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dirtyredneck〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Autumn
AGE: over 18
JOURNAL: No personal Journal
IM / EMAIL: PM this journal
PLURK: N/A
RETURNING: New Player
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Daryl Dixon
CHARACTER AGE: Early to Mid 40's
SERIES: The Walking Dead
CHRONOLOGY:
CLASS: Hero with the occasional anti-hero tendencies
HOUSING: no preferences! throw Daryl where ever, he'll make do
BACKGROUND: Daryl on the Walking Dead Wiki
Daryl's world is one in which the apocalypse has come and gone in the form of the titular walking dead. The world that was (one parallel to our current IRL, early 2010's) is over and the new world, born of those who have survived going on two and a half years post-outbreak, has only just started. The rules of society as they used to be have little meaning and now society revolves around groups of survivors and who has the power to take and keep what they want, be it land, food, munitions, or scavenged supplies.
Prior to the outbreak, Daryl spent time between living in an abusive household and following his older brother Merle around. When the outbreak happened, he and his brother found each other and tried to make it to the supposed safety of Atlanta. However, Atlanta was fire-bombed before they got there and they ended up helping set up a camp of survivors in an old quarry a few miles outside the city within a couple weeks of the bombing. Merle talked to him about eventually robbing the camp of supplies and heading on their way, but the two ended up staying with the camp until roughly two months after the outbreak, with Daryl going on regular hunting trips into the surrounding woods to keep the camp fed with as much meat as he could.
Things changed the day Rick Grimes rode into town. Merle was out with a group scavenging supplies in the city, but had chosen that opportune time to get high on some pills. The resulting kerfuffle between himself and the group and Rick resulted in Merle being handcuffed to a roof and left. Daryl found out about this and met Rick Grimes for the first time the day after when he returned from a hunt to find the deer he'd been tracking was being chewed on by a walker close enough to camp to be cause for concern.
At that point events kind of spiraled out, hitting the group fast and hard. Daryl and a few others went back into the city to try and find Merle and were unsuccessful - Merle was gone from the roof, leaving only his hand behind from where he'd cut it off to free himself of the handcuffs. They then returned to camp to find it being attacked by a small horde of walkers and when the dust settled, a little over half their number were gone. With the camp compromised, Rick suggested they head for the CDC and the majority of them did so. The CDC ended up being a bust in that the one doctor that remained alive there had reached the point he didn't care about living and the building had locked itself into a self-destruct countdown before the group got there. Those that got out barely did so before the whole thing went up in flames.
After that, the group largely kept on the move for the next eight or so months. They found a farm early on and gained and lost some members before they had to abandon it. The rest of the time was spent running from ever-growing herds of walkers while hoping the one pregnant member of the group didn't end up giving birth before they found a place to stay in for a couple months. During this period, Daryl formed a close friendship with Carol, the other abuse survivor in the group. Their running ended for a time when they found a prison.
By then, Daryl had become a very beloved and trusted member of the group, which was now led by Rick Grimes. Daryl had gained the unofficial and unspoken (but intimately understood) position of second-in-command. Time at the prison was rocky at first, as the group had to deal with surviving inmates, followed by the birth of Rick's daughter, Judith (and sadly the death of her mother during childbirth), and then the return of Merle. Merle's appearance caused a short-lived division in the group and for about a day, Daryl left with Merle because the rest of the group didn't want to accept his brother as one of them.
While Daryl was out with Merle, however, Daryl realized how much he'd changed since losing him. And how much Merle hadn't changed. While Merle was still stuck in the 'Dixon Brothers against the world' mentality, Daryl had gone and created a new space for himself that came with a ragtag group that might not have been blood, but were family all the same. It only took about a day for Daryl to force his brother to make a choice of leaving him again, or following him back to the prison. Daryl knew getting his family to accept Merle would be difficult, but at least with him there, they'd both be 'safe' from what might be thrown at them by the world.
Merle died not long after that, essentially sacrificing himself to thin out the forces of an opposing group of survivors. He hadn't planned on getting killed, but he didn't shy away from getting caught in that kind of fight. When Daryl found him, Daryl had to put a knife through his skull because Merle had already turned and was eating whatever flesh he could. The event broke Daryl's heart, as Merle was the last of his blood family and as much as the man was a bastard, he was still Daryl's brother and he loved him.
The group eventually won out against the other one and life calmed down for about six months. Daryl became a more active leader of the growing community they built at the prison. He was part of a council that formed when Rick stepped down, unable to deal with the continued stress of leading as well as mourning his wife. Daryl gained a lot of new friends and was looked to with trust and love and even a little bit of hero worship. A situation he didn't always know how to deal with, but one he enjoyed.
This life came crashing down when the leader of the group that killed Merle returned with a new group. He came to tear them down and get his revenge and the tank he rolled through their gates did a pretty effective job of doing just that. Daryl's family was scattered to the winds and Daryl ended up escaping with only one other member: Beth. Daryl knew Beth pretty superficially, as she'd been part of their group since the farm. But he didn't really know her that well. She was simply all he had left and he set himself to protect her as best he could. But Beth fought against his silent watchfulness and forced him to face the fact that he was blaming himself for what happened at the prison. She also forced him to realize it wasn't his fault and he had to move on and keep going. He couldn't just shut down and go through the motions like he had been. They had only a short time together before a walker group separated them, but she managed to renew hope in his heart.
Beth would have been reunited with him after the walker group, but something happened and all Daryl knew at the time was that a car was being floored away from the attack and Beth was no where to be found. Daryl tried following the car and obviously couldn't follow it for long, not at the speed it was going. This trajectory, however, ended up setting him on a path to reunite with others from the Prison. The first ones he found were Rick, Rick's son Carl, and Michonne, who had all ended sort of together. The group of four chose to follow signs that had been put up to another community offering sanctuary: Terminus.
Terminus was situated on an old Railroad terminal and the people there seemed friendly on the surface. However, they soon showed themselves to be only superficially welcoming. In actuality, the entire community were cannibals. Daryl and his friends were captured and forced into a train car to await their execution. Inside the train car they found the majority of those that had survived from the prison. They, too, had followed the signs to Terminus, arriving about a day or so before Daryl and the others. Sometime later, Daryl and three of the other men were taken out to be killed along side four others from another train car. Fortunately for them, one of their own - Carol - had shown more caution in approaching Terminus and found out they had some of her people caught there. She chose to create a diversion to get herself inside and check it out by blowing up a fuel container and letting the noise draw walkers inside the hole in the fence the explosion caused. This, in turn, aided Daryl and his group in killing their immediate captors and freeing themselves. The entirety of the remaining prison survivors were eventually reunited and they chose to turn north, back towards Atlanta, and try to find another place to make 'home'.
Along the way, they gained a temporary sanctuary at a church who's lone survivor was the priest in charge of maintaining it. The group spent a couple days figuring out what their plans for moving on were going to be and Daryl helped Carol prep a car for her to take out on her own. She never got to leave the group on her own terms because while they were getting it ready, the car that had driven off after Beth disappeared drove past their location and she and Daryl chose to follow it. This brought them back into Atlanta and into contact with the survivors of Grady Hospital.
Beth had been picked up by their group and given medical care. But she had also been kept there against her will as part of Grady's insistence that they should be paid back for services rendered with service in turn. And that when she'd paid her dues back she'd be free to go. This was, of course, weighted against her. Daryl and Carol found out about this from Noah, a young man Beth had helped escape from Grady not long before Daryl and Carol arrived in the city and by chance they managed to run into. Unfortunately during their scouting of the hospital, Carol was hit by one of Grady's cars and then taken by them for medical care, leaving just Daryl and Noah to figure out a means of getting both Beth and Carol out. Daryl returned with Noah to the group at the church and they decided to capture a few of Grady's officers and then conduct a hostage exchange rather than go in guns blazing. The rescue plans went about as smoothly as the could right up until Beth was being sent over. The leader of Grady decided that since Beth and Carol were being exchanged for two of her officers, that Noah needed to be 'given back' to Grady or it wouldn't be a fair trade. Beth chose to turn to the woman and confront her. She did so by stabbing her in the chest with a pair of scissors she'd secreted away. The leader reacted to the threat without thinking and her gun went off, catching Beth in the neck and up through the top of her head. The group left the hospital with Noah and Carol and Beth's body in Daryl's arms. Daryl was even more broken by her death than he had been his brother's.
For weeks, the group traveled, having decided to head to D.C. on the idea that if there was anything left of the old world, that's where it'd be. Their journey was long, hard, and it took most of it before Daryl even let himself cry over Beth. Shortly after he did, a storm hit and they had to find shelter in an old barn. The next morning a man, Aaron, approached them about joining his community: Alexandria. The group was wary at first, but they eventually made their way there and while most of the group began to integrate, Daryl found he was most comfortable around Aaron and Aaron's boyfriend, Eric. Fellow 'outsiders' in the community. Aaron offered Daryl a job as a recruiter for Alexandria, to work along side him, and Daryl accepted. It let him spend needed time outside the walls, while still helping his family.
Daryl's canon point is only a couple weeks after arrival in Alexandria, while the group is trying to lead a massive herd of walkers away from the walls using the noise of cars and Daryl's motorcycle to draw the attention of the front of the herd. The rest of the walkers will follow because of the noises and movement they all make. Daryl and two others have just been ambushed by an unknown group about 20 miles out from Alexandria and Daryl has been separated from them, escaping into the remains of a burned forest.
PERSONALITY: 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.
While he is strong, Daryl has moments where he just shuts down for a while. He'll go through the motions and follow others, do what he needs to, but shutting down is a coping mechanism for dealing with loss and pain. Something to keep him from crying in front of his father after the belt was out. It allowed him to disassociate and not tie the pain and anger and fear he felt directly to him. While he's like that, working out the emotional toll of whatever triggers the state, he becomes very subdued and generally unresponsive. This sometimes ends up with him being 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 explosive anger comes out the most when he cares about someone and is worried about them, while his cold and quiet fury comes when he's genuinely angry. He's not good at expressing his emotions properly and is still learning how to do so in a what's considered a 'healthy' manner.
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.
Not all of his caution comes from the abuse his father etched into his back - though certainly a great deal of it is from remaining in an actively abusive household into his early 40s. A decent portion, however, comes unknowingly from his brother, Merle, and the many times Daryl perceives himself as having been abandoned by him. Merle left home as soon as he could legally get away with it so he could get out from under their father's belt before it got to the point Merle would turn around and kill him. Before he left, Merle was the only one of the two getting physically abused. After Merle left, however, Daryl became the new focus for his father's anger. When Merle did come back into town, he stayed for short stints, no more than a few months at a time. He'd take Daryl out with him on rides with his biker gang, but he'd eventually bring Daryl back to their father's house and then leave again. He left a lot and the message Daryl kept getting was that deserved what he got under Will Dixon's roof.
Due to that abuse, 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 if it can be helped. The closest he comes of his own volition is wearing a button up he's cut the sleeves off of, or a thick undershirt if he absolutely must. 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.
POWER: Daryl has no canon super powers, but he is one of many 'badass normals' within his canon. Daryl has become something of a weapons expert, above and beyond the familiarity he had prior to the apocalypse, and displays an accuracy with even improvised weapons that borders on being 'uncanny'. He's also an experienced hunter and tracker in the literal sense, as well as being incredibly observant and able to process context clues others often miss. Daryl is an experienced brawler, more on the dirty scrapper end than any kind of martial artist. His most common tactics involve tackling people and/or punching them into submission. In addition to this, he's a skilled enough mechanical engineer to build his own motorcycle out of spare parts.
Powers gained on arrival:
Flower Power - Daryl has been given a supernatural tracking ability that comes in the form of plants, predominantly flowers.
When Daryl wants to find a specific person, he has to focus on them (if it's someone he's not familiar with, he needs to know their name [partial is fine] and either a) have a picture of them, or b) to have spoken with them long enough to remember their voice) and a trail of plants, usually flowers of some sort, appears. This is not a straight line of flowers, but rather a single bloom will appear within his line of sight and when he gets to the plant, he has to pick part of it. When he picks it, the plant disappears into a softly glowing pile of ash that blows away and a new bloom grows somewhere further on the path Daryl needs to take, again, within line of sight. Where it grows tends to indicate where he needs to go. Next to a door or on a window sill means he should go through them, up a wall means he needs to climb, in a sewer grate means he'll be getting his boots really dirty, etc.
He can also summon a flower plant with the express purpose of picking a bloom and giving it to someone. The flower will remain in a healthy bloom until that person crushes it, turning it briefly into the glowing ash before a trail of flowers forms between them and Daryl. If the person is able to follow it on their own, they can do the same as Daryl does. If they can't, well, not to worry, he'll be made aware of the trail and start following it on his end. Daryl can create an infinite number of these 'tracking flowers' to give to others, but he's not likely to hand many out.
Wings - Daryl has also been given the power to manifest wings for both flight and protection so long as he wears/has something on him containing a wing motif.
The kind of wings manifested depends on the wing motif Daryl channels this power through. Because of his choice to almost perpetually wear his vest, the majority of the time, his wings will come out like white 'Angel' wings. However, Daryl does have three tattoos involving wing motifs on his body: two demon-like angelic figures on his back and a small devil on the underside of his right arm, near the pit. If he's without his vest, he can focus on any of these to obtain wings as depicted. His wing span will never exceed his arm span by more than half.
Despite the size of his wings, Daryl is able to fly much like a bird would, and carry about twice his own weight without being dragged down. His flight speed is generally comparable to a golden eagle: averaging about 30mph but able to go upwards of 80mph on a horizontal flight given the right conditions, and 150 on a controlled dive. To ensure he doesn't hurt himself just from flying, Daryl also gains some limited avian physiology to allow his eyes to endure windshere at speeds that high.
More importantly, the wings function as a shield generator. He can extend them or wrap them around himself and someone else (as many people as can fit within his wing span) to deflect any oncoming attacks. The shield generated is an invisible force that is roughly spherical in shape when his wings are wrapped, and more of a flat plane when they're extended in any direction. The shape and size varies depending entirely on how Daryl positions his wings, though the shield will always encompass the full length of his body and the 'edge' of the shield otherwise ending about a foot past his wing tips. When used in this manner, the more force, damage, or power Daryl has to deflect, the more energy it takes out of him. The wings cannot manifest if he's unconscious and will disappear if he passes out while they're manifested. First uses will exhaust him a lot, but with practice, he'll be able to build stamina and the ability to hold out for longer and longer.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: [Daryl doesn't bother with anything more advanced than text. Doesn't feel the need and isn't really in the mood to talk. 'Sides, with text he can still smoke and not have to interrupt himself when he wanted a nice long pull. He was going to need it to help calm his nerves for this one.]
Been hearing some strange rumors and ain't been able to get a proper answer out of my family on this. Need someone to tell it to me straight so I know what kind of fucked up situation I'm dealing with. Something about people dying and coming back to life, but not like walkers where they're really still dead and rotting and just up and moving and wanting to eat whatever's moving. Actually coming back to life. JC kind of coming back. And something about Rick Grimes being one of them that has.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
Test Drive Top Level
w/Ruby
FINAL NOTES: One thing: Daryl is an active carrier of the Wildfire (walker) Virus, but I'm assuming this is nullified upon arrival due to past apps from canonmates. correct me if I'm wrong, please!
Canon Updates - DO NOT REPLY
Date: 2016-07-26 03:36 pm (UTC)