My AB OCs: Delilah Wancio
Aug. 28th, 2013 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_sporking_ratDelilah has a tumblr!
http://dead-little-girl.tumblr.com/
Delilah has art I drew!
http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/vv59/Lilabella/2013%20Art/Delilah_zpsb1323536.jpg
http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/vv59/Lilabella/2012%20Art/DelJams.jpg
first is how she normally is, second is jammies she'd only have after being taken in by Maureen (see below)
And I got this FUCKING AWESOME AND PERFECT PICTURE OF HER in an art trade with the superb VikingCarrot!
http://dead-little-girl.tumblr.com/post/57562213300/vikingcarrot-6-months-of-avoiding-half-a-dozen
So, uh, this is another doozy, with lots of bullet points and a big copy-pasted profile, and I am so sorry. One day I'll learn how to crunch these things. In the meantime...
+ I originally made Delilah as the modern-day actually-sixteen human girl that she believes she is. She was made when I was in college, maybe nineteen or so, as an experiment in self-insert characters. I knew there was probably no way I could make an objective insert of myself in the present, so I decided to try making a character that was based on my younger self--someone separate from me, but still clearly memorable. I have a history of depression, and this was at the beginning of my recovery, so revisiting my mindset during what was one of the worst times for me psychologically was a very interesting project, and helpful in figuring out who I was now, since getting away from my constant sadness and suicidal ideation had left kind of a big hole where a lot of my identity used to be. I also got a probably-less-healthy kick out of heaping punishment of all kinds on her, because I was just so *angry* with myself for being so fucked up, and she was me, she was the embodiment of me at my most fucked up, so I took out all that self-hate on her through roleplay as much as I could rather than doing *actual* self-punishing behaviors like cutting (which I'm also in recovery for)
When I first got into vampire/shifter/etc setting roleplays, I decided to convert her from being such a straight-up self-insert into a character that was more her own, so I decided she was actually a 150+ years old vampire and her identity as a normal-but-depressed modern teenager was actually a delusion brought on by her inability to cope with her vampirism and immortality. Given her mental fragility and suicidal obsession, it seemed a realistic response, or at least it does to me (there's no way to be sure, of course, since that's a situation that's never going to happen to anyone in real life and thus not something I can research to make sure I'm getting it right, which is a hurdle I've encountered many times since after starting to make supernatural characters). Through this and the subsequent playing she got that developed her further, she became her own person, and Delilah now has no resemblance to me other than some basic physical traits (blue-eyed brunette with scars) and very minor quirks such as liking rats, unicorns, and butch women. Hey, I love ratties so much, somebody in my cast had to too! I still torture her terribly and enjoy putting her through the worst hell, but now it's for fun rather than therapy! She's lucked out ever since I met writtenelision though (see bullet below about her character Maureen) and no longer goes through such terrible ordeals...for now.
+ I technically count Delilah as a child vampire, because even though she's physically sixteen, she was sickly and malnourished enough at death to pass for 14, even 12, and she's emotionally about 6-8 despite a normal IQ.
+ This is her 'generic' profile that I can tweak to adapt to any book or roleplay canon, hence why it doesn't mention the AB-specific detail that Morella, the vampire Ruthven forced to turn Delilah, was a rotting vampire, and that Delilah herself is therefore, in the Anitaverse, a rotter as well. Ruthven preferred to use rotters as his guinea pigs because of how they can heal from much more than a normal vamp can, and thus could undergo more...serious...experimentation.
+ If Dolly gets freaked out and triggered enough, SHE WILL ROT ALL OVER YOU! Other than that though, she's a weak vampire and probably always will be because, well, it's hard to work on increasing your power and skills as one of the undead when you refuse to acknowledge *being* undead.
+ I put her original human name as Dinah in this profile, because it's generally required for roleplay applications that you don't leave anything out or mysterious 9so you can't pull bullshit out of your ass later to get your way/justify something canon-breaking, etc.), but in my own personal stories her human name is never going to be revealed (and as it is, I don't really like Dinah for her anyway, and would be looking for something else if I were still roleplaying)
+ In my original stories and in the Anitaverse version, it's also Morella who renames her Delilah after she is turned, rather than it being changed when she came to America like this profile says. Morella is kind of a melodramatic sort, see. She picked the name "Delilah" not for the character from the Bible, but for its meaning of "delicate, weak, languishing" in Hebrew, as it suited the girl and Morella liked it.
+ Her role in stories is that Ruthven really did alter her in some significant way (I haven't decided what/how yet) and she's important for that reason. But she was just normal vamp in roleplay because making special one-and-only canon-breaking types like that is not my thing. But as a plot device in stories? Yeah, that's cool, especially since she's not the main character. She's obviously got a role in the swanmane/Ruthven plot, and I've mentioned the parent/child relationship with she forms with Gaspard. She also has quite the crush on Max! And because she still wants to die, she's a char I won't kill off. Delilah is never, ever supposed to get what she wants, whether it's death, Max, her family back, etc. She's pretty much the only character who has that immunity.
+ In roleplay, she was adopted by writtenelision's character Maureen instead of Gaspard, and in fact doesn't seem to have even met Gaspard, and her connection to Ruthven isn't known. Gaspard meanwhile adopted writtenelision's character Odette instead. Speaking of Odette, her and Max are sort of a thing, and Delilah is kinda jealous of her and Max, but not in a hostile way, more wistful and admiring. She's also got a friendship of sorts going with Parker, and is probably the only vampire that the Flock would allow her to associate with. Her one other major relationship, besides familial ones with Maureen's husband and son, is with Hank, writtenelision's adorkable wererat. Except that, well, she's not friends with him. She's friends with his rat form. She doesn't seem to really register/recognize he's a wererat that turns back into a human, let alone a human MAN (she's terrified of men, and is only beginning to adjust to Maureen's husband...Simon she's ok with because he's a kid about her apparent age), and not just an adorable giant rat. Hank, being a nice sort, indulges her and lets her treat him like a pet in his rat form and won't turn back around her and spoil her fantasy. Simon, her adopted "brother", who has genuine affection for Delilah but was already a bully towards Hank that loves tormenting him, decided to take advantage of this. Basically...he came up with the bright idea of Delilah riding her giant ratty friend, whom she calls Mr. Zebra, and Maureen even got her pink riding gear custom-made for the body shape of a huge rat! And Simon's idea...was a riding crop that Delilah doesn't know is tipped with silver.
http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/vv59/Lilabella/001.jpg
+ Maureen dresses her up in the most adorable little outfits omg
+ Morella might have been the one to turn her, but Ruthven is the one who forced Morella to do that, so he's just as responsible for her creation. They're pretty much supposed to be the vampire equivalents of her mother and father. I really that's kinda Louis/Lestat/Claudia, but they've got a very different dynamic.
Firstly, while Ruthven is of course very important to Delilah's story, as the person who caused her creation as a vampire and did heinous experiments on her that altered her in equally permanent/significant ways, and is definitely remembered in her subconscious with all the rest of her past, she's...really not important to him at all. He's very much meant to be the Bad Father counterpart to her human Good Part, with all of her real father's bad traits exaggerated to ultimate extreme and with none of his good traits. These former traits are neglect and a lack of emotion. Konstantine was as attentive to his daughter as he could possibly be, but he was still a working man with a family to support, and therefore he wasn't always there to stop the abuse of her brother. Ruthven, of course, has utterly nothing to do with Delilah and the others in his labs beyond that he does to them in experiments. Konstantine had feelings, but he wasn't so great at always showing them, and it could leave Delilah confused and at a loss sometimes...Ruthven just genuinely doesn't have much/any.
While Konstantine and Ruthven are a dichotomy, a set of two, not so much opposites exactly as a shadow image, Moira and Morella were only the first in a series. Delilah goes through multiple mothers, partly through coincidence aka my authorial interference steering them her way, partly through her own subconscious of seeking out a 'better' mother than Moira was. Moira was a good mother in most regards, but as far as Delilah sees it, Moira being unable to stop Jonas hurting her when she was right there in the room is much less forgivable than Konstantine only ever failing because he was away. She's forever felt neglected in that sense, as if her mother chose her brother over her. The fact that her father seemed able to protect her from *everything* when he was present, not just Jonas, only further emphasized to her how helpless her mother was at protecting her from anything else. Again, this is really not fair to Moira, but it's how Delilah saw it, and it's what first made her turn to the Virgin Mary as a substitute-mother figure, whereas she's never felt the need to seek out another father because in her eyes Konstantine was PERFECT.
Ruthven very much a counterpart to her father, all his bad traits e
Her original mother Moira, the Virgin mary, then Morella, maybe Lucretia, Maureen in RP, MOAD in the Anitaverse, and many, many more throughout the years, both human and monster.
Maybe there's some resolution to this whole "two fathers, many mothers" deal with Gaspard becoming her next parent-figure, seeing as how Gaspard is androgynous, but who knows, maybe that's just the next step in the cycle instead.
+ Delilah is still very Catholic, just as she was raised to be, but this doesn't negate her belief in more heathen things as well. She was deeply interested in the folklore and myths that her parents told her from their respective homelands, as well as the ones she heard from locals in England, and this gathering of stories from all over the world continued into her death...with the additional aspect that her insanity now causes her to believe in them to varying degrees more often than not. She's also not so much Catholic, to be honest, as Marian. The Virgin Mary is the part she's most focused on, the part she finds most spiritually relevant and resonating to herself, the part she really FEELS the very most. Needless to say, Mary fits in with her multiple-mothers theme, being the first female figure that she looked to when she found her own mother lacking as a child. She was probably six then. As a result she's attracted to the idea of goddess-figures in general, and her Anitaverse version would be utterly drawn and devoted to MOAD...how that works out exactly with her not recognizing she's a vampire, well, I think she can easily love MOAD and still believe she's human. A human could totally love MOAD. There's no rule that says they can't! As for how holy objects of her own faith affect her...I have no clue because LKH never covers that, dammit!
Name: Delilah Faith Wancio
Nickname(s)Dolly (since 'Deli' doesn't work too well), Dorklilah/Dumblilah/Dykelilah/etc
Age: eternally 16 physically and mentally, chronologically over 150
Sex:Female
Heritage: Irish mother, Slavic Ukrainian father
Place of Birth: Yorkshire, England
Sexuality:Lesbian, though in a really innocent unaware way. She could never go beyond schoolgirl crushes and hand-holding
Physical Appearance:
~ If she had been born in our modern age, with proper nutrition and medical care, she would be 5'4 and 110-120 lbs. As it is, she was so starved and sickly that she's at a stunted just under/just barely 5'0 and 90s lbs
~ Not much of a figure, if you get my drift
~ Deathly pale skin, some self-harming scars on arms and thighs
~ Blue eyes
~ Oval face, small mouth, mild to moderate acne when alive
~ Long brown hair that falls almost to her waist, gets in her eyes a good deal
~ Small feet
Typical Clothing:
Due to being homeless and often on the move in some way, Delilah has no static wardrobe, but the rats always bring her something to her tastes. Usually it's just basic items, typically in black. Examples of outfits she might be seen in include a black sundress or black jumper dress from a school uniform (no shoes), a black or white shift dress that is basically a very long T-shirt (no shoes), a gray shirt with a squirrel on it and black shorts and one black legwarmer and no shoes, a black tank top and black skirt with black boots and stripey black/white socks, a black T-shirt and grey shorts (no shoes), or a black jacket of some type over a gray sleeveless above-the-knee dress with, you guessed it, no shoes. She likes collars, pearls, frilly wrist cuffs, and lacey-ruffly things when she can get her hands on them, though, and when she does don/find shoes, they are either black boots or black ballerina flats.
PERSONALITY
Delilah is a strange little girl indeed. She lives (as much as she can be said to even be alive, and we're not just saying that because of the vampirism) in the side of shadows where nothing is ever put straight, ever quite right, ever as real as it seems, when it even seems real at all, which it never does. She's really only half in this world mentally, walking through cities and streets in a dreamlike fugue, and her physical form at times almost looks as if it could be as ghostly as her psyche, though this could just be because her frailty in body almost matches her frailty in mind, not to mention the way she goes unnoticed so easily and often just disappears altogether with no hint as to where she vanished to...though she also has the habit of showing up, for no discernible reason, in the situations that are the worst possible for her. If there is an opportunity for her to be mutilated, she's there. She doesn't know how she got there, she may not want to be there, but she'll be right on top of it all the same, and suddenly the little girl that no one can seem to see is a blazing target instead.
Bittersweet, soft, submissive, and sad-eyed, Delilah has little concept of reality and contrasts paranoia with an inability to actually recognize danger. Her fearfulness is outdone only be her blindness towards the awful situations that she is always getting herself into. She's always afraid of what's lurking out of sight, but can't see the real monsters when they're right before her eyes. In fact, she's more likely to cuddle up and cling to them right before the claws rip through her body. But that's not so bad-- she probably wanted it. She's not so much masochistic as maudlin, not so much depraved as depressed. She was a suicidally sorrowful child during life, and after dying and then living again for more than 150 years, her mind still retains a subconscious (and at times, not so subconscious...) drive towards self-destruction. Like a glass doll, she breaks easily, but since she was never fully whole to begin with, she can always return to her original fractured state, put the cracks back in the right place...it is through this twisted 'repair' that she stays, if not sane, at least not even more insane than she already is.
Delilah is basically the butterfly from The Last Unicorn when it comes to how she talks. So much of her very limited mental energy goes into maintaining her fantasy world delusions that her ability to interact with reality is limited as a result, plus resurrection kinda frayed some parts of her upstairs. Or death did, hard to say. Either way, the system in her brain that is responsible for processing thoughts into language got kinda fucked up and only works half-right half the time now. She often only repeats bits of songs she’d heard, books she’d read, metaphorical snippets of how emotions only FEEL versus how they actually are, etc, for communication, because she is no longer CAPABLE of making her own words for the most part. It's like listening to a Tori Amos song; what she says may not make sense just in terms of the words at all, but emotionally it’s clear as crystal to her, and that’s the part that you should try understand. This doesn’t work so well, of course, because most people don't try to understand it that way at all. They just instead perceive her as saying random nonsensical things, but there’s actually a rhyme and reason to it, and it can be translated. But it takes time, and a very rare breed of sensitivity. No loss though, since Delilah doesn’t really say anything worth listening to anyway.
It was not just Delilah's body that froze when she was turned--her mind did as well. She is not only eternally stuck in the same psychology, never mentally growing past the moment when she was turned as most vampires do, but she is even so delusional as to believe that she is a normal modern-day human being. Unable to cope with the idea of eternal life, her mind has completely blocked itself in self-defense from consciously realizing and recognizing that not only is she not human, she's alone in the world. She thinks that she still has a family, and that they are alive, and that they're normal modern-day people who live in a normal modern-day suburban neighborhood. Every decade or so, she just sort of…resets her self-manufactured memories subconsciously so that they’re in-line with how the world currently is; Daddy is a sales manager now, for instance, not a navvy, and she goes to high school, and was never a trapper in the coal mines, adjustments like that. She has no idea that she is dead, making her suicidal tendencies so ironic as to be ridiculous. Delilah erases and resets, erases and resets. She will never know that she is a child of anything but the present, instead of a refugee from the past. The truth would destroy her.
Ever-imaginative, she also constructs many a fantasy world for herself to escape into, and finds living in a fairy tale to be one of the few comforts in her life besides hurting herself. She is passive, she is feminine, she is fairylike, and she is in the habit of ripping herself to pieces. She is also in the habit of squeezing herself into the most compact positions so that she takes up as little space as possible, and of holding anything cylinder in shape ( a lollipop, a chapstick tube, etc.) like a cigarette. She loves all animals, especially rodents, and especially rats most of all. Someone hurting a rat is one of the very few things that could ever cause her to be violent. She also loves unicorns, horses/ponies, carousels, tea parties without tea, pearls, sweets, confined spaces, and folklore/mythology/fairytales. She dislikes boys (they are still icky to her), the smell of cigarette smoke, cold, loudness, crowds, roaches, centipedes, babies, herself, and her big brother Jonas.
Her fears are many, and include paper tigers (literal and metaphorical), a light in the dark, living another day, and the idea that there might be life after death. One of her biggest fears is men, rape, assault, and male sexuality, which are all conflated in her mind, however unfair to the opposite sex that might be. She is also terrified of wolves, werewolves, coyotes, skinwalkers, etc., for the story of Little Red Riding Hood left a very lasting impression on her when she was young. Her weaknesses are also many, and in addition to the insanity and depression already described, Delilah also has very little concept of space, time, and direction, not to mention trusts authority figures (or those who present themselves as such) far too much and far too easily.
Thus far though, she has survived despite herself through many a mishap. It seems she has been cursed with luck in that regard. As for how she feeds without realizing it, Delilah gets the blood that she needs not by attacking anyone, but by crouching down next to passed-out bums and the like and drinking delicately from their hands, like a baby kitten sucking on a bottle, always careful and temperate with her intake. Though this restraint would suggest to some that she is deliberate, she is indeed truly unaware that she is doing such a thing, since, in order to keep the fact that she is a vampire from herself, she goes into a sort of detached auto-pilot state when on the hunt, and buries the memory of it from herself. Doesn't stop her from being a good girl during it, though. She's gentle even when she's crazy. And that's all the time. In fact, besides imagination, perhaps the sole virtue of hers that could be called a strength is her compassionate and tenderhearted nature. But of course, as fate would have it, that's only managed to work against her more often than not in her sad little afterlife so far...
HISTORY
It was the Victorian Era, specifically the 1840s, when a mass exodus of immigrants from Ireland were coming to England due to the Great Famine. Moira O'Daley and her young son, Jonas, were among them. There was no father for Jonas in the picture, because Moira's marriage to him had been annulled (since divorce was not an option for a Catholic like her) and she hoped that a new start in England would allow her to leave the past behind her, as well as the shame that had come from her community for it. After all, given the history of Henry the Eighth, perhaps the English would not be so judgmental about spouses separating over there. She failed to factor in that, unlike herself, Henry the Eighth was not an unmarried woman with a child (very bad back then), lower-class (also bad), an immigrant (bad as well), Catholic (still bad, even if Henry had started as one too) and Irish (about as bad as it got). Still, she did find work as a laundry maid there, and a husband as well, also, of course, Catholic and working-class as well as a fellow immigrant. He was a navvy ( a type of general laborer in the Victorian Era who worked on building large-scale developments such as canals and railways) named Konstantine Wancio and he was a Slavic man from the Ukraine. Immigrants or not, it was very unusual back then for people to marry outside their own ethnic group. However, Moira and Konstantine both people with with very few options. Moira already had a son, making her no virgin and thus unfit for marriage in the eyes of society at large, as well as being a bit older than the average Victorian Bride. As for Konstantine, there were far more eligible Slavic men around in that area at the time than eligible women, and he was quite bad at courting, not to mention that being a navvy was a socially-reviled position by much of Victorian English society due to being a job mostly taken by immigrants. This is not to say that they weren't in love, a luxury that the lower class was afforded since they had no money or land to marry for, but that they likely would still not have wound up together if they had any other options, just for the sake of escaping the scorn of society. Lucky for Moira, Konstantine cared a lot less about that than she did, and had the shockingly modern notion of considering it nobody's business who he took for a wife.
And so they were wed, and had a daughter, Dinah, when Jonas was ten. Dinah, a pale and thin baby who was sickly yet fairy-like in appearance, was already off in the head even before she emerged from the womb, but Jonas, a bad seed, made things worse, as he disliked her right away and took any opportunity he had to harm her, be it physically or emotionally. Dinah in turn lashed out at her younger sister, Pearl, who was born two years after her, since Pearl was the only one smaller than she was. This continued on and on as Dinah got older; Jonas would hurt her worse and worse, her parents would fight about it, and Dinah would attack poor innocent Pearl whose only crime was being alive. Eventually Dinah realized the wrongness of what she was doing to her younger sibling and stopped, becoming mortified with shame for what she had done and forever trying to make it up to Pearl, but Jonas had no such revelation, and continued his cruelty to Dinah, whose mental illness made it difficult for her to truly communicate the extent of what was going on, as well as making her considered less trustworthy in her perceptions of the truth. For indeed, Dinah *was* mentally ill, having inherited depression (then called 'melancholia' or 'the vapors') from Moira's side of the family, which sported a long history of sorrow, suicide, alcoholism, and abuse as a result (Moira herself had a streak of emotional masochism that even her children noticed, and which Jonas exploited). Depression tends to manifest differently in pre-pubescent children than in the way it does in adolescents and adults, and such was the case with Dinah; like many depressed children, her condition took the form of disruptive behavior, of irritability, of being exhausted, of being excited, of difficultly concentrating or of intense obsessive focus from which she could not be deterred, and, most of all, of rage.
She had intense and unstoppable fits and tantrums, terrifying Pearl and her parents. In Victorian times, all children, regardless of class status, were expected to be well behaved, modest and quiet, especially when in the presence of adults. Sparing the rod was not part of the culture either, whether it was in England or from where Moira and Konstantine respectively hailed from, and so Dinah racked up beatings over and over. It must be stated that her parents were NOT cruel or abusive, they both loved her very much (Konstantine, in fact, was extra protective of her, and she was quite the Daddy's Girl) and honestly wanted to help her, this was just the only way they knew *how* back then. Needless to say though, it didn't work; they couldn't beat her brain chemistry out of her. They very rightly feared that she would not be able to function properly enough as a young lady, even one of the scummy working classes, to obtain work, which was needed to make sure the mouths of everyone in the family stayed filled. As it turned out, however, work was one of the few places where she found solace. Moira and Konstantine had found her a job as a trapper in a coal mine, and since a law had been passed about ten years prior to her birth forbidding the employment of females in mines, they passed her off as a boy, using the name of one of her male cousins (Michael Joseph). She was nine years old at the time, which was the age that the children of poor families typically began working in Victorian England, usually at mines or factories.
Being a trapper entailed basically sitting in a cold, dark, damp little mine tunnel for hours and hours with no light or food until the hurriers approached, at which point the trapper would open a trapdoor to let the hurrier and their cargo through, as well as to provide ventilation. It terrified most children, but Dinah was at peace there. The darkness and silence soothed her, and while she could do without the cold and damp, she quite liked the rats that came by now and then in hopes of scraps that the miners might drop from their food. She always tried to have a crust or two to share with them, even if she couldn't see them in the pitch black down there. Thus, Dinah was able to keep this job for years despite the worries of her family. Even when she got old enough for her status as a girl to be apparent, no one really cared or did anything, since labor laws were generally not enforced during this time period unless someone was enough of a prat to squeal about it, which no one did. No, it was Dinah's own mind that did her in.
Entering adolescence had made her depression morph into its more well-known manifestation of worthlessness, hopelessness, and an ever-present clouding of the mind with dimness and despair no matter what external events might be taking place. Sitting alone for hours as her job was now not so much soothing, as it had been in her childhood, but just simply a saving mercy, since her apathetic sadness had turned her into such a lifeless sludge that even the smallest of tasks took all her willpower, and a job that involved more than pulling open the trapdoor with widely spaced increments of time between each pulling would have taxed her beyond her capabilities. Her condition was noticed by her family (not by her friends though, for she had none, having been too strange as a kid and now too disinterested to foster any relationships with her peers) but not understood. They knew they couldn't beat it out of her, but that was about it. Moira, who had seen the trait in her family before, simply chalked it up to "being Irish" and thus naturally moody, but Konstantine tried everything he could to cheer her up, and when she could feel anything at all, it was guilt tearing her inside for not being able to be happy despite all he was doing for her.
Guilt was part of how she justified her desire and plans to kill herself. She told herself that it would be best for everyone. Her family didn't need her, someone so useless and helpless that, should she ever lose her job as a trapper, would be an unemployable burden upon them, that she had caused her parents so much stress with her childhood tantrums, her sister so much pain with her lash-outs. But most of all, she just needed to not exist. She needed for everything to just stop. She could not face a future of being like this, and, with her mindset the way it was, could see no end in sight. Her only way of making it day to day while she worked up the courage and means to end her life was through what today is commonly called cutting. Self-mutilation is often thought to be a modern trend, but it is in fact an ancient manifestation of inner pain, and women and girls who made use of knives and needles upon their own flesh were in no short supply during the 1800s. Dinah was one of them. She didn't realize that letting her pain out like this in fact helped her not kill herself. And she was able to keep it hidden despite the close and crowded quarters her family lived in, due to the modesty standards of the day.
But just because cutting herself helped her suicidal drive, it didn't eliminate it. Instead, it'd be more accurate to say that it was what made her attempts unsuccessful ones, aside from the fact she just always was the type to screw almost anything and everything up, as well as fewer in number than they might otherwise have been. The number, specifically, was three. The first two went unnoticed. Attempt number one was poisoning herself, but as an uneducated peasant girl, she didn't actually know what she needed to buy that would be lethal, nor could she afford it, and she also utterly misunderstood the dosage needed to be deadly of the diluted opiates that she haggled from a street huckster. She ended up just going to sleep at work and getting in trouble for it, not to mention was woozy and constipated for nearly a week afterward. Second time, she tried hanging, but couldn't tie the knot right and it ended up coming undone instantly and she simply fell to the floor, no closer to being dead save for a bruised knee. It was only on the third time that she got caught--she was on the roof of the house, and while she was wasting time trying to gather her courage to jump, Pearl blew the whistle on her to her parents, who came to her rescue before she could do the deed.
Understandably, Konstantine and Moira refused to just let the matter go unaddressed now that they were aware of it. They didn't want to let her out of their sight for fear she'd try again, but they both had to work, and having either of her siblings do the job was not an option either for several reasons. Therefore, it was decided quite swiftly that the best thing to do would be to surrender Dinah to an insane asylum for women. There, the Wancios believed, she would be under constant watch and would get the care and treatment that she needed from people learned in how to help girls like her. It was a terribly heartbreaking decision for them to give her up, but they wanted what was best for Dinah, and they believed that this was it. Like most of the Victorian public, they were unaware of the true and horrific nature of the asylums in that time.
The treatments at such institutions could be as harmless, if ineffective, as foot baths and mustard plasters...or bleeding the patients with leeches, fastening them with muzzles and restraints, and even removing/mutilating the genitalia of female inmates. And at the particular asylum at which Dinah was sent to, there was an extra danger--one of the orderlies working there was in fact a shifter who was in service to a vampire by the name of Lord Ruthven Strongmore. Strongmore was a powerful vampire in the area that was not only in charge of a small number of fellow vampires, but also of some shifters as well. He sought to use science and magic to make himself into the first vampire/shifter hybrid. The subjects that he used as human lab rats (as he certainly wouldn't test anything out on himself until it was proven to work!) were collected by his vampires and shifters and ghouls from among the parts of the population that were least wanted by society and thus least likely to be missed or searched for--the derelicts, the tramps, the prostitutes, and, of course, the mentally ill who had been shut away to rot. Dinah was among those in the last category who were abducted, brought to Strongmore's lab, and turned into vampires for the experiments (since, after all, the goal was to make someone who was *already* a vampire into a hybrid, so all his guinea pigs had to begin as vampires too).
Given the torturous nature of the experiments and the fact that the test subjects were to be killed once they were no longer considered useful, Strongmore did not turn them himself, since he didn't want to risk any potential backlash to himself from their pain and death through the bond that would result between the new vampire and the one who made them, not to mention that, just in case one ever escaped, he wanted there to be nothing that would link them back to him. And how could he be expected to have TIME to turn every test subject? Instead, the vampires under his command did the turning, and the one who sired Dinah was a female named Morella, who herself had also been a victim of Strongmore's scientific pursuits.
Out of all those that Morella was forced to turn, Dinah was the only one that she regarded as really being her child. This was because, unlike the other subjects who feared death, the still-suicidal Dinah was hoping for it, and Morella was a morbid sort. She was also a sentimental sort, in her own strange and hysterical way, and so she waited for an opportunity not only to escape from Lord Ruthven Strongmore herself, but to free Dinah as well if she could. Soon enough, she had devised a plan. Morella arranged for Dinah to be put in a box to be shipped to a safe place (probably to another group of vampires) during daylight disguised as cargo, and the young girl was loaded on to a cart in a crate that looked no different than the other parcels and goods. The journey was only supposed to be a day, but the cart carrying her got waylaid due to a broken wheel and an injured horse, so it was still on the road when the sun went down. When Dinah awoke and began banging on the walls of the crate she was trapped in. The cart driver opened it, and, thinking her to be a stowaway, tossed her out on her own.
Dinah was left to her own devices in a strange place, with no way to find her family and no idea of how to deal with her new vampirism. Worse yet, resurrection had driven her insane. Dying had been all she had ever wanted, and once she'd gotten it, it had been taken away. That, plus perhaps what she'd gone through in the laboratory, had broken her mind, so that while she may have come back from the dead, she did not come back quite the same girl at all. Though she lacked training as a vampire, she had enough basic instincts to be driven to dark places before dawn, and starvation would put her in to 'auto-pilot' mode previously mentioned in her personality.
In order to deal with her new reality, her mind began reshaping the way she perceived the world, so that she in effect didn't perceive it at all, at least not any more so than was necessary, withdrawing into the black and white little world that she had made for herself inside her head, where everything was better, everything was safer, everything was alright. She was never able to find her family again, and so she has crafted the fantasy that she is only out for this one night but will return back home soon to see her loving father and well-meaning mother. And it is in this delusion that she has drifted through the decades like a living mist, barely visible and even less tangible, out of everyone's sight and out of her own mind, hiding out in havens like girls' school as the best of times, and at the worst of times, well...she was victimized plenty a time, we think, but it's hard to say, since her innocence eternally repairs itself so that each new pain will be as fresh as the first was.
She came to the USA in the late 1910s with the wave of European immigrants who were fleeing WWI, which was when her name was changed from Dinah to Delilah and the latter is now the only name she remembers having ever had in the first place. It is not for sure who exactly arranged her passage, or why, but it is likely that it was done by one of the humans that she came under the care of through the years. While the bulk of her existence has been spent alone, there have been a fair few lost souls who took her in here and there, usually seeking someone else in her--a runaway daughter, a dead sister, a companion more pitiable than they were, or perhaps simply just something to hurt.
She's been everybody else's girl, maybe one day she'll be her own...
http://dead-little-girl.tumblr.com/
Delilah has art I drew!
http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/vv59/Lilabella/2013%20Art/Delilah_zpsb1323536.jpg
http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/vv59/Lilabella/2012%20Art/DelJams.jpg
first is how she normally is, second is jammies she'd only have after being taken in by Maureen (see below)
And I got this FUCKING AWESOME AND PERFECT PICTURE OF HER in an art trade with the superb VikingCarrot!
http://dead-little-girl.tumblr.com/post/57562213300/vikingcarrot-6-months-of-avoiding-half-a-dozen
So, uh, this is another doozy, with lots of bullet points and a big copy-pasted profile, and I am so sorry. One day I'll learn how to crunch these things. In the meantime...
+ I originally made Delilah as the modern-day actually-sixteen human girl that she believes she is. She was made when I was in college, maybe nineteen or so, as an experiment in self-insert characters. I knew there was probably no way I could make an objective insert of myself in the present, so I decided to try making a character that was based on my younger self--someone separate from me, but still clearly memorable. I have a history of depression, and this was at the beginning of my recovery, so revisiting my mindset during what was one of the worst times for me psychologically was a very interesting project, and helpful in figuring out who I was now, since getting away from my constant sadness and suicidal ideation had left kind of a big hole where a lot of my identity used to be. I also got a probably-less-healthy kick out of heaping punishment of all kinds on her, because I was just so *angry* with myself for being so fucked up, and she was me, she was the embodiment of me at my most fucked up, so I took out all that self-hate on her through roleplay as much as I could rather than doing *actual* self-punishing behaviors like cutting (which I'm also in recovery for)
When I first got into vampire/shifter/etc setting roleplays, I decided to convert her from being such a straight-up self-insert into a character that was more her own, so I decided she was actually a 150+ years old vampire and her identity as a normal-but-depressed modern teenager was actually a delusion brought on by her inability to cope with her vampirism and immortality. Given her mental fragility and suicidal obsession, it seemed a realistic response, or at least it does to me (there's no way to be sure, of course, since that's a situation that's never going to happen to anyone in real life and thus not something I can research to make sure I'm getting it right, which is a hurdle I've encountered many times since after starting to make supernatural characters). Through this and the subsequent playing she got that developed her further, she became her own person, and Delilah now has no resemblance to me other than some basic physical traits (blue-eyed brunette with scars) and very minor quirks such as liking rats, unicorns, and butch women. Hey, I love ratties so much, somebody in my cast had to too! I still torture her terribly and enjoy putting her through the worst hell, but now it's for fun rather than therapy! She's lucked out ever since I met writtenelision though (see bullet below about her character Maureen) and no longer goes through such terrible ordeals...for now.
+ I technically count Delilah as a child vampire, because even though she's physically sixteen, she was sickly and malnourished enough at death to pass for 14, even 12, and she's emotionally about 6-8 despite a normal IQ.
+ This is her 'generic' profile that I can tweak to adapt to any book or roleplay canon, hence why it doesn't mention the AB-specific detail that Morella, the vampire Ruthven forced to turn Delilah, was a rotting vampire, and that Delilah herself is therefore, in the Anitaverse, a rotter as well. Ruthven preferred to use rotters as his guinea pigs because of how they can heal from much more than a normal vamp can, and thus could undergo more...serious...experimentation.
+ If Dolly gets freaked out and triggered enough, SHE WILL ROT ALL OVER YOU! Other than that though, she's a weak vampire and probably always will be because, well, it's hard to work on increasing your power and skills as one of the undead when you refuse to acknowledge *being* undead.
+ I put her original human name as Dinah in this profile, because it's generally required for roleplay applications that you don't leave anything out or mysterious 9so you can't pull bullshit out of your ass later to get your way/justify something canon-breaking, etc.), but in my own personal stories her human name is never going to be revealed (and as it is, I don't really like Dinah for her anyway, and would be looking for something else if I were still roleplaying)
+ In my original stories and in the Anitaverse version, it's also Morella who renames her Delilah after she is turned, rather than it being changed when she came to America like this profile says. Morella is kind of a melodramatic sort, see. She picked the name "Delilah" not for the character from the Bible, but for its meaning of "delicate, weak, languishing" in Hebrew, as it suited the girl and Morella liked it.
+ Her role in stories is that Ruthven really did alter her in some significant way (I haven't decided what/how yet) and she's important for that reason. But she was just normal vamp in roleplay because making special one-and-only canon-breaking types like that is not my thing. But as a plot device in stories? Yeah, that's cool, especially since she's not the main character. She's obviously got a role in the swanmane/Ruthven plot, and I've mentioned the parent/child relationship with she forms with Gaspard. She also has quite the crush on Max! And because she still wants to die, she's a char I won't kill off. Delilah is never, ever supposed to get what she wants, whether it's death, Max, her family back, etc. She's pretty much the only character who has that immunity.
+ In roleplay, she was adopted by writtenelision's character Maureen instead of Gaspard, and in fact doesn't seem to have even met Gaspard, and her connection to Ruthven isn't known. Gaspard meanwhile adopted writtenelision's character Odette instead. Speaking of Odette, her and Max are sort of a thing, and Delilah is kinda jealous of her and Max, but not in a hostile way, more wistful and admiring. She's also got a friendship of sorts going with Parker, and is probably the only vampire that the Flock would allow her to associate with. Her one other major relationship, besides familial ones with Maureen's husband and son, is with Hank, writtenelision's adorkable wererat. Except that, well, she's not friends with him. She's friends with his rat form. She doesn't seem to really register/recognize he's a wererat that turns back into a human, let alone a human MAN (she's terrified of men, and is only beginning to adjust to Maureen's husband...Simon she's ok with because he's a kid about her apparent age), and not just an adorable giant rat. Hank, being a nice sort, indulges her and lets her treat him like a pet in his rat form and won't turn back around her and spoil her fantasy. Simon, her adopted "brother", who has genuine affection for Delilah but was already a bully towards Hank that loves tormenting him, decided to take advantage of this. Basically...he came up with the bright idea of Delilah riding her giant ratty friend, whom she calls Mr. Zebra, and Maureen even got her pink riding gear custom-made for the body shape of a huge rat! And Simon's idea...was a riding crop that Delilah doesn't know is tipped with silver.
http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/vv59/Lilabella/001.jpg
+ Maureen dresses her up in the most adorable little outfits omg
+ Morella might have been the one to turn her, but Ruthven is the one who forced Morella to do that, so he's just as responsible for her creation. They're pretty much supposed to be the vampire equivalents of her mother and father. I really that's kinda Louis/Lestat/Claudia, but they've got a very different dynamic.
Firstly, while Ruthven is of course very important to Delilah's story, as the person who caused her creation as a vampire and did heinous experiments on her that altered her in equally permanent/significant ways, and is definitely remembered in her subconscious with all the rest of her past, she's...really not important to him at all. He's very much meant to be the Bad Father counterpart to her human Good Part, with all of her real father's bad traits exaggerated to ultimate extreme and with none of his good traits. These former traits are neglect and a lack of emotion. Konstantine was as attentive to his daughter as he could possibly be, but he was still a working man with a family to support, and therefore he wasn't always there to stop the abuse of her brother. Ruthven, of course, has utterly nothing to do with Delilah and the others in his labs beyond that he does to them in experiments. Konstantine had feelings, but he wasn't so great at always showing them, and it could leave Delilah confused and at a loss sometimes...Ruthven just genuinely doesn't have much/any.
While Konstantine and Ruthven are a dichotomy, a set of two, not so much opposites exactly as a shadow image, Moira and Morella were only the first in a series. Delilah goes through multiple mothers, partly through coincidence aka my authorial interference steering them her way, partly through her own subconscious of seeking out a 'better' mother than Moira was. Moira was a good mother in most regards, but as far as Delilah sees it, Moira being unable to stop Jonas hurting her when she was right there in the room is much less forgivable than Konstantine only ever failing because he was away. She's forever felt neglected in that sense, as if her mother chose her brother over her. The fact that her father seemed able to protect her from *everything* when he was present, not just Jonas, only further emphasized to her how helpless her mother was at protecting her from anything else. Again, this is really not fair to Moira, but it's how Delilah saw it, and it's what first made her turn to the Virgin Mary as a substitute-mother figure, whereas she's never felt the need to seek out another father because in her eyes Konstantine was PERFECT.
Ruthven very much a counterpart to her father, all his bad traits e
Her original mother Moira, the Virgin mary, then Morella, maybe Lucretia, Maureen in RP, MOAD in the Anitaverse, and many, many more throughout the years, both human and monster.
Maybe there's some resolution to this whole "two fathers, many mothers" deal with Gaspard becoming her next parent-figure, seeing as how Gaspard is androgynous, but who knows, maybe that's just the next step in the cycle instead.
+ Delilah is still very Catholic, just as she was raised to be, but this doesn't negate her belief in more heathen things as well. She was deeply interested in the folklore and myths that her parents told her from their respective homelands, as well as the ones she heard from locals in England, and this gathering of stories from all over the world continued into her death...with the additional aspect that her insanity now causes her to believe in them to varying degrees more often than not. She's also not so much Catholic, to be honest, as Marian. The Virgin Mary is the part she's most focused on, the part she finds most spiritually relevant and resonating to herself, the part she really FEELS the very most. Needless to say, Mary fits in with her multiple-mothers theme, being the first female figure that she looked to when she found her own mother lacking as a child. She was probably six then. As a result she's attracted to the idea of goddess-figures in general, and her Anitaverse version would be utterly drawn and devoted to MOAD...how that works out exactly with her not recognizing she's a vampire, well, I think she can easily love MOAD and still believe she's human. A human could totally love MOAD. There's no rule that says they can't! As for how holy objects of her own faith affect her...I have no clue because LKH never covers that, dammit!
Name: Delilah Faith Wancio
Nickname(s)Dolly (since 'Deli' doesn't work too well), Dorklilah/Dumblilah/Dykelilah/etc
Age: eternally 16 physically and mentally, chronologically over 150
Sex:Female
Heritage: Irish mother, Slavic Ukrainian father
Place of Birth: Yorkshire, England
Sexuality:Lesbian, though in a really innocent unaware way. She could never go beyond schoolgirl crushes and hand-holding
Physical Appearance:
~ If she had been born in our modern age, with proper nutrition and medical care, she would be 5'4 and 110-120 lbs. As it is, she was so starved and sickly that she's at a stunted just under/just barely 5'0 and 90s lbs
~ Not much of a figure, if you get my drift
~ Deathly pale skin, some self-harming scars on arms and thighs
~ Blue eyes
~ Oval face, small mouth, mild to moderate acne when alive
~ Long brown hair that falls almost to her waist, gets in her eyes a good deal
~ Small feet
Typical Clothing:
Due to being homeless and often on the move in some way, Delilah has no static wardrobe, but the rats always bring her something to her tastes. Usually it's just basic items, typically in black. Examples of outfits she might be seen in include a black sundress or black jumper dress from a school uniform (no shoes), a black or white shift dress that is basically a very long T-shirt (no shoes), a gray shirt with a squirrel on it and black shorts and one black legwarmer and no shoes, a black tank top and black skirt with black boots and stripey black/white socks, a black T-shirt and grey shorts (no shoes), or a black jacket of some type over a gray sleeveless above-the-knee dress with, you guessed it, no shoes. She likes collars, pearls, frilly wrist cuffs, and lacey-ruffly things when she can get her hands on them, though, and when she does don/find shoes, they are either black boots or black ballerina flats.
PERSONALITY
Delilah is a strange little girl indeed. She lives (as much as she can be said to even be alive, and we're not just saying that because of the vampirism) in the side of shadows where nothing is ever put straight, ever quite right, ever as real as it seems, when it even seems real at all, which it never does. She's really only half in this world mentally, walking through cities and streets in a dreamlike fugue, and her physical form at times almost looks as if it could be as ghostly as her psyche, though this could just be because her frailty in body almost matches her frailty in mind, not to mention the way she goes unnoticed so easily and often just disappears altogether with no hint as to where she vanished to...though she also has the habit of showing up, for no discernible reason, in the situations that are the worst possible for her. If there is an opportunity for her to be mutilated, she's there. She doesn't know how she got there, she may not want to be there, but she'll be right on top of it all the same, and suddenly the little girl that no one can seem to see is a blazing target instead.
Bittersweet, soft, submissive, and sad-eyed, Delilah has little concept of reality and contrasts paranoia with an inability to actually recognize danger. Her fearfulness is outdone only be her blindness towards the awful situations that she is always getting herself into. She's always afraid of what's lurking out of sight, but can't see the real monsters when they're right before her eyes. In fact, she's more likely to cuddle up and cling to them right before the claws rip through her body. But that's not so bad-- she probably wanted it. She's not so much masochistic as maudlin, not so much depraved as depressed. She was a suicidally sorrowful child during life, and after dying and then living again for more than 150 years, her mind still retains a subconscious (and at times, not so subconscious...) drive towards self-destruction. Like a glass doll, she breaks easily, but since she was never fully whole to begin with, she can always return to her original fractured state, put the cracks back in the right place...it is through this twisted 'repair' that she stays, if not sane, at least not even more insane than she already is.
Delilah is basically the butterfly from The Last Unicorn when it comes to how she talks. So much of her very limited mental energy goes into maintaining her fantasy world delusions that her ability to interact with reality is limited as a result, plus resurrection kinda frayed some parts of her upstairs. Or death did, hard to say. Either way, the system in her brain that is responsible for processing thoughts into language got kinda fucked up and only works half-right half the time now. She often only repeats bits of songs she’d heard, books she’d read, metaphorical snippets of how emotions only FEEL versus how they actually are, etc, for communication, because she is no longer CAPABLE of making her own words for the most part. It's like listening to a Tori Amos song; what she says may not make sense just in terms of the words at all, but emotionally it’s clear as crystal to her, and that’s the part that you should try understand. This doesn’t work so well, of course, because most people don't try to understand it that way at all. They just instead perceive her as saying random nonsensical things, but there’s actually a rhyme and reason to it, and it can be translated. But it takes time, and a very rare breed of sensitivity. No loss though, since Delilah doesn’t really say anything worth listening to anyway.
It was not just Delilah's body that froze when she was turned--her mind did as well. She is not only eternally stuck in the same psychology, never mentally growing past the moment when she was turned as most vampires do, but she is even so delusional as to believe that she is a normal modern-day human being. Unable to cope with the idea of eternal life, her mind has completely blocked itself in self-defense from consciously realizing and recognizing that not only is she not human, she's alone in the world. She thinks that she still has a family, and that they are alive, and that they're normal modern-day people who live in a normal modern-day suburban neighborhood. Every decade or so, she just sort of…resets her self-manufactured memories subconsciously so that they’re in-line with how the world currently is; Daddy is a sales manager now, for instance, not a navvy, and she goes to high school, and was never a trapper in the coal mines, adjustments like that. She has no idea that she is dead, making her suicidal tendencies so ironic as to be ridiculous. Delilah erases and resets, erases and resets. She will never know that she is a child of anything but the present, instead of a refugee from the past. The truth would destroy her.
Ever-imaginative, she also constructs many a fantasy world for herself to escape into, and finds living in a fairy tale to be one of the few comforts in her life besides hurting herself. She is passive, she is feminine, she is fairylike, and she is in the habit of ripping herself to pieces. She is also in the habit of squeezing herself into the most compact positions so that she takes up as little space as possible, and of holding anything cylinder in shape ( a lollipop, a chapstick tube, etc.) like a cigarette. She loves all animals, especially rodents, and especially rats most of all. Someone hurting a rat is one of the very few things that could ever cause her to be violent. She also loves unicorns, horses/ponies, carousels, tea parties without tea, pearls, sweets, confined spaces, and folklore/mythology/fairytales. She dislikes boys (they are still icky to her), the smell of cigarette smoke, cold, loudness, crowds, roaches, centipedes, babies, herself, and her big brother Jonas.
Her fears are many, and include paper tigers (literal and metaphorical), a light in the dark, living another day, and the idea that there might be life after death. One of her biggest fears is men, rape, assault, and male sexuality, which are all conflated in her mind, however unfair to the opposite sex that might be. She is also terrified of wolves, werewolves, coyotes, skinwalkers, etc., for the story of Little Red Riding Hood left a very lasting impression on her when she was young. Her weaknesses are also many, and in addition to the insanity and depression already described, Delilah also has very little concept of space, time, and direction, not to mention trusts authority figures (or those who present themselves as such) far too much and far too easily.
Thus far though, she has survived despite herself through many a mishap. It seems she has been cursed with luck in that regard. As for how she feeds without realizing it, Delilah gets the blood that she needs not by attacking anyone, but by crouching down next to passed-out bums and the like and drinking delicately from their hands, like a baby kitten sucking on a bottle, always careful and temperate with her intake. Though this restraint would suggest to some that she is deliberate, she is indeed truly unaware that she is doing such a thing, since, in order to keep the fact that she is a vampire from herself, she goes into a sort of detached auto-pilot state when on the hunt, and buries the memory of it from herself. Doesn't stop her from being a good girl during it, though. She's gentle even when she's crazy. And that's all the time. In fact, besides imagination, perhaps the sole virtue of hers that could be called a strength is her compassionate and tenderhearted nature. But of course, as fate would have it, that's only managed to work against her more often than not in her sad little afterlife so far...
HISTORY
It was the Victorian Era, specifically the 1840s, when a mass exodus of immigrants from Ireland were coming to England due to the Great Famine. Moira O'Daley and her young son, Jonas, were among them. There was no father for Jonas in the picture, because Moira's marriage to him had been annulled (since divorce was not an option for a Catholic like her) and she hoped that a new start in England would allow her to leave the past behind her, as well as the shame that had come from her community for it. After all, given the history of Henry the Eighth, perhaps the English would not be so judgmental about spouses separating over there. She failed to factor in that, unlike herself, Henry the Eighth was not an unmarried woman with a child (very bad back then), lower-class (also bad), an immigrant (bad as well), Catholic (still bad, even if Henry had started as one too) and Irish (about as bad as it got). Still, she did find work as a laundry maid there, and a husband as well, also, of course, Catholic and working-class as well as a fellow immigrant. He was a navvy ( a type of general laborer in the Victorian Era who worked on building large-scale developments such as canals and railways) named Konstantine Wancio and he was a Slavic man from the Ukraine. Immigrants or not, it was very unusual back then for people to marry outside their own ethnic group. However, Moira and Konstantine both people with with very few options. Moira already had a son, making her no virgin and thus unfit for marriage in the eyes of society at large, as well as being a bit older than the average Victorian Bride. As for Konstantine, there were far more eligible Slavic men around in that area at the time than eligible women, and he was quite bad at courting, not to mention that being a navvy was a socially-reviled position by much of Victorian English society due to being a job mostly taken by immigrants. This is not to say that they weren't in love, a luxury that the lower class was afforded since they had no money or land to marry for, but that they likely would still not have wound up together if they had any other options, just for the sake of escaping the scorn of society. Lucky for Moira, Konstantine cared a lot less about that than she did, and had the shockingly modern notion of considering it nobody's business who he took for a wife.
And so they were wed, and had a daughter, Dinah, when Jonas was ten. Dinah, a pale and thin baby who was sickly yet fairy-like in appearance, was already off in the head even before she emerged from the womb, but Jonas, a bad seed, made things worse, as he disliked her right away and took any opportunity he had to harm her, be it physically or emotionally. Dinah in turn lashed out at her younger sister, Pearl, who was born two years after her, since Pearl was the only one smaller than she was. This continued on and on as Dinah got older; Jonas would hurt her worse and worse, her parents would fight about it, and Dinah would attack poor innocent Pearl whose only crime was being alive. Eventually Dinah realized the wrongness of what she was doing to her younger sibling and stopped, becoming mortified with shame for what she had done and forever trying to make it up to Pearl, but Jonas had no such revelation, and continued his cruelty to Dinah, whose mental illness made it difficult for her to truly communicate the extent of what was going on, as well as making her considered less trustworthy in her perceptions of the truth. For indeed, Dinah *was* mentally ill, having inherited depression (then called 'melancholia' or 'the vapors') from Moira's side of the family, which sported a long history of sorrow, suicide, alcoholism, and abuse as a result (Moira herself had a streak of emotional masochism that even her children noticed, and which Jonas exploited). Depression tends to manifest differently in pre-pubescent children than in the way it does in adolescents and adults, and such was the case with Dinah; like many depressed children, her condition took the form of disruptive behavior, of irritability, of being exhausted, of being excited, of difficultly concentrating or of intense obsessive focus from which she could not be deterred, and, most of all, of rage.
She had intense and unstoppable fits and tantrums, terrifying Pearl and her parents. In Victorian times, all children, regardless of class status, were expected to be well behaved, modest and quiet, especially when in the presence of adults. Sparing the rod was not part of the culture either, whether it was in England or from where Moira and Konstantine respectively hailed from, and so Dinah racked up beatings over and over. It must be stated that her parents were NOT cruel or abusive, they both loved her very much (Konstantine, in fact, was extra protective of her, and she was quite the Daddy's Girl) and honestly wanted to help her, this was just the only way they knew *how* back then. Needless to say though, it didn't work; they couldn't beat her brain chemistry out of her. They very rightly feared that she would not be able to function properly enough as a young lady, even one of the scummy working classes, to obtain work, which was needed to make sure the mouths of everyone in the family stayed filled. As it turned out, however, work was one of the few places where she found solace. Moira and Konstantine had found her a job as a trapper in a coal mine, and since a law had been passed about ten years prior to her birth forbidding the employment of females in mines, they passed her off as a boy, using the name of one of her male cousins (Michael Joseph). She was nine years old at the time, which was the age that the children of poor families typically began working in Victorian England, usually at mines or factories.
Being a trapper entailed basically sitting in a cold, dark, damp little mine tunnel for hours and hours with no light or food until the hurriers approached, at which point the trapper would open a trapdoor to let the hurrier and their cargo through, as well as to provide ventilation. It terrified most children, but Dinah was at peace there. The darkness and silence soothed her, and while she could do without the cold and damp, she quite liked the rats that came by now and then in hopes of scraps that the miners might drop from their food. She always tried to have a crust or two to share with them, even if she couldn't see them in the pitch black down there. Thus, Dinah was able to keep this job for years despite the worries of her family. Even when she got old enough for her status as a girl to be apparent, no one really cared or did anything, since labor laws were generally not enforced during this time period unless someone was enough of a prat to squeal about it, which no one did. No, it was Dinah's own mind that did her in.
Entering adolescence had made her depression morph into its more well-known manifestation of worthlessness, hopelessness, and an ever-present clouding of the mind with dimness and despair no matter what external events might be taking place. Sitting alone for hours as her job was now not so much soothing, as it had been in her childhood, but just simply a saving mercy, since her apathetic sadness had turned her into such a lifeless sludge that even the smallest of tasks took all her willpower, and a job that involved more than pulling open the trapdoor with widely spaced increments of time between each pulling would have taxed her beyond her capabilities. Her condition was noticed by her family (not by her friends though, for she had none, having been too strange as a kid and now too disinterested to foster any relationships with her peers) but not understood. They knew they couldn't beat it out of her, but that was about it. Moira, who had seen the trait in her family before, simply chalked it up to "being Irish" and thus naturally moody, but Konstantine tried everything he could to cheer her up, and when she could feel anything at all, it was guilt tearing her inside for not being able to be happy despite all he was doing for her.
Guilt was part of how she justified her desire and plans to kill herself. She told herself that it would be best for everyone. Her family didn't need her, someone so useless and helpless that, should she ever lose her job as a trapper, would be an unemployable burden upon them, that she had caused her parents so much stress with her childhood tantrums, her sister so much pain with her lash-outs. But most of all, she just needed to not exist. She needed for everything to just stop. She could not face a future of being like this, and, with her mindset the way it was, could see no end in sight. Her only way of making it day to day while she worked up the courage and means to end her life was through what today is commonly called cutting. Self-mutilation is often thought to be a modern trend, but it is in fact an ancient manifestation of inner pain, and women and girls who made use of knives and needles upon their own flesh were in no short supply during the 1800s. Dinah was one of them. She didn't realize that letting her pain out like this in fact helped her not kill herself. And she was able to keep it hidden despite the close and crowded quarters her family lived in, due to the modesty standards of the day.
But just because cutting herself helped her suicidal drive, it didn't eliminate it. Instead, it'd be more accurate to say that it was what made her attempts unsuccessful ones, aside from the fact she just always was the type to screw almost anything and everything up, as well as fewer in number than they might otherwise have been. The number, specifically, was three. The first two went unnoticed. Attempt number one was poisoning herself, but as an uneducated peasant girl, she didn't actually know what she needed to buy that would be lethal, nor could she afford it, and she also utterly misunderstood the dosage needed to be deadly of the diluted opiates that she haggled from a street huckster. She ended up just going to sleep at work and getting in trouble for it, not to mention was woozy and constipated for nearly a week afterward. Second time, she tried hanging, but couldn't tie the knot right and it ended up coming undone instantly and she simply fell to the floor, no closer to being dead save for a bruised knee. It was only on the third time that she got caught--she was on the roof of the house, and while she was wasting time trying to gather her courage to jump, Pearl blew the whistle on her to her parents, who came to her rescue before she could do the deed.
Understandably, Konstantine and Moira refused to just let the matter go unaddressed now that they were aware of it. They didn't want to let her out of their sight for fear she'd try again, but they both had to work, and having either of her siblings do the job was not an option either for several reasons. Therefore, it was decided quite swiftly that the best thing to do would be to surrender Dinah to an insane asylum for women. There, the Wancios believed, she would be under constant watch and would get the care and treatment that she needed from people learned in how to help girls like her. It was a terribly heartbreaking decision for them to give her up, but they wanted what was best for Dinah, and they believed that this was it. Like most of the Victorian public, they were unaware of the true and horrific nature of the asylums in that time.
The treatments at such institutions could be as harmless, if ineffective, as foot baths and mustard plasters...or bleeding the patients with leeches, fastening them with muzzles and restraints, and even removing/mutilating the genitalia of female inmates. And at the particular asylum at which Dinah was sent to, there was an extra danger--one of the orderlies working there was in fact a shifter who was in service to a vampire by the name of Lord Ruthven Strongmore. Strongmore was a powerful vampire in the area that was not only in charge of a small number of fellow vampires, but also of some shifters as well. He sought to use science and magic to make himself into the first vampire/shifter hybrid. The subjects that he used as human lab rats (as he certainly wouldn't test anything out on himself until it was proven to work!) were collected by his vampires and shifters and ghouls from among the parts of the population that were least wanted by society and thus least likely to be missed or searched for--the derelicts, the tramps, the prostitutes, and, of course, the mentally ill who had been shut away to rot. Dinah was among those in the last category who were abducted, brought to Strongmore's lab, and turned into vampires for the experiments (since, after all, the goal was to make someone who was *already* a vampire into a hybrid, so all his guinea pigs had to begin as vampires too).
Given the torturous nature of the experiments and the fact that the test subjects were to be killed once they were no longer considered useful, Strongmore did not turn them himself, since he didn't want to risk any potential backlash to himself from their pain and death through the bond that would result between the new vampire and the one who made them, not to mention that, just in case one ever escaped, he wanted there to be nothing that would link them back to him. And how could he be expected to have TIME to turn every test subject? Instead, the vampires under his command did the turning, and the one who sired Dinah was a female named Morella, who herself had also been a victim of Strongmore's scientific pursuits.
Out of all those that Morella was forced to turn, Dinah was the only one that she regarded as really being her child. This was because, unlike the other subjects who feared death, the still-suicidal Dinah was hoping for it, and Morella was a morbid sort. She was also a sentimental sort, in her own strange and hysterical way, and so she waited for an opportunity not only to escape from Lord Ruthven Strongmore herself, but to free Dinah as well if she could. Soon enough, she had devised a plan. Morella arranged for Dinah to be put in a box to be shipped to a safe place (probably to another group of vampires) during daylight disguised as cargo, and the young girl was loaded on to a cart in a crate that looked no different than the other parcels and goods. The journey was only supposed to be a day, but the cart carrying her got waylaid due to a broken wheel and an injured horse, so it was still on the road when the sun went down. When Dinah awoke and began banging on the walls of the crate she was trapped in. The cart driver opened it, and, thinking her to be a stowaway, tossed her out on her own.
Dinah was left to her own devices in a strange place, with no way to find her family and no idea of how to deal with her new vampirism. Worse yet, resurrection had driven her insane. Dying had been all she had ever wanted, and once she'd gotten it, it had been taken away. That, plus perhaps what she'd gone through in the laboratory, had broken her mind, so that while she may have come back from the dead, she did not come back quite the same girl at all. Though she lacked training as a vampire, she had enough basic instincts to be driven to dark places before dawn, and starvation would put her in to 'auto-pilot' mode previously mentioned in her personality.
In order to deal with her new reality, her mind began reshaping the way she perceived the world, so that she in effect didn't perceive it at all, at least not any more so than was necessary, withdrawing into the black and white little world that she had made for herself inside her head, where everything was better, everything was safer, everything was alright. She was never able to find her family again, and so she has crafted the fantasy that she is only out for this one night but will return back home soon to see her loving father and well-meaning mother. And it is in this delusion that she has drifted through the decades like a living mist, barely visible and even less tangible, out of everyone's sight and out of her own mind, hiding out in havens like girls' school as the best of times, and at the worst of times, well...she was victimized plenty a time, we think, but it's hard to say, since her innocence eternally repairs itself so that each new pain will be as fresh as the first was.
She came to the USA in the late 1910s with the wave of European immigrants who were fleeing WWI, which was when her name was changed from Dinah to Delilah and the latter is now the only name she remembers having ever had in the first place. It is not for sure who exactly arranged her passage, or why, but it is likely that it was done by one of the humans that she came under the care of through the years. While the bulk of her existence has been spent alone, there have been a fair few lost souls who took her in here and there, usually seeking someone else in her--a runaway daughter, a dead sister, a companion more pitiable than they were, or perhaps simply just something to hurt.
She's been everybody else's girl, maybe one day she'll be her own...
