Sarah Zellaby

* Fanart
* Official art

**Sarah Zellaby** is a major character and narrator in the InCryptid series. She is a cuckoo and an adopted member of the Price-Healy Family

## About

### Appearance

Pale skin, black hair with bangs, blue eyes. Appears nearly identical to other female cuckoos. She likes to wear oversized sweaters that cover her hands and obscure her figure, intended to prevent accidental skin contact.

Sarah's blood is a clear and mucus-like.

### Personality

Sarah loves math and is excellent at it. In New York, she audited college-level math courses for fun. She is a huge nerd and loves comics, especially Jean Grey whom she relates to.

As an empath, she is overly sensitive to people's emotions and tries her best not to violate boundaries. She is in denial about Artie's feelings for her.

Sarah likes being around babies because their thoughts are simple and she can watch their neurons wire themselves together.

### Abilities

Sarah is a cuckoo with the ability to manipulate memory and emotions. The skill is mostly passive and unconscious, but she can also intentionally change someone's mind. While she is technically able to completely rewrite a person's memories, it takes a significant mental toll.

Her blood has antibacterial properties.

She is also a savant-level mathematician. After her fourth instar, she becomes a Johrlac Queen, more powerful than any other member of her species, and able to perform equations that rewrite reality and transport people and objects between dimensions.

## Biography

As with most cuckoos, Sarah's biological mother Ingrid abandoned her to a human family when Sarah was an infant. Her human adoptive family, the McNallys, believed that she was biologically theirs due to Sarah's latent cuckoo telepathy.

The cuckoos then engineered the death of Sarah's human parents, timing it so that Sarah would be ideally placed for Angela Baker to hear her cries for help. Even then, Angela would have left her be if Sarah hadn't used "please" when calling out for help; it showed that she was not fully conditioned into cuckoo selfishness. Angela and Martin took in Sarah with full knowledge of the adoptive relationship. Angela raised Sarah with the express aim of eliminating a cuckoo's psychopathic tendencies. In doing so, she delayed Sarah's metamorphosis and broke Sarah's connection to her Johrlac inherited memories.

Sarah grew up in the Price-Baker family. She spent summers in Portland and received the same basic combat training as her cousins, though she always knew she could depend on her telepathy instead. Sarah grew closest to Artie and Antimony, the three bonding over comic books and other nerdy interests.

When Verity went to Los Angeles to perform in Dance or Die, Sarah followed her supposedly to provide protection, but really to audit university math classes. She subsequently followed Verity to Manhattan under the same excuse.

## In the Series

### Discount Armageddon

Sarah helps Verity find the sleeping dragon under Manhattan, and brings Dominic to rescue Verity when the snake cult captures her.

### Midnight Blue-Light Special

When the Covenant of St. George captures Verity, Sarah teams up with Dominic and their other allies for a rescue. Knowing that they cannot kill the agents or send them back to share that the Prices are alive, Sarah wipes the agents' minds and implants false memories of them killing Dominic and an "imposter Verity." However, using her powers this way puts her in a coma and also triggers her first and second metamorphosis.

### Half-Off Ragnarok

Sarah spends more than five years recovering with her family in Columbus. During that time her family uses anti-telepathy charms to protect them from accidental damage, but this also leave Sarah mentally "face-blind" and unable to identify them individually. She must restart her education with simple children's math, and she avoids talking to Artie out of fear and shame.

### Imaginary Numbers and Calculated Risks

Finally, she feels ready to test herself and travels to visit her family in Portland. While there, she encounters several other cuckoos who identify her as a "queen" able to solve the equation to take them to a different dimension. Her calculations bring the entirety of the Iowa State University campus to an alternate world and accidentally wipes her memory from her allies' minds. She perseveres to earn their trust again and get everyone home safely.

## Relationships

### Artie Harrington

Sarah and Artie have been close since they were kids, and this slowly turned into love. However, both of them are in denial about it, believing the other person doesn't reciprocate their feelings. They finally confess to each other and kiss in Imaginary Numbers, but Sarah accidentally erases Artie's memories of her at the end of that book.

### Antimony Price

Sarah and Antimony are both huge nerds, and they often hang out together, sometimes with Artie. The three of them (and possibly Elsie) have a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that was put on hiatus after Sarah went into a coma. When Sarah erased her memories of her, Annie was suspicious of her, but was the first to trust her again after braving the horrors of the "Giant Bug Dimension" together.

### Evelyn Price

Sarah's relationship with her adoptive sister is complicated, but in a good way. Sarah was adopted long after Evelyn had left her parents' home, so they didn't grow up together. However, they still share a sisterly bond and loyalty; Evelyn is invested in Sarah figuring out her feelings for Artie.

Sarah is the age of Evelyn's children, so they all find it easier to call Sarah their cousin than their aunt.

### Greg

Greg is a giant jumping spider the size of a Clydesdale that Sarah tamed telepathically and accidentally brought back to Earth with her. In the hospital, Dr. Morrow describes him as her "emotional support animal."

## Trivia

* Sarah mentions that she chose her last name when she turned 18. The name Zellaby is a reference to a main character in The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. Her mother Angela's first name is also a reference to the book, as is Sarah's username, MIDWICH\_GIRL.
* Angela taught Sarah ethics by making her watch every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5.

## Quotes

**Midnight Blue-Light Special**

* **Sarah:** "Oh, goody. Slumber party of the damned." (Ch. 12)
* **Sarah:** "Okay, so is it time to have the talk about lying to the telepath again? I say 'don't lie to the telepath, it never works,' and you all say you won't. And then I point out that the corollary to this is that when the telepath says someone isn't lying, she's probably right. That's when you look sheepish and say you're sorry and hey, look, I just shortcut about ten minutes of awkward conversation, go me." (Ch. 18)

**Calculated Risks**

* **Sarah:** "The cuckoos came from another dimension and orchestrated the functional extinction of at least one of the species that actually evolved on Earth."
**Mark:** "Yes. We did."
**Sarah:** "And you have *got* to stop putting it that way. This isn't some human church, accusing everyone who walks through the door of bearing the burden of original sin. *We* didn't do anything. *You* didn't do anything, even if you got the ancestral memories to tell you you did. You may remember it, but you weren't there. You didn't make the choices that led us here. You didn't hold the guns. *I* didn't do anything. I was raised to think intelligent life is valuable and deserves to be protected, and that means all intelligent life, even the lives I don't like very much. We weren't there. Whatever our ancestors did isn't on us. Only what we do of our own free will."

## References

1. ↑ Imaginary Numbers
2. ↑ Midnight Blue-Light Special Ch. 18
3. ↑ IM
4. ↑ Imaginary Numbers Ch. 2
5. ↑ Calculated Risks Chapter 8
6. ↑ Midnight Blue-Light Special Ch. 5