Name:
Detective Alexandria "Alex" Di Santi
Age:
30
Sex:
Female
Appearance:
Alex is a tall and formidable woman at a height of 5'10", paired with either a deadpan expression or cynical smile most of the time. A cigarette is usually seen dangling from her lips, being a habit she gave up attempting to give up years ago. Her eyes are maroon, when reading they are hidden behind delicate rectangular frames of plain metal; she's not one for frills. Her fashion sense mirrors this too, wearing usually neutral colours of button-down shirts and slacks. When not tied up into a sloppy ponytail, her dyed-red hair can have a slight wave to it, falling free to her mid-back.
Backstory:
Alex's life was pretty typical. Grew up in a bustling American-Italian household, and being the second girl among 2 sisters and 3 brothers; she often had to fight for attention from her parents, who, while very busy with jobs and looking after 6 kids, still loved them all equally. Eventually Alex just chose to stop fighting and caring for attention, and found that life was a lot easier after that. School came and went, her oldest siblings marrying straight out of high school and adding to their already huge family with kids of their own. Alex, however, had different plans. While she wanted to follow in her father's footsteps and join the Police force, she still wanted to go to college. Excelling in her classes with nought but excellent behaviour and hard work (barring a few run-ins with her fists and bullies, but most were boys too embarrassed to admit they'd been taken down by a girl - it never came back to haunt her, thankfully for her education), Alex won a scholarship for a fairly decent college in Crystalisis, and moved there to study Law and Psychology.
Being rather proficient for her age in self-defence and some martial arts, Alex got a job as a security guard at some high-flying technology company. It was a decent wage, and she struck up a decent friendship with a few of the workers there. Time passed, Alex got her degree, and finally, she was able to join the police at the age of 22. However, it was not long after this that her life became much darker.
What with doing so well in college and the entrance examinations for the force, Alex went up through the ranks of the Police quite quickly; again, she was putting in nearly extreme amounts of hard work in the hopes of stopping criminals and impressing her superior officers. She became known for spending extra hours at work when she'd exceeded her maximum amount of overtime for the month; while the other's went on night's out, she would pore over cases at home, drinking and smoking through the night by herself until gaining some insight into something that she had missed before. Alex never became uncomfortable with this lifestyle; she started to think that friends would be nothing more than a distraction from her work. But one case, one crime, changed this outlook for Alex.
After following a string of break-ins at several companies in town - one of them being the old technology company she had worked for years ago - Alex and her team finally found the perpetrator. It led to a car chase that undoubtedly looked exciting on TV, but for Alex, it was chaos. The car ended up flipped over on the highway out of town, the thief scrambling out and shooting blindly towards the officers. They were all wearing vests - he wasn't. 3 bullets to the chest and he was down, with nothing more than a few bruises and minor cuts from ricochets for the officers. But Alex was changed by all of this. She had been the one to kill him, and even after all of her time on the force, this was the first time she'd had to kill somebody. It turned out the guy was an old tech advisor for the company she had worked for; kicked out for being late too many times. These robberies had been a blind and panicked attempt to get money to feed his kids and pay the rent, nobody had been hurt until that day.
After this, Alex lost her inspiration for work. People kept telling her "It was part of the job", but she didn't like this part of the job. As a child, looking up to her father, she assumed she could handle the responsibility of taking a life, and by default, potentially ruining somebody else's. But she couldn't - so she left.
That was 2 years ago now; shortly after leaving she set up her own Private Investigation company, allowing her to pick and choose cases that she knows will help people, but won't lead to bloodshed like with the police. Recently, she's been doing her own personal investigation into supposed "Gems" in the city. Nobody seems to know what or who they are, and the mystery behind them has brought that curious intrigue back into Alex's life. She believes now is the time to investigate just a little bit deeper...
Skills:
- Advanced Hand-To-Hand combat; having started lessons in arts such as Tae Kwon Do, Brazilian Jui Jitsu and Kick-Boxing at a young age, Alex has seen and done enough in her life to be fairly advanced in fighting people. The training has aided her in developing better reflexes, endurance and strength.
- Marksmanship; The Police are trained in a number of ways, especially when it comes to firearms. Having put in more practice hours than anyone in her graduating class, Alex has impeccable aim with a large number of firearms. She still needs to work on her pitching though - she may need to throw a grenade one day, for some reason. Or y'know, a baseball like a normal person.
- Strategic and Intuitive thinking; to catch criminals, you've got to think like one. Over the years, Alex has become used to plotting and thinking one step ahead of her suspects in order to catch them.
Other:
With her previous ties to the police and the technology company, she is sometimes able to get her hands on prototype weapons before they're put on the market. Her old techno buddies will even add some less than legal mods to guns for an added extra punch - normally she would refuse such things, what with her disagreement with killing humans. But the more she learns of the Gems, the more she appreciates these extra punches.
Has a favourite
black motorcycle, but also has an
army jeep passed down to her from her brother as a graduation present.
Also has kept a bunch of generic police stuff, such as riot gear, handcuffs, tracking devices, bugs, tasers, mace, and a stapler she stole from a douchebag colleague.
Drinks and smokes too much to be healthy, but she stopped caring about that a long time ago.
Her partner in the PI Agency is
Captain Jugular, Jug-Jug for short. She named him it jokingly at first ("Because that's where I've trained him to bite", she would tell terrified witnesses), but now he won't answer to any other name so it's kind of stuck.
