Background

Persephone's childhood was rather stereotypical of a middle-class girl in the 80's, growing up with her parents and elder brother Anthony; an accident before she was born left him deaf, so the whole family learned Sign Language to accommodate their new reality. She was her father's golden child, whereas Anthony was her mother's. Her family life was reasonable, with sparring between siblings only occasional. Percy's summers were spent mostly with her father - moving abroad to whatever dig site he was working on this year, getting to learn new things from him and occasionally explore when he let her out of his sight as she grew older. A number of holidays in her teens were spent in Athens, learning Greek to get by without needing her dad's translation skills. Her father, Professor Robert Riggs was an archaeologist who spent a great deal of his time on the move across Europe and the Middle East, delving through ruins, tombs and libraries for snippets of historical significance. He enjoyed tinkering with ancient tools and writing treatises on how pre-Industrial societies functioned and relished sharing this knowledge with his daughter, hoping she would follow in his footsteps one day to become an archaeologist. Her mother, Dr Julia Riggs was a General Practitioner at home, treating general malaise and injuries typical of an English countryside village. She enjoyed reading in her spare time, and often took her children along to Basic First Aid classes she taught at the local school. Percy never had the interest nor the patience to go into medical school, though she was always an enthusiastic assistant to her mother (perhaps a little morbidly so). After her college years were over, Percy skipped university in favour of a gap year or three, like many with the means to do so. She hiked across Europe and the US, partly financed by her parents and picking up jobs here and there to give herself spending/partying money as she went along. Sometimes she'd indulge in weed at these parties, but harder substances didn't interest her; she'd seen what they'd done to some of her fellow hostel-hoppers. She was like most travelling farm workers moving back and forth across the continent through the spring and summer months every year; she ended up in Knox County, Kentucky, at the end of summer '99 - when things became stranger than fiction, and the state shut down. The last phone call Persephone got from her family was from her mother, tearfully informing her of Ant's death after a seizure, during which he'd bitten her arm - she sounded stuffed up and sick herself, though insisted she would be okay with some antibiotics - her calls to Percy stopped not long after this. Her father was in Norway at the time - she would try to call every week, though by the time her battery died every call to either parent had been left unanswered... Trapped in the Kentucky Quarantine Zone with no means of leaving the country safely, Percy took a measure of inspiration from her father and started utilising the skills she'd learned over her youth to be of use to the community she was currently a stranger to. Stitching and cleaning minor injuries, working the fields and cultivating herbs, helping to set firebreaks so defensive fires didn't reach "safe" areas, and maintaining farm equipment. She moved from place to place for a few years, before finding a spot to settle down. She enjoyed scavenging from time to time, likening it to her father's old digs, and calling back to those rose-tinted years, she used her skills with sign language and her knowledge of Greek to aid with any travellers that needed those methods of translation. Over the years Percy's English accent still marked her as an outsider, though she'd been fortunate in that she hadn't had to struggle every day; the angry fear of flowers had been ingrained in her by the culture that prevailed over time, and she refused to grow any outside of those used for herbal medicines - and even those, cautiously. Always examining them for any trace of aberrance.