Dolores Valentine

[Lola]

NAME: Dolores Valentine. Formerly known as Dolores Le Roux.
NICKNAMES: Lola. Dolly, by her father. At the club she works in the dancers are all named after states, Dolores is Texas, usually shortened to Tex. Fox/Foxy, as a result of her wolf’s colouring, real original guys.
RACE: Werewolf; born.
OCCUPATION: Rogue; Exotic Dancer (read: stripper) at Vesuvius
GENDER: Female.
SKIN COLOUR: Caucasian, tanned.
NATIONALITY: South African.
AGE: 192.
CLOTHING: Not much when she’s working. Most of the time she’s in a combination of corsets, stockings and high heels. It’s obvious that she’s comfortable in those clothes, she doesn’t mind showing skin, she has nothing to be ashamed of and that, more than the clothes themselves, seems to be what people remember about her. On themed nights, like the rest of the girls, she dresses in the vein of the Texan flag to match her name which usually includes a red cowboy hat and blue and white garter belt and stocking. Outside of work she dresses down considerably; sweatshirts, jeans, whatever she feels like. There is always a sense that she’s well put together, she looks neat and tidy at all times, even when he hair’s in a pony and she’s kicking around in a pair of sneakers.
HEIGHT: 5'8"
WEIGHT: 133lbs.
TATTOOS: None.
PIERCINGS: None.
JEWELLRY: None.
BODY MODIFICATIONS: Lola has no tattoos and only minimal scars. You’d think that after a young life spent hunting vampires in Cape Town she would be riddled with them but the only scars she has are from her mother, Maala La Roux. Across her lower back, easily covered up though they are, several long, horizontal scars can be seen as a result of punishments for goals not met. There are similar scars on the underside of her upper arms and around her ankles, most of them are often covered with stage make-up.

WOLF FORM
BUILD: Small, lithe, fast, but by no means lacking for power. What she lacks in size Lola makes up for in the speed with which she can attack an opponent. Often times this comes in handy for fighting vampires as she is almost as fast as they are. In terms of build she is actually quite graceful for a werewolf; there’s that is down to training or to the wolf form itself is up for debate but there’s no doubt that in her alternate form she is quick, careful, and incredibly agile.
HEIGHT: 4’2 on all fours.
WEIGHT: 225lbs.
HAIR: In many ways Lola looks like an oversized fox in her wolf form, with her red fur and the dark paws of black, her tail is even white tipped like a fox.
EYES: Yellow/Orange, extremely bright and distinctive.
DEFINING MARKS: Her general colouring and her bushy tail.

PACK
PACK: Rogue.
POSITION: N/A.
TERRITORY: N/A.

HAIR
LENGTH: Long, past her shoulders, much longer when straightened.
STYLE: Left loose it’s curly and voluminous. In the twenties she cut it into a very short, severe bob since that was the style and it helped her to blend in but she always hated that as as a result she keeps her hair very long nowadays.
COLOUR: Brown.

FACIAL HAIR
LENGTH: N/A.
STYLE: N/A.

EYES
COLOUR: Hazel.
ODDITIES: When angered Lola’s eyes change to that of her wolfen colour.

PERSONALITY: Lola is, simply put, an animal. There’s black and there’s white for her, there’s right and wrong (though her version of which is which might be a little skewed seeing as she has no problem ripping someone’s throat out if they get frisky). If you cross her, if you fuck with the people she cares about then all bets are off and you’re dead. There is literally a trail of dead bodies belonging to those who have wronged her in her wake; she can’t help it, her temper gets the better of her and she just loses it. As much as she tries to act as though she embraces that part of herself she knows that it’s genetic and she fears it deep down; her mothers rages scared her for most of her life and knowing that she, too, can lose control of herself like that terrifies her.

In ability to form attachments. That’s a big problem for Lola too, only she doesn’t see it that way. Of course having been in Los Angeles for so long it’s only natural that she has friends now but she tries not to think about it too much, tries not to dwell on the fact that if she had to she would leave them all behind and run again. There’s a possible exception in that of her employers Gina Serratore and Ioan Marrok, they have helped her in the past and supported her through the final years of her struggle to control her wolf, but everyone else is fair game. In a way that makes her self loathing even deeper; she likes her co-workers, she likes her boyfriends and the people she knows from the grocery store, the little attachments she’s made that makes her life complete and full of actual life but she knows herself and she knows how seriously she takes her own survival. Lola is conditioned not to care about them, she’s programmed to up and run if she has to. In short, she is her mother’s daughter and that seeps into every aspect of her life.

Beneath the bright, sassy, seductive she is quite a dark person. All instinct and survival with this great gaping pit for... something. There’s room for something inside of her and she doesn’t know what. Dolores suspects that until she finds it that pit is just going to grow until it consumes everything.

WEAKNESSES: For one thing; her temper is a massive weakness. Lola has a lot of trouble not reacting when someone pisses her off, when someone gets too close. Of course working in a strip club is probably not the best place to be if she’s liable to break someone’s arm in four places when they get drunk and try to cop a feel but that’s besides the point. There’s a strict no touching policy and she is more than happy to help security enforce it if she has to. Lola is also full of crippling self doubt and anxiety. You’d never see it from the surface but she is riddled with fears and dresses them up in bravado. Being a werewolf she is also allergic to silver and contact will burn her.

ABILITIES: You’ll never see someone who can throw themselves around a pole better than Lola. Undeniably she’s an incredible dancer and a favourite at Vesuvius, she prides herself in her work and puts a lot of time into it. Thanks to her militarised upbringing in a pack comprised wholly of fighters Lola is well versed in hand to hand combat and with various bladed weaponry. She is strong, relentless and absolutely vicious in battle. Lola no longer changes at the pull of the moon. She is able to speak French and Afrikaans, Swazi and Urdu with Spanish and some picked up Italian (usually the swear words) from Gina and Ioan.

WEAPONS: None; she doesn’t need them.

PRIZED POSSESSIONS: None. Save her own life.

HOME(S): Lola shares an apartment with one of the other dancers from the club on Bella's side of the city.

HISTORY: Born in Cape Town, South Africa, to Maala and Thaddeus La Roux Dolores was the golden child of a small but powerful pack that controlled the center of the city. Unlike many packs the Alpha female ruled the house in the La Roux pack and she did so with an iron fist; they were all fighters, there was -- in Maala’s words -- no room for passengers, they all had a responsibility to protect the pack territory and all were trained in various brutal forms of combat. They lived in a dangerous area, vampires had swollen in number over the years and as a pack they took it into their hands to rid the city of them completely; for many years Cape Town was a vampire free city, one of extremely few in the world.

One of the few wolves who had effectively married into the pack was Dolores’ father, Thaddeus. Greek by birth he had met Maala as he had travelled the globe, a young rogue. It had not been hard to fall for the dynamic, fiery female and a passionate relationship turned into mate-hood with surprising speed. This speed was something that he would come to curse in the later years of his life. After Dolores was born his wife seemed to change. Qualities that had been minimal when they had been younger came to the forefront of her personality; she became harder, crueler and more demanding than ever before. As a general shapes their troops so too did Maala shape Lola from a young age. When she was fifteen her mother was taking her on vampire hunts, clearing the streets. Thaddeus and Maala argued constantly about the upbringing of their child and eventually he snapped, he was no longer able to take watching his baby girl turn into her mother with each fresh kill, each sleepless night of either an uncontrolled wolf or stalking vampires through the back streets of Cape Town. Arguably he knew their daughter better than her mother ever could; he took the time to speak to her, to get to know what she liked and what she didn’t. Thaddeus knew that Lola wasn’t really that interested in being a fighter, running around killing vampires and keeping human gangs in check through intimidation and violence. Thaddeus knew that she wanted to be a dancer.

At first he held out hope that he might be able to reason with his mate, convince her to let their child go out into the world and learn the things that she wanted to. They were wolves after all, Dolores had all the time in the world fo be whatever she wanted to be and come home again but Maala flew into a vicious rage at the thought. Inconsolable she wrecked their rooms and severely injured Thaddeus. At that moment he knew he had to do what had been previously unthinkable; he had to take Dolores and run.

After he had cleaned himself up as best he could (he was partially blinded in his left eye and deaf in that ear thanks to the blows Maala had landed) he gathered up his sixteen year old daughter and whisked her away in the dead of night. Lola was partially confused and partially relieved. Maala had been terrorising her in her own way for years and she was thrilled to be leaving even if she didn’t feel she could show it. Part of her was suspicious of the move, not sure whether she could really trust that she was about to be granted access to her own life. It only seemed real when they got to France. When she asked her father why he had brought them there he told her that she was going to dance school, she was going to follow her desires.

Lola was thrilled, ecstatic. For the last few years she had been secretly going to dance classes behind her mother’s back and now she was in Paris, France, about to get the chance to really learn the art that she loved so much.

Of course she was still miles behind her human counterparts when she started but being a wolf she was able to pick it up a lot faster than they could as well and with her poise and agility she was easily one of the most promising students. They told the school she had a medical condition and that she would be out of class frequently as a result of her illness, mainly so that she could go into isolation when the full moon came around. They also took her out of class on random occasions so that no one would spot a pattern and it all seemed to work wonderfully. Lola didn’t even mind lying to her classmates and teachers so long as she could keep dancing.

Six years of classes, training, performances and she was leaving the school with the equivalent of a masters in ballet. A company had invited her to join them, just invited her and she was ready for a career as a dancer for as long as she could look the way she did without it raising suspicion. When they had auditions for the lead female part of Giselle in the ballet of the same name she went for it gladly and was awarded the part. Lola ran pretty much the whole way home to tell her father the amazing news but when she made it to their Parisian flat she found their door slanted off the lock, the hinges blasted off. When she walked into the living room she found her father’s body in a lake of congealed blood. She fell into it, screaming for her papa to wake up to no avail. Her raw shouts brought the neighbours flooding in. She heard them coming in through the door but she didn’t care, all she cared about was the fact that her father, the only person in the whole world that truly loved her, was dead and she was alone. It was only when she heard screaming that wasn’t hers that she turned around to see one of the upstairs neighbours was lying on the floor with a knife in her forehead. The others were yowling, crying, running. Maala had waiting for her daughter, she had butchered Thaddeus and now she was throwing kitchen knives and in a moment bounding after the humans to silence them. Lola was paralysed; she wished she could do something but her limbs seemed to refuse her orders and she could only sit cradling her father’s corpse as her mother launched into action, slaughtering the humans who had come running.

When she was done Maala came and stood over the corpse of her mate and her only daughter, rocking slightly in the blood. Crying. Squeaking pathetically. Maala scoffed and reached down for her daughter’s arm, telling her they were going home. Lola rounded on her, smacking her hand away. Screaming at her, asking her how she could do such a thing, asking what was wrong with her, calling her une salope and worse, Lola received a bloody slap to the face so sharp her mother knocked two of her teeth out. Dazed, nauseated and slick with her father’s blood she was dragged out of the apartment.

Maala did exactly as she threatened; she took Lola home. Of course by now Paris was more her home than South Africa had ever been and having lived on the outside world the difference between the oppressive pack life and the freedom she had known in Europe made her ache all over. At twenty-two she was still a very young wolf, but she knew her own mind and she knew she hated her mother for what she had done. All Lola dreamed about was escape after that night in Paris but she had to accept that she was not nearly strong enough to make it on her own. Not yet. So she trained. Hard.

For ninety agonising years she fell in line with her mother and the rest of the pack. It took a few decades just for Maala to trust her child with a weapon more deadly than a bo staff, honestly. She was smart, cautious, Lola could give her that, but as she lay awake in bed at night she envisaged confronting her, telling her how much she loathed her for what she had done, how badly she wanted to hurt her in return for the pain Maala had caused her. During the day she held her tongue. It wasn’t until she was one hundred and twelve that she had the opportunity to get away. Finally Maala decided that her daughter was ready to lead a hunt of her own. All that good behaviour, all the times when she had stopped herself from saying what was on her mind, it had all paid off. Lola took her team into the heart of Cape Town and lost them. It wasn’t all that hard really, she issued orders to split up and then disappeared; she had been preparing for the chance for years and now that it was upon her she was not about to waste it.

Lola travelled north to Morocco and from there she made it to continental Europe. As much as she would have loved to return to France she knew that was idiotic, the worst place she could go. Maala would find her there in a heartbeat. So instead she decided to travel to America. There was opportunity there, she could blend in, she was a good actress, ninety years of pretending to be a dutiful daughter had taught her that about herself. Perhaps she could even dance again. It was the roaring twenties by now, she cut her hair short to disguise herself, she blended right in with the young society of bright young things.

It also got her into a lot of trouble. Lola’s inability to trust and her general dislike of being handles thanks to her mother’s mistreatment of her for ninety years of training that bordered very closely (and sometimes crossed the border fully) to torture made her a difficult person to be around. Men got too drunk on champagne in New York and they had a broken wrist and a shattered nose. Woman touched her hair to compliment her and she shattered their collar bones. Lola lad to move around a lot at that point and she was deeply depressed. She felt like she’d turned into her mother without even realising it, the training had seemed in through the cracks and she was saturated with it, she thought of her father and imagined how disappointed he would be in her and she came very close to giving up. If it hadn’t been for Ginevra Serratore and Ioan Marrok she would have done.

One terrible night she was partying with a new group of friends, people she’d met at the Vaudeville, people who had seen her in a burlesque performance she was currently in to make money so that she could cross the country, and some of the other girls, someone had too much to drink again and things got handsy. Lola snapped worse than she had ever done so before; one moment there was a pair of hands on her rear and the next she was kneeling over a young man, straddling him between her thighs, beating him to death with a crystal decanter. It shattered in her hands, slicing her palms open and he was a pulp of bones and brain and blood beneath her. Gina came running into the back room where Lola had escaped the party to get her headdress for a game they were all about to play, and where she had been followed by the now deceased gentleman, and found the young wolf just like that. Wild eyed, numb with panic, Lola looked up at the much, much, older female and something in her expression must had pleaded with the Italian wolf. She took care of everything, Lola didn’t even ask how or why, she just cleaned herself up in the bathroom and when she came out, changed and washed the body was gone, the blood was nowhere to be seen and Gina was there with a coat for her.

Since that day Lola kept in close contact with Gina and her stoic (slightly frightening) bodyguard. They helped her to leave the city, Gina gave her words of encouragement and the promise that if she ever needed help all she had to do was call. For a time she move around the country, afraid that somehow she would be discovered by the police, by her mother, by the family of the human man she’d killed, but she kept her head up and no one she met was any the wiser to her past or her temper. Every time she felt herself teetering on the edge of a break she up and left town to be safe. It was never so much that she cared overly for those enough her that might be hurt, it was that she didn’t want to have a way for anyone to track her. Of course there were slips, Lola has killed enough people over the course of her life to keep a funeral director in business for a decade or more, but she’s not proud of it. It is what it is, she can’t change it now, all she can do is try to minimise the damage.

When Ginevra created her own club with dancing, drinks and girls, Lola was the first girl hired to perform. There are really no words for how grateful she has become to Gina, Ioan and the club; Lola has lived in Los Angeles for the last decade. Thankfully the influence of older wolves has managed to keep her bloodthirsty temper largely in check and she;s only actually managed to kill one person in her time in the city. Bully for her.