Darla Grumman

Concept: Freelance Fabricator

Desc: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” is an apt descriptor for Darla. She tops out at 5’1” and that’s with straight black hair that sticks up a bit. She is muscular without being broad or unflexible. She has a ready smile and a hearty laugh. Green eyes that have seen a lot. a storm of tattoos with a repeating motif of flowers and barbed wire mixed together. Also, she has a number of interesting piercings. Body modification is kind of a thing with her. Tribal scarification fascinates her, but it’s still a bridge too far for her. Her hands are small, deft, and her grip is freakishly strong.

History: In the wee small hours of the night when she has trouble sleeping, Darla often wonders if her life might have been different if certain things had gone different ways. I mean, she knew her parents were strict and conservative, but she wonders if they would have thrown her out of the house if she’d simply come out to them in a more controlled manner, rather than being caught going down on another girl from her bible study group.

So. Homeless at the age of 14 and on the streets, Darla turned her hand to the one thing that her father had actually encouraged her to learn, and that was auto repair. It saved her life really. She’d had to do some sketchy things in those nights and was glad for honest work. She couch-surfed with friends until she got on her feet, and never looked back.

    Now she has a pretty decent gig working in a machine shop. She’s got the knowledge, if not the actual vo-tech degree and is seriously saving up money to take some engineering courses at the local community college. Her boss, Axle has become like an adoptive father to her and allows her to use shop machines for the various side projects she has going on. He’s the one who’s been encouraging her to take the classes.  She’s also seeing a fairly high-strung sous chef named Stacy and they fight...a lot.  Axle can’t stand that bitch.

Attitude: “I test off the scale for math and spatial relationships. So I think I’m pretty much where I am supposed to be. You get me? Everybody’s got their own flavor of smart, and this is mine.  I can visualize things in my head and make them happen out here in the world. Some people call that a gift.  To me, that’s just the water this fish swims in.  Now, the ability to make a relationship work...That would be a gift. You get me?

Skills:  Yes.  Serious dots in Crafts, Science, and a few dots in Computer with a specialization in working with AutoCAD. Dots in Mentor (Axle, of course.)  She’s not a combat wombat by any stretch, but she can throw a punch, and if someone was foolish enough to attack her while she was in the machine shop, they would find her more than capable of defending herself on her home ground. Vampires and welding torches do not mix. Just saying.   A few dots of streetwise and a few dots of allies in various little groups that have benefitted from her expertise. (The theater groups love her to pieces when she’s available.)

Gear: Darla has a large steel tool box in the trunk of her Dodge Duster. (You laugh, but that fucker has a V8 and a blower on it.)  There's a lot she can accomplish with just that, but she also has access to a full machine shop and can machine parts and custom tools from scratch if she wants to.  She's been talking with Axle about 3d printers for months now. Axle, for his part, is intrigued, but the expense is keeping him at bay for now.

Home: Stacy's overly fussy apartment. Darla is still weird about her living arrangement, She's not one to really get comfortable in any one place to the point where she couldn't leave in an hour if she had to. Considering how often she and Stacy fight, this might not be a bad thing.

Circle: Darla is slow to warm up to people. But when she does, it's a good chance that it will be for life.  She's got good friends in the lesbian community. a few token straight friends, and her theater/dance friends, who may or may not fit into either category.

Story Uses:

“Is this to scale?”

Every once in a while it’s good for a PC to have someone around who is skilled in the art of simply making things. Maybe you need to forge a sword or put a blower on a 65 Shelby. or modify an SMG to full auto-fire.  Darla can do all of that, and if you’ve got the right amount of money, you don’t even need to be an ally. Darla is also conversant in enough carpentry and plumbing arcana to build an outbuilding or shed. She knows a guy or two who’s up on the electrical stuff so that won’t even slow her down for interesting modifications to buildings or projects of a like size.

“We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”

Darla’s relationship woes are beginning to be a thing of legend in the lesbian community in her town. She has a talent for getting emotionally entangled with the sort of women who are dead wrong for her. It’s gotten so bad lately that her friends, who love and adore her, have taken to threatening her prospective bedmates with biblical retribution if they break her heart.  Not that this has a huge impact...It may be that Darla is one of your character’s ex’s   Or it may be that your character is connected in some way to Darla parents. (She’s had no contact with them since being thrown out. It may be that they miss her and would like to re-connect with her.  And they certainly would do so as soon as she’s willing to undergo reparative therapy for her “illness”.  The interesting thing is that Darla has changed so much in a few short years that her parents could pass her on the street now and not recognize her.

"Nope. I don't remember building anything like that. I'm pretty sure I'd remember."

Darla's had a brush or two with the shadowy realm. Mostly she's completely oblivious. But if someone made the right approach and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she'd made things for some creature of the night, she's likely to throw in with hunters and already knows a few members of the Union.

Imagine that...What a coincidence.

Connections:
*Is in the contractor Rolodex at Caligari's  Knows her way around a trap-door and has mended a few spring-loaded contraptions.
* Knows a couple of the girls at The Caboose. "It's not like I go in there a LOT." 
* Got picked up once by Illyana Baker of Holmes, Gillis, Baker, Savage, North, and Dean She was gone when Darla woke up. Haven't seen her since.
* Reads Lara X avidly.