Under the cut is rambling about Coreen and her connection to Dinah. Only a little important for anyone participating in her 'set your teeth on edge' thread. And mostly just because I felt like writing it.
Coreen took charge and responsibility of Dinah, helping her to learn walk and talk and act like a normal person. She helped Dinah learn her chores around the inn, kept Dinah in her room, and tried to mold the cat into the bosom buddy she’d never had. Dinah transfered all the attention and care she once had for Alice onto Coreen, putting her on an impossible pedestal for her rescue and ‘kindness’. As Dinah began to resemble something of a person, Coreens attentions turned. She was a teenager on the verge of adulthood, questioning herself and sexuality, and saw a golden opportunity in the cat for experimentation.
The ‘relationship’ was awkward and fumbling, Coreen fueled by the secrecy and Dinah all too willing to please her only connection in the world. It was something always doomed for failure, Dinah’s impossible admiration for Coreen put her far more invested in the emotions than the other girl ever was and without the onset of heat, she’d lacked the sexual maturity to keep interest in the physical side as the other girl.
It ended as badly as young love could, in a violent screaming match. After the death of Coreen’s father, her mother began to press her to marry to keep their inn afloat. Coreen was effectively forced into an engagement to an older man for his riches and she took out her hurt on the only person she could- Dinah.
From the fight Dinah took away many things- that she’d lost the only home and family she’d know since coming to Underland, and that love was a damning lie.
If Dinah had a proper support system and any bit of true emotional maturity, she wouldn’t have taken it so hard. She wouldn’t have gotten such a twisted lesson out of a bad breakup. But she was still young, stupid, still confused by the sudden largeness of her world and the life pushed on her, still too immature to process it. So she came out of it with the stupid idea that love, familial or otherwise just wasn’t something that happened to people like her without causing hurt.
Because of the life she led after, spending several weeks homeless until she experienced her first heat and realized that sex could lead to at least a night under a roof and a meal if she’d played it right, she never took the time or got the chance to mature enough to deal with it. She got stuck in the idea that people ultimately lie and leave, and that physicality was a handy bargaining chip. She got stuck in a perpetually bad attitude, without knowing anyone on the long term she didn’t know how to keep herself in good graces- if it was just for one night, who cared how off putting she was? It was during this time she took up drinking; bars were a good place for picking up prospects. She became steadily more depressed with her life, hopping from house to hotel room with days in the wilderness in between.
She eventually found a way out of her funk, upon realizing her Alice would be returning. She cleaned up a bit, stopped drinking so heavily. She started to live more in the wild, on her own rather than hitting up every guy at the bar.
At this point is where things cut off for her Underland verse.
She reconnected with Alice after her third arrival, forcing her way into the group in an effort to stay near the human girl. When Alice decided to return to Upperland, with the gang in tow, for a musical gig, Dinah learned her way around the turntables for an excuse to go with her. Living in an actual house, with a real job and faces she saw everyday did good for her. She started to form some loose connections, started trying to be a little kinder and stop some of her worse behavior for the good of her place there. She largely believes her place in the house, in the group is only because of her connection to Alice and she worries that puts her in a risky position.
She’s currently working with Nivens as a DJ at the Mad T Party.
This is the cut off for her Upperland verse.
