with people in town, with purposefully low stakes. Enough for everyone to enjoy the thrill of getting to claim something new, but with things low value enough that genuine anger between players would be unlikely.

She continued all her studying still, deciding to do it on her own time. Eventually, with her collection of books growing so large, and to the point where she couldn't even reasonably reread most of them whilst also reading new things, she decided to start up a library, with the support of the town. As her collection continued to grow both in size and range of topics, her library started to become known to visitors of the planet as well, and eventually other planets as a whole. More people coming from all around to come peruse the selection of books collected from all over the galaxy. This uptick in visits helping the town itself boom as well, with many visitors stopping at shops as well on their ways to and from the library. The increase in visitors also helped to fund expanding the library, and her collection grew and grew, as well as eventually adding other services. Her library is basically a cornerstone of the community by this point, a library, a game spot, a few rooms people could stay at while visiting the planet, and sometimes, depending on the person, she would offer therapy as well. Not in any official capacity, she would always clarify that she is not a professional, just passionate about helping others and doing the research to do so, but she would gladly give advice to any who asked for it, for free.

With a growing place though, eventually it was getting to be a lot for her to run on her own. It was often just her and some people who volunteered to help her out sometimes. With the perfect timing however, one day two cats showed up in her library. The two sisters, Peony and Dahlia, would just look through everything normally at first, but eventually grew interest in everything else there too, and started volunteering as well, very actively. After awhile, Mirabelle simply offered the idea of them just actually working there, and the two agreed, and have worked there since.

With time, the library hasn't expanded as quickly as the past, but the addition of Peony and Dahlia, a duo who loved alchemy and the supernatural, eventually got their own little section of the building too, assisting those who might have been seeking something more magical. Today the three of them still run things rather peacefully, Mirabelle is content with her work, and while she still suffers her bouts of depression, she's much better at coping through them and keeping a positive outlook. She's made friends from many places, regular visitors are her favorite sights to see, enjoying getting to hear from people from all sorts of places with different lives. But she has to admit, it's sometimes worrying how many visitors the library gets these days, while it's nothing crazy, it's only a library, it's enough that it sometimes disrupts the feeling the town had when she first moved there. This burst of business has been great economically, but she can't help but fret sometimes that maybe she's brought too much attention to a relatively small and pacifistic planet. Is she just paranoid? She doesn't really know.