Think I’ve got the basics of Monroe’s backstory nailed now:
A noble who when she was aged twenty eight was abducted by a sinister sorceress looking to cause strife within a large city by taking nobles and cursing them. In Monroe’s case the curse came in the form of being transformed into a gorgon.
Due to her transformation, Monroe couldn’t live in the city with the rest of her family anymore. Instead her family brought a small manor house in the countryside with a view of the ocean on one side, and a deep forest of pine trees on the other. Monroe had no staff with her, but her family paid all of her expenses and even sent a generous allowance every month.
While Monroe’s condition was not widely publicised, to the point where she was thought to be an invalid recluse still living in her family home, Monroe spent her days idly reading one of the many tomes that accompanied her chest full of presents and an allowance, or else she’d sit around in her garden painting or smoking.
One day, a powerful and vengeful Baron forced his way into the Manor. Monroe had dealt with many such intrusions before as her garden of statues could attest to, but this time the Baron seemed to have come prepared. Before she could get her mask off to give him the ‘Stone Stare’ as she called it, the Baron tore her wig off, forced her head back and ran a sharp sword straight across the left side of her head, narrowly missing her ear but cutting off every copperhead snake from a quarter of her head. While she screamed in pain from the sudden loss the Baron dragged her into her own basement, shackled her and then cauterised each and every stump from a severed snake with a red hot poker, the entire time babbling about some lost child of his who he believed to be in Monroe’s garden.
Waking up hours after the last stump had been cauterised, Monroe found her shackles loosened and the Baron gone - along with most of her fortune accrued from years of setting aside a lot of her allowance. With no will to beg her family for more money and harbouring a desire to learn exactly who the Baron was who had invaded her home and maimed her - Monroe spent the next two years with a singular goal in mind. To train in the ways of an assassin, like the characters she had read about in her books, so that one day, when she had learned who the man who attacked her was, she could repay the favour and get satisfaction for her deceased snakes.
Once she’d gone as far as she could on her own, working out night and day to hone her body, Monroe started travelling from her manor house, looking for people who could teach her without expecting more than coin in return.