Hothead at a Book Burning

Name: Dolores Martin

Height: 5’8”

Age: 21

Hair: Shoulder-length, wavy, dark brown worn loose in a typical wash and go non-style.

Eyes: A warm, deep umber capable of sparkling with mischief or hardening into something flinty and dangerous when her principles are crossed. They're her most expressive feature, betraying every emotion she claims not to feel.

Features: An oval face with a faint, stubborn jawline. An upturned nose she’s always thought was a bit too small for her face. A tan complexion with a few faint acne scars on her cheeks and temples, like ghostly constellations. She rarely wears makeup, not out of a grand statement, but out of a ingrained belief from her bad-skin years that it would only draw attention. On the rare occasion she does, it's a quiet act of reclamation, not concealment.

Clothing: most often she’s a t-shirts and jeans sort of woman, wears hoodies and sneakers. Comfort even over function is her credo she will only dress up when she feels like doing so, even on the most special of occasions her mood alone dictates her wardrobe.

Personality: Fun-loving and headstrong, she has the wisecracking exterior of a loudmouth built over years of feeling academically inadequate and socially awkward (thanks, acne). it's designed to control the narrative. If she's the one making the jokes, she can't be the butt of them. Her sarcasm is a precision tool, used to deflect vulnerability and dissect hypocrisy. Her kneejerk reactions are less lack of control and more of a moral compass stripped of its hesitation needle. She sees wrong, and her body moves before her brain can conjure up excuses or fear. This makes her both heroically effective and frustratingly reckless. She confuses action with doing good, and the aftermath often requires clean-up she's not prepared for. She is creative and imaginative but channels it into inconsequential avenues like pranks, movie critiques, and daydreams rather than committing it into a tangible, judgeable. Deeply compassionate in a rugged, elbows-out kind of way. She helps because she has to, not because it's nice. It often emerges as rudeness ("Move, idiot, I got it") because softness feels like a weakness or an invitation for disappointment. Her snark is often directed at systems and attitudes, not individuals, unless they embody those systems. Has an "inkling of awareness" about her faults that is an almost constant, low-grade hum. She knows she's a mess. She knows she pushes people away. She's trying, in her own clumsy, two-steps-forward-one-step-back way. Enrolling in college is the biggest part of this—a structured attempt to etch out a life for herself.

Likes: movies, movie podcasts, pranks and comedy, electronica and classic industrial music, managing to use her troublemaking tendency for good reasons, having been involved in what she refers to as ‘this book thing’ when she was one of the Banned Book Bandits and now that her horizons have widened ‘this book thing’ very well might expand to other related issues in ‘this resisting thing’. While she will champion books, she is a reluctant reader and will sooner watch the movie versions or at best listen to a book on tape version.

Dislikes: Feeling stupid, snakes, having to catch up, deep water, heights, struggling to keep her grades up, high stress situations, cops.

Hates: that the world seems to be burning. Hesitating, feeling useless, being helpless, worst of all not acting when she can and feels she should.

Quirks & Contradictions: Her greatest shame is feeling that she is stupid. It’s why she champions books she doesn't read (they are symbols of intelligence), why she mocks things she doesn't understand first, and why academic struggles trigger a deep, angry panic. Her friend Melody was her anchor and her mirror—the disciplined, well-read activist who showed her a path. With Melody geographically far away, Dolores is trying to be her own anchor, but often feels like a cheap imitation, acting out a role without the script. Rage is her fuel and her hatred of helplessness is all-consuming. She'd rather be wrong and in motion than right and passive. This action-oriented rage is her primary motivator, drowning out fear, anxiety, and even practical consequences.

Backstory: With bad grades and undisciplined ways during high school she was 19 when she finally graduated. Back then she didn’t even think about college. It was only her friend Melody Plourde that inspired her, first to join the other woman in fighting back against a spate of book banning measures at their high school. They would raise funds to buy banned books that they would then sneak back into the library shelves from which those books had been removed. Whenever those it was impossible to get the books back onto the shelves, they would leave them in as many public places as possible. During the course of following Melody’s inspiration about the value of books, Dolores found herself inspired toward valuing not just books but also her own education enough to now two years after graduating high school and after her friend Melody has gone off to a university several states away. Dolores has now enrolled in community college and is taking classes toward a Cannabis Studies Certificate at the same time she works in a dispensary even though she rarely partakes in marijuana consumption herself.

Notes: She’s just discovered that certain people have reignited the practice of burning books. She noticed it while she was at a local park and stumbled upon a church group having a book burning event. The people orchestrating and participating in the book burning will be upset with attempts to stop it. Dolores previous involvement in the "Banned Book Bandits" wasn't just activism; it was the first time her natural tendency for mischief and rule-breaking was validated as heroic. It was an addictive formula: rebellion + righteousness = purpose.