Background

One evening in the year 1991, a healthy baby girl was born somewhere in backwater Minnesota. This little bundle of joy never even got to know the touch of her mother, quickly whisked away by social workers. This very child was soon given the name Maria, and placed into the care of foster parents that drove 20 hours to retrieve her. Maria’s earliest memories were that of being surrounded by a family that she didn’t quite fit in with. She was quickly deemed the ‘weird kid,’ with strange mannerisms and tendency to act out in explosive fits of anger when she didn’t get her way. So frequent these fits of anger became, in fact, that Maria’s foster parents had begun to seriously consider having her rehomed around the age of 6. But before Maria could be brought back under the mercy of the foster care system, a guardian angel in the form of a man named David Stone arrived on her doorstep. A pile of paperwork and several conversations spoken in tense, hushed tones later, and Maria was soon leaving that awful house towards greener pastures. Finding herself under the care of David, she was introduced to life on the homestead. Finally free of white picket fence suburbia, Maria had all the room in the world to run, play, and burn some of that boundless energy that drove her like a motor. Her so-called problem child behaviors faded over the next two years, instead replaced with valuable lessons in homesteading and Spanish from her now adoptive father. Then, on one particularly hot evening in the Summer of 1998, Maria returned home from an afternoon spent playing with Georgia, her best friend at the time. With her, she carried a small bundle of freshly picked daisies. The young girl was all smiles as she recounted the afternoon to David, placing the flowers into a little glass vase that would sit on their dining room table. Apparently she and her friend had spotted an unusually large patch of daisies on the way back from playing in the nearby creek. What followed after became a blur after a while. Days turned into months, and in those months everything began to fall apart. People getting aggressive, people ripping into each other– and Maria herself falling ill, no doubt in part due to the daisies she picked that fateful day. While her friendship with Georgia disintegrated at the seams, Maria’s family dug in and fortified their homestead in what would eventually become the Alabama Gap. It took some time, but Maria's immune system pulled through in the end when others weren’t so lucky. The close-call would become something of an especially traumatic memory for her however. While most other families around them planned to migrate northward towards colder climates, Maria’s family opted to go the route of helping those that were choosing to stay behind. As the infected threat grew, so too did the need for weaponry and tools. The forge at the homestead was kept aflame almost constantly, headed by Maria’s uncle Jack. When Maria was too scared to do anything else, she would spend hours watching Jack slave away at the anvil. There was something powerful about the work he did. Something selfless in how he worked himself to the bone to keep the forge churning. It was then, when Maria was 10, she decided that she wanted to be a blacksmith herself one day. Maybe no amount of “sorry”s would fix anything, maybe she would never be strong enough to slay infected herself, but maybe she could one day give others the tools to do so themselves. Maybe then it would all mean something. For the next several years, she apprenticed under uncle Jack. For months upon months she did little more than sweeping the floors and ferrying buckets of water, but she didn’t care. She watched, and over time she learned. With Jack’s help, she was handling metal by age 11. Her days were filled with a lot of hard labor, and a whole lot of mishaps. What little free time she had away from the forges was spent learning other vital skills of the new world, which included practice shooting from David. By age 13, she had crafted her very first axe head with Jack’s help. By 14 she was starting to help take down the occasional infected, first from afar, and then eventually up close. As time passed, Maria became fixated on the idea of helping others. When she and David eventually began traveling north towards the Federal Remnants, Maria witnessed local militias that would fight to keep their areas safe. She both idealized and idolized them, aspiring to be like them someday with little regard for the realities of their dirty work. Being a naive 16 year old, she told her father about believing herself ready to join the defense force of wherever they settled down next. Although David was supportive of Maria’s ideals, he told her that she was not ready to fight on the frontlines yet. Maria then decided she was going to prove to her dad just how ready she was by taking matters of scouting into her own hands. She secretly boarded a Coalition caravan headed for the KQZ, intending to scope the place out. All was going relatively well, until Maria ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Accidentally overhearing someone recounting their secret past as a member of a raider group, she ended up being framed for weapons smuggling in a bid to silence them. Unable to prove her innocence, they considered throwing her to the wolves and kicking her out of the KQZ. But given her age, they opted to instead show ‘mercy’ by putting her to work producing much needed tools, nails, and other mundane equipment that made sense for her skillset. Here she has remained ever since. She’s technically already done her time, and can leave anytime she wants now– but she hasn’t. Maybe she’s made too many connections in the KQZ to want to leave, or maybe she’s still just a scared teen who is afraid to face her father after all this time.