Post by Arsenal on Jan 18, 2016 7:43:18 GMT
DAHLIA
•19•HENCH•JUNO TEMPLE
Headshot by Cayran
•19•HENCH•JUNO TEMPLE
Headshot by Cayran
Dahlia is a tortoiseshell, mostly black down her body with touches of flaming red-orange on her limbs and tail and, most notably, in the small ruff looping around her shoulders and down her white bib, bursting around her like a firecracker. The bottom half of her face is the same shade of orange, and the color creeps up her right cheek, mottled among the black until it reaches her right eye. Her mane is of standard length, but curly, bouncing around her head like a dark, orange-flecked cloud. Her eyes are blue-green, glittering with brown, and most often bright and upturned with a smile. She has a variety of scars scattered across her body, which are mostly hidden by her fur. Most cats wouldn't know they were there unless they felt them. She wears a plain black collar from which dangles a wire-wrapped obsidian pendant that she uses to access her intuitive powers.Family:
Dahlia is the seventh of nine kits (eight of them still alive today), with about six fathers between them. She does not know who her father is, but unfortunately knows her mother, and lived with her through her youth. They all still live near Bristol, as far as she knows. She may have more younger half-siblings, but she has not seen her family in years, and most of them are little more than a dim memory to her. (Open to additions!)
Additional Family
Half-Siblings: Tanatia (unknown)Personality:
+Friendly
Dahlia is the type to make friends everywhere. The old tom who sleeps in the alleyway across from the pub? Potential best friend, source of fascinating life stories, and a definite good time. The stony queen who stares at the horizon day after day, speaking to few and smiling at none? Well, surely Dahlia can get a laugh or two out of her. She wants to know everything about everyone, and is very talented in putting the cats around her at ease. To her, there's nothing more boring than seeing a cat and not knowing the stories behind them.+Courageous
Foolhardy and foolish is more like it, but Dahlia prefers to view things in a positive light. Nothing really phases her, and she goes through life with almost reckless enthusiasm, poking at things that would be best left unpoked. There are some that might argue it's because she has little regard for the value of her own life, and, well, they just might be right. Either way, Dahlia will act as she pleases, regardless of any fear in her heart.+Generous
Living their early life with nothing will do that to a cat, really. Dahlia is deeply empathetic, and seeing somebody go without aches deep down to her core. So long as she has the power, she will do whatever it takes to keep a cat feeling safe and happy - even if it means suffering herself. True, this is linked to her disregard for her own health and safety, but genuine concern for the well-being of others is the strongest driving factor of this trait of hers. Besides, she was trained to have a servant's heart and put the needs of others well above her own. And she is very dedicated to her training still.
+Optimistic
The worst has already happened to her, what is there left to keep her spirits down? The world is full of nothing but positive experiences for her from here on out. Hell, even the bad experiences are positive - in the sense that they teach her a lesson. Dahlia takes her optimism almost to an extreme, refusing to view anything in a bad light. In her experience, letting that kind of negativity dampen her spirits leads down a dark hole that she's not entirely sure she could escape.
-Brash
Dahlia has a louder-than-life sense of confidence that borders on cockiness. After all, she's a damn delight. Why would she ever let herself believe otherwise? She has no filter, no limits, and no brakes. 'Consequence' is a foreign word to her. She's lightning covered in fur, a firework suspended in that moment before the explosion, ready to burst at a moment's notice.
-Impatient
Dahlia is not fond of waiting around anymore. She is all about action, action, action, getting out into the world and doing what needs to be done. Anything that causes a delay will either irritate her to no end or, on a bad day, send her into a spiral of frayed nerves. There's a great wide world of things to do out there, and a deep part of her resents being held up away from it. She is also predisposed to perceive virtually all situations that halt her path as threatening, as there was a period of her life where not responding promptly could result in severe punishment.
-Destructive
Dahlia has, as far as she sees it, a healthy curiosity about the concept of destruction. It's an obsession, really. The concept of humanity (or felinity, if you will) is endlessly fascinating to her, and she loves the question of how far a cat can be pushed before they break. She is masochistic and sadistic in even levels, loving to be toyed with and tortured just as much as she loves watching another cat learn the beauty of pain. Destruction is cleansing, destruction exposes truths that cats didn't even know they had, and hell, sometimes it's just plain fun.-Unhinged
You wouldn't know it, looking at her. Even after a few conversations with her, you might still be in the dark about this side. But make no mistake - Dahlia is completely and irreconcilably unhinged. Her grasp on reality is strained at best and dangerous at worst. Mortality is a foreign idea to her, and she was trained to lose all sense of personal autonomy. She has long since forgotten that these are things most cats still hold in high regard. Though she won't judge anyone for seeing the world differently than her. To each their own, right?History:
Dahlia never expected to live a very happy, successful life. She was born near Bristol, the seventh of nine unwanted kits, to a low-brow outcast of a mother. Alys and her family were part of no tribe, so Dahlia spent her kittenhood living on the streets and, for the most part, fending for herself. Her mother was by no means an active participant in her kittenhood. In fact, for the first few years of her life, she thought her oldest sister was her mother. Janei was the one who made sure she was fed, bathed her, kept her out of harm's way, and taught her everything she needed to know to survive.
Her life was never quite ideal, but she was happy. That is, until she was about ten years old. Her Janei, her bright, lovely Janei, was found behind a nearby pub with a slash across her throat. There was nothing any of her siblings could do, though they all knew who'd done it. Their mother's fling, her flavor of the week, the slimy, despicable tom whose eyes were on Janei far more often than they were on their mother. Dahlia had to learn to take care of herself from then on, and the only way she knew how to do that was by taking care of her younger sister, Viv.
She likes to say that drugs found her. They were abundant in her neighborhood, and she fell into that scene just a few short years after Janei's death. She hid it all from Viv as well as she could, though she knew her sister was old enough to know what was going on. Young as Dahlia was, she kept up with the best of them, partying and sleeping around as much as she needed to keep the darkness at bay.
Her mother's track record of letting her down her came to a glorious crescendo when Dahlia was thirteen. Alys had gotten into a spot of trouble with a local gang - mob, to be more precise - over a debt she owed them. Of course, Alys had little more to her name than her kittens, so that is where she turned. She barely hesitated in handing Dahlia, the prettiest of her daughters, over to them in exchange for a pardon from all of her past debts. Dahlia was then purchased by one of the leader's business partners, an older tom near London whose name she was never allowed to know. Thus began her second life, with Sir.
She was born into withdrawal, not allowed so much a drop of alcohol or a glimpse or any sort of drug. Dirty, dirty habits, and Sir liked to keep things clean. Her first months were spent mostly in semi-solitude, with occasional visits from Sir. If she was good, she got to spend a few days at a time with him, so that he could train her more closely. Otherwise, she lived in a cell among Sir's other pets. They could not see each other, and were not supposed to speak to each other, but she would often hold whispered conversations with the ones closest to her to pass the time.
It only took Sir a few months to break her down, once they both discovered her inclination toward destruction. The first step as a psychological break from the memory of her family, from anything keeping her tethered to her 'first life'. Sir was an expert and an artist. Erasing her mother from her consciousness was easy, and he knew exactly what buttons to push to shed her of her sense of obligation toward her siblings. A mix of isolation, water torture, sleep deprivation, and gas-lighting severed any ties she felt with her siblings within a few weeks. All but one. Nothing Sir did could ever empty her younger sister from her heart. Dahlia shared this with him accidentally, feeling almost triumphant, and his methods turned more brutal. She spent her days in agony, until the moment it felt like a switch had flipped in her mind, and something within her had become unhinged.
She was like clay in Sir's paws. The easiest project he'd ever had, he would often tell her. She was allowed out of her cell only four months after his purchase of her, the fastest any of his pets had ever achieved. This was when the second step of her training began. Sir was very particular about what he expected from his pets. Over the course of two months, she was taught how to clean for him, how to cook for him, how to keep herself looking nice and clean for him, and, most importantly, how to keep him satisfied in bed. It was a much more enjoyable process than being broken in, and Dahlia learned plenty about herself along the way. Sex was an absolute joy, and pain was a cleansing, maddening reward.
Her most cherished reward, though, was getting to sit in when Sir doled out punishments to some of the other pets. It was in these sessions that she learned how far a cat can be bent before they snap - a process that she considered the most beautiful thing nature could possibly conceive. Getting up close to them and watching the look in their eyes slide from resistant to submissive, watching them melt under Sir's touch, was the highest honor ever bestowed upon her. Seeing the effect she had on the other pets, Sir put her to work welcoming new cats and explaining the details of their new life under his care.
Sadly, she had barely a year of bliss until Sir's compound was raided by a nearby tribe who had lost one of their members to him. They 'liberated' Dahlia and the other pets, and Sir was put to death mere days later. Many of the pets went back to their homes and families, but Dahlia did not. She had no family any longer - despite the hole in her heart that ached for her younger sister, who was nothing but a distant memory, a dream she'd all but forgotten. She followed a number of Sir's pets in joining the tribe that had freed them. Her fifteenth birthday passed unknown and unacknowledged.
Dahlia didn't even last a month with the new tribe. Everybody had pity in their eyes when they looked at her, and self-satisfactory smugness, like they had rescued her from some terribly traumatic life. They had no idea what they'd done to her, what sort of tailspin they'd set her into. She had been Sir's favorite, his most treasured, and they had ripped that away from her and expected to be thanked. So she ran. She didn't know where she was going, but she knew her best bet would be the nearby city of London that many of the cats had mentioned.
She arrived in London after a few days of travelling, and almost instantly befriended a mystic queen named Niylah. Niylah had the ability to sense mysticism in other cats, and her sense of Dahlia's powers overwhelmed her instantly. Together, the two spent nearly half a year tapping into her abilities and testing the limits. It was Niylah who found her the obsidian pendant, and taught her how to access her power while in conversation with other cats, Niylah who taught her how to recognize when it needed to be recharged and how to recharge it, Niylah who taught her what the signs meant and how to recognize a cat's sign even without her powers. As intuitive as she already was, Dahlia was a natural.
But Niylah did not have a very dominant personality, and therefore did not give her the kind of environment Dahlia needed to help in her transition into her new life of freedom. So she pointed her in the direction of the notorious Macavity and the Henches, where she knew Dahlia would be able to find a balance between freedom and control that would hopefully help her thrive. And thus, at fifteen-years-old, Dahlia sought out Macavity's Warehouse and pledged herself to his service.
She has made plenty of friends in the four years she has been with the Henches, and has come to worship Macavity and the things he can do, but she struggles all the same. She misses Sir. She misses the other pets. She spends her nights dreaming of somebody who might be a little sister, or maybe an older one. And she struggles every day to comprehend the idea that she can go anywhere, speak to anyone, and do more or less whatever she desires. Perhaps one day, she will remember what it is to be a cat with autonomy. But for now, she is simply Dahlia.Powers:
Dahlia has the ability to sense a cat's astrological sign. She is intuitively connected to the movements and meanings of the planets, and what this means in accordance with a cat's personality. The advantage this power gives her is that she can sense a cat's hidden motivations and desires, making her quite adept at both making friends and dealing with enemies.Weaknesses:
Dahlia's power is linked to the obsidian pendant she wears at her throat. She cannot access any of her mystic intuition without that pendant. Unfortunately, the pendant needs to be 'recharged' if it is used too often, a process which typically takes a full twenty-four hours, so there are days where she is without it. This happens at least once a week, though it can happen more often if she accesses her powers more often. She is still rather skilled at deducing a cat's sign without her powers, based solely on their personality and her experience, but she has no way of deducing anything deeper than that.Fun Facts:
-Dahlia has no fear of water after the water torture she endured in Sir's care. She swims in the Thames when the weather is nice, and one of her favorite ways to decompress after a particular hardship is to hold herself underwater until she is just on the verge of passing out, over and over again, until her mind is cleared.
-Dahlia has no sense of personal space or privacy, for herself or others. She'll lounge in one of the other Hench cat's dens if it looks comfortable to her, rifle through their stuff if she spies something interesting, shout private information across a crowded room, you name it.
-Dahlia hero-worships Macavity. She absolutely adores him. Such a powerful and skilled cat in a position of direct authority over her is all she really needs in life, and she is loyal to him to such a disturbing level that she would crawl through the flames of hell if he said he needed her to deliver a message to the devil.
-Dahlia has a lot of casual sex, and it can never be anything more than casual. Sex has no personal meaning attached to it in her eyes. Usually, she is either doing her duty by serving those in a higher position than her, or helping somebody else feel better the best way she knows how. She is not asexual by any means. Her training has simply given her an incredibly skewed view on sex.
-Dahlia is not allowed to drink or use drugs of any sort. Nobody is stopping her now, of course, but one of the things that Sir drilled into her brain over and over is that those are dirty habits, and they are not for good pets like her. This is a struggle for her, as she fell into addiction at such a young age and is now around alcohol and drugs fairly often.
