NAME Abigail Gunn

PERSONALITY
ALONE
When left to herself, Gunn is free to malfunction in any way she likes. If she has access to alcohol, that will be her method of choice. She is careful not to say too much about what she's thinking when she drinks. If she is “alone in a crowd,” she may get herself into a fight just for the sake of activity. She takes risks others might think idiotic. People might think that, frankly, because they are. Gunn is immensely self-destructive, with an addictive personality. She is something of an adrenaline junky, and has been a substance abuser in the past. She never progressed to hardcore drugs. Her drug of choice was painkillers – Loratabs in particular. These days, she'd hardly be picky. Nobody to live for but herself, and that's a person she has been at odds with for years.

INTERPERSONAL
The four possible relationships are enemies, acquaintances, lovers, and friends. Most people never leave the enemies, acquaintances, or lovers quadrants for Gunn. Lovers are not, in her mind, necessarily closer to her – beyond proximity – than acquaintances. Friends, now – those are a rarity. Enemies and acquaintances she has in abundance. Lovers... perhaps to an extent others would consider “abundant.” With other people, Gunn tends to be abrasive, harsh, and off-putting. She wouldn't hesitate to save a person's life, though. She is... good-hearted. But hard to handle.

MORAL CODE
Gunn wouldn't watch a person die, any person, without mounting a rescue attempt. After the immediate threat is quelled, though, it would be rare for her to take on any additional responsibility for the individual unless more danger presented itself. She feels too out of control to provide stability for anyone else, and the idea of failing them haunts her mind more than one would imagine.

Fighting, not killing, is a fair means of expression. If someone leaves with a bloody nose or cracked ribs, all is still good. Gunn intentionally seeks fights when she's particularly bogged down with thoughts, and so starting fights is perfectly alright by her standards. She wouldn't progress to killing, though, and when she fights for the hell of fighting, she engages only in hand-to-hand combat.

Gunn has a sense of justice. Anything she perceives as injustice, she will bluntly involve herself in, particularly if it involves a weaker or defenseless group. She will make herself judge and jury, even executioner, if she feels she has to. On the flip side of this, she will not act on anything that will break her persona. If it challenges her morality but interferes with her revenge, she'll overlook it... if she isn't doing it herself.

If it feels good, do it. That's her recent philosophy on life. She has no qualms about people being indiscreet sexually or any other wise that hurts nobody but themselves. Out for endorphins, she considers it, and everybody knows those are a scarce resource these days. Funny how much people pay for the drugs when the happiness was more a scarcity.

BACKGROUND
Daddy was a cop; mommy cut open dead people.

Hardly glamorous, but true. Abigail Gunn was born June 13th, 1985, to Samuel Gunn (29 January 1953 – 5 August 1998) and Charlotte Gunn (29 July 1956 - ?). Sam was a police officer for more than twenty years, and Charlotte was a medical examiner. She was born in Beckley, West Virginia, but this is a fact that she forgets later in her life... or, rather, in her death.

Sam was a quiet man, someone who often had nothing to say but the occasional guttural agreement or dissent to the conversation. The most part of his conversations with Gunn were instructions or corrections. Most politicians were lying bastards in his mind, and his television shows of choice were generally news or sports-oriented. Anything else he tolerated or snored his way through. He enjoyed gardening, growing things with his hands, and building things. Charlotte, on the other hand, was very talkative, predominantly about her passion. She almost seemed to lose touch at times, so engrossed in her puzzles of the human body, but Gunn was fascinated by her. They had a closer bond than she had with her father, if only because her mother was the more talkative and friendly of the two. While the world sometimes might have seen her as aloof and cold, she really treated her daughter as more of a companion than a child.

Her childhood was abnormal, to say the least. Where most children got the canned “stranger danger” speech, Abigail got photographs of very real, very dangerous men as part of their morning routine. Between Charlotte's dispassionate tales about a boy whose neighbors had killed him and locked him in a chest freezer and Sam's stories about taking down the absolute dreggs of human society, Abigail grew up a painfully aware young woman... but, not afraid. She had preconceptions about justice and the world. She didn't really feel like anybody was beyond the law, or beyond catching. She came to believe that justice would always prevail, basically, which was a very naïve expectation.

Charlotte and Samuel weren't the most social people. They had a circle of friends that consisted mostly of co-workers, and Abigail had an even smaller circle of friends consisting of the few children of that group. In her early life, she was a mirror of both Sam and Charlotte---the placid and quiet sort, and full of disturbing conversations. As in, they had a drawing of a boy she'd colored in violet aquamarine and a very passionately alarmed letter from her first teacher, so Abigail was encouraged not to communicate the things that she thought of most often in the earliest years.

One might think that her oddity made her a primary target for bullies, and they would be right. Young Abby had a very unique way of handling these situations, though. Initially, she tried to fight her own battles... then, later, she simply paid other bullies to handle her problems. In middle and grade school, this amounted to bribes of candy or maybe her break money. In high school, she spent her time with the people who were considered delinquents. If people thought her friends were rough, her boyfriends were real beasts. Some of her friends got her into martial arts and kickboxing, and after some time, she never needed anyone else to help her in her battles again. 

Regardless of who she spent her time with, though, she had a straight aim to what she wanted. She wanted to follow in her father's footsteps.

In August of 1998, barely a month after Gunn's sixteenth birthday, her father had a massive heart attack. Her father had been taking Cumadin, a blood thinner, for the maladies his heart was affected with. The initial symptom presented as a nosebleed, with him calmly going to the hall and flicking on the light to see his way to the kitchen for paper towels. His hand was bloody from the initial reaction of feeling his face for the blood, and he left a smudge on the light switch. There were a few smaller droplets, perhaps indicative that he'd coughed on his way to the kitchen. Dots of blood on the floor showed the trail he'd taken. He was passing Gunn in the hall when he fell flat to the floor, smashing his nose open on the hardwood. 

He hadn't had the innate reflex to bring up his hands to brace for the fall. It was what the funeral director described to her as a light-switch heart attack. He was dead before he hit the floor. After it was over, before the walls and floors were cleaned of his blood, Gunn slipped into the house to retrace her father's footsteps, to hover her hand over the bloody handprint on the wall. It was so surreal that it almost seemed he'd never been. She needed that, for some strange closure. She can still point out where the handprint was, behind the lamp on the opposite side of the wall from the light switch with the smudge of blood.

Gunn missed a week of high school, and was back, trying to act as if nothing had happened. She was plagued with bouts of random breakdowns, simply bursting into tears in the middle of conversation or in the middle of some mundane task---even when she didn't have it at the forefront of her mind. Her friends were quick to embrace her, to hold her through the moment, until she could choke down her emotions. Her father was her first true experience with mourning. She'd had other relatives die, people she had seen but didn't have that daily familiarity with.

The grieving process is a difficult one for everyone, and she was certainly no exception.

When Gunn graduated high school in May of 2000, she had a 4.0 GPA and was in the Beta and Spanish clubs at her school. She had been awarded a full academic scholarship to a New River Community College, where she pursued an associates of science in their law enforcement track. By the time she graduated in May of 2002, she was in all of the academic honor societies: mu alpha theta, sigma kappa delta, and phi theta kappa, for excellence in math, English, and general academics, respectively.

Abigail joined the police force in 2002. Her family friends were quick to get her on with the department her father had served all those years. After 8 weeks in police academy, she was on the force. It was largely uneventful, but she was proud to have accomplished it. If you'd asked her in first grade what she wanted to be, she'd have said a police officer. She was one of the few people out there who woke up every morning doing exactly what she'd wanted to do.

In late 2003, she was responding to a call. To make a rather short story even shorter, she was shot on duty by some meth-addict, left to die in her own blood. She used her radio to gurgle out her location, and against her expectation, she survived.

She went through rehabilitation to learn to walk again, pain management, doctors visits, surgeries, on and on and on the medical merry-go-round. She became addicted to the painkillers she was given. Loratabs. She was discharged after she was caught buying prescription pain pills illegally. The litigation really didn't matter to her; once she'd lost her way, she dove headlong into everything she could put in her veins.