[The view is from Dinah's POV, and mostly the view is her hands in her own lap, sewing up a tear in the sleeve of a dress. Suddenly the dress comes to life, hopping off Dinah's lap and skittering along the floor.] Ah! [She jumps up to chase it, but doesn't get very far before tripping over -another- dress that happened to be lying on the ground, which decided it also wanted to come to life and run off on her.] Hey, get back here! [She gets to her feet then, logic, or lack of, be damned. She was almost done with those repairs, you know!]

[And then she wakes up. Her sewing is still in her lap, and pretty obviously not going to run off any time soon. She rolls her eyes at her own weird dream.] "Note to self: get your hands on a sewing machine." She mutters. That would certainly speed up the whole sewing process- and if it didn't take as long as hand sewing, the chances she'd fall asleep while doing it were slimmer.]

[And on that note, she folds the dress up and heads for bed- if she's sleepy now, it'll only get worse if she doesn't get some rest, to the point where she'll be too tired soon to do anything productive.]

[She stands in a small graveyard, in her pajamas, with a cool wind stirring up her hair and tugging at the loose cotton pants and t-shirt and the full moon shining down.

There's a crackling sound behind her, and she whirls. A few yards behind Dinah, half facing away from her, is a blonde boy about her age, a few inches taller than she is.

"Vincent!"

She runs toward him, but he seems not to hear her and turns, walking away. The distance between them stretches out, and no matter how fast she runs Dinah can't seem to close that distance any quicker. Or at all. The space between them is exactly the same as it was when she started running. 

"Vincent!"

Still no response from the boy. He finally reaches the open stone archway that acts as the entrance and steps through. Suddenly Dinah is able to close the gap between and reach the entrance too. But when she tries to follow him out, something holds her back from passing under the archway.

Chains. Chains that have sprouted from the graveyard soil and wrapped around her wrists. Oddly, they glow white in the moonlight and are shaped like human bones. Perhaps they are bones. In any case, the chains are dragging her back the way she came, and she cries out again. "Vincent, come back! Please! Help me!"

No response from the boy, he just continues walking, beginning to disappear as a thick white fog rolls in. Dinah strains against her deceptively fragile-looking bonds, only to have them start reeling her in even faster. "Vincent, please! I'm sorry! Come back!"

He vanishes completely into the fog, and Dinah falls to the ground from the force her chains are tugging at her with.  They tug her back into the graveyard, and as she gets nearer the place they're coming up from the ground at, a hole roughly the size of a grave opens up to meet her, a simple slab tombstone marking it, bearing the legend 'Dinah' and the brand of the Mausoleum.

Her legs and the bottom half of her torso are pulled into the hole and she digs her nails into the dirt near the edge. "Vincent!" She called one last time, then screamed as she was pulled into the grave which immediately began to fill again.]

[Upon waking, Dinah sits up in bed (she found and claimed an empty house in Espoir) and curls herself into a little ball, hugging her knees so that she can rest her forehead on them. And she doesn't make a sound, except for the sound of her breathing as it slows from fast and panicked back to normal.]

[Video; there is brief static, then anyone looking at their Dreamberry would see a young teenage girl, pale and dark-haired, and looking nervous, confused, and uncomfortable.]

Um...hello? Can...can anyone hear me? What is this place? ...Am I dreaming?

[She sounds about as confused as she looks.]

[The camera tilts around now, kind of crazily, as if she's playing with the Dreamberry, or examining it. A slight laugh is heard, and her voice is a touch amused when she speaks next.] Wow, fancy phone. I guess this place can't be too bad if they just give away stuff like this...

( Read more... )
This lasted well into her teens, when she and her best friend Vincent stumbled across a strange place walking in the woods one night. The place was the Sunken Mausoleum, a place where restless spirits are kept sleeping in vaults until a human agent can come through and send them on to whatever afterlife awaits them. And Dinah accidentally signed on to be that human agent. So, she and Vincent began clearing the Mausoleum's vaults, with a warning from the caretaker, Bali-lali (an anthropomorphic spider-jester): if they did not clear the vaults before sunrise, or shirked their duties in any way, they would die (this mostly applied to Dinah, as it was her contract).

Tension rose between Dinah and her aunt over her sneaking out at night to do her work, but eventually, the confidence Dinah gained through her experiences there, and the fact that it had lessened her fear of ghosts, lead to her and her aunt becoming closer. And work at the Mausoleum got easier when she and Vincent were joined by the Tower Guards Edaniel and Edrear. Then, out of the blue, tragedy struck: the particularly violent spirit they'd been chasing killed Vincent, and it seemed all of the Mausoleum's positive work on Dinah would be undone. She reverted to the frightened, helpless girl she'd been at the beginning, looking for a way to get Vincent back and not caring about anything else.

Her grief allowed her to fall pray to the wily spirits in the vaults, and she might have died if not for Edaniel and Edrear (mostly Edrear, he's the one that fights). Finally, the Mausoleum itself brought the three into a vault of its choosing so it could have a talk with Dinah. It told her "You can't dwell forever. You must carry on for your own sake and not live in the past. Wallowing in self-pity is not the way to live. You're stronger than that. You're worth more than that." And Dinah took those words to heart.

[Personality] Going through so much in the Mausoleum has made Dinah strong-willed and fairly self-confident. She shapes her own fate, rather than believing she has no choice in anything, like she did early on. She realizes that she has been pitying herself and relying on others (like Vincent) to make the tough decisions for her for a long time now, and is working to change that (it had changed a lot before Vincent died, but presumably, it'll be an even more noticable change now that her enabler is gone for good). At the same time, though, she's a young girl trying to cope with the death of her best and really, only, friend outside the Mausoleum. She's stopped dwelling on her grief and self-pity thanks to the Mausoleum's intervention, but she still has a lot of grief to work through. Especially considering the hints of romantic tension that were there, between her and Vi in the first three volumes.

She's gotten good at thinking on her feet/otherwise under pressure thanks to her tenure with the Mausoleum, and probably picked up a fair bit of problem-solving skill there as well. She's pretty quick-tempered, and calling her sensitive/any synonym of the word or treating her like a helpless damsel in distress are likely to set her off. Temper aside, she's generally a very nice, polite person, if a bit dark. I'd like to say she's got a Gothic mindset as well, in the every-day-is-Halloween, looking-for-beauty-in-dark-places sense. And she most likely has a morbid sense of humor, thanks, once again, to the Mausoleum. She's also a touch...not vain precisely, but she certainly spends a lot of time on her appearance; her outfits tend toward elaborate, Victorian Gothic/Gothic Lolita styles (not to mention, it's hinted she sews a lot of her own clothes) and her hair is often styled in ways that, in rl, would take a long time in front of a mirror to do right.

[Specialties/Abilities] The only supernatural ability Dinah has is that she can see and communicate with ghosts. And usually, the ghosts seek her out, not the other way around. Aside from that, she has a talent for sewing (it's been hinted she sews a lot of her own clothes, if not from scratch, then at least heavily customized), and she gardens (I would go as far as to say horrorticulture- collecting and growing plants like they mention in old horror stories, wormwood and asphodel and such).

[Affection]
[Fighting] Dinah is not the confrontational type. However, if her back was to the wall and she had no other choice, she'd probably fight to defend herself. That being said, she wouldn't start a fight. She tends toward a "violence is not the answer" stance unless dealing with insane ghosts who want to kill her.
And she really can't fight (she mostly depends on her self-appointed bodyguard Edrear to do that), so I'd really prefer not to have her getting into scuffles with anyone. ^_^

[Other Facts] Anything else can go here~</div>