Merla Riva

Personality
Merla has borderline personality disorder due to the abuse she received from her parents. Because of this she has a distorted and unstable self-image of sense of self. She views herself as a destined destroyer of grimm and bringer of happiness, making her strive to tell jokes, hug people warmly, do magic tricks and crush any grimms that she finds, viewing them as the bringers of negative emotions.

She also has chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom regularly trying to find new ways to amuse herself or bring smiles to others, be it from making lots of jokes, going on semi-often spending sprees or mastering magic tricks. Another symptom of her borderline personality disorder is intense and highly changeable moods. She HATES people to abuse others physically or emotionally and if she finds people who try to ruin others through bullying or manipulation, she won't think twice about brutally injuring them with extreme prejudice. When in the sight of others who are looking down, she'll immediately try to give the person a gift or do something for them to make them happy.

Merla is very also impulsive and semi-frequently goes on shopping sprees, frequently binge eats any sort of pasta based dish when she gets the chance and is an extremely reckless and aggressive fighter. She often buys presents for people close to her and has a very strong relationship with her foster mother. She’s probably the only loved one Merla did not have a stormy relationship with. Even though she gives a lot of gifts and tries to make people happy, she never tries to get too close to others out of the thought that they might in the end betray or use her like her parents.

She also likes small fluffy animals and has small conversations with a few of them when not many people are around. Since they don’t really talk back, to her animals are great listeners.

Her mother is the huntress who helped her face the pain of her parents and helped save her from even more abuse in her life. The lady taught her how to endure pain, how to fight, and took deep care of Merla as if she was her own daughter. The two are as close as a mother and daughter could possibly get, always trying to be in each others warm company and helping each other through any and all trials.

Merla is also quite fond of her adoptive father too. The two could often at home be seen playing magic tricks and listening to music together.

Weapons and abilities
Merla's weapons of choice are dual lower arm shields, based on the design of a classic weapon, light enough for Merla to keep on her arms for a long time without wasting energy but with no second form.

The shields armor is made out of several thin layers of graphene, a layer of carbon in a honeycomb lattice pattern that makes the metal lightweight but also very durable, providing shock absorption, while underneath those layers is a titanium alloy plate made in a smaller honeycomb structure than the outer armor, providing the shields with durability against heavy attacks. Merla uses the shields to protect herself from hard hitting blows or projectile fire while also using it to enforce her blows and create openings to land heavily damaging counter attacks with either the sharp edge of the shield or her kempo combat moves. She also uses her semblance to make clay spikes to give her attacks more damage.

Merla's semblance is called Clay-more. With it, she can create clay in her hands and manipulate it at will to fire and quick drying clay at them or make the clay form sharp spikes on her shields to increase the damage made by her blows. Merla can also use the clay to crate a wide variety of mid range attacks with hard clay, or soft liquid like clay. The range for her semblance is mid range, allowing her to fire the clay at a range of eight to twelve meter radius. As a small bonus, Merla can also use her semblance skillfully to make clay sculptures for fun. Merla can only make about twenty gallons of clay a day and constant use can leave her feeling quite exhausted after about one half an hour of constant use. While using her semblance, Merla's eyes and hands glow with a smokey light blue aura.

Any dust mixed in the clay will usually just make a small explosion depending on the dust used. For example, fire dust mixed with the clay and thrown will make a fiery explosion while ice dust mixed in with the semblance will make ice freeze on the target after an explosion. But she doesn't carry any dust on her so any dust based moves would have to be with a teammate nearby.

Background
Merla is the daughter of two abusive parents. Whenever they even felt a little bit stressed, she’d end up getting beaten by them as some form of stress relief. Any injuries found on her would just be excused for ‘Merla just being clumsy’.

At the age of five, she had her aura unlocked as the beatings became more and more frequent. The aura would heal the wounds usually before anyone could see the bruises. Merla just kept silent in her tears, afraid of ever telling someone the truth about her parents. In public they acted as sweet as can be. Out of people's view however, they’d just continue the abuse.

Eventually at the age of seven, Melra discovered her semblances power and began to try to train with it during art classes in her school. Clay manipulation. She at first thought that by making amazing art for them they would stop picking on her. Unfortunately, they just started to use her to make pottery as an easy way to make money. She then after school was day by day forced to go and do pottery on a DIY stand on the front yard of her home, selling her art to anyone who was passing by.

One day, a huntress was walking by the street on a slow day and saw the father punch Melra hard on the back of the head when he thought no one was watching, ordering her to work faster. When her father left, the huntress walked towards the girl, pretending to be a client interested in buying some pottery and introduced herself to the girl, Rosetta Bastet. From just asking about the girl’s parents and Merla's fear of talking about them to a stranger, Rosetta could tell that this had been going on for a while. Though she wanted to aid the girl, she’d need actual evidence about their abuse. So, she’d visit daily, buying some of the pottery to seem like a regular customer while teaching the girl ways to endure physical pain with her aura, telling jokes to the girl and in general trying to keep her spirits up while her parents weren’t looking.

At the age of nine, Merla asked the huntress to help her escape from her parents. So, Rosetta instructed the girl to at night pack what little she had quietly at night pack what little she had while the huntress used her stealth training to open up her bedroom window quietly and carry the girl to her new home. Rosetta became the foster mother to Merla and the police began to interrogate her original parents about an ‘anonymous’ report about child abuse and placed them as lead suspects about the girl’s sudden disappearance.

Merla changed her hair color slightly and Rosetta and her husband Robin, a professional medic, began to raise the girl like a beloved daughter, watching comedies every night, teaching her magic tricks, and homeschooling the girl in kempo, gymnastics and normal studies as well. Merla would often listen with wonder whenever her new guardians would tell her stories about her missions, about the evil grimm who were lured by negative emotions. She then asked if she could have two dual shields like Rosetta used to use in the old days, naming them Chrysanths.

Years of happiness continued but the damage done by Merla’s original parents had already made a serious mark on her. The girl was suffering from borderline personality disorder. This was making her see herself as someone who should destroy more grimm than anyone else had in their lifetime and spread joyful glee and emotions to all. Even her combat gear began to look more circus themed. Rosetta and Robin didn’t at the time know about her disorder. They just thought of it as the girls personality finally showing itself after years of oppression, a cheerful girl who just wanted to see others smile.

Eventually Merla asked her dear foster parents if she could study at Beacon, vowing that she would make them proud through her hard work and training and return as a famed huntress who could help her on future missions. Smiling at the thought of working alongside her daughter, her mother gave Merla her approval and recommendation to enter the combat school, beginning Merla’s journey to achieve her goals while her father also gave her medical books for her to learn while at Beacon, just so that she could take care of herself if she ever got an injury. The two are still as close as they could possibly get and Merla always writes letters to her and tries to visit them every Saturday for cookies and hot chocolate.

Trivia
Chrysanths is a type of flower used to represent cheerfulness.