Black Dahlia

General Information: A mysterious woman who is at least partially mechanical, Black Dahlia has risen through the ranks of the Medici Mafia's minions to become one of Lorenzo Medici's top enforcers. When she's not acting as his personal bodyguard, she's being sent on the most important and heinous missions for the Medicis. She has worked for Lorenzo for at least fourteen years.

She trains prospective enforcers working for Cirque des Cartes, referred to by Regina as their "conflict coach". [2] She is also the trainer of the Medici's legion of female assassins who dress in bunny suits and specialize in hidden weapons, such as the footblades Cerebella uses.

Four of these bunnies serve her as her personal assistants;

The Timeout Assistant Bunny: Bookie (JP: ブッキー Bukkī) The Shotgun Bunny: Bonnie (JP: ボニー Bonī) The Pistol Bunny: Buttercup (JP: バターカップ Batākappu) The Knife Bunny: Killer (JP: キラー Kirā)

Personality: Cruel, sadistic, and twisted, Black Dahila loves little more than carnage and violence. She has no true loyalty to the Medici Mafia and only serves as Lorenzo's consigliere as a constant excuse to be violent. Even before becoming the psychotic hitwoman she is today, she was always “rough around the edges”.

She mainly plans to make everyone and anyone understand her twisted logic to try and prove they are no different than her as making them know their "true selves", an example being her dialogue with Big Band, as well as getting noticeably bothered when she doesn't succeeds to "break" his morals.

It gets to the point that not even the Skull Heart understands her methods before making a wish in her story mode.

Black Dahlia despises unfinished business, and is specially eager to take care of said business as needed, as seen when she encounters Squigly, and later Ms. Fortune, prefering to handle it herself, as shown when she has a villainous break down when Brain Drain has Robo-Fortune kill her organic counterpart.

Character Basis: Name:

Her name is a reference to the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, nicknamed Black Dahlia, which in of itself may have been inspired by the film noir The Blue Dahlia. Dahlia's real name and surname are unknown.

Design:

Aside from using hidden weapons that hide across her body, her concept art for her moves also show that the gun on her arm can change into other weapons such as a chainsaw, a chicken sickle/fleur-de-lis spears, a bayonet-like weapon, an axe/halberd and a gun with a saw. The mask she wears obscures her face in all known pictures.

Black Dahlia is a human cyborg but is sometimes mistaken for an elf. Alex Ahad stated the idea that she was elven sprung from the misinterpretation of a piece of art where her ears were stylistically more pointed, but never meant to indicate she was anything but human.[2]

She is around 50 to 60 years old, making her the oldest non-immortal character in the game, but the extent of how much she has aged is unknown due to her mechanical parts and exposure to the Life Gem. Peacock does refers to her as an "old hag."

Dahlia lost both her legs and her right arm in her first fight with a Skullgirl. Possibly something happened to her face too, but no one knows what it looks like now, not even the developers known what she looks like underneath as it was also confirmed in another stream that they don't even have what her face looks like in her reference model sheets.

Backstory:

Many years ago her body was grievously injured in a Skullgirl attack, but due to the efforts of Anti-Skullgirl Labs founder Dr. Geiger, she was rebuilt with a formidable armament of projectile weaponry. She was the first ASG created. Black Dahlia's time in the Labs drove her mad, as she used to be a lot different and had a different name before becoming an assassin. Much like Big Band, she was a veteran ASG agent who resided within the labs years before the parasite experimentation that would eventually birth Peacock and Painwheel took place and as such she too is not equipped with a synthetic parasite.[2] Black Dahlia eventually went rogue from the Anti-Skullgirl Labs and now works as a seasoned assassin for the Medici Mafia.

Closer to the events of the game, Black Dahlia was sent to pursue the Fishbone Gang following their theft of the Life Gem. She killed them all, cut them into pieces, and dropped the remains in the bay of Little Innsmouth. Unbeknownst to Dahlia at the time, one member of the gang - Nadia Fortune - survived her fate, having consumed and bonded with the Life Gem prior to her "demise".