◩ Cookie obviously wasn't born "Cookie", but then no one is born with any kind of name or any kind of anything, right? Born Chiu Xiu-Fen (or the other way around on her paperwork) in Carson City, Nevada, USA, Cookie came to be known as such when she refused to answer to her name, but would look up when people offered or talked about cookies. It just kinda stuck the way childhood nicknames do, and it was cute and easy to spell. Unlike Booger, her little sister's nickname. She prefers to go by her proper name obviously. ◩ The first daughter of a Taiwan-born mother and a Nevada-born Filipino-Chinese father, Cookie came into the world premature and frail and despite finding a ridiculous amount of energy in her early childhood she never really seemed to get over it, always sick with something and having to be practically strapped into her bed or she'd wind up overexerting herself, delaying the healing process further. ◩ But who could blame her for wanting to be up and running around with her younger brother and sister, twins who were always coming up with schemes to cause trouble wherever they were, who loved to explore every square inch of every place they visited. All of the sibs were inquisitive children, it didn't seem fair to Cookie that she would have to be left out! Only whenever she was given all the freedom she could ever want, the inevitable always happened and she’d wear herself out and wind up sickly for days, sometimes even weeks. ◩ Despite her fragile health, Cookie had no real trouble making friends and maintained a healthy imagination with a lifelong interest in creative pursuits. She was successful in school but had no real academic interests, unless one counts sitting in the back of the library all day drawing and reading, Orrrrr making a fort out of all the books. She never got rid of that urge but she did, unfortunately, have to grow up and suppress it when she decided she wanted to work in the library. ◩ Though it was just the five of them in the household, the extended family were numerous and those who could visited often, while those who couldn’t loved to call and send yearly letters. When Cookie developed an interest in writing, so too did her same-aged cousin Mayumi, her dad’s sister’s daughter. Writing to Mayumi helped her to learn writing in Filipino and helped Mayumi learn English, so it was encouraged by their parents. The girls soon discovered that they shared many of the same interests, and they would write each other fantastical stories which they would sometimes cast one another in as the lead role. Cookie loved writing to Mayumi so much that she would go through all her writing paper within a week, and then continue writing on the back of any paper she could find. One time she sent Mayumi a letter written on the back of a utility bill. She had her stationery taken away from her for two weeks after that. ◩ Aside from being generally the family Ill Girl with a predisposition to catching every illness under the sun plus a skin condition that made her break out in gross lumps, nothing exciting or terrible happened to Cookie outside of the usual pre-teen/teenage dramas. Crushes, love gained and lost, meeting up with cousins from overseas and getting together to cast spells on the mean bitches at school by making up a potion to dump on them in the movie theater. You know, normal girl stuff! Kind of a theatre kid, she tried for every single supporting role going for every play and musical her school did, and she was part of the choir, and liked to shirk her chores to draw her favourite video game characters. But she didn’t really have any major ambitions to star in anything or become a landscape artist or whatever like her dad seemed to think she would do. Her mother tried to put a little pressure on her to go to college, maybe become an accountant or something, but all she wanted to do was organise books and play video games and cheer her brother on in his med school ambitions while cheerleading for her sister’s baseball ambitions. Some people are just meant to be cheerleaders! ◩ When she was twenty three she became interested in content creation for YouTube and started her channel Dizzydots, mainly reviewing video games she’d played as a child, including bootlegs she’d played on plug and play consoles. She also liked to feature food vlogs and fashion/design, and life seemed to be going pretty well for her. She had a new job at the library, she’d just moved into a new apartment, her boyfriend was the sweetest dude you could ever meet. Dizzydots began to take off six months in, after a video she made about a bootleg Harry Potter game went viral. Well, barely viral. She wasn’t racking up the gold play button level of views yet. Not even silver play button. But enough that she was able to make money from the platform. Mostly the kind of money that meant she could treat herself with a coffee every now and then but still! Progress! ◩ Everything seemed so stable and calm for about a year or so, and a couple of weeks after turning twenty four her brother begged her to see a doctor about the lumps she’d found under her arms that refused to go away,something she’d been complaining about for nearly two months. Used to this kind of thing because of her skin condition she didn’t expect the news to be anything big, but many scans and sombre looks and talks she zoned the fuck out of later the diagnosis of lymphoma hung heavy over her. She barely remembers agreeing to chemo but she does remember every stupid acupuncture session she agreed to to make her mother shut up about chemo, and every bitter herb her cousin told her father to give her in her food. Insecure, sickly and anxious, Cookie no longer wanted to be seen on camera and for a while, Dizzydots stopped being a thing. Her boyfriend lost empathy and patience and bounced when she was halfway through her treatment course. She couldn’t lift anything heavy or move very much, so she wound up quitting her job and her father moved in to look after her, and hey, surprise - her parents were divorcing now? Twenty four was a barrage of shit she’d rather not remember. ◩ Twenty five, twenty six and twenty seven weren’t much better. Her cancer went into remission, her hair started to grow back, but she was still very much processing everything that had happened to her in the last year. Depressed, she barely left her room at all, her father struggling to support her and trying to convince her to come to his apartment now she was well enough to handle a move. She played The Sims a lot more than she ever had to have some semblance of control over her life. Or any life, any event, anything. Becoming intimately acquainted with the community, she was encouraged to start up Dizzydots again, making it a cosy kind of channel. ◩ At least until she began to regain energy and motivation as interest in her videos increased. Bouncing back big time at the age of twenty eight, Cookie learned about virtual youtubers and decided to create her own persona based on the Dizzydots channel. Dizzy/Diz was written up one feverish summer night when random inspiration struck - Diz would be an android designed specifically to gain information on the Internet to feed back to an alien population in another galaxy. Information on what NOT to do in developing a virtual space like the Internet back on her home planet. It was a gimmick that seemed to work with her boisterous spirit, and she found minor success once more. She started braving the real world more often, too, making friends again and managing to find another job at the library she loved so much. And then everything was okay after that, forever. ◩ Except ten months before her death and revival, Cookie found more lumps at her groin and was feeling extremely fatigued. She put off going to the doctor as long as she could, terrified of what the news might be, worried about paying the bills on her own. Eventually, however, she started falling asleep mid-stream and waking with night sweats that soaked her sheets and was unable to tolerate the pain she was in. As she had suspected, her cancer had come back and was more aggressive than before. Due to her med team’s advice to travel now before starting any treatment, she was pressured advised by her family to visit her cousins in the Philippines. ◩ Mayumi welcomed her with a sort of bittersweet excitement, knowing Cookie’s prognosis wasn’t good. In the years since they’d last met in person, Mayumi had become deeply fascinated by folk medicine, something Cookie had heard more than enough of from her father and his sister back home. Admittedly she had become so fascinated since Cookie had become ill, something the streamer/librarian was less than thrilled to hear, reminiscent of the folks back home who’d told her to turn to faith or acai berries or ginseng to cure her cancer. Which sort of ended up being how the visit turned out - Mayumi insisted on being her personal healer, happy to chaperone her around town and take her for the most amazing meals at little known restaurants, but who would also lace her food with bitter herbs and insist on choosing her food combinations for the most “effective healing”. While Mayumi had been her favourite cousin in childhood, this visit felt way better whenever she could ditch the girl who fancied herself some sort of sorceress. Besides, Cookie could speak the local language just fine; ditching her was easy. But all this did was make Mayumi more determined to do something, and so she threw herself into research in secret. ◩ A few months after returning home, sick of being fed gross bitter tea and wrapped up in weird bandages full of strong smelling herbs, Cookie answered an unexpected knock at the door. Who else would it be but Mayumi? Claiming to be visiting to celebrate her auntie’s birthday - not a terrible lie; Cookie’s mother’s sixtieth birthday was right around the corner - she asked to hide the gifts she’d brought in Cookie’s apartment, since she didn’t trust her host (Cookie’s father) not to spoil the surprise! Feverish, the aggravated streamer hadn’t the energy to push her cousin out and instead invited her in, adamant however that she would have to leave in about an hour. Mayumi offered to make her cousin some lemon and ginger tea for her “obvious cold”, and though she was suspicious, Cookie agreed to let her, returning to her blanket pile on the couch. ◩ Mayumi made the tea as promised, but Cookie was right to be suspicious. To the tea, Mayumi added a total of twenty crushed belladonna berries. She wasn’t certain of their potency and feared all it would do would be to make Cookie violently sick, and offered her another cup once the first cupful was finished and it was accepted - the streamer thought nothing of the unusual sweetness of the tea, and seemingly swallowed the skin as she sipped. Another identical cup was made and offered before Mayumi was dismissed, and she feigned taking her leave, waiting in the shadows for the poison to take effect. ◩ Cookie fell asleep shortly after Mayumi “left”, suddenly lethargic and somewhat delirious, but already unwell she just accepted it as a need to “sleep it off”. Within hours she was dead, her breathing slowing to a stop, her heart out of rhythm. Mayumi joined her cousin’s still warm body on the couch to perform her resurrection, believing it would purify Cookie’s body and revive her perfect, giving her a second chance to live healthy until her natural death of old age. ◩ Of course, the necromancy didn’t exactly work like that. ◩ Instead of reviving her in perfect health, possibly due to her proximity to natural death (and if myth is to be believed, because of the strained relationship between the witch and her victim), Mayumi created a creature she recognised immediately as Bal-Bal, a monster known to creep around graveyards and homes where people are dying, lying in wait for death to claim them so that the creature might devour them whole. Upon revival, Cookie was irrational and desperate for flesh and Mayumi, fearing that her creation would slaughter her in order to devour her, fled the scene. It resulted in the newly revived Cookie running after her, seeking what she needed entirely through instinct. Mayumi didn’t have to run far to lose the Bal-Bal - Cookie had no interest in her living flesh. Instead, the ex-streamer spent her first night exhuming deceased pets in backyards, using her new claws to dig them out of the earth and her new teeth to rip pelt from rotting flesh. General consensus in the neighbourhood was a really hungry bear or coyote - it was late enough that no one saw Cookie and wherever there were automatic lights she would flee. ◩ Once out of her daze and realising something was very wrong - hard not to notice when you’re holding the mangled carcase of some sad old Pomeranian - Cookie returned to her apartment and called Mayumi, because fucking obviously Mayumi did something! Who else would it be?! The sorceress answered, surprised that Cookie wasn’t just a mindless meat muncher - but surely it meant her plan worked! It worked entirely incorrectly, but Cookie wasn’t ill anymore! ◩ Obviously this broke their relationship down beyond repair. Cookie was mad because- well, who wouldn’t be mad when their cousin killed them and brought them back as some kind of freakish zombie thing? Mayumi was mad because Cookie couldn’t accept that this was a kindness offered to relieve her favourite cousin from her impending death… by killing her and reviving her. Mayumi returned home after her auntie’s birthday, which Cookie did not attend, citing a change in her illness while she tried to figure out the magic she’d apparently contracted from her cousin. ◩ Throwing herself into her streaming side gig to keep her apartment, Cookie spends most of her days as Dizzydots (or just Diz/Dizzy), and if she’s not streaming she’s making videos for her YouTube channel. Her nights, though, are usually spent hanging around hospitals trying to figure out where to go to get a hold of dead things no one will miss, because it’s either that or digging up a hell of a lot of Fidos and Princesses.