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[faithaintdoneshit]

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Sophie
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Hell yeah
CONTACT: plurk; skype: pumpkinmushroom (dn: butt stallion) ; PM this journal
CHARACTERS PLAYED: none

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Daryl Dixon
CANON: The Walking Dead
CANON REFERENCE: Daryl. Show.
AGE: Mid thirties, we'll go with 34. Age is not stated in canon, hinted he’s mid- to late thirties, possibly forties.
GENDER: Male
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: Adjunct Faculty, primarily survival and hand-to-hand combat training, also if needed the go to guy if something is missing or needs repairing.
APPEARANCE: Here. Daryl is 5’10” and has a muscular build. He usually keeps his brown hair cut short, the image being the longest he allows it. Generally he wears button down shirts--often with the sleeves ripped off, worn jeans, motorcycle boots, and a leather vest that has appliquéd angel wings on the back. He prefers leather jackets in the cold.

PERSONALITY:
Daryl Dixon is somewhat of an enigma of a man. As far as he’s concerned, the Xavier Institute made a huge mistake in asking him to come to New York. He was meant for the South, for tough roads, and for tougher times because according to him, he’s bad news.

But see, here’s the thing. This Dixon is far from being bad news.

From the moment he could walk, Daryl was taught to rely upon himself. The others in the world, and he knew there were many of them, they weren’t to be trusted. The only one who seemed to even care about him throughout his childhood was his brother. This bond has been intensely important through his life, leading even to adulthood. Its taught him to be fiercely loyal, after all blood comes first, always. Even though his blood may not have always made the smartest decisions, Daryl happens to be a follower, not a leader. He would follow Merle to Hell and back. That being said, Daryl knows better than to blindly trust his elder brother. The man was always an asshole as Daryl describes him, and in canon, shows hesitation at following through some of the more cruel plans of Merle’s. Not only that, but when Merle left home Daryl felt abandoned. Consciously or not, he has sworn not to do the same to the people he cares about. He may not be the best of people, but it would simply be wrong to say he doesn’t have a code.

In fact, Daryl’s code is quite clear. Though he works best in a group, the man still attempts to keep others out--even to the point of having difficulty trusting people he knows are good. He’s quick to anger when it seems like he’s been taken advantage of or had, and that often leads to more coming out of his mouth than he intends. Overall, however, he tends to be quiet and keeps to himself. He purposefully camps away from the main group in the second season, spending all of his time searching for a lost girl by the name of Sophia. And as long as there’s a trail or a reason to believe, Daryl doesn’t give up. He genuinely believes the best is possible--but also knows the worst is too. This is echoed in his relationships with the survivors around him in canon. In season 2, he insists Sophia is alive for weeks seeing that her mother is distraught without her. He sees what a proper family looks like and he wants to make what he never experienced real. However, when she’s found bitten and turned, he becomes withdrawn and very angry--not at the world, not at the people who captured her, but at himself.

In some ways, Daryl’s biggest issue is his morality. He frequently blames himself for things he could do nothing about. He tries very hard to provide others he cares about with the type of security he never had. However, if he keeps his distance, it’s much easier to act much like his older brother, as if nothing matters to him at all. His hunting weapon of choice mirrors this, as it’s a crossbow. A mid-ranged weapon, it gives him enough control to manage the fallout while still enough distance to be indifferent. He’s had a lot of practice living life distanced from his feelings, but there’s a part of him that wants to embrace them, to have had the blessed life granted to many. It’s possible that the angel applique appealed to him for this reason. It allowed him to admit his difficult past, without begging for pity.

From first glance, however, Daryl seems to be the typical Southern biker redneck. He has never owned too many things, except what he could wear on his back. He swears, drinks, spits, and has never been the boy you take home to your mother. He’s done a lot of bad things and he knows it, in fact he wears it on his sleeve. But Daryl has never been arrested. He’s smart about what he gets involved in, you just wouldn’t know it from the outside. On top of that, the hunter seems to exude an air of arrogance, but it’s just that, an air. Daryl is very aware of his capabilities. He does know how to do a lot more than a normal man you’d meet on the street--he’s simply had to learn as a matter of necessity--but book smart he isn’t. Covered in dirt from the road and with last night’s drink on his breath, he’d be easy to dismiss. In reality, however, Daryl is someone you’d want on your side when bad came to worse.

POWERS/ABILITIES: His most prominent power is his ability to track or find things. From a very young age, Daryl has always been the person to go to if you lost your glasses or that library book. Within minutes, he’d put it in your hands. This extends even to people and paths in the woods--being raised in rural Georgia with little food made it a necessity to be able to find animals in the wild to eat. However, the more something moves, the more time he needs to find it. He’s only one man and his powers certainly don’t include super speed.

His powers, while rather strong in ability, can also be confused with his own wants at times. Though he doesn’t need blood or hair to find a certain thing sometimes what Daryl wants to believe, such as the canon case of Sophia’s disappearance, get in the way of him seeing the truth. Generally however, there are hundreds of paths and choices that he can follow, one of which is obviously the one the subject has chosen.

Tying into this is a lesser ability to get visions pertaining to choices in paths. Occasionally, should the imprint be strong enough or a drastic enough change, Daryl gets a mental image of the thing or person he is tracking and a general sense of time. This helps him when he’s tracking animals especially. This can also apply when it comes to his own choices, he gets a flash of what could be in his future however it’s more of a feeling than an image. This can be somewhere from knowing that robbing that particular convenience store is a bad idea to the sense that he could be safe at Xavier’s Institute.

AU HISTORY: From the day Daryl was born, he led a tough life. His mother was a drunk, his father an addict, and his older brother Merle wasn’t much better. They were always wanting for something, never having more than just enough to feed the four of them--or the three of them as it usually went. Merle was in and out of juvenile detention from the ages of 12 to 18, and was about eight years older than Daryl. So throughout his early childhood, Daryl functioned mostly as an only child. But instead of being blessed by this, he was more often than not quite unlucky. When he was four years old, his mother died in a house fire, destroying the entire Dixon property along with her life. This was when his father began to frequently go on benders, leaving for days at a time, never really there to make sure his sons were doing all right. It was rare for Daryl to go to school, let alone have a proper meal.

This was when his powers started manifesting--he could find the rare piece of food in the house. And when Merle was out of juvie, he frequently took advantage of his little brother’s presence, having Daryl tag along on his adventures with older kids often getting them in deep trouble. Merle used Daryl for his abilities too since he could tell them when the supermarket clerk wasn’t looking so they could sneak that bottle of Jack and a few packs of twinkies out. Even so, Daryl found more support in Merle than he did in his own father, to the point where he was no longer tagging along and instead part of the crew.

When the two of them would get back, their father would be drunk and waiting for them. He would take Merle away, and Daryl would go hide in the woods until his older brother came out, blood soaking through the back of his shirt from the belt lashes, angrier than ever. It was this way that Daryl learned the ways of the world. There was no good, there was no evil, there was just surviving. Whether that meant stealing from the convenience store down the street or making traps in the woods to catch rabbits when their fridge was empty--it didn’t matter. Food was food.

And so life continued like this, Merle in and out of Daryl’s life, his father only there to punish. So around the age of ten, Daryl ran away from home. Originally the plan was to take a long walk, but no matter how far he walked, the younger Dixon didn’t want to return home. Soon enough he found himself lost deep in the woods with only his circling path to follow. He was out there for nine days, living off of what he could find, following one animal’s trail to another, and drinking water out of the stream. He ate raw meat when he could catch it and wiped his bottom with poison ivy by accident. It was a miserable nine days, but it was then that Daryl knew he could make it on his own. Eventually, he found his way back to his house--on sight of it, he ran in and made himself a sandwich. It took him a few days to realize his dad had never even realized he was missing.

Not long after Merle got out of juvie for the last time, he moved out of the shattered Dixon home. That was when their father started to turn his anger onto Daryl. The lashings started, same as they were with Merle. For awhile, Daryl hated Merle for leaving but it wasn’t long until he realized he had to do the same. During the days he’d go to the local public school--at least there were free lunches--occasionally picking up some school lesson or another. And at nights, he’d avoid his father.

Daryl left home when he was sixteen and followed his brother’s trail, eventually catching up with Merle’s crew somewhere outside of Atlanta. From then on the two were inseparable. They did bad things to survive--sometimes selling drugs, sometimes stealing money--and they travelled all through Georgia. Together they always found enough to eat and, if Merle’s charm was good, even a place to stay the night. Daryl didn’t particularly like the stealing however. He did his best to choose those who had enough, who wouldn’t miss the extra box of cereal or $20, but he kept quiet about it. No use in fighting with Merle over people’s rights. When he could, Daryl got them paying jobs, often working construction or under a car, but Merle more often than not got them kicked out with his big mouth. They did this for years and years--until one day, Daryl was approached by people from Xavier Institute in a dive bar somewhere outside of Macon. They asked him about his powers and he played dumb until they gave him a card and left, insisting they had the wrong guy while Merle watched from across the bar. Afterwards, he got the tenth degree from his brother--who were they, what did they want with his baby brother, were they worth stealing from? Daryl shook him off--some douchebags, dunno thought he was someone else, nah nothing seemed right--and eventually Merle forgot about it.

Daryl didn’t. They had told them there was a school for people like him, mutants. That he could get a job, have a place to live, three square meals a day, it almost seemed too good to be true. So he didn’t go for it, didn’t even bring it up to his brother. He couldn’t throw the card away though. It just lived in the bottom of his jeans pocket, folded in two and grimy as all hell. It wasn’t soon after this that Merle got cocky. He went for a job that they just couldn’t handle. A big gun sale. The guns were obviously stolen, their serial numbers filed off, and quite a few of them were illegal in the states. Daryl tried to reason with his brother, telling him about how this would just end in trouble, that someone might end up killed, but Merle wouldn’t listen. It was a lot of money and fast and he kept on insisting he had a good feeling about it. After all, if one Dixon could have powers, why couldn’t both of them? Daryl went silent at that, but didn’t agree to help. Merle was on his own on this one.

Just as Daryl predicted, it went terribly wrong. From what Daryl could gather listening to the news and witnesses, it started like any other job, but at some point, it became clear that they were selling guns to an undercover agent. Maybe when the police showed up, anyway, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they caught Merle red handed--and the idiot made a run for it.

Daryl waited in their usual places for days. He waited to get a call or a letter or even a goddamn note from someone, but no sign of Merle ever showed up. It was if his older brother had just vanished off the face of the planet. And without his brother, he found him thinking more and more about the people who had approached him at the bar. He almost called them a few times--often hanging up before he dialed the last digit at the pay phones. If Merle was out there, he'd wait for him.

Money started getting scarce and the weather started getting colder and finally, finally Daryl picked up the phone and made the call. The offer was still open to him, he just had to be there by the end of the week. So Daryl packed his meager bags, stashed Merle's bike and left him a note telling him to find him in New York or at least fuckin' call him. And he headed out.

Daryl has only been at the Xavier institute for about half a month now, and primarily he's kept to himself. He offers help when it's needed and has asked for the materials for a proper class in hand to hand combat as well as survival classes, but by and large, he stays out of the way.

SAMPLES

NETWORK SAMPLE: [the video flicks on to a scruffy-looking man. some of you may have seen him around the edges of the campus or at meal times, but he hasn’t been here long. he frowns at the screen for a moment before speaking, his accent from the deep South.]

A’right, so I guess I’m s’posed to uh, advertise for the new class, or somethin’.

[he pauses, not quite sure what’s the best way to go about this. It’s all very new and unfamiliar to him and he looks pretty uncomfortable.]

I’m addin’ a survival course ‘n a defense class for anyone who wants it. It’s gonna be afternoons ‘n Saturdays. So… yeah.

[he looks as if he’s going to shut off the device and then hesitates. oh yeah, they don’t know him, he’s new around here. But if he’s going to teach he supposes they should have a name at the very least. still, this whole teaching thing is really weird to wrap his head around.]

Name’s Daryl by the way. Daryl Dixon.

LOG SAMPLE: This was the farthest north Daryl had ever been--Hell, this was his first time out of Georgia. The weather was different up here, cooler, more temperate. The trees were different species, and even the deadfall was foreign to him. Still, he felt more comfortable near the edge of the property than he did anywhere in the buildings of the Xavier Institution. He didn’t even make it a full night inside, it was too plush, too… dare he say it, normal. Halfway through his first night there, Daryl had brought his blankets out to the bed of his old pick-up and just slept there. And damn, was it cold out. Even a few nights later, he still couldn’t quite sleep through the night.

Maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t been without Merle in a long time. His older brother did this every now and then, usually with some girl, but then Daryl could find him if he wanted to. This time the asshole hadn’t even left a general idea of where to track him. The hunter let out a heavy breath and took a moment to look around himself. The leaves were falling one by one, their red and orange fading to a dull brown, but still the light that cast through the trees had an orange tint. He looked behind him--he was maybe out a mile from the school, maybe a little less. He shifted the shoulder strap of his crossbow on habit, but the truth was that he didn’t need it. There was actually lunch waiting for him back at the Institute.

He sighed again, running a rough hand through his hair. It was strange for him to have made a decision like this, it was almost like he was--but he wasn’t. He wasn’t running. This was legit, this was real, they were like him.

A mirthless chuckle escaped him and he spat an, “aw Hell.”

If he didn’t know any better, it would sound like he was trying to convince someone. Maybe he was. Maybe he was trying to convince himself. This just felt… Wrong to him. Being without Merle gave Daryl space to think about things he wasn’t sure he was ready to think about. But if he could help other kids from living the life he led, that was worth something, right?

The hunter shook his head to clear it of the intruding thoughts and turned around. That was enough of that. It was time to head back, stuff some grub down his throat, and busy himself with the idea of teaching these kids something useful.