Norma Parole

== Norma Paroll ==
Norma Elizabeth Paroll is a 27 year old internet personality and paranormal investigator located on 1313 Mallard Way, Lower Duck Pond.
Norma is the character of u/AmhranRipley (Liz Lands). Her name is a pun on the word "paranormal".
=== Overview ===
Norma is a native of Lower Duck Pond and grew up in the suburbs with her paternal grandparents. Her grandparents appeared to have ample finances, sending her to Faire Creek School for Girls until the 6th grade, where Norma struggled with making relationships in such a secluded environment. Public school proved surprisingly beneficial for her mental health and she graduated from Central High School in 2011 and received a Bachelor's of Classical Studies from Southwest University.
Norma began to write when she was very young and ultimately decided to focus her career on her longtime interest in the supernatural. Norma runs a host of social media pages where she documents, details and debunks various folk stories, myths, and urban legends and has even been known to respond to requests from paranoid individuals seeking advice or clarity on perceived apparitions or unnatural phenomena. Norma works with a large-scale internet comedy company and publisher and receives a monthly salary based on content and ratings from her work.
Norma currently works from her apartment and has three cats. She is also Ivy's current caretaker after her banishment from her house.
== Detailed Biography ==
==== Early Life (1993-2006) ====
Norma Jean Elizabeth Paroll was born in March of 1993 to Jacklyn “Jackie” Mollica (1975-) and Cason Paroll (1977-), two college undergraduates in a tight relationship. When the couple entered a nasty divorce involving their conflicting desires for the future and financial instability, Norma was turned over to her father’s family, and grew up with her late paternal grandparents, Doreen and Warren Paroll, in Upper Duck Pond. 
Warren suffered a severe brain injury in the US Air Force, which granted him a settlement from the US Military. Doreen worked for the mayor’s office and retired when Norma was three. 
Norma spent most of her younger years in a private Christian school where she was subject to severe bullying and isolation from her peers. Most of her friendships until age 13 were developed online through chat threads and MMOs. Norma later transferred to the LDP public school system.
=== The Incident (2007) ===
Norma suffered with depression and suicidal thoughts from the age of nine and at the age of 12 began to experience dissociative episodes and severe panic attacks. At some point during her life, Norma’s mother expressed concern that she was self-harming after seeing Norma intentionally pressing the palm of her hand against the hood of a hot car and explaining to her that it ‘felt good’. At the age of 14 (2007), she visited her mother Jackie’s woodland property in Charlatan, [REDACTED] for the summer, and experienced a serious episode in which she wandered over three miles from her mother’s home on foot and was found in a nearby town about three miles (5km) away, unable to identify herself to police. According to Norma, she woke up that morning with no knowledge of her name, location or any of her life prior to the incident, and felt a compulsive urge to run away from something chasing her. She rapidly regained her memory and resumed normal life one week later after a very brief stay in a mental hospital in [REDACTED].
==== Post-Incident ====
* When asked about the ordeal, Norma describes wandering for what felt like 3-4 hours in a nearby cornfield and seeing strange apparitions and speaking to a strange, abstract figure which she at that time believed was either an unwelcome memory of a past life or a messenger from God* (at that time, she was struggling to distance herself from religious trauma and still believed in a higher power.). Norma appears to have been seriously affected by whatever happened in the cornfield, often cryptically quoting advice she does not remember hearing (or following) before. There is no evidence anything actually supernatural happened in the cornfield, and she publicly explains it away as a seizure or heat stroke. Interestingly, she indicates that she knew that she was heading westwards.
The following year Norma began cognitive behavioral therapy and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, panic attack disorder, and ADHD.
=== Research Papers, Rosewater, and Rehab (2008-2014) ===
Norma originally entered Southwest University in 2011 on a music scholarship and proceeded to get her bachelor’s degree in classical studies, and intended to move on to a second major in anthropology but suffered a severe depressive episode in her late junior year that caused her to drop out and move to Rosewater, choosing to live in the back of her 1998 Chevy Astro rather than seek out permanent lodging. 
Around that time she briefly experimented with drugs, including a stint in which she was introduced to MDMA and magic mushrooms by a coworker and attempted to overdose on the former but was discovered by a passerby and attended rehab for four months in 2014. 
After rehab Norma decided to drive back to her hometown and adopted Peaches[link] while on the road in 2015 as a companion. She quickly found a house in the LDP suburbs as an old relative had recently moved and was struggling to sell it, and moved in shortly thereafter, cementing her place as a permanent resident of Lower Duck Pond.
Norma is currently caring for, and in the process of adopting, Ivy.
== Interest in Folklore ==
While international mythology has fascinated her since she first learned to read, Norma has held an interest in horror and the unsolved since she was a teenager; while she is rarely able to stomach gory or particularly dreadful films, she appreciates the form of horror and cinema as art. Norma particularly focuses on cosmic horror and the fear of uncertainty as her struggles with mental health and traumatic experiences instilled in her an appreciation for escapism and absurdism. Her favorite horror movie is The Thing (Carpenter, 1982). 
Norma’s online presence has grown since beginning her blog Anomaly Management Services Of Lower Duck Pond in 2016, which she uses to detail superstitious folklore, strange occurrences, unsolved disappearances and local folklore in the LDP area and beyond. She has also performed 'house calls' for neighbors worried about ghosts, usually resolving the problem by discovering an animal infestation or simply restarting the WiFi.
== Personality ==
Norma has a particular weakness for cats, sugary foods and small children, and loves to talk to or look after friends and family member’s children. Norma takes care of a small but growing collection of succulents on her windowsill and leaves the lower half of the backyard to let wildflowers and grass grow freely. After moving into the house on Mallard Way she adopted Nefertiti[link]; Alistair[link] showed up in her windowsill on Friday the 13th in May of 2016, and she found herself laden with yet another cat which she happily adopted. However, with her upbringing as a psychological and physical caretaker for her grandfather, Norma has developed an Atlas personality in which she feels a responsibility to defuse potentially confrontational situations and make herself less of an inconvenience to others, offering food, favors, compliments or advice to nearly everyone she interacts with, in an attempt to “justify” the time and space she inhabits, which sometimes leads to extreme stress and emotional burnout as her people-pleasing tendencies take their toll.
== Trivia ==
* Norma drives a 1998 blue-green Chevy Astro that once belonged to her father.
* It has been speculated that Norma has type 3 hyperlexia, but ultimately sufficient evidence for diagnosis was never produced.
* Norma has three cats: Alistair[link], Nefertiti[link], and Peaches[link].
* Norma's name is often mispelled as Parole. 
Category:Citizens