Application for Project Oasis

[dirtyredneck]

Player Info
Name: Autumn
Age: 18+
Contact: PM to this Journal
Other Characters: N/A

Character Info
Name: Daryl Dixon
Canon: The Walking Dead (TV)
Age: Early to Mid-Forties
Canon Point: s5ep16 "Conquer" - Meeting Morgan.
History: Daryl's Article on the Walking Dead Wiki

Personality: "A dirty, angry redneck... with a heart of gold." - Norman Reedus

Daryl is one of the seemingly rare people who became a better person after the world went to shit. While everything about him seemed to point at him being a 'mini-Merle' - an angry, racist, volatile copy of his older brother when things first went down - Daryl has, instead, grown into his own person. He's become the man he wants to be rather than the stereotype he thought he was supposed to be.

Daryl is a generally emotionally strong man that has learned to hide his perceived weaknesses behind anger and intimidation. A lifetime of having to 'be a man' and trying to gain his abusive father's respect, as well as live up to the expectations of his older brother, have made it so Daryl is very closed off socially. He's had to put on a strong front, be tough, for as long as he can remember. And he does it well. There are many things that take a toll on him, but he has proven himself quite adaptable and able to roll with the punches, as it were. Daryl does, of course, have some heavy self-esteem issues. He knows the others rely on him, but he doesn't see his life as holding as much value as theirs. He blames himself when there's a loss to the group because he wasn't good enough, or fast enough, or strong enough to save the people he's cared about. He is the one the most likely to offer to throw his life away to save another.

When a loss does occur, Daryl shuts down for a while. He remains and he keeps moving because he has to, but he takes a long time to work through the emotional toll it's put on him, becoming subdued and generally unresponsive. Sometimes outright hostile to anyone that tries to approach him or confront him while he's like that. He also rarely cries and tries to hide it when he does. Fake that he's not or force himself to stop if it starts because that's a weakness to him: drilled into his head by his father and his brother since before he could remember and reinforced for the majority of his life.

For all that he has some obvious anger issues, particularly in how easily he can get growly and grumbly with others, Daryl is one of the most level headed in his group. And he's only grown more so in the last two years. His hot-blooded, quick to anger attitude tempering out as he became a trusted leader and adviser within the group he's been running with. He puts the needs of the group first, and his own second. His own life experiences means he's hesitant to trust. But once he does, he trusts completely. It's a bit childlike, and that's largely because his socialization was heavily stunted due to the abuse he suffered and has yet to really work through. Heck, it's only within the last year that he's been able to deal with people physically reaching for him while he feels vulnerable without flinching and expecting to be hit.

He's open minded and optimistic in a way that comes across as unexpected because he's also very realistic. His caution with others belies a very open and bleeding heart. He actually believes there's still plenty of good in the world. Despite all that the group's been through and how it's stripped away the hope of many of those he cares about (Rick, Carol, Sasha), Daryl believes they still need to reach out and grow and trust others they come across if they can.

Abilities/Powers: Daryl is an incredibly observant and smart man (far more than he's often given credit for due to his 'backwater' and 'hick' manner of speech and habits) who has been hunting and tracking for most of his life. The world going to shit just made him all the more dangerous, enhancing his skills with various weapons (crossbow, handguns, rifles, knives, even weapons like grenades that he wouldn't normally have access to) as well as his tracking and the ability to move silently merely through the rigors of constant use. Of his weapons, it is his crossbow with which he is the deadliest and most skilled.

He's very familiar with living off the land and has an extensive knowledge of the natural world native to his home state of Georgia. This includes interacting with animals, not just hunting them. It also includes vast range of general knowledge surrounding geology, ornithology, zoology, and botany.

His observation skills also apply to his intuition about people and he generally has a decent ability to tell 'good people' from 'bad people'. This is not infallible and he's been wrong on enough occasions to second guess himself, particularly when he's on his own and doesn't have someone he trusts to consult with, but he's had a track record of being right a good 80% of the time.

Due to the nature of his life after the Wildfire Outbreak, Daryl has become very good at making and using improvised weapons, as well as scavenging/salvaging the ruins of the world that was. He has shown himself to be a skilled mechanic when it comes to motorized vehicles and he's learned a lot about maintenance and repair of electronics, particularly generators, in the last year. He's also generally decent at field dressing wounds and, due to his brother having abused a lot of substances (and gotten more than a few STI's), knows his way around some uncommon medicines and pain relievers that usually remain in the realm of someone dedicated to learning medicine. It's not really enough to be an expert, but he can keep someone alive long enough to get them back to a doctor.

Weaknesses: As a victim of childhood abuse (both physical and emotional) that extended long into his adulthood, Daryl has a hard time letting people get close. Even those he thinks of as family and would die for, he keeps at a distance and doesn't share much of his past with. Not the parts that he thinks are shameful or would come across as 'weak'.

One of the obvious signs of his past 'weakness' are the scars that cover his back from when his father would take a belt to him. Because of them, Daryl doesn't take his shirt off where anyone can see them. The closest he comes of his own volition is wearing a button up he's cut the sleeves off of and the few times he's been forced to show them, he's been very defensive and done his best to cover up quickly. He also doesn't like to admit in any real way that he's struggling with his abuse and recovery. As such, he deflects all lines of discussion away from the topic if it ever focuses on him.

Network Sample: Opposite Carl on the Truth Meme 01/22

Prose Sample: On the TDM 01/27

Misc: Daryl is an active carrier of the Wildfire Virus. Everyone in his universe is infected and if he dies for any reason (including because someone mercy killed him over the Ira Virus), if his brain is not damaged to the point of non-functioning, his body will re-animate and get back up to bite people. It will take between 2 minutes and 8 hours for this to happen.

It is unknown how the virus spreads, but it is a pathogen that is likely airborn (and definitely able to be contracted through water/blood) due to how fast it spread once it went global (which was about four months after it was first discovered by governments; we meet Daryl and the other camp survivors about two months after it went global). There is some suggestion that there were people immune or did not catch it (as there were dead bodies in car pile ups that had died without obvious head trauma and did not get back up), but as they are all long since dead, everyone in his world is now a carrier.

More on the specifics of the virus can be found here. Notably, it is not the pathogen itself that kills a person, since it is an active infection that everyone already has. That detail is not known to anyone in canon and they assume the infection is dormant until someone is either bitten/scratched (and the 'active' virus comes over from the walker), or they die.

This means, if you want to use it, that Daryl could be actively infecting the very air he breaths so that anyone who dies after his arrival will have the potential for getting back up within a few minutes and attempting to eat whatever living thing they get their hands on.