Dolores Ybarra/History
Lola was born in Mexico City, but like many of her generation she grew up in a corner of East LA as the child of an immigrant. While surrounded by her culture, she felt apart from it and began to embrace the Goth culture that gave her an ability to escape the thought of her permanent poverty.
Her mother seemed to have a heart bigger than her sense, and would adopt stray dogs by the dozens. Soon it became more than the neighborhood could handle, and animal control would come by on a regular basis to take them away to be put down. While this had an impact on her daughter, it was more her mother that Lola would blame. This was not how dogs wanted to live. This wasn't to say she didn't have her own love of animals. She would watch the dogs, how they would act within a pack and establish order.
Eventually she would begin to volunteer at the local shelter and find her calling: ecology. The fauna of the desert fascinated her, how it could survive in such a harsh environment. A balance maintained, sometimes infringed upon by the outside. Working two jobs and taking night classes, she received her Bachelor's in Biology, focusing on animal behavior. Most of her time was split between field work with UCLA and earning money working in pet stores and low-paying jobs.
Finally she takes the risk, and moves down to Tijuana to study how the border affects migration and hunting habits. While fluent in Spanish, she felt like even more of an outsider. More and more often she would simply camp out under the stars and study the wildlife. Some of the wildlife, however, was studying her. During the day she would sleep, and at night watch and occasionally see those attempting to cross. She was an American citizen, it hardly mattered to her one way or the other. They get through, good on them. If not, them's the breaks. Not all those crossing were seeking to traffic or to find freedom. A pattern was noted, those coming back and forth often. Coyotes, human trafficking? No, they didn't take anyone with them or back.
One night she finally sees the same group in pursuit of an unfortunate. They pounce, human in shape but animal in movement. In fact, they even harried like animals, and seemed to show dominance in attacking. What is she witness to? The next morning she finds the remains, sickened and somehow entranced at the same time. Bite marks, feeding, no blood. She made notes, noted the tracks. It should have felt wrong, but she wouldn't report it. If it's cartels, it's none of her business. It's none of her business anyways. If so, why didn't she leave? Why did she observe them night after night? Why were they hunting in such a way, almost as if they were performing this for her?
The reason was obvious, it was a show just for her. She awakes to the figures above her, pawing through her notes. They read them aloud: "Pack harried prey half a mile. Small one trips, prey gains ground climbing an arroyo. Pack circles back and surrounds, prey killed. Alpha re-establishes control, evacuates." They seemed quite delighted in her description, so much so that she was invited to join them back home. Home, in this case, was Mexico City. The Palla Grande had begun, and it was a show-and-tell occasion. Packs arrived from all over, and forced Lola to recount the acts she'd seen in clinical detail, laughing all the while. She found no such humor in it, knowing how those who pried into the criminal underworld along the border ended up. A drag pack from New York finally won the honor of keeping her as a chronicler and pet, and forced Lola to keep an account of their atrocities during the party.
In the end, however, her usefulness was over and she had to die. It was only after a Gangrel Antitribu of some age and clout stepped forward that she was "saved." Her life became subject of an extended experiment of the Feral, ghouling her and attempting to mold her pre-embrace. A scholar of the Path of the Feral Heart, the Gangrel monk known as Cardel believed the mindlessness of the beast was due to the stripping of emotions from the human. With no feeling behind it, one's soul was doomed to forever slide into wassail. To this end he worked upon Lola over the decades, stripping her humanity before embrace, but careful to nurture her emotional and spiritual side. His rival, a Tzimisce on the Path of Death and the Soul, had endless debates to the veracity of this claim, undercutting each other at every change.
Finally the time came to embrace the woman, but the Fiend still had one more trick up it's sleeve. Presenting the very chronicle that the girl had written decades before, it showed as evidence that Lola belonged to Daniel Murphy, the Tzimisce who won her at the Palla Grande. Protests, rage, but it was of no good. Property rights are sacred to the Fiends, and it was a conflict Cardel could not win. In the end, she was embraced and left to her own devices, and Cardel sought another subject, as he felt his experiment ruined by their blood. The last anyone heard, the monk had gone mad, a wight haunting the desert before being hunted down. Lola herself was part victim, part subject and part conspirator in his experiment. A pang of guilt struck her, not for the atrocities committed or moral compunction, but rather that she was the cause of the failure. She vowed to continue her former master's study, taking his centuries of notes and carving out the spiritual. To her, the Cainite was a biologic, not spiritual animal. She would bring his research into the 21st century. In practice she would tag along the Crusades, attached to packs but acting as an observer of behavior. Her status as an outsider lent itself to acting as a pioneer within cities to watch and learn, then report back before the siege.
