Melissa (The Bone Girl)

Originally written: Fall 2009

Name: Melissa

Alias: The Bone Girl

Weapons: A pair of blades made from human bone, one larger for deep cuts and scraping gore off bone, and a smaller one for detailed work and carving into bone.

Species: Human

Gender: Female

Pronouns: She/her

Orientations: Unknown

Age when written: Fourteen

Family: Not important (all dead)

Friends: Tina and Rachel

Description:

Melissa is average height, thin but used to hard travel, tanned from living outside, and blond. In the story she works as a shopgirl in a town called Rockfield. She is known to be jumpy and fearful, but willing to smile through her fear albeit nervously. She is very attached to her friends and seems slow to form bonds with people outside of her friend group. The other townspeople assume this is because she is used to having to flee whatever town she's in every few months. She and her friends are survivors from the first town the Bone Girl terrorized.

Melissa is secretly the Bone Girl. Her killing spree started when she was thirteen and slaughtered her parents. To cover her crime she started killing other families in town, always leaving a single family member alive but never letting them see her. During this time she killed the families of her friends as well. She only kills at night and at first was careful to be seen by nobody. When she had killed about six families, the town collectively evacuated, small groups of refugees scattering to other towns. She and her friends fled too, of course.

By the time she got to her second town, she had decided to do things a bit differently. She switched to killing one person a night because it meant she was able to kill for more nights in a row before townspeople evacuated. She also started gathering materials from the corpses of her kills. Eventually she made a sort of hooded dress-like garment out of the bones of her victims, tied together with strips of their flesh tanned into leather. She also made a pair of knives from the bones of her victims as well. Once she completed that, she only took bones and skin from her victims if she anticipated her dress needing repairs. She also started leaving a calling card after her kills: the victim's skull with their name carved into their forehead, left wherever she had taken them from.

The Bone Girl's true personality is heartless and sadistic. She enjoys causing pain and fear and death, but she also enjoys being the center of attention. By letting herself be seen in her concealing dress of bones, but always from a distance and always by people who aren't likely to be believed, she was able to start rumors about herself that evolved into a full-fledged mythos. The townsfolk start come up with the name "the Bone Girl". She is essentially a murder cryptid. Everyone fears her, and she loves it.

After about two years of murdering people every night, she realizes it has started to lose its savor. She decides to take an apprentice to carry on her legacy and keep the myth of the Bone Girl going. Once she is satisfied her apprentice will be believed to be her, and once her apprentice has her own dress of bones, Melissa takes her own life. This is not done out of despair, but out of a deep belief that her lack of interest in murder means her life cycle has come to an end. Before she dies, she instructs her apprentice to stage her death to look like another victim of the Bone Girl. As instructed, her apprentice not only leaves Melissa's skull on her pillow with her name carved into it, but also her femur inscribed with her last words: "The Bone Girl will live forever!"