Amy Dallon

⏵ player information
name and pronouns: cass (she/her)
age: 22
contact: ectoplasmfear

⏵ character information
name: Amy Dallon
canon: Worm
age: 19
canon point: A few weeks after Scion's defeat at the end of 30.7
history: The wiki page's summary of Amy's history is pretty terrible, so I decided to write out my own. A blanket warning for child abuse, homophobia, sexual assault, incest, body modification. Amy is a character that deals with a very homophobic trope, the fact that she's a nuanced and layered character doesn't change this.

Amy Dallon was born Amelia Laverre, daughter of the famous supervillain Marquis and prior to that, a mother that she doesn't remember. When her father was arrested by a group of local superheroes as part of an ongoing campaign to retake her home city, Marquis requested that they look after her. Which lead to her being adopted by the Dallon family - enthusiastically by her adopted father, less enthusiastically by her adopted mother, who felt a deep revulsion at the idea of raising a child that wasn't her own flesh and blood, especially because she associated Marquis - and Amy by association, with someone who hurt her deeply as a child.

Her only consistent companion as a child was her adopted sister, Victoria. Mark Dallon fell into a state of clinical depression and wasn't an active parent, leaving most of the responsibility on his wife, Carol, who neglected and emotionally abused Amy by making her constantly feel like an invader in her own home. Victoria was the only one who was consistently kind to her, overjoyed at the idea of having a sister and just a little bit blind to the way that Amy had been made to feel as if she never belonged.

When she grew older, her feelings towards Victoria changed into a fixation. She fell for her hard, despite them being sisters - something she spent her entire desperately trying to hide from Victoria. Amy ended up triggering (In Worm, powers are a genetic virus that awakens in moments of intense trauma and stress) when Victoria was injured, with the desire to help her shifting her power into a powerful biokinesis that essentially allows her to manipulate the biology of anyone that she touches - meaning she was immediately the most powerful healer in the entire world. She could cure cancer, fix irreversible damage, regrow limbs, and this meant that she had a moral obligation to heal as many people as possible, knowing that every time she took a break to have a life or sleep, that's even more people that died because she couldn't get to them in time. Her family had ingrained in her an extreme black and white morality, that there were bad people and good people, leaving her with a deeply ingrained fear that she was a bad person by nature of her feelings for Victoria and the fact that she didn't deep down want to spend her entire life healing people at the cost of her sanity, health and free time.

This comes to a head when she's held hostage by the Undersiders during a bank robbery, and Tattletale threatens to reveal Amy's secret infatuation to Victoria after she came to rescue her, as well as saying out loud that Amy's adopted and that Amy's real parents were a little less squeaky clean than the Dallons would like to broadcast.

Things escalated, her life got worse, a Kaiju attacked the city, displacing thousands and leaving her with an endless supply of sick and wounded civilians, Victoria's boyfriend died, the Undersiders seized control of the city, and then a gang of internationally famed serial killers called the Slaughterhouse Nine attacked, with the intention of recruiting a new member after their last one died, with the surviving eight members all having a candidate they would like to recruit. Amy was one of them, picked out by a little girl named Bonesaw with a very similar power to hers, who wanted Amy to be her sister.

Bonesaw put her through a test that forced her to kill - one of her hard moral rules she set up to avoid slipping to becoming like her father/worst self - she then tried to run away from home to avoid any further damage, but she was stopped by Victoria who was distressed by the level of distance there was between them since her boyfriend died and Amy was blackmailed by the Undersiders. Amy - on the brink of falling apart, told Victoria not to touch her - but Victoria who trusted Amy deeply and could never be afraid of her, went to hug her anyway to show that she wasn't dissuaded.

In a moment of pure weakness, despair and loneliness, Amy did something horrific - she modified Victoria's brain to make her feelings requited. Victoria could tell immediately that something had changed, and Amy shamefully explained herself and begged to be able to undo it, but Victoria was understandably not very keen on letting Amy have free access to her brain and body again.

The whole Slaughterhouse Arc happens, Amy gets tormented by the other seven members of the nine, has two of her fingers bitten off, gets recruited by the Undersiders into helping them against the Slaughterhouse Nine - which she's deeply reluctant about due to feeling as if helping them (Villains) would mean betraying her family even further (Because they're heroes). Tattletale and Skitter convince her eventually before Victoria gets extremely badly burned with acid and Skitter has to bring her to Amy. Tattletale tries to convince her to undo her effect immediately but Amy... doesn't do that. She creates a shield of stray animals around Victoria to keep her warm and she keeps her emotions stable to make the healing process safer - she denounces the Undersiders as hypocrites and assholes when they make an offer for her to join them and she leaves with her sister.

She eventually helps them stop the Nine from killing people with a plague by making a counter plague and they leave after most of their members get murdered - but she locks herself in an abandoned house with her sister, figuring that in the dictionary definition of sunk cost fallacy after being told repeatedly by the Worm Joker that she's a rotten person at her core and no amount of miracles will ever change that - she'll just spend a few days fixing Victoria's body up, letting Victoria keep the extra affection so that she can comfort Amy before Amy leaves to "repent through healing for the rest of her life." Bad. Too much time passes, and Amy realizes she can't actually fix her, because her body and mind have become too different for her to be able to easily get her back to normal, and in the process of it all, Victoria becomes a tangled melted mess of limbs and skin from insects, rats, stray dogs and cats that can only really call Amy's name lovingly.

Carol Dallon finds her and finally sees Amy for the pitiful creature she is with this one horrible act, and is dissuaded from killing her and finally recognizes how deeply she's damaged this girl that was entrusted to her care. Amy forces everyone's hand and gets herself sent to the Birdcage, where she's reunited with her father, who wasn't actually a sinister demon after all and genuinely would have done his best to support, love and care for her - and continued to do this after she was incarcerated. Aimless and depressed, Amy was practically catatonic for the first week or so of her stay, before she met another villain by the name of Glastig Uaine who spoke in riddles and controlled dead superheroes and supervillains as ghosts added to her arsenal, and Amy started to unravel the greater thread at the heart of all their powers. This new purpose motivates her and she finds a period of relative peace in the Birdcage, serving as her father's lieutenant and holding one of the most important positions in the whole prison, as the only one capable of healing everyone's injuries.

Gradually learning that the world isn't entirely black and white and that not every villain is a black hearted ontologically evil villain - and that not every hero is a good person - she slowly grows as a person as she does her best to help the greater hero community from within the Birdcage by warning them about the coming apocalypse.

Two years later, the apocalypse comes, and the Birdcage is opened to help them all fight against the alien god trying to kill them all. Amy and her dad are reunited with the Dallons and the Undersiders, and Amy has grown a lot tougher with a reputation that gets her fear and respect from the other inmates of the Birdcage.

Taylor Hebert (Skitter) comes to her, asking Amy (and Bonesaw, who is also helping) to modify her brain so that she can get greater powers that could be used to properly fight against the end of the world. Amy, having learned that her ironclad rules aren't the be all end all of morality, and that part of where she went wrong was not listening to Taylor when she first tried to help, does as she asks. And Taylor's mind falls apart as her powers grow into something genuinely horrifying (The power to hijack and take direct control over the bodies of other "Parahumans".) Horrified by what she's done, Amy begins to fall apart, believing she's repeated the exact same mistake that lead to Victoria transforming into a car, she gets roped into trying to fix things and salvage this by the remaining Undersiders and her father.

This lead to Taylor defeating the alien god they were fighting against and being shot in the head, dead as far as the whole world is concerned, leaving Amy in the aftermath of her actions once again - for good and for ill this time. After fixing Victoria, Amy "said goodbye to her family."

The world slowly rebuilt itself, Amy healing refugees by the thousands with no real sense of direction but a feeling of debt. She will be coming in with no strong emotional attachment to her world - seeing it as something she was never really allowed to participate in, but also feeling a great debt that she owes Taylor, and a desire to make right on her initial goal of utilizing her second chance for all it's worth.
abilities: Amy is a biokinetic with an innate understanding of, and the ability to modify, the biology of any living organism she touches. This is not limited to humans but encompasses all carbon-based life based on what is seen in the story. For much of her life, Amy primarily restricted her use of the power to healing but it is a power that doesn't really have any limit beyond her own imagination and willingness. When she is particularly focusing on someone's brain, she can also use this to "read their mind" by having an innate understanding of the inner workings of their neurology.
personality: Amy has spent her entire life trying her hardest to be a "good person", but she has never been a particularly nice person. She's bitter, mean, dismissive and jealous. She's also insecure and shy - prone to hiding behind her sister or father or whatever other authority offers her protection and affection.

It's not that she doesn't care/never cared about the people she helps - more so that it's come at such a high personal cost to her that she's lost to ability to really differentiate from one sick person to another. Her lack of empathy for them is another thing that Amy fears makes her a bad person, or at least makes it so that she doesn't fit the heroic mould she was raised to fit. There's a silent desperation and hunger to Amy, of all the things that were denied to her, mixed with a deep feeling of shame for wanting anything.

After her time in the Birdcage, some of these feeling have lightened, and she's much more capable of friendliness and genuine compassion after two years where she wasn't strapped to a permanent ethical trolley problem. She believes herself to be a monster, irredeemable, but she's determined to make the most of her second chance anyway. She's also extremely intelligent, and considerably more cunning than she'd like other people to believe, having been the first person to really figure out the larger mystery of Worm.

She's also deeply committed to her personal moral code, skewed though it might be. After having broken it, it's less of a hardline and is subject to change, but Amy has a tendency towards hard rules she sets for herself to keep herself in control of her own actions.
samples: Here & Here