Name: Emelia 'Emy' Vance
Age: 17
Specialty: Slayer
Bio:

Emelia Vance never remembers the same normal as most people do. Even when life was at it's most stable, she still found herself moving every three to four years, a new home she could never truly get settled in to have it be a home. Her mother was the only true constant in her life with her Army father deploying to this theater of operations or that theater of operations seemingly every other year, and on the years he wasn't he was preoccupied with travel for training, or conferences, or "war games" with a group of countries that were never held in her backyard.

A few years in Korea, a few years in Japan, years in Germany, years in Texas, a stint in Puerto Rico, Washington D.C. It could be exhausting, and it could also be quite the adventure; Emelia has done more traveling, and experienced more, than nearly anyone else her age. She speaks a handful of languages, is as aware of global events and trends as most global news correspondants. She wouldn't trade most of that in for anything in the world...but she cannot escape her desire to actually put down roots. To know a place as a home, not just a waystation in life.

In Puerto Rico her mother was diagnosed with cancer. The Army allowed her father to be reassigned to Washington D.C. in a Congressional military liason capacity so his wife could get the best possible care in the most stable environment possible. Somehow that made the entire situation worse; Emelia and her mother had always been a tight knit team, their primary source of support and comfort through the stresses of being military dependents. Now Emelia's father was almost always present; while good in theory, in practice it was pretty fucking strange and destabilizing for both mother and daughter. Still, Emelia backed away, letting husband and wife reconnect with what little time her mother had left.

A time in her life of impossible stress was further complicated by puberty, by being in normal public schools for the first time in forever, and by being 15. Just on it's own all of that was really difficult to navigate and stay above the waterline about. Throw in the impending devestation that was the loss of her mother, the complication of having to deal with a father she barely knew who was trying way too hard, and Emelia was past the point of being done. Yet she handled it, sort of. She could never quite figure out the "right" fashion choices and got tired of being considered either out of date for wearing the wrong style of jeans, or considered a dyke for not caring what she looked like. All in an age when some tights and a tank top SHOULD have been enough, but apparently it wasn't. Fuck Becky Johnson and her super judgey friends.

Just saying.

But then the unavoidable came, and Emelia's mother died. As ready as she could've been for it, nothing else had ever quite hurt like that. Suddenly Emelia was alone. Her father tried, but she wouldn't let him. In part because she just couldn't, she just didn't have the emotional maturity to process it all AND do right by him, and in part because she was already losing her mind. Her mother's death had coincided with nightmares, with daydreams so vivid, so real, her doctor believed she was having passive seizures.

She wasn't. Emelia was simply starting the process of becoming the Slayer.

A title that explained nothing and meant nothing to her, yet she constantly found herself scribbling it in the margins of notebooks, even writing it in lipstick on her mirror with a giant fucking question mark behind it. "Slayer?" What was it? What the fuck did it mean? Was she just losing her mind? Was she just crazy? Her therapist thought so, her doctor thought so, her school counselor thought so. Fabricated reality to escape into instead of dealing with the trauma and pain of losing her mother--that was the clinical line on Emelia Vance.

Her father called it bullshit, and pulled his daughter out of that public school, placing her into a small girl's only private highschool. They changed doctors, changed therapists. Anyone who didn't try to HELP his daughter was quickly dismissed, and replaced. He refused to not believe something was going on with his daughter, even if the Slayer stuff and all the nightmares were imagined. Even if they weren't real, institutionalizing her would solve nothing, and help Emelia not at all. But try as he might, her father couldn't alone win this war.

Not when the monsters of nightmares and fiction were the enemy.

They found her; the first a Scottish sounding vampire who claimed to have killed "half a hundred" monster hunters in his time, but never a Slayer. He wanted to kill a Slayer. In a weird way, it made Emelia happy to hear this monster of fiction turned real calling her--HER!--a Slayer. It meant it wasn't all in her head. It meant, somewhere, somehow, it was real. And she knew he was real; she had the bruises and lacerations he provided her to prove it. You couldn't imagine blood spilled like that. And then...instinct took over, and Emelia Vance found herself going all Neo on the Scottish vampire's bitch ass.

A man named Prescott stalked her, but it was hard to get to a girl that lived in the most secure gated community in the world--a US Army base. Turns out he wasn't a stalker, so he claimed, but instead a "Watcher." He was there to help her. He was there to train her. Prescott was brave, Prescott was wise, Prescott was dedicated to her...and Prescott died. Impaled by a second vampire that found her, an older, stronger one that spoke with a Russian accent and said he had killed "stronger, better, Slayers" than her.

In the end the difference was a tactical flashlight she'd nabbed from her father on "blind the fucker" mode and quick thinking on her part that saved her and ended the second "Slayer hunter"--but in the process half her small girl's only private school was trashed. And worse, the vampire never showed up on camera. So no one believed her, and even her father seemed out of patience. He accepted "twilight tour" orders, his last duty station before retirement, to a small Army training base just outside Washington, Missouri. Washington wasn't as big as D.C., it was a great school district, and a steady town that nothing big ever happened in outside some gang violence and meth heads. So they moved again, this time living off base, in an actual house, one that Emelia helped pick out, one her father promised they wouldn't have to leave.

A home, he said, if she could make it one without burning it down or trashing it.

Challenge accepted.

Name: "Dana Griese" ([???] Kawaguchi / "Kawaguchi-chan")
Age: 18
Specialty: Hired muscle - originally in America on a protective basis, Dana relishes a good fight, be it at staking distance, the length of a blade, or from down the barrel of a gun. Outside of combat, she takes on the role of fashion police, often serving as an unwanted and caustic guide to fashion.
Bio: The girl who would adopt the identity of Dana Griese began life under quite a different name, halfway across the world in the Hyōgo Prefecture capital of Kobe. Her parents were affluent members of society in a country suffering under the weight of a dozen societal problems - with a tech magnate for a father and a mother who had earned herself a safe career as a fixer at a law firm that had been heavily associated with the hometown Yamaguchi-gumi going back to the Japan bubble of the 1980s, Kawaguchi was all but guaranteed a life of privilege in Japan's sixth-largest city.

But the prospect of a safe, privileged life quite understandably failed to appeal to a young girl whose family dabbled in the cutthroat worlds of business and mob law. From a young age, Dana was impulsive and outspoken in a conservative, staid Japanese culture, traits which quickly earned the charismatic rich girl a hushed reputation as a delinquent in the making. Eager to avoid the pitfalls of having a little street fighter or gangster of their own for a daughter, Kawaguchi's parents directed her towards various interests, a few of which stuck - rhythm games, fostering a childhood passion for dance, were one such hobby that the competitive Kawaguchi adopted with vigor. More seriously, the young girl took an interest in high fashion, and even found herself pursuing several brief jobs on both ends of a fashion photographer's camera. It seemed that she had found her calling until one fateful ride home on a late-night shuttle.

What began as a mere surprised annoyance - saying Japanese men's penchant for harassment on board a subway was an issue would be putting it mildly - when Kawaguchi felt herself being groped quickly grew serious when she turned around to swat at her attacker. The young girl, not exactly a weakling, found herself tossed halfway across the shuttle for her trouble, and barely managed to scramble out of the car and into the familiar streets of Kobe. She found herself pursued for several blocks before managing to hide among some of the port city's fish crates, breaking off large, irregular chunks of wood to defend herself in lieu of any weapons. Regaining her courage, Kawaguchi leaped onto her demonic assailant's back as it passed, doing her damnedest to bludgeon its head into a pulp with her fishy-scented improvised weaponry with negligible effects. She landed the kill, but it was ignonimous and accidental; the creature had reached up behind it and thrown Kawaguchi off its shoulders, and when she rose up to whirl around and regain her bearings she had accidentally speared it through its heart with the ugly, jagged end of a plank.

After enjoying a few nights of recovery and therapeutic Dance Dance Revolution, Kawaguchi decided that whatever had attacked her had been demonic in nature - and that it was, in turn, dispatching such evil creatures who would prey on young girls was in the nature of a champion. Her mother's Yakuza contacts, of all people, were the bearers of her first partial answers in the realm of the occult and demonology, and with the information her mother helped her glean she grew into an able, if not exactly finessed, vampire killer around the Prefecture over the course of her time as a first-year and second-year student. She even ended up getting the hang of wielding a stake, although she preferred the more universally fatal method of a sweeping decapitation over piercing the vampire's heart.

However, through all of this, Kawaguchi's restless streak never dulled, and as her quarry grew sparse around Kobe she began to realize that these creatures, and perhaps worse, lurked elsewhere in the world, untamed, without champions such as herself to spell their end. Any requests to leave behind the doldrums of her school career were rebuffed coolly by her mother until after her seventeenth birthday, when she took an absence from school (not a rare occurrence in her life) on her mother's insistence (which was much more rare) to meet with her mother at her law firm. To Kawaguchi's surprise - and, soon, to her glee - her mother informed her that she was being entrusted with a very special assignment, one that could not be trusted to some simple mob grunt or a lesser fixer with a law degree.

Kawaguchi would be serving as a glorified bodyguard for some eerie pale-skinned quasi-foreigner, who had fallen afoul of some sort of supernatural chicanery of a type which Kawaguchi knew nothing of and cared even less for. What mattered was that this odd creature was a ticket across the ocean, to the United States, and that fulfilling her mother's wishes and protecting her would surely result in meeting newer and more disgusting monsters to dispatch. She accepted the chance given to her greedily, and the two girls departed for America for a quiet location named Washington, Missouri, where a fresh pair of identities as Victoria Cross and Dana Griese awaited them. Her initial nonchalance and ambivalence towards her charge quickly gave way to piqued interest when it appeared that "Victoria" possessed some demonology acumen of her own, and she accepted her guard duty with even more zeal than she had before in the hopes of accompanying her ward on some of her hunts.

Sure enough, in the eighteen months since they had left Kobe for Washington (a town which, to much confusion and consternation on Dana's part, had no monuments, history, boutiques or undead Senators) Victoria Cross proved herself to be quite the weirdness magnet, joining up with a group of other American misfits in an attempt to protect the town and its citizens from all sorts of vampires, demons, and other oddities.

And, in keeping with both of her life's primary directives, the artist formerly known as Kawaguchi was alongside her young mistress for every hunt.

Name: Adam Avery

Age: 17

Appearance: Adam is one who spends most of his days, out and about and anywhere but his own house and it shows. Between the messy hair which he has to keep adjusting on the go and the black marks under his eyes, it’s rather clear that he stays busy. He’ll be hesitant to tell you about what it is that he actually does, mind you but traces of dirt and occasionally stranger stains can be found on his clothing. He isn’t a very large individual, he stands at a pretty average height and his build is about the one you’d expect from one who stays on the move but doesn’t actually spend any time working out; thin yet lacking any significant muscle. The feature of every single attire he chooses to make his own on any given day is his signature green military jacket. Usually he will wear band shirts for rather old rock bands from the seventies and eighties but don’t you dare call him a hipster.

Adam is a slightly peculiar fellow, he’s got a tendency to look over his shoulder and sometimes get lost staring off at things that other people would find rather mundane. However when you get the guy talking, good luck getting him to stop. He always talks with his hands, using them to emphasize everything he is saying. Of course, perhaps the most important of all his habits is his phone. Indeed, he has a smart phone which he rarely neglects to hold in his hand and while most would see others giggle and smile at whatever they are doing on their phone, Adam’s face remains perfectly serious and stern and oddly… Calculating? He is up to something on that phone of his.

Specialty: So let’s cut the fluff and move on to the crunch. What do you want? Serial keys for video games? You got it. Alcohol even though you’re underage? You’re covered. Maybe you’re feeling a little 420-friendly? That’s fine, Adam won’t judge. Whatever you need, he can get through an extended and strange network of connections that involves friends, relatives and business associates. Of course, the things I have mentioned are only the small-fry stuff he has access to. Things of a less… Mundane nature that are much more dangerous are also a part of Mr. Avery’s repertoire, all you ever need do is ask. Oh also he has a black van and even a license to drive it!

Bio: Adam Avery was was born to a strange family in Washington, Missouri. Few actually trusted anyone with the Avery surname because of their secretive and strange nature. The family had garnered themselves a reputation, some accounts would paint them as religious nuts and a secret cult. Others painted them as a crime family. Some claimed they were a coven of witches but how did this tarnished reputation even come to be? Most those who were an Avery were home-schooled and often strayed away from anyone from outside the family’s social circles. In fact Adam himself was home-schooled until he reached his early teens but why all the secrecy you might wonder? The Averys were a branch of an ancient family of demon hunters who were blessed to have a Slayer among their family tree(it just so happened that said slayer was Adam’s grandmother, he never got to meet her sadly.) The Averys were considered a warrior branch of a much larger family whose name eludes most tongues. Even Adam himself struggles to recall the name of the much larger ‘family’.

He was strictly schooled in his home by his family and most of his social life revolved around his siblings and whatever relatives came to visit at the time but after he became twelve, he insisted to his family that he would be sent to a public school. While they were hesitant at first, pressure and suspicion from the public had become too much to handle. He was well-versed on everything supernatural and strange but little was going to prepare him for what was considered by most to be a ‘normal’ life. Everyone around him appeared to be ignorant to the unnatural side of the world while he witnessed mundane events from a different point of view. He was labelled a weirdo and was treated with much suspicion by his peers due to the name that the Avery family had earned themselves with their clandestine nature.

While the original reaction to Adam was originally hesitant and suspicious, Adam quickly managed to make himself a relatively notable individual thanks to his family’s connections and training. What started first as merely stealing some alcohol for his fellow classmates eventually turned into things of a much more serious nature. Adam found that he could capitalise on family connections, becoming the middle-man to many transactions between many people. It got him involved with a bad crowd, sure but he was making himself the name as ‘the man’, he could get you what you needed and if he couldn’t, then he’d find a way to do it. He had a few entanglements with the law which got sorted through his parents who were anything but approving of the young Adam’s new lifestyle but attempts to get him under control failed more frequently as the boy grew older.

He enjoyed being the one everyone came to, gaining a unique sort of popularity instead of being isolated from all the social circles like the rest of his family. Despite the illusion he had created for himself for being the coolest kid in school, he failed to realize that many kids around him still did not precisely appreciate his presence. They treated him as more of a necessary evil because he could get them what they wanted but his shifty family and ‘connections’ so to speak made his fellow students fear him more. So even though they’d smile to him and label him the guy who could get anything, they would still whisper behind his back and keep their distance whenever he walked around.

Oh how ironic it turned out to be that despite the lessons taught by his family to hate the supernatural world, it was precisely the supernaturals that treated Adam in a manner that wasn’t hypocritical. In more than one instance did a witch approach seeking magical supplies or magical texts to get them started on their path to witchcraft. Along with other kinds of people who had some kind of ‘in’ into the supernatural world. You’ll be surprised to learn that it didn’t take long for the unnatural types to come flocking to Adam to get what they needed but being an Avery drew a certain type of crowd to someone. In the end, Adam’s closest and most regular ‘customers’ became the ones who were supernatural in one way or another, much to his family’s chagrin.

How did his family feel in the meantime? Pissed, expectedly. He had all but abandoned his studies to pick up the family legacy but there was little point to his family’s efforts. Regardless of his friendly treatment towards the world of the supernatural, Adam just did not have the killer instinct and fighting prowess that seemed to come to most Averys naturally. They tried to stop him and ground him and whatever was in their power to stop his association with the unsavory sorts but it was too little too late. Adam had become the go-to for many mundane as well as supernatural people for what they need. And whether they tried to forcibly stop him from doing what he did, someone would come along and get Adam out of his bind in order to get what they want.

So what happens now that Adam is close to graduating high school and becoming his own man? Well the responsibilities are piling up and Adam’s tensions with his family are greater than ever and they have made their threats to disown Adam but more than once Adam has called their bluff because they couldn’t just let a fellow Avery go. Not due to their morals however, but due to the main family’s teachings and rules. However, it’s starting to seem like the bigger, more serious family may get involved in disciplining Adam. More than once has Adam noticed shadowy figures stalking him from rooftops and cars tailing his ‘party van’.

Name: Ash Pierce
Age: 41
Specialty: Librarian | Watcher
Bio:



Ashton Pierce comes from a different reality than most. The social elite of the East Coast; bloodlines that go back centuries, priviledge few can imagine. A life put in a pattern determined by the progenitor. Upon that dream like pattern the good son Ashton was awoken to the ugly and the sinful, to the real. Like many a dream turned nightmare there was a monster at the end of it. A monster that nearly killed Ashton but for the timely intervention of an English gent from a background not too dissimilar from Ashton's. A brief explanation from the gent became an obsession to Ashton. An obsession that cost him nearly everything, at first; inheritance, family connections, trust funds. All of it. In his desperation he gave in to obsession, and obsession took him in.

Ashton Pierce became a shadow of his former self, giving everything into his singular, narrow, focus. Fiction became his new reality; monsters, demons, magic, rituals, ancient languages long thought dead, now known to him as undead languages. Maybe they had died, but their function, their purpose, had survived death and become stronger for it. The gent came calling, the Watcher Council knew talent when they saw it--they knew one of their own affected by the calling. Within their ranks, within the training he was born for, Ashton became Ash, a transformation that went much further and deeper than names and skin. It was with the Council Archives that Ash discovered them; journals there was no accounting for. Text that was sharp, then fuzzy, then sharp again. Books that were heavier than a book ought to be, and then suddenly, almost as light as air. The journals of Rupert Giles.

Ash Pierce was charged with investigating the anomoly. Through a maze of clues and coincidence came the final piece of the puzzle: Rupert Giles himself. A man with no family, no history, no tether to this plane of reality. He was a shattered mess when Ash Pierce found him; mumbling about a girl, a Slayer, about vampires and demons and Hellmouths and the ends of all things. Ash returned Giles to the Watcher Council, and when he spoke shibboleth the Council accepted Rupert Giles as one of their own, one lost in time and space, planted upon them by chance or fate. One way or another, it was an opportunity, and resource, they could not pass it up. But while the Council would continue to explore Rupert Giles and those journals, they had other plans for Ash Pierce.

Namely...Emelia Vance.

Washington, Ohio's Washington Lee High School was need of a Librarian. A few favors called in by the Council, and the job was Ash's. He was now a High School Librarian; albeit one that was usually impeccably dressed and fashioned as befitted his birth, with a depth of intellect and knowledge unmatched by any academic within days drive. The Council was certain, through whatever mysterious means, that the girl would show up. In the meantime Mr. Pierce would establish himself and gather information on the town and it's less obvious going-ons. Every time something interesting came up, one of several teenagers were never far behind. It didn't take him long to determine their motivations, and their actions. He helped them however he could in ways just large enough to help, but small enough to escape their knowledge. It wasn't long until the Council was proven correct: the girl moved into town with her father. And not just any girl, but a Slayer. Suddenly Ash Pierce had a new obsession.