Talk:Merle Dalton

Full background for the people who need to see it for working things in:

CHILDHOOD AND INTRO TO ADULTING

Marlene “Merle” Dalton is the only child of her mother and one of many from her father’s side. She was born in Detroit and grew up as trashy as white trash can get. Her father skipped out while her mom was still pregnant and in turn, when Merle was 10 her mom lost custody of her for being an unfit parent. Merle got shoved into the system and bounced around foster families, none of which seemed to stick for long. She was tough as nails even at that young age, having gone from stepping over her passed out mother in order to make herself something to eat to being in situations where she never knew who she could trust and there was certainly no one she could develop affection for. She was around fifteen when she got word that her crack whore mother overdosed and as far as Merle knew, she was an orphan, alone in the world.

Strangely, it was religion that gave her some level of sanity to hold onto. No matter what home she got stuck in, no matter what family was planning to kick her out and no matter what happened, she felt a sense of peace at church and it became a secret sanctuary of hers. Even when she wasn’t able to go into the physical church, she had a place inside of herself where she could withdraw and center herself again. Church was the only place she felt protected.

She got her GED when she was 16. Bounced out of just about every foster home they could find to stick her in throughout the state, she had become a bitter, angry teenager with a chip on her shoulder large enough to land a small plane on. Without school to distract her, she was able to get a real job, so got two of them in order to cut down on the amount of time she had to spend at the state-run home for foster kids who got returned one too many times. She worked a fast food gig at the food court in the mall and got a job at a tattoo shop as a receptionist and general gopher. It was there that she fell in love with the art of tattooing as well as fell in love with the first person she ever let past her outer shell. She started sleeping with one of the artists and even talked him into giving her the first ink on her skin. That ended quickly and badly when his pregnant fiancé came in and found them screwing on the couch in the waiting area. So began Merle's nonstop string of meaningless relationships, figuring out what men she could manage to get something from in exchange for some attention and her inability to stay in one place for long. As soon as she was set free from the system, she was long gone and hasn't managed to stay put since. She hasn't even kept the same hair color for more than a few months at most. About the only permanent thing about her are her many (many) tattoos.

After a few failed attempts at careers, Merle managed to fall into the wild world of being a bail bondsman (AKA a 'fugitive recovery agent' or 'bounty hunter' or 'skiptrace' or whatever the media thinks is the cool name to use this week). It's been a good few years and has given her the chance to go to new places, meet new people and make money by bullshitting people, tracking down scumbags and getting paid to sometimes rough people up a little. Oh, and she likes roughing up people who deserve it. Plus, it was a good cover story for her *other* job…

WTF VAMPIRES

She was a week and six hundred dollars away from getting evicted when she got one of those bounties that should be too good to pass up but she was just a little too desperate to see it. You know the kind. So she tore off half-cocked in search of the bounty. She was hungry, tenacious and just wouldn’t give up.

She didn't know that the guy she was after was (GET THIS) working for a vampire. Yeah, seriously, a freaking VAMPIRE. Fangs, bad attitudes, bad breath, the works. So when she finally got this guy into custody, she ended up cornered by a fanged freak. Something in her kicked in and she fought back and managed to take him out. It was pure luck, like most things in her life.

Something changed that day. She became obsessed with learning more about what was actually going on in the shadows. Merle, who had never given even half a shit about anything in her life aside from herself, started to feel like she had some sort of responsibility to help the helpless. After all, what good was being a rock-hard badass with no fucks to give if she couldn’t use it for something good? Over time she started sifting through the real information (which was surprisingly hard to come by) from the bullshit that was prevalent in her studies. Of course, liberal application of alcohol and some recreational drug use in order to head off the nightmares and anxiety made it slower going than it maybe should have been. Still, her research, combined with the fact that she had a couple of run-ins with fellow hunter-small-h types like herself put her on the radar of the local Union. So they sent her a guy named Link.

Now Link was tasked with just sussing out what she actually knew and how useful she might be. Instead, they got drunk, banged a hole in the wall with her headboard at her shitty apartment and the next day he took her to their headquarters. Jumping the gun there, dude? Amiright?

And that is how Merle became a member of the Union. Only she didn’t know it was the Union. In fact, all most of them knew is that they were the only crew in town and aside from a few dimwitted hunters (as opposed to Hunters like them because distinction is important and their precious egos require a capital letter), they were the only defensive line that the area had against the bullshit that came through.

But it wasn’t enough. It never was. She had anger. She needed an outlet. She decided that she could do a job on her own, show them all that she was the resident badass. So she snuck into the back room and took a peek at the files to find out just what action she was missing out on. And that’s when she find a file on her. Well, technically there was a file on everyone but all she cared about was the one that read DALTON, MARLENE. That right there was a red flag. Because how the fuck did they find out her birth name when she never ever went by Marlene?

Yeah. Of course she opened it. Of course she read it. Of course she found out what they had been keeping from her. Namely, they had tracked down at least one sibling from her father’s side. Which means they had tracked down her father, but she didn’t even bother looking into that part of it. All she cared about was that she had a sister. A sister who was just a couple of years older than her. All this time she thought she was entirely alone in the world but she had a sister.

Her anger spiked. She left that group of Hunters and went looking for her sister, making friends and enemies along the way. It took almost a year in total to find her, but when she did, Merle had started to knot some ties with a local biker gang that were secretly Hunters. She fell in with them for a long time and started to finally for the first time in her life have a family. Sophia ended up joining the crew with them and Merle was slowly starting to find some small level of happiness and contentment in her life. Which of course meant that she was about to fuck it all up by getting high as hell and nearly getting Sophia killed on a hunt.

Over time, Merle’s drug and alcohol addictions slowly spiraled out of control and a small wedge began to slide between her and Sophia. Family started to feel almost like a burden rather than a blessing. Even church made her feel stifled. Nothing helped quell the anger inside of her that just never really went away. The times she brutally unleashed on something supernatural, having developed an almost hatred for anything not vanilla mortal, she felt powerful and alive. Afterward she felt dead and wrong. She was the protector of those that didn’t know they needed protecting. By day she was looked down upon by the very society she was protecting at night. She channeled this into a cunning, ruthless cruelty against supers. Over those years, Merle made more than a few enemies. She was the figurehead of the local Hunters (or at least their callousness), not to mention she's just a pretty memorable and unique individual anyway. So guess who gained some low levels of fame of ‘Well fuck that bitch’ and has the enemies to go along with it? The more she’d Hunt, the more that would come after their cell in retaliation, which caused her to Hunt more. She may or may not have turned to getting paid for the sex she was having anyway and she might have been slinging some drugs on the side since the Hunting was getting in the way of her day job of hunting bounties.

"WHAT, *THIS* SKANK IS THE BIG BAD SCARY HUNTER?"

Merle was trying to stave off the shakes that came from the start of withdrawl when she got the call. Sophia and the guys she went out with that night were in trouble. She had just started to empty the needle into her arm when she found out. Surely it wasn’t too much for her to be able to function, right? It was just a little bit. Just a taste. Just enough to make her stop feeling like shit and start feeling better. It was like medicine. She was self-medicating. Life is pain and everyone medicates, she just chose to do so with heroin in her first aid kit.

It was… blurry. Fuzzy. Something bad happened, right? But it felt like everything was okay. Why was Sophia bleeding, though? Didn’t they get there in time? Shit, why was everything so muffled? Oh, the ringing was from the gunshots. Give it a few hours. Yeah. Okay. Right. So why was everyone looking like they were yelling and in her direction?

Long story short, Merle was too fucked up to be of any use. In fact, she was the opposite of useful. She was so high that she nearly got her sister killed, nearly got herself killed and nearly got everyone else killed in the process. All for chasing a high she couldn’t even find anymore. After some harsh words were exchanged and a few things might have been thrown, Merle decided to take off on her own. They didn’t need her, she didn’t need them. Even Sophia could go fuck herself. Merle didn’t need this in her life. She took to a slightly more nomadic life. She'd go where the trouble was (or a good bounty, since Hunting doesn't exactly pay the bills or buy the beer). Life became even more of a blur. An endless stream of guys, both in bed and in cuffs as she hauled them back in. She hardly remembered most of them until she ended up with another Hunter in her life and in her bed. They worked together on a case and it just sort of… stuck. He was the only one who could keep up with her. He was the only one that even tried. Yet, somehow, he didn’t find himself drowning in a haze of drugs and booze like she did. He even made her want to be better. He made her think about trying to get back to a level of sobriety she couldn’t even remember.

Then it became less than an option. As soon as she found out she was pregnant, her life changed. Her first inclination was to have it ‘taken care of’ but she couldn’t do it. Twice she made an appointment. Twice she didn’t go through with it. She was damning the child to a life even worse than the one that she had. Ending up in rehab for the duration of her pregnancy, she got clean and sober. She could cope. She could do this. She’d give up Hunting. She’d be a mother. She’d be the best damn mother in the world. She wouldn’t end up a loser passed out on the floor that her kid had to step over to make its own dinner. She wouldn’t just ditch like her father had. She would stop being a fuckup and start being a responsible adult.

And she did. She gave birth to a healthy daughter named Merida (yes, after the girl in Brave, Merle is not very good at names). But she did so on the run. Because just a few weeks before having the kid, Merle and the baby’s father were running from some of the enemies they (mostly she) had made in the supernatural community. And so Merle made the hardest decision she’s ever made. She shoved the baby into her father's arms and told him to leave and take her to safety and cut all ties with her forever. To Merle, it was the only real way to make sure Meri would be safe, and Merle's already cold heart was even colder. Fueled with new levels of rage, Merle threw herself into ridding the world of the unnatural and wrong that is everything supernatural. She made powerful enemies, then slaughtered them. She became almost akin to the boogieman that the supernaturals would tell each other about. "Beware of Merle Dalton! Behave or she'll come get you!" Though when they would finally see her in person, before being killed, they would see an overly-thin skanky slip of a girl on a motorcycle wearing pants that are way too tight and think 'Oh she doesn't seem so bad...'

GTFO.

As you can probably imagine, having become a very well known Hunter is rough. The past decade and change left her already halted emotions in pure shambles. The last six years without her daughter, without even knowing what she looks like or where she is, has been even harder. Without the one chance at feeling love in her cold heart, Merle snapped and became darker than ever before. Rehab became a thing of the past. The long ago past that existed in a world of sunshine and rainbows and golden sparkles in the air. It was myth. It was painful. It was gone.

Her life became about drugs and booze. Uppers to get out of bed, downers to fall asleep, various levels of inability to properly function to full capacity in between. A balanced breakfast for her is a couple of beers, a few shots, a couple good drags off the bong and a line of coke. And that's before her shower. After her shower can vary anywhere from another line with her coffee to a bit of meth, or even crack if her suppliers are dry. It's a disgusting and terrible lifestyle but it's how she's learned to cope over the years. Maybe one day something her sister Sophia said got through to her. Maybe it was a sense of guilt that still burned like acid in her heart. Maybe it was because Sophia nearly got killed when Merle was too messed up to help her when some supers came after them. Maybe it was the staring at the local school playground and realizing her daughter would never grace it with her presence. Maybe it was because she just wanted a family again, but three or four years ago, Merle tracked down Sophia. It wasn’t a reunion that you’d see on TV. It was sharp and hard and painful and loud. But reunite they did in Merle’s attempt to unfuck her life a little.

After a few months, Merle started to think maybe this life could work. Maybe she might be able to get clean and sober again and maybe this time it would stick. She tried her best. But then it happened. Sophia was Taken. The whole event is a blur in Merle’s mind. It’s flashes and things her brain just can’t quite comprehend in the way that the True Fae impact the mere mortals who are in their presence. Was that thing after both of them or just Sophia? Merle will never know. She just knew that no matter what she did, Sophia was gone and she was left behind and she couldn’t handle it. Not after having come to grips with maybe, just maybe, not losing everything in her life. So she has spent a little over three years doing whatever she can to find her sister. In the process, she has learned some about the Lost, about the True Fae and about what might have happened. She knows the chances of her sister having ever gotten out are slim to none. She knows even if her sister did get out, it might be a century from now when Merle is long dead. But she won’t stop looking. Every time she gets a tip that a girl matching her sister’s description has been spotted, Merle checks it out, using her job bringing in federal-level bounties as an excuse to travel. There’s been another sighting. In some little town in the middle of nowhere.

Hell is descending, Vermont. Brace yourself.