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[b]Name:[/b] "Dana Griese" ([???] Kawaguchi / "Kawaguchi-chan")
[b]Age:[/b] 18
[b]Specialty:[/b] Hired muscle - originally in America on a protective basis, Dana relishes a good fight, be it at staking distance, the length of a blade, or from down the barrel of a gun. Outside of combat, she takes on the role of fashion police, often serving as an unwanted and caustic guide to fashion.
[b]Bio:[/b] The girl who would adopt the identity of Dana Griese began life under quite a different name, halfway across the world in the Hyōgo Prefecture capital of Kobe. Her parents were affluent members of society in a country suffering under the weight of a dozen societal problems - with a tech magnate for a father and a mother who had earned herself a safe career as a fixer at a law firm that had been heavily associated with the hometown Yamaguchi-gumi going back to the Japan bubble of the 1980s, Kawaguchi was all but guaranteed a life of privilege in Japan's sixth-largest city. 

But the prospect of a safe, privileged life quite understandably failed to appeal to a young girl whose family dabbled in the cutthroat worlds of business and mob law. From a young age, Dana was impulsive and outspoken in a conservative, staid Japanese culture, traits which quickly earned the charismatic rich girl a hushed reputation as a delinquent in the making. Eager to avoid the pitfalls of having a little street fighter or gangster of their own for a daughter, Kawaguchi's parents directed her towards various interests, a few of which stuck - rhythm games, fostering a childhood passion for dance, were one such hobby that the competitive Kawaguchi adopted with vigor. More seriously, the young girl took an interest in high fashion, and even found herself pursuing several brief jobs on both ends of a fashion photographer's camera. It seemed that she had found her calling until one fateful ride home on a late-night shuttle.

What began as a mere surprised annoyance - saying Japanese men's penchant for harassment on board a subway was an issue would be putting it mildly - when Kawaguchi felt herself being groped quickly grew serious when she turned around to swat at her attacker. The young girl, not exactly a weakling, found herself tossed halfway across the shuttle for her trouble, and barely managed to scramble out of the car and into the familiar streets of Kobe. She found herself pursued for several blocks before managing to hide among some of the port city's fish crates, breaking off large, irregular chunks of wood to defend herself in lieu of any weapons. Regaining her courage, Kawaguchi leaped onto her demonic assailant's back as it passed, doing her damnedest to bludgeon its head into a pulp with her fishy-scented improvised weaponry with negligible effects. She landed the kill, but it was ignonimous and accidental; the creature had reached up behind it and thrown Kawaguchi off its shoulders, and when she rose up to whirl around and regain her bearings she had accidentally speared it through its heart with the ugly, jagged end of a plank.

After enjoying a few nights of recovery and therapeutic Dance Dance Revolution, Kawaguchi decided that whatever had attacked her had been demonic in nature -  and that it was, in turn, dispatching such evil creatures who would prey on young girls was in the nature of a champion. Her mother's Yakuza contacts, of all people, were the bearers of her first partial answers in the realm of the occult and demonology, and with the information her mother helped her glean she grew into an able, if not exactly finessed, vampire killer around the Prefecture over the course of her time as a first-year and second-year student. She even ended up getting the hang of wielding a stake, although she preferred the more universally fatal method of a sweeping decapitation over piercing the vampire's heart.

However, through all of this, Kawaguchi's restless streak never dulled, and as her quarry grew sparse around Kobe she began to realize that these creatures, and perhaps worse, lurked elsewhere in the world, untamed, without champions such as herself to spell their end. Any requests to leave behind the doldrums of her school career were rebuffed coolly by her mother until after her seventeenth birthday, when she took an absence from school (not a rare occurrence in her life) on her mother's insistence (which was much more rare) to meet with her mother at her law firm. To Kawaguchi's surprise - and, soon, to her glee - her mother informed her that she was being entrusted with a very special assignment, one that could not be trusted to some simple mob grunt or a lesser fixer with a law degree. 

Kawaguchi would be serving as a glorified bodyguard for some eerie pale-skinned quasi-foreigner, who had fallen afoul of some sort of supernatural chicanery of a type which Kawaguchi knew nothing of and cared even less for. What mattered was that this odd creature was a ticket across the ocean, to the United States, and that fulfilling her mother's wishes and protecting her would surely result in meeting newer and more disgusting monsters to dispatch. She accepted the chance given to her greedily, and the two girls departed for America for a quiet location named Washington, Missouri, where a fresh pair of identities as Victoria Cross and Dana Griese awaited them. Her initial nonchalance and ambivalence towards her charge quickly gave way to piqued interest when it appeared that "Victoria" possessed some demonology acumen of her own, and she accepted her guard duty with even more zeal than she had before in the hopes of accompanying her ward on some of her hunts. 

Sure enough, in the eighteen months since they had left Kobe for Washington (a town which, to much confusion and consternation on Dana's part, had no monuments, history, boutiques [i]or[/i] undead Senators) Victoria Cross proved herself to be quite the weirdness magnet, joining up with a group of other American misfits in an attempt to protect the town and its citizens from all sorts of vampires, demons, and other oddities.

And, in keeping with both of her life's primary directives, the artist formerly known as Kawaguchi was alongside her young mistress for every hunt.