Just a quick little tag for those who might be interested in this, mostly tagging people that have interacted with Ralhy more than once (or how ever many people I can remember interacting with Ralhy lol)
@beautifulpcople, @selina-taylor, @mangledmenagerie, @malicendredwine
The Evolution of Ralhy Navane
ages 13 to 33
Her entire life, Ralhy has never known a day of happiness, love or care of any kind. Her parents had stopped even looking in her direction when she could do even the most basic thing for herself. She had learned to do mostly everything by herself. She walked to school by herself, she did her work by herself, and because she had never known any sort of care it scarred her in learning how to make friends or even asking for help in class if she didn’t understand something. Every time her grades would slip and her parents would be called in for a meeting nothing ever happened. And from ages 5-8 she was a relatively mute child.
Because she was deemed as ‘weird’, a ‘loner’, and the ever popular term ‘freak’, she didn’t have any friends but only those that would either taunt her, tease her, or physically bully her. It was because of these people that her anxiety and panic attacks had finally begun at such an early age. She had also started forming her own weapons when she was 13, not for use on anyone else, but to cut herself and attempt to calm herself down or just to simply numb her own pain, internally and emotionally. She had absolutely no one in her life, and very little options when it came to trying to get herself some help in the only way she could come up with.
It wasn’t long after she had turned 13 that the bullies had started coming after her for being different from everyone else and quiet.
When she was 16, she had gotten more bruises than she’d ever had before. She had scabs, scrapes, and scratches. Black eyes, busted lips, and just being all but trampled on for three years had been enough. She had taken to hiding at first until she could heal the last of her injuries and when she was finally able to move and use her body was when she had gone to the fight club in the Narrows. While there, she had finally made a few of her first friends, watched the fights and then finally she learned how to fight for herself. She used everything that she had learned from the most experienced fighters there and used every single technique, both with and without weapons, on the ones that had brought her so much hell.
She had given them ten times what they had given her over the years, and a new feeling had started to grow within Ralhy. Her first taste of adrenaline and wanting to do more was absolutely intoxicating to her. So, when she had gotten rid of her bullies, eventually she had driven all of them out of the school and no one ever came near her after, she had joined the fight club. She had gone through what they called the ‘trial matches’ just to see if she could really get into something like that, and also time for her to change her mind about anything. Then she slowly moved up within the club, but her taste for wanting more and wanting to do more as far as that only skyrocketed. She even began to start stealing what she needed in places while before she would just think about wanting something but never go into the store to get it because of her lack of funds.
Even when she had started getting paid for her fights, she continued to steal. Although along with her new habits, new attitude and new age of 18, she had picked up another habit. She had found another way to cope with her stress and her anxiety and panic attacks that she was still having on a weekly basis. She took up the habit of smoking. First, she started just taking the cigarettes that were given to her by the local talent at the fight club. She found it was a much less destructive way of cutting herself and she liked the feeling of it.
However, it didn’t completely numb her pain so she continued to find other ways to give her the same feelings she was used to having to help her. Cigarettes mostly just helped her to settle, but nothing as particularly lasting as her other methods. So, she looked to and found other methods she could utilize and began to start smoking marijuana as well. And along with that, she kept looking for more and more things and her efforts to be free of the pain and the hurt she was feeling so deeply had brought her to more extreme depths, including illegal binge drinking. She had stolen from anywhere she could get in from clubs with less than diligent bouncers, of course the regular liquor stores, and just knicking them from others when they weren’t looking. The latter was mostly done at the fight club. Of her methods and measures to keep her pain at bay, drinking was the most helpful option to her.
Along with her new interests, things were only getting more unbearable and terrible at home. She was getting more and more tortured by her parents. If she was either drunk or high, she would forget that she needed to go through her bedroom window rather than the front door at a certain time so that she wouldn’t be the victim of their anger. If she was so much as spotted by them, she would be reminded of how tame her former bullies had been compared to them. She never had plates being aimed directly at her head from her former bullies, or very nearly missing a knife being plunged into her hand if she so much as stepped into the kitchen. It was especially worse if (and this was most often the case) she had come in after yet another argument they had had, which was near constant.
After very nearly missing a punch that her father had tried to land on her when he was drunkenly aiming for her mother, she had completely snapped. She threw him into the nearest wall and slammed his head repeatedly into the stove top and then put the exclamation point on the end with a half full glass bottle of whiskey going right over his head before she had gotten out of the house, more fumed than ever before.
She wasn’t under the influence of anything this time, this was pure hatred and anger that fueled her fire, making it almost unbearable to ignore. She didn’t want to ignore it, she wanted to embrace it. So, she headed down to The Merc where she had armed herself with an axe, a .44 magnum, and even a mallet (purely getting it because the handle was red, she didn’t end up using it, however). There was no time to waste after that, the beating she had given out was going to be the beginning of the end. She was riding this need to its ultimate end, and the entire way back to the rickety house, she was smiling the entire way there, and laughter followed as she slayed her parents down.
Ralhy had thought that slaying her parents would make her feel better, which it had, but she had no idea that the best moments of her life were about to happen. She was finally going to be happy, even within the confines of Arkham Asylum. On her first day in the asylum, she had met the man who would change her entire life. The one person that she could see as an absolute equal and the one who would become the love of her life, which she was more than happy to have him as the main focal point. Everything would begin to revolve around none other than Jerome Valeska.
After only knowing him for minutes, Ralhy knew that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Jerome. She wasn’t just enamored, but she was finally feeling her first bouts of happiness. Before it was something she only saw others portray in front of her, but to actually feel it. To finally feel something so euphoric and to be able to spend time with someone like Jerome, she knew she didn’t want anything else. Even if it meant spending the rest of their lives in Arkham.
The two had spent their time together in and out of Arkham, having their own fun in Gotham, and there was never one moment where Ralhy wasn’t by Jerome’s side in one way or another. However, even though he had escaped death once, the second time he wasn’t so lucky.
She had told him not to go up on that roof, she had told him if he were to get shot that he should just head right to the car and they could take care of him when they were out of dodge. The idiot, of course, didn’t listen to her and ran up to the roof. She had followed right after him, but just as she had gotten up there she wasn’t in time. He was falling and Jim Gordon had just let it happen. She was determined to follow and even made a step off of the building so that the two could get their escape from Gotham after all, but the next thing she knew she was cuffed in the GCPD.
Everything had gone in slow motion for a long time. She had no idea what her feelings were, she felt a harsh emptiness, she had blamed herself, she had fallen deep into her own mind to where it was mistakenly diagnosed for about three months that she was in a vegetable state. She sat there in Arkham, not aware of anything going on around her as she sat in her cell in Arkham Asylum.
When she had finally gotten out of her vegetable state, and the only person she had left to call a friend, Selina, had broken her out of Arkham, she had to try and figure out how to pick up the pieces. First, she had to figure out the most pressing question: Would she continue with her life or not? What was a life without Jerome really like? Could she even live like that, or face a life like that? She had been so happy for so long with him, she had completely forgotten what it was like to feel this way, although the feeling of pure loneliness was ever more present and daunting as it weighed upon her entire body. So much so that not only were destructive thoughts clouding her mind, but hallucinations were too. And along with hallucinations came several suicide attempts.
She had tried slitting her wrists, sleeping pills, she had been reckless when she did go out (which was rarely) by walking across the street and praying that someone wouldn’t stop while barreling down the streets. She had even near successfully hung herself before Selina had come in to stop her. She had started having even more trouble sleeping than normal, even developing a fear of sleeping alone in a bed which was why she had tried to sleep on the couch, but still nothing was able to put her to sleep unless she resorted to either smoking or just injecting herself, which only caused more hallucinations of Jerome. Like he was taunting her, torturing her...blaming her. Guilt and Grief were her worst enemies and the only time she would frighteningly lash out would be if she ever caught sight of a couple. Thinking it was a tactic to torture her more, although she had been stopped by Selina mostly, however once she had been able to exact her own “revenge”, so to speak on an innocent couple. She was utterly deranged, unhinged, and scorned for a very long time and in the worst possible state of mind.
Ten years later, Ralhy is now 33 and still doing her best to cope with her greatest loss. She had a few little opportunities to start building her life again. She had a little club in the Narrows she looked over for about a year until she had decided to get a place of her own, or well a place that was currently vacant of an owner. That place being Fish Mooney’s old club, and she only hoped that she could do Fish proud. She had met her a time or two during her life, and she had taught her some very important lessons. She would always tell Ralhy to be her own woman, and to not let any man or anyone else to keep her down and take anything she wanted with an iron fist and a strong will. She remembered even staying at Fish’s club some nights when she didn’t want to go home. She had unfortunately lost contact with Fish when she had been carted off to Arkham, but she had made sure that Ralhy still had the ear of Carmine Falcone if she ever needed anything.
About a year before her 33rd birthday, Ralhy had been feeling that particular itch. She needed more than just this club. She needed more destruction, she wanted to cause some havoc and Jerome was ever more present on her mind than before. She had to get back to what she was best at which was keeping Gotham on the edge of burning and turning it into the mass of insanity it pretended it wasn’t. She wanted to start off small and build up from there, so she had decided to get her lower level thugs together to put a bomb scare into action.
Not long after the little fiasco, her club was one of many other places that were searched, and hers was the one that had minimal evidence while the other places were deemed to be clean. She could have scoffed at that because no place in the Narrows were clean, and that was of course where the useless GCPD had decided to check instead of anywhere else. So, with Ralhy being their only suspect, they had put her right back in Arkham Asylum, where she spent most of her time with her brother’s twin, Jeremiah Valeska who was feigning to be brain dead. Since he wasn’t talking, she had decided to vent anything she needed out to him because no matter how much time had passed she always had something going on in her mind about Jerome. She had even taken to telling Jeremiah their entire history together, everything she felt when she was with him, and, of course, some of their personal bedroom stories just to see what would happen.
When the GCPD had started to interrogate those lower level thugs Ralhy had gotten together for the bomb scare, one of the weakest ones in the group had been the one to break and reveal everything that would be the reason Ralhy had been transferred from Arkham to Blackgate Prison. She had taken the transfer easily, not even being a bother since she knew that eventually she would have been found out. She had friends in Blackgate though, so that was another reason she didn’t make too much of a scene.
While in Blackgate, she had formed a little gang of admirers, caught up with a few friends, and caused a little chaos within the Prison, ultimately having a good time at first. However, it wasn’t too long into her stay when she had been separated from all of her friends and admirers so that she wouldn’t be so much trouble. She was put into an isolation cell, devoid of anyone but guards near her. The guards that were purposefully stationed outside of her cell were all those who she had given a hard time before. They were more than happy to get their frustrations out by delivering harsh beatings to her at least three times a day or whenever they could find the time where they wouldn’t be seen. The beatings went on for about three months before she had thought to take a cue from Jeremiah and feigned a very believable vegetable state. This underwhelmed the guards, who had notified the warden about her condition and he deemed that she was to be sent back to Arkham Asylum.
Upon her return to the asylum, she had been placed in the basements by the guards, only a few select people knew of her arrival but certainly none that wanted to help her. The guards that were aware of her presence were no kinder than the ones at Blackgate purely because of how she had manipulated them and tortured them when she was in the asylum with Jerome, and the beatings only continued until she was able to escape with barely a single breath left in her body.