[Basic Info]

Name: Delilah Salazar

Nickname(s): Della, Lila, Dels

Age: 26

Gender: Female

Orientation: Straight

Nationality: American

Ethnicity: Mexican-American

Height: 5’3”

Weight: 125 lbs

Looks:

Della is a petite, tan-skinned Mexican-American woman with warm brown eyes, thick dark-brown hair, and a soft, very feminine appearance. She has a rounder face, naturally rosy cheeks, and a smile that makes her look considerably younger than twenty-six.

She is unmistakably a country girl.

She grew up around dirt roads, horses, chickens, old pickup trucks, county fairs, dusty boots, and people who thought knowing how to fix something was more useful than knowing how much it cost to replace it.

But Della is extremely girly.

She loves dresses.

Not just practical dresses, either. Floral dresses, sundresses, little vintage-looking dresses, gingham, lace, eyelet, tiny embroidered flowers, polka dots, puff sleeves, ribbons, and anything with a cute waistline.

Every dress she owns has a matching hairpiece.

A yellow dress gets a yellow ribbon.

A floral dress gets a little flower clip.

A blue dress gets a blue bow.

If she doesn’t have a matching accessory, she will make one.

Even after the apocalypse, Della refuses to stop dressing like herself.

Her dresses are worn, patched, occasionally stained, and sometimes missing buttons, but she washes them whenever she gets the opportunity and repairs them by hand.

She’d rather walk through the apocalypse looking ridiculous in a dirty floral dress than give up the last thing that makes her feel like herself.

Personality:

Della is sweet, excitable, emotional, stubborn, and painfully sheltered.

She is a country bumpkin in the most genuine sense of the word.

There are certain things she knows extremely well and other things she knows absolutely nothing about.

She can tell the difference between animal tracks.

She knows when a horse is sick just by looking at it.

She can milk a cow, gut a fish, shoot a rifle, grow vegetables, and tell you which fence post is about to fall over.

Ask her about politics, technology, science, or anything remotely complicated and she may stare at you like you’ve just started speaking another language.

Della is not stupid.

She’s simply practical rather than academic.

She’s also incredibly trusting.

That trust has become dangerous since the apocalypse.

Della assumes people are telling the truth until they give her a reason not to. She tends to believe that someone who smiles at her probably means well.

She’s also very easily frightened.

When she’s scared, she talks.

A lot.

She’ll ramble, ask questions, apologize repeatedly, and sometimes start crying without even realizing she’s doing it.

She hates being alone.

She hates the dark.

She hates sleeping somewhere unfamiliar.

She hates blood on her clothes.

And she absolutely hates the idea of someone seeing her cry.

Despite all of that, Della has a stubborn little streak that refuses to die.

She’ll be shaking with fear while saying:

“no. i’m going with you.”

And somehow, she’ll actually go.

Della isn’t brave because she’s fearless.

She’s brave because she keeps moving while terrified.

Occupation:

Former: Country diner waitress / ranch hand / occasional seamstress

Current: Survivor, scavenger, gardener, animal caretaker

Values:

* Family

* Kindness

* Loyalty

* Keeping promises

* Taking care of animals

* Having something beautiful in an ugly world

* Not becoming cruel just because the world is cruel

* Making sure nobody goes hungry if she can help it

Status: Alive

[Relationships]

Family:

Her entire family is dead.

Her mother, father, and younger sister were killed during the first year of the outbreak.

Della was the last one alive.

She doesn’t like talking about it.

She keeps a tiny photograph of her family tucked inside the lining of one of her dresses.

She doesn’t let anyone touch it.

Friend(s):

Della currently has no permanent friends.

She has met plenty of survivors but tends to become attached very quickly.

This is both one of her greatest strengths and one of her biggest weaknesses.

If somebody is kind to her once, she’ll remember it for months.

If someone saves her life, she’ll consider them family.

Pet(s):

None currently.

Before the outbreak, Della had a small mixed-breed dog named Buttercup.

Buttercup was killed during the evacuation of their town.

Della still has Buttercup’s old pink collar.

She keeps it tied around the handle of her backpack.

Enemy(ies):

No specific enemy.

However, Della has developed a deep hatred for people who hurt animals.

Someone threatening her will scare her.

Someone threatening an animal will make her genuinely angry.

Affiliation(s):

None.

She travels alone.

[Abilities & Skills]

Physical:

Della is small but surprisingly capable.

She isn’t particularly muscular, but she’s spent most of her life doing physical work.

She’s good at walking long distances, climbing fences, carrying buckets, working outdoors, and handling animals.

She isn’t fast, but she has decent endurance.

She’s also surprisingly good at staying balanced on uneven terrain.

Her biggest physical disadvantage is that she isn’t particularly strong and struggles against larger people.

Mental:

Della has excellent practical intelligence.

She isn’t good at complicated theory, but she’s incredibly good at recognizing patterns in her surroundings.

She notices when animals are behaving strangely.

She can tell when weather is about to change.

She remembers landmarks.

She knows which plants she’s seen before.

She’s good at remembering people’s habits.

Her biggest weakness is emotional decision-making.

If someone she cares about is in danger, she’ll abandon a perfectly good plan without thinking.

Specialties:

* Gardening

* Animal care

* Horse handling

* Basic farming

* Sewing

* Clothing repair

* Cooking

* Preserving food

* Fishing

* Hunting small game

* Basic firearm handling

* Identifying common plants

* Basic vehicle maintenance

* Rural navigation

* Making candles and simple household items

* Keeping morale up without realizing she’s doing it

Fighting Style:

Della avoids fighting whenever possible.

She’d rather hide, run, distract something, or find another way around.

She is especially uncomfortable killing humans.

Zombies are different.

She’s still terrified of them, but she’s learned that hesitation gets people killed.

When forced to fight, she becomes frantic rather than skilled.

She screams.

She swears.

She cries.

She hits much harder than you’d expect from someone her size.

Then she usually apologizes afterward.

Weapons:

* Small .22 rifle

* Old revolver

* Kitchen knife

* Sewing scissors

* Hatchet

* Heavy metal flashlight

Her favorite weapon is actually the rifle because she feels safest keeping things at a distance.

[Survival Stats]

Combat: 2/5

Della can shoot and defend herself in an emergency, but she isn’t trained for combat and panics easily.

Strategy: 3/5

She isn’t a long-term strategist, but she’s good at adapting to practical problems.

Mental State: 2/5

Della is frightened, grieving, lonely, and emotionally exhausted. She functions mostly because she has forced herself to keep going.

Resourcefulness: 4/5

She can make surprisingly good use of limited resources. Her sewing, farming, cooking, and rural skills make her useful in ways she doesn’t always recognize.

Medical Knowledge: 2/5

She knows basic first aid, wound cleaning, splinting, burns, and some herbal remedies taught to her by her mother.

She is absolutely not a doctor.

[History]

Della grew up in the kind of place where the biggest event of the summer was the county fair.

Her family wasn’t wealthy.

They didn’t need to be.

They had chickens.

A vegetable garden.

A couple of horses.

An old truck that had been repaired so many times that nobody remembered what parts were original.

Della loved it.

She was always a girly girl, even as a child.

While other girls were climbing trees in jeans, Della would climb the same tree in a little dress and complain about getting sap on it.

She loved ribbons.

She loved perfume.

She loved doing her hair.

She loved being pretty.

But she also knew how to shovel horse manure before breakfast.

That was simply Della.

Her mother taught her how to sew, preserve food, garden, and make clothes last longer.

Her father taught her how to shoot.

Her grandmother taught her how to make tortillas and recognize plants.

Her younger sister taught her how to get into trouble.

Then the dead started walking.

At first, Della didn’t understand how serious it was.

She thought the government would handle it.

She thought the military would arrive.

She thought they’d eventually go back home.

Then her father died.

Then her mother.

Then her sister.

Each death took away another piece of the life she understood.

Della survived the first year mostly because other people kept telling her what to do.

Eventually, there was nobody left.

So she learned.

She learned how to sleep with one eye open.

She learned how to clean a rifle.

She learned which abandoned houses were worth checking.

She learned how long food could last.

She learned how to tell whether footsteps belonged to a person or something dead.

She learned that sometimes you had to leave things behind.

Including people.

That was the lesson she hated most.

Now, a year and a half into the apocalypse, Della travels alone.

She carries a backpack filled with practical supplies alongside things that are completely unnecessary.

Food.

Water.

A first-aid kit.

A lighter.

A sewing kit.

A flashlight.

Three hair ribbons.

A little bottle of perfume.

Buttercup’s collar.

And more dresses than any reasonable survivor should be carrying.

She knows people would tell her the dresses are dead weight.

She doesn’t care.

They’re hers.

They’re one of the last pieces of the old Della she has left.

Every morning, no matter how bad things are, she picks a dress.

She finds the matching hairpiece.

She fixes her hair.

And then she goes outside.

Because if the world insists on ending, Della has decided she is at least going to look cute while it does.

[Trivia]

* Every dress she owns has a matching hair accessory.

* She refuses to wear the wrong hairpiece with a dress.

* She has a specific order for her dresses and gets genuinely upset when they’re mixed up.

* She can sew surprisingly well.

* She repairs her dresses instead of replacing them.

* She has made bows out of scraps of curtains.

* She once spent three hours searching an abandoned house for a pink ribbon.

* She will risk going back for a hairbrush.

* She smells faintly like old floral perfume most of the time.

* She keeps a tiny mirror in her backpack.

* She talks to herself when she’s nervous.

* She talks to animals like they’re people.

* She gives animals human names.

* She cannot stand seeing a chicken go to waste.

* She cries when she’s angry.

* She gets embarrassed extremely easily.

* Compliments make her blush.

* She has absolutely no poker face.

* She is terrible at lying.

* She hates cussing but has developed a surprisingly impressive vocabulary since the apocalypse.

* When she’s really scared, her country accent gets noticeably thicker.

* She says “lord have mercy” constantly.

* She still says “excuse me” when walking around abandoned buildings, despite there being nobody there.

* She doesn’t like sleeping without something soft under her head.

* She can make an entire meal out of almost nothing.

* She misses birthday cakes more than almost anything.

* She has a habit of saving pretty things she finds.

* She once carried a dead bouquet of flowers around for two weeks because she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away.

* She hates the smell of gasoline on her clothes.

* She secretly likes being called pretty.

* She will deny it if anyone points that out.

* She doesn’t think she’s particularly strong.

* She doesn’t realize how much she’s learned.

* She thinks surviving means becoming hard.

* She doesn’t realize that refusing to become hard is actually one of the things keeping her human.