Penny Dacote

""I run, I fight, I hunt, I bite!""

Penny M. Dacote (she/her) is the daughter of paranormal investigators and the heir to an enhanced, monstrous set of abilities handed down from slayer to slayer within her bloodline. Though she’s a little disgruntled, she is energetic, irreverent and doesn’t take herself seriously in the slightest. With a need for constant occupation and engagement (less social and more intellectual, mind) she’d be among the first to equate standing still with death. Despite her grisly calling, she attends Monster High in order to see the good in monsters: she’s not so blind or antiquated in her views to believe they all need to be destroyed. Put simply, she has a great love for the supernatural, and is simply out for the blood of anyone (monster or human) that would seek to harm her friends and world.

Pulpy, rip-snorting, and thunderously unflinching in almost all aspects, she’s fun to be around and absolute Hell to be pitted against.

Personality
Penny is a monster, in her own way. Hell yeah, she’s a monster, and proud of it. Though effectively mortal in most respects, she’s decidedly fell in her abilities, and proud of it. She wants to be the scary story that evil things tell their children. She wants to be bogeyman of demonic culture. She wants those that seek to threaten the balance to fear her like something out of their nightmares. She’s just here to destroy demonic threats and have a good time. She’s not big on preamble, nominal/ token facades, and any form of harassment or irritation. Her patience doesn’t get much meatier than ‘thin’, and though she can stretch it for as long as she can, when it breaks she doesn’t think twice about being blunt and to the point, whether that’s with words or fists.

She’s kind of just… coasting. Running. She has a distinct, short-fused personality, sure, but she’s also just trying not to tangle herself up too much in other people’s lives or her own emotions. She’s there to do things. To have experiences. To enjoy life and slay evil and be unapologetically true to herself.

She’s a big believer of direct experience, or that one can only truly behave or understand as much as one has directly encountered something, as much as one can truly advise. She’s not always the smartest person in the room, no, but she’s sometimes the most situationally equipped, socially or otherwise.

She’s kind of a nut. Her zeal and bravado are decidedly over-the-top at times and she’s a little self-referential in her persona. That is, if you know Penny, you really know Penny. You get her in-jokes, you understand her odd, niche sense of humor, etc. and you’re not terribly put off by her more rampage-y character traits.

She’ll never turn on those she truly considers friends, though. She would never utter an unkind word or behave in any overly callous or cruel way to them. Never. That would go against her personal code and sense of loyalty. All her anger, frustration, and fear are funelled directly into competitive/ performance settings, and everything else exits the barrel of her gun when it’s pointed towards evil beasts.

She’s the kind to crack a joke in a grim situation, lighten the mood, take chances where she finds them.

Interests

 * Running- Penny prides herself in being physically fit and having a plethora of stamina, and as such she’s big on cross-country running and cardio-based fitness, the occasional Krav Maga class or some such thrown in the mix for fun.
 * Gunning- Penny’s a ‘practical gun nut’. She’d be hard pressed to tell you every spec or piece of trivia about a given firearm, but she knows what she likes, she knows what works for her, and she knows what she can comfortably use effectively enough to win competitions.
 * Baseball - Penny follows exactly one baseball team professionally (the Toronto Blue Jays) and enjoys playing the sport herself.
 * American History - Despite being painfully Canadian, Penny is a closeted US History nerd and has particular appreciation for the Jacksonian/ Civil War eras. As a natural combination of her love of firearm sports and the West, Penny secretly competes in CAS (or Cowboy Action Shooting) Matches, complete with costume. She operates under the stage name/ alias ‘Anxiety Janice’.

Abilities

 * Otherworld Energy - As the current heir of a bloodline of Demon Slayers, Penny has been granted bursts of increased strength, energy and speed as a result of being imbued with an extradimensional quality within her physiology.
 * Athleticism - Penny’s track-and-field/ baseball outings has lead her to have consistently high level of physical fitness.

Appearance
She’s blonde-ish, has nice cheeks (in more ways than one), and she’ll kick your butt.

Penny radiates strength, packing streamlined muscles and all the reflexes of a cat on a hot tin roof. Her main outfit consists of fingerless gloves, a sleeveless acid-washed denim vest (complete with a couple patches of spikes), dog tags, a shark-tooth choker necklace, a Canadian Flag bandana (worn tied around the head in true Solid-Snake fashion), and steel-toed boots.

She has a sort of antiquated quality about her beauty, a sort of ‘scruffy bombshell’ look to her that is endearing, to a point. Her hair’s deliberately a little messy, her presence vaguely rough around the edges.

Role - Demon Slayer
Hailing from Canada (British Columbia in her childhood and Alberta in her adolescence), Penny is the next in the line of a prominent clan of Scourges, demon hunters gifted supernatural abilities in order to balance the world and protect Earth from malicious forces. Exposed to the otherworldly at a young age, Penny transferred to MH in order to grow closer to creatures and seek a greater understanding of what makes most monsters good, so she can exterminate the bad ones later in life.

Her father, Bruce, and her mother, Ripley, have allowed her to move in with her Uncle Frank and Aunt Sadie, relatives on the Dacote side.

Relationships
While Penny’s general irreverence and lack of patience can sometimes be offputting, she is not without friends. She is, however, open to new relationships of all kinds.

Aunt and Uncle
Penny’s Uncle Frank and Aunt Sadie have been nothing but kind to her, and she considers them close friends of hers. As socialites and the effectual ‘toast of the upper crust’, they are truly people about town, but they love Penny dearly. Penny describes their guardianship as “responsible when it’s needed and neglectful when I want them to be”, which works for her own purposes flawlessly. Penny’s mother wasn’t terribly comfortable with sending her to live with the relatives (believing them to not necessarily be the best examples), but due to their close physical proximity to Monster High, it was decided to be the best course of action.

Frank is Penny’s Uncle on her Dacote side (father's brother), and worked as a prominent supernatural exterminator in his youth.

Anne Antebellum
TBA

Pet - Rose
Penny owns a lop-eared rabbit named Rose. She loves her dearly.

Gallery
N/A

Trivia

 * Her first name, Penny, is a composite reference to the biblical appearances of The Four Horseman, specifically the Black Rider/ Horseman of Famine. Revelation 6:5-6 sees one of the Apocalyptic Harbingers carrying a set of scales (or balances) and making mention scarcity upon the Earth, specifically a ‘measure of wheat for a penny’. Penny herself, as a demon slayer, is there to ensure that the mortal plane is balanced and that hostile demons are scarce.
 * Her middle name, Mignola, is a reference to the creator of the Hellboy comic book series.
 * Her last name, Dacote, has a double meaning. ‘Dacote’ itsself is an acronym used by the writers of the Doom video game franchise (Dies At The Conclusion Of This Episode); the title/ term was given to characters who had limited time to live within the narrative. As such, her last name is both a reference to Penny’s recklessness, as well as one more added reference.
 * Penny’s father Bruce is meant to be a reference to Ash (portrayed by Bruce Campbell) of the ‘Evil Dead’ series, while her mother is named Ripley after the protagonist of the original ‘Alien’.
 * Frank and Sadie, Penny’s uncle and aunt, are heavily inspired by Frank and Sadie Doyle of Acker and Blacker’s Thrilling Adventure Hour, specifically the segment ‘Beyond Belief’; privately wealthy alcohol connoisseurs/ socialites who moonlight as exorcists/ paranormal investigators, with the husband working as a gun-toting demon exterminator in his youth, having come from a long line of the same. Penny’s interest in baseball is a reference to Sadie Doyle’s favorite sport.
 * Penny’s CAS Alias, ‘Anxiety Janice’, is a spin on ‘Calamity Jane’. This is less a reference to actual, clinical anxiety, and more just Penny making fun of the fact that she considers herself ‘a fundamentally twitchy, nervous person’.
 * Penny adores billiards/ pool.
 * Her affinity for denim stems from 80s action-heroes and their connected aesthetic.