Mary Lloyd Grayson (Earth 427-0)

Mary Grayson was a trapeze artist at Haly's Circus and the mother of Dick Grayson. During her son's childhood she investigated a pattern of unusual disappearances at Haly's, but her search was cut short by her death at age 34.

Early Life
Mary was born Marie Lloyd in Hamburg, Germany, to a Romanichal father and a Sinti mother. Mary's father was a World War II veteran who spent his time after the war studying and cataloging dialects of Romanes, including traveling to various points in Europe with a tape recorder in order to preserve as many dialects as possible.

Mary was an outgoing child, described by her family as "stubborn and curious". She first met her husband John Grayson, along with the boy who would later become Raptor, as a child when her father was in Paris for a conference at a university. She and John kept in touch through their teenage years.

Mary practiced gymnastics from when she was a small child, and when she was a teenager reached Olympic level, earning Germany a silver medal. At 18, rather than attempting to get into university as her parents did, Mary joined Haly's Circus as an acrobat and began learning trapeze.

Mary's mother did not fully approve of her choices, and expected Mary to quit the circus once she married and had children, either moving back to Germany with her family or settling somewhere else. This was a source of tension through their lives, but Mary's mother ultimately loved her children and grandchildren, and supported them.

Time At Haly's
A few years after her arrival at Haly's, Mary married John Grayson. At 22 she gave birth to her son Stefan Grayson, and at 24 she gave birth to Dick Grayson. She was also close friends with Lila Valeska, leading to their children seeing each other as extended family.

During Haly's off season, Mary and John would frequently take Stefan and Dick to visit Mary's family in Germany.

Investigation and Death
When Dick was four, his cousin James, the son of John's brother Rick and his wife Karla, went missing. Mary was suspicious, a feeling increased by the refusal of the other adults to talk about James' disappearance. Karla was the only one to acknowledge James' existence and disappearance, acting paranoid about the other children and claiming that a bird had stolen him. Two months later, Mary went to check the rigging of the trapeze and found Karla hanging from the aerial silks. Karla's death was declared a suicide, and treated as such by the rest of the performers at Haly's. Mary, however, was suspicious, as Karla had left no note. The only member of Haly's to acknowledge the strangeness was the fortuneteller Paul Cicero, who told Mary that there were three spirits in Gotham who would take five children. Mary laughed and told him she knew fortunetelling was made up to sell to locals, but grew unsettled after he asked if she had heard or seen any owls.

Mary confronted John about his silence, who eventually admitted that sometimes people disappeared from Haly's and it was best not to talk about it or cause trouble - those that did typically ended up like Karla. Horrified, Mary threatened to take the three remaining Grayson children and move back to Hamburg unless he helped her. John reluctantly agreed, and the two began investigating. Their investigation did not yield them any friends, and Mary's propensity for asking questions (along with her ethnicity) often made the other performers at Haly's shut her out.

Knowing the danger in them being found out, Mary quickly developed a code for keeping their notes. They would only write in Romanes, using the Welsh alphabet as a standard for spelling, which was then filtered through a substitution cipher. Since nobody else at Haly's spoke Welsh or Romanes, their notes were safe. Over the years, their evidence piled up, hiding under their mattress, revealing a conspiracy surrounding Haly's and Gotham which Mary referred to in Romanes as "the owl magistrate."

Six years after Mary and John began their investigations, the Court of Owls sent their operative William Cobb to kill them. Cobb cut the rope that held their trapeze, killing Mary, her husband, their nephew Johnny, and severely injuring Rick and Stefan. Dick alone survived uninjured.

Powers and Abilities
Abilities


 * Acrobatics: Mary trained in gymnastics from a young age and was part of the Flying Graysons, known for performing trapeze without a net.
 * Multilingualism: Mary speaks fluent Romanes, English, and German, and has some French, Spanish and Welsh.
 * Cryptography: Mary and her sister Harriet formed codes as children which Mary later developed into more difficult codes for use while investigating the Court of Owls.
 * Investigation

Trivia

 * Although some Romani burn or sell the belongings of the dead, Mary and John's RV was left untouched until their son was an adult
 * Mary taught her husband Romanes
 * Mary's favorite costume to perform in later inspired Dick Grayson's Robin costume
 * The name Lloyd comes from the Welsh word for "gray"
 * Mary became more religious after she married
 * Mary's Hebrew name is Esther
 * Mary's Romani name Baro Sero means "bigheaded", and reflects her stubbornness