lady horatio

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Huddled in one of the chairs in the conference room, Mandy stirred.

It didn’t take long for her to wake; she hadn’t allowed herself to fall truly asleep. Just a preemptive catnap to prepare herself for the very likely event that today’s case would prevent her from her usual midday siesta. Mandy unfolded her legs, hoping the creases in her dark gray slacks weren’t too obvious, and pushed her long bangs from her eyes, smoothing a hand over her low ponytail to make sure it wasn’t too disheveled.

Sol had called at six o’clock—calling her first because, in his words, she was both the person most likely to be up that early and the one least likely to bite his head off. He’d been right, of course; he’d caught her near the beginning of one of her “awake” periods, just finishing off a homemade omelet and still trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her morning. Taking his mention of a client meeting for the gentle hint that it was, she’d immediately exchanged her jeans and cotton tunic for something slightly more work-appropriate and less likely to get her marked as the office intern. She’d been ready to go by six-ten, beat the rush-hour traffic that, if not avoided, could more than double her commute, and made it to the office by six-thirty.

Mandy raised her arms over her head and gave a languorous stretch, glancing at the clock as she did so. If she focused, she could hear the faint sounds of low conversation from the next room; if she were going to hazard a guess, she’d bet that the majority of her coworkers had arrived by now, if not all of them.

Could go and say hi, she thought, wondering if the voice in her head was Sol’s or her own. It didn’t really matter who was speaking, because even as she thought it, she reached for the half-completed crossword puzzle on the table next to her. She didn’t like to draw attention; she would much rather be the first person in a room than the last, hence her near-perpetual earliness. If she was going to make the first move in a social setting, she preferred to do so one-on-one, or to skirt the edges, if there was a group.

Which wasn’t to say that she didn’t make her own attempts at being social. She’d gotten there too early to play coffee fairy that day, especially not knowing who exactly would be called in, but she’d substituted that offering with another: down at the opposite end of the table, nearest the door, sat a lone box, containing a dozen donuts of all kinds. The box was as far from her as it could be—as if it had just appeared on its own, and she was just an innocent bystander, so caught up in her crossword puzzle that she hadn’t even noticed its appearance.

It was a ridiculous, circular way of making friends, especially by human standards. But she’d only been with PHI a scant six months.

Really, she thought she’d already made a lot of progress.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

@lady horatio - Don't worry about it. :3 I'm all right if the posting speed for this game is "deliberate" rather than breakneck.

As for everyone else, just so you know, starting on Tuesday I'm going to be in the GMT+1 timezone for a couple of weeks. Posts and replies will still come, but seeing as most of us seem to be in North America, the timing might seem a little bit weird. :3 My plan is to have another yummy post up before I get on my nine-hour flight late Monday (which will, to my chagrin, not have wifi), so that we're not in suspense.

Also, don't assume there's a posting order, necessarily - if your character has something to say, by all means, do that!

@Naril

Ooh, I hope you have fun! Sorry, I replied to your PM last night, but I don't know if it went through/notified you--is it in your inbox, or should I resend? No rush; I'm off to work in a little less than an hour. I just wanted to check. :)

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Sorry for the delay, guys! Our kind GM has been helping me hash out some details via PM, and I was gone most of the day. I promise promise promise that I'll have Mandy's intro up tomorrow (which is now today, because it's oh-God-early), either before or after I go to work.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

@NarilThank you! I would have a hard time getting my post finished before I had to leave, anyway, so I'll gratefully take you up on that and shoot you a PM.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

I got stuck on a lot of stupid little things (such as figuring out where Mandy lived and how far it was from the office), so my intro is not done, but I'll try to have it up before I go out tomorrow. :) For the moment, I'm going to succumb to sleep, but I repeat: I'm so excited to get this thing started! I enjoyed reading everyone's intros so far.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Just got home from work and am so excited! :D

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Oh, no, @Naril! We can get some pretty bad thunderstorms in my state, so I very sincerely sympathize. I hope the rest of your night's going as smoothly as possible.

I think I'll throw my vote in with the lot who're pushing for "Festive Spirits." Any kind of holiday brings with it loads of baggage, and since some of us are probably still getting a feel for our new characters, it might be a good jumping-off point. :)

In that vein, if anybody (@Austronaut,@vietmyke,@Habibi359?) wants to do a few practice posts to get in the swing of things and see how our characters interact before the main story starts, please do hit me up! It might make it easier to get a feel for what their dynamic would be like, since it seems like all or most of them will have already met in the first chapter.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Name: Amanda Staten, but it’s likely that anyone she becomes friendly with at PHI would call her Mandy.

Gender: There is, in fact, a girl buried somewhere beneath all those sweaters.

Race/Species: Half-breed, poor thing. Amanda’s mother was a cait sidhe, a race of faerie cats with both human and feline forms. Mom had a fling with a human man, and a few months later, Amanda was born, the runt of the litter. Her human half is most definitely dominant. (More details in the traits and background sections.)

Age (Real and apparent, if applicable): Amanda is recently turned twenty-five, but is often mistaken for younger. As faeries go, even as a half-blood, she’s still considered an adolescent by most standards.

Appearance:

Lean and angular, Mandy clocks in at about five-five—neither terribly short nor terribly tall. Narrow wrists, a fondness for oversized clothing, and an absolute refusal to take up space conspire to give her a diminutive appearance, despite her middling height. Her long brown hair is very fine and easily mussed, falling in indecisive waves down to her waist. Her fair skin shows everything easily, from blushes to bruises, and her battle with under-eye circles is constant. Her eyes and ears—golden-green and subtly pointed, respectively—are the only real hints of her heritage, and they’re both things that even her limited grasp on glamour can usually hide.

Her aesthetic can best be described as “starving college student,” and she likes to be comfortable above all else, so dressing professionally can be a challenge. As in everything else, she tries. She does at least have a good eye for color and a fondness for cashmere, so if she could just be convinced to buy a sweater in something resembling her own size, she’d be in pretty good shape.

Personality:

If there’s an ounce of the stereotypical feline standoffishness in her genetic makeup, Mandy doesn’t know it—think less hardened alley cat and more that friendly stray that hangs around your back door until, somehow, you now have a cat. She can be skittish when presented with strangers or conflict, but she wants to like people, and once her affection’s been won, it’s hard to shake. The only time she’s the least bit grumpy is when she’s just been woken up; living on a human schedule takes its toll, and sleep deprivation leaves her disoriented and disgruntled.

Amanda is generally surrounded by an aura of comfortable chaos. She tends to be scatterbrained, though not specifically forgetful. Her files may be all over her desk, but she knows what’s in each one. She tries very hard to be organized for the sake of her teammates, but sometimes, she just works best when left to her own devices, as seen below.

Powers, Traits, and Abilities:

Amanda is good at making connections, in more than one sense. Dump a pile of information in front of her, and Mandy will scatter it, rearranging things until “like” items are together, creating pairings that other people might not have thought of. Whether or not on the matter at hand, her mind is always working on something—and she has been known to dream up the answer to a problem during one of her midday naps. Focusing is sometimes difficult, but she battles this by always having a pen handy, so that she can jot down ideas as they come and set them aside for later.

With her open personality, it’s no surprise that Mandy is also good at making connections with people. She occasionally sticks her foot in her mouth, and her methods may grate on more linear thinkers, but she is always trying—her mixed reception in both the fey and human communities has made her eager to please. She puts people at their ease, largely because she is the least intimidating person you are likely to meet, especially in the world of the supernatural.

Her specialty in a fight, when she is forced to have one, is the ability to move fast and force her opponent to do most of the work. Most of her clumsy moments are due to distractedness; when she puts her whole focus on something, she’s naturally pretty agile. She also doesn’t fight completely fair, having been taught by some of the older kids growing up that it was better to play dirty now and live to feel bad about it later.

As far as “powers” go, Amanda’s are limited. Her night vision is not as good as that of her feline counterparts, but it’s better than a human’s. She doesn’t shift easily anymore; partial transformations are easier than full ones. Claws are still within her reach and are her first line of defense; they won’t do killer damage (unless she gets lucky and hits an artery), but they’ll definitely convince most attackers to let her go. Glamours are almost completely beyond her, but she has a knack for sensing ones that have been cast by someone else.

Just like mundane cats, cait sidhe are crepuscular, most active at twilight and dawn and sleeping sporadically in between. Amanda is no different, but she’s determined not to let this interfere with her work, and so can sometimes be found napping in empty offices in the middle of the day, rather than going home.

Background:

Just as with “real” cats, the kittens in cait sidhe litters can have different fathers. Amanda was the only one in her litter with human blood. Her faerie blood was dominant in her infancy, but her human side asserted itself as soon as she stopped being dependent on her mother for nutrition. The cait sidhe aren’t kind to runts or outliers, and Amanda’s mother was quickly faced with a dilemma: what to do with a child that could no longer reliably shift or keep up with her stronger siblings, and how to protect that child in a community where she would never be completely welcome.

Then came that gold-embossed card. Amanda was too young at the time to understand everything, but she remembers being passed off to a social worker that didn’t think it at all strange to be picking up a child in an alley, and she remembers the long car ride to an orphanage full of children of all shapes, sizes, and colors. And she remembers the look on her mother’s face as she gave her away—one of affection, yes, but also of guilty relief.

Amanda has not been home since her mother gave her up. She doesn’t know who her father was. She passed her time at the oddball orphanage in relative comfort, surrounded by kids like her—half-bloods and mixed-breeds, some of them with blood so thin that they passed for human, many others doomed by non-human features and not enough glamour to hide them, making it impossible for them to live comfortably in either world. But the orphanage was run by volunteers, understaffed and overcrowded; it was impossible for any child to truly get the attention he or she should have, and adoptions were rare. Mandy left at eighteen with a basic education and a legal enough identity to qualify for a work-study program at a human university.

College was not an easy transition; Mandy’s lack of experience in a traditional classroom and her trouble staying focused meant that she almost flunked her first semester. Depressed and dispirited, she almost quit, but had nowhere else to go. A kind professor stepped in, got her in touch with one of the guidance counselors, and helped her get on track. By the time she graduated a few years later, she had made a few friends, taken classes in almost every discipline, and somehow qualified for a degree in the humanities with her hodge-podge of credits. She did not, unfortunately, have a great sense of purpose, nor did she feel like she’d found her home in academia (though it did get her her first job, working as a research assistant).

So, once she’d found a way to temporarily support herself, she went looking for the first place that ever wanted her. And it took a while, but eventually, it showed up: that little, gold-embossed card...

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

@Habibi359 I am delighted by this idea. It would be an interesting dynamic, since Rob still seems a bit wary of the supernatural. I have a feeling that Rob's going to walk away from his desk on more than one occasion and return to find a mug of coffee sitting there that wasn't there before. It may also be cold, half the time, as the person gifting it to him will never do it when he's actually in the room... Mandy's like a brownie; you do not actually mention the coffee, but if you accept the coffee, it's her signal to move on to step two in her circular friend-making process.

@vietmyke Your response made me grin! It may never come up aloud, but I think Mandy's going to be fascinated as much by the fact that Jacob's a father as by his magical talents. Like Rob, he might notice her occasionally appearing in the room he's in--seated far away, without making noise. A few days later, she might move to sitting a few desks away, still doing her own thing. If that goes well, she might sit a little closer, and on, and on, until... Well, suddenly, you have a cat. :P

The Guardian Angel Project {Revival}

Alex drifted along behind Silvia, keeping pace with her new teammates until something buzzed in her pocket. She fell back a little as she pulled out her cell phone--she'd made sure to put it on vibrate so it wouldn't disturb any of the evening's briefings, but she didn't think anyone would mind her checking it now, while they were en route between different stops on the tour.

New message from Jericho, the screen said. She wasn't surprised, though she had expected him to wait a little longer, to be sure she'd be out of her meetings. She opened the text and read, Are you dead? She'd been getting variations of that same message sporadically all week, ever since she'd told her best friend and her family that the Guardians would be going into hiding.

No, Jer, she typed, the corners of her mouth twitching upward, not dead yet. Thanks for checking.

Somebody has to, he replied. No other messages were forthcoming, but it wasn’t hard for Alex to fill in what went unsaid. She had a lot of practice.

Love you, too, she sent, pocketing the phone with a grin. Nothing made Jericho more uncomfortable than open expressions of affection, which was possibly why Alex’s parents never seemed to believe her when she declared that she would marry him by the time she turned thirty-five.

She looked up, addressing her first question to Silvia. "This is probably going to sound really stupid," she said, "but do the facilities here include internet access?"