[App] babylonwood
Mother was human, but father wore feathers; he hasn't been seen since he flew
And I am the child of their very strange union, and I have been left here with you...
The Player
User Name/Nick: Aubrey
User LJ: allfireburns
AIM/IM: allfireburns
E-mail: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
Other Characters: The Tenth Doctor, Harry Dresden and Emily Prentiss
The Character
Character Name: Nate Cavanaugh
Character Journal: bestwillgowrong
Canon: Original
Age: 18
From When?: Shortly before she let a crazy Barnam drag her out of the city and ruin her life. She really should have just gone back to bed that day.
Appearance: The descriptor most people tend to use for her is "cute", to her great annoyance. She's 4'11" with a delicate build, despite having quite a bit of muscle on top of it. She has chin-length blonde hair that likes to curl, dark gray eyes, and fair skin marked with a pretty impressive collection of scars. Her nose is slightly crooked, and so are a couple of her fingers, all of the above having been broken and healed not terribly well (her nose a couple times, actually).
There are two long, thick scars on her back, tracing along her shoulder blades, marking the place where her wings come out. When extended, her wings are thin and tapered, much longer than she is tall, and blue-gray with barred black-and-white undersides.
Abilities/Powers: Nate is an angel, which in her universe is a weird subspecies of human, no special holiness or connection to God included. She's not entirely mortal - with a lot of luck, she could live for upwards of a thousand years - but she's not immortal either. She can get sick or injured, and she can absolutely be killed - she bounces back faster than a human would, if she survives the initial wound, but at the base level, she is as fragile as an ordinary human.
More than being an angel, she's an archangel - which isn't a special position, it's a classification. What it means, primarily, is that she feels compelled to kill any demon she runs into... which may or may not extend to demons of other universes, and probably depends on how she interprets them. It's a psychological trigger, not one tied to the actual biology of the demons; if she thinks you're a demon, she will probably feel the need to kill you. This doesn't mean she'll act on the compulsion, but it's always going to be there.
So that's the downside of being an archangel. The upside? She's a natural warrior: faster, stronger, and with much better reflexes than your average human, or any other kind of angel. (Actually, she's stronger than anyone her size ever has a right to be - she just shouldn't have the muscle mass for it, but that's magic for you. Even so, her size is still a disadvantage in close combat, even against normal humans, and against pretty much anyone else with greater-than-average-human strength, she tends to be overpowered.) She has some training in unarmed combat (no specific style, as her training was weird and eclectic) and knife fighting, and she's pretty damn competent with a handgun. She has a working knowledge of how to combat most supernatural threats in her universe, but that won't be terribly helpful here.
The most noticeable feature of angels - and, presumably, what led them to be called angels in the first place - are their wings. These wings are retractable, folding into a small pocket of reality concealed in her back when she pulls them in (and yes, that's weird and creepy; she tries not to think too hard about it). When extended, all her superhuman abilities - speed, reflexes, strength, healing ability - are at their strongest. They also afford her a limited ability to sense magic and the supernatural, though it's not strong enough to pinpoint who or what she's sensing, just that it's there. She can not fly with her wings, though she's small enough and her wings big enough that she can sort of glide, in a pinch. She has done this a grand total of once, and plans to never do it again.
Inventory • Brown leather jacket
• Gray sweater
• Blue long-sleeved shirt
• Blue jeans
• Gray tennis shoes
• White socks
• White sports bra and underwear
• Silver knife with sheath
• Analog watch
• Cellphone
• Messenger bag containing: Three notebooks, two textbooks (psychology and Latin), one ridiculously detailed day planner, a collection of pens and highlighters, a water bottle, two granola bars, bottle of ibuprofen, some tampons, a small first aid kit, hand sanitizer, packs of tissues and wet wipes, a pocketknife, two lighters, a small flashlight, and a ziploc bag of... some kind of powder Tamara made for her for repelling most minor supernatural nastiness.
• Wallet containing: NY state driver's license, Columbia school ID, credit card, thirty dollars and twelve cents in cash
Personality: The first impression most people get from Nate is that of the quintessential archangel: confident to the point of arrogance, extremely driven and goal-oriented, not terribly friendly and more than a little violent. All of these are true, to a degree, but they're only a small part of the whole picture.
Nate is certain of herself and her abilities, carries with her a particular air of self-assurance generally seen in apex predators - but just being certain of that isn't really enough for her. It's important to her that other people acknowledge that she's capable and good at what she does, too. Blame her mother, who managed to tie her self-worth into her ability to excel at a young age - it doesn't matter so much that people like her, it matters that they know she is competent and worthy of respect. She'll do everything she can to prove herself if necessary, and dismissing her out of hand is the fastest way to piss her off.
She is a perfectionist and an overachiever, throwing herself completely into whatever she does, and she excelling at it. That excessive competence is rarely due to natural talent, though, just intense focus and the near-compulsive need to keep working on something until it's right. There's no such thing as "good enough" for Nate: it's either perfect, or she's not done yet.
She has little tolerance for those not quite so competent, too. Put her on a team with people who meet her standards, and she's fine - make her work with people who don't live up to her expectations, and she'll probably try to take over their job before long so someone will do it correctly. It's not surprising, then, that she tends to overestimate her capabilities rather frequently, taking on more than she can handle and then running herself ragged to make sure it gets handled anyway.
This perfectionist streak doesn't stop at school or work, either. It extends, quite naturally given her calling, to her monster-hunting hobby, but also to her home, where everything is obsessively ordered and organized, and even to personal relationships. If she perceives a problem in a relationship, she'll either hammer at it until she feels better about it, or she'll discard the relationship as not worth salvaging. Although... to be fair, she's only taken the latter course twice, and one of those times was with her mother, so that one might not count.
Nate doesn't make friends easily, or often. It's a common misconception about archangels that they're loners by nature - they're actually more like pack animals. Most form their pack of other archangels, but Nate grew up without the company of other angels, and so she builds her family out of whoever she gets close to... which she is very selective about. When she likes someone, she'll let her guard down a little, and they'll get to see her friendly and teasing and showing concern about people instead of her usual cold politeness, but until and unless she feels like she can trust someone unconditionally, she will keep them at arm's length.
When she does trust someone that much, though, she is fiercely protective of and loyal to them, and there's almost nothing she won't do for them if they really need her. She is openly affectionate with close friends, and often expresses it physically - usually small gestures, leaning against them, grabbing their hands to drag them somewhere, giving them little "love taps", but contact is important to her, and it's a distinct departure from how physically restrained she is with most people when she's not trying to make them bleed.
Her close friends are also the only people she'll confide in, and who ever get to see even a hint of her being scared, lonely, sad or hurt. Even then, it's not usually intentional; she just lowers her guard around them enough that things slip out. It's not repression, exactly. It's more that Nate doesn't take her own negative emotions very seriously most of the time (except for anger: that one she embraces fully and often violently). She assumes that they're not that important, and they'll go away before long if she just ignores them, and in the meantime she throws herself even more into whatever task is at hand - the more emotional she is, the more focused and obsessive she gets about it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it all just builds pressure until she explodes and ends up crying on Tamara's shoulder (or alone in her closet). It's about even odds either way.
With the exception of her quick temper (which usually fades nearly as quickly as it's triggered), she's not generally someone who makes decisions based on emotions. She'd like to think that her motivations are all based in cool, dispassionate logic instead, but the reality is, she's driven by two different and sometimes conflicting motives: a strong sense of fairness and need for justice, and her calling, an instinctive compulsion to hunt and kill demons.
She may not much like the majority of humanity, but she does firmly believe that innocent people deserve to be protected from all the dark things out there in the world. And on the flip side, real monsters deserve to be put down, and people who behave like those monsters deserve to be brought to justice for it. And since she has the power and the knowledge to do those things (provided your definition of justice doesn't involve courts or a trial or anything), she really can't not hunt the creatures that live in the dark corners of her world.
On the other hand, she was both bred and trained to be a very efficient, absolutely ruthless hunter, and when she recognizes a demon, there's a part of her that wants to kill it so badly it almost physically hurts to resist. In the normal, non-supernatural world, people like that are called serial killers. She knows, intellectually, that many demons are perfectly good people, just as innocent as the people she's theoretically protecting, and that even the ones who aren't rarely deserve to die for whatever they may have done - and none of that perfectly good logic makes her calling go away. At best, it buys her a little breathing room.
She avoids fighting demons because she's afraid of what she'll do to them, and diverts the impulses triggered by her calling into hunting monsters, which can be very clever but can't be classified as people under any definition. So not all of her need to fight the darkness is about protecting people from bad things - a very large part of it is about making sure she doesn't become one of the bad things herself.
History: Nate was born in Boston to a single mother, Alicia Cavanaugh. She never knew her father, and in fact doesn't even know his name - Alicia never saw fit to put him on the birth certificate, and Nate never got up the courage to ask. Growing up, her mother was both distant and demanding at once: as long as Nate's grades were excellent, her room was clean, and she didn't demand too much attention, Alicia didn't much care what her daughter did. Nate met all of her expectations flawlessly, excelling in both school and sports, never getting in any kind of trouble. She was basically the kind of child most parents dream of, and if she never made many friends... well, Alicia managed to overlook things like that.
When Nate was fourteen, just before her freshman year of high school, she and her mother moved to Manhattan. Nate did not take the move well - she hated New York and everyone in it. And then one day, walking home at twilight, she was attacked by a spectre, one of the more minor magical threats of her universe, and rescued by two flashlight-wielding classmates: Tamara Crews, a witch, and David Kaplan, who... wasn't anything special except fabulous.
Nate went home that night shaken but determined to pretend none of it ever happened... except the next day at school, David had apparently decided she needed a friend and just kind of adopted her, and where there was a David, Tamara was soon to follow. And with the two of them came all sorts of magical weirdness, including Tamara's pet fire sprites, a pair of dead twins with an unsettling fondness for the trio, and her own new-found wings. Before long, Nate was forced to admit two things: first, that magic, angels, fairies and the rest of it were all real, and second, that Tamara and David actually were her friends and not just some weird people who kept following her around all the time. Guess which of the two was harder for her to accept.
Coming into her own as an angel made Nate considerably more interesting to the supernatural element of the city - mostly nasty creatures with lots of teeth... and other angels. She was approached by a man called Michael, another archangel, who offered to help her work out the whole angel thing, and since no one else could explain any of it to her satisfaction, she accepted. He and his friends were the first to train her to fight, the first to explain her calling to her, and as she'd never met any demons before, their explanations gave her a somewhat warped idea of what demons actually were. (ALL EVIL ALL THE TIME, AND ALSO THEY MIGHT EAT BABIES. ...this is only slightly an exaggeration of what they told her.)
At some point, Michael decided it was time she killed a demon, sort of an archangel rite of passage, and sicced her on a demon they'd identified - a young one, about her age, so it should have been an easy kill. Except that demon happened to be one of her classmates, Jack Delaney, a far cry from the monsters Michael's gang had been trying to convince her demons really were. She balked and refused, and ended up having to protect Jack from the other archangels. No one got killed, but it was a close call a couple times, and eventually everyone - Nate, archangels, and demons - backed down and made a reluctant truce to just ignore each other as best they all could.
It wasn't until after this incident that she met some other angels, who informed her that yeah, Michael Barnam and his friends were kind of crazy. Thanks, guys. Could have used that information a little earlier. But that group was more than happy to continue her training, with a much less psychotic bent this time, and the only things they ever asked her to fight were the actual monsters of the city - dangerous magical animals, not people.
So Jack joined what David referred to as the Scooby Gang (none of the others ever agreed to that name, for the record). They all had more adventures with monsters, and fairies, and various other magical stuff, and did their best not to flunk or get kicked out of school in the meantime. Nate started dating Jack, which on reflection was the dumbest thing she's ever done, but logic doesn't work so well when you're a teenager and in love. Tamara and David graduated, a year ahead of Nate and Jack, and though they were still in the city... it still left the younger two to face their senior year alone.
This would have been fine, except that senior year brought a new student to their school, another angel. A vengeance angel, to be precise, with a vendetta against archangels, and he set his sights on Nate. That made the entire school year something of a running battle, as Nate really did not want to hurt some kid who just got screwed over by fate... but she also really didn't want to let him kill her. It's a miracle she managed to graduate, under the circumstances, though not without incident.
The vengeance angel took one last shot at her, and... fights where someone's intent on killing you while you really don't want to hurt them too badly just never work out well. Jack ended up stepping in and killing the kid for her, which... There's a way to see that as sweet(ish), but Nate didn't exactly see it that way. A demon just killed another angel in front of her, and the facts like that demon was her boyfriend and the angel was trying to kill her really don't even factor in when it comes to an archangel's calling.
She nearly killed Jack that night... but instead, she made a few (mostly bad) deals with various members of the city's supernatural element to make sure he didn't get arrested for saving her life. Now she's in debt to several very unpleasant people, Jack's tied to the local demon mafia (a fate they'd both been hoping he'd escape), some of the archangels who work in law enforcement have been starting to give Nate weird looks, and Nate and Jack are not so much together anymore.
She just started school at Columbia, where she is trying very hard to just have a normal life that doesn't involve fighting monsters for a while. The universe, however, apparently doesn't think she deserves a normal life: she's about to meet a crazy Barnam half-sister she didn't know she had, get dragged out of the city before she even realizes what's going on, and end up on the longest roadtrip ever unless your last name is Winchester. But before any of that can happen... the Wood steps in.
First Person Sample: Okay, I'm willing to believe that this isn't actually the shadow world. I guess. If nothing else, the existence of sunlight and the relatively linear geography is pretty convincing. But if that's the case, I'm not buying the 'fairyland' theory I keep hearing - it's both or neither, guys, they don't really come separately.
[A deep breath, and a pause. There's a very slight wobble in her voice when she starts to speak again, a hint of strain, but it's gone in a moment.] Someone mentioned that there are angels here. Archangels. I'd like to speak with whoever's the commander here. If... they're available.
Prose Sample: Nate scrubbed at her hand with a grimace, and tried to ignore the state of her shirt. She was almost certain she hadn't replaced her set of spare clothes at Kara's place since the last time she ended up covered in blood. On the very faint bright side, at least whistler blood didn't tend to alarm most people - disgusting, yes, a sort of pale pink viscous slime, but it didn't look much like blood.
"I'm not doing this again," she snapped, tossing the wet wipe onto the damp cobblestones at her feet. Some small, fuzzy creature immediately scurried out of a crack in a wall and made off with it. "I had actually planned to sleep tonight. Or at the very least spend my night in my room. Or a nice, warm, dry library..."
She pulled her wings in, shuddering at the chill of wet feathers sliding through skin. There were probably worse sensations - the slick film of whistler blood she hadn't managed to get off her hands, for one - but not very many that she could think of.
Kara stopped in front of a door Nate didn't recognize, and turned to face her, dark gaze intent and absolutely impenetrable. "I asked."
It took Nate a moment to work out what she was actually saying. "That's... not... I came when I thought that..." She trailed off with a soft growl, and pressed the palm of her clean hand to her forehead. She was sure Kara had a point of some kind here, but deciphering Kara-speak was difficult enough when she was well-rested and well-caffeinated, never mind tired, sore, and damp from the rain. "What time is it? Back in the real world?"
Kara sighed and pressed her hand flat against the door beside her. Nate flinched as steam coiled out from the place her palm touched the battered steel, but Kara didn't seem to even notice, tilting her head to one side with a vague frown. "Almost dawn."
"...are you kidding me? Open the door. Now, before I get stuck in here all day." She'd been hoping to at least have an hour or so to sleep when she got back. So much for that. If she left right now, she could probably manage a decent shower and a detour for coffee before she had to be at class...
The door swung open under Kara's hand seemingly of its own volition, and Kara stepped away from it quickly as warm air, the sound of traffic and the smell of the city flooded through the gap. Nate let out a breath of relief and stepped quickly past her, hoping the door came out somewhere not too far from where she meant to be. She paused in the doorway, and turned to face Kara, hands braced on either side of the door frame.
"I'm serious, Kara. Normal people - living people - need sleep. Unless it's the actual, literal end of the world, this is the last time."
"Yes," Kara said quietly, something almost pitying in her eyes and her smile, "it is."
She reached out, grabbed Nate's shoulder gently, and spun her around to shove her out onto the sidewalk, too quickly for Nate to protest. The door slammed shut behind her before she had a chance to ask what the hell that was supposed to mean.
And I am the child of their very strange union, and I have been left here with you...
The Player
User Name/Nick: Aubrey
User LJ: allfireburns
AIM/IM: allfireburns
E-mail: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
Other Characters: The Tenth Doctor, Harry Dresden and Emily Prentiss
The Character
Character Name: Nate Cavanaugh
Character Journal: bestwillgowrong
Canon: Original
Age: 18
From When?: Shortly before she let a crazy Barnam drag her out of the city and ruin her life. She really should have just gone back to bed that day.
Appearance: The descriptor most people tend to use for her is "cute", to her great annoyance. She's 4'11" with a delicate build, despite having quite a bit of muscle on top of it. She has chin-length blonde hair that likes to curl, dark gray eyes, and fair skin marked with a pretty impressive collection of scars. Her nose is slightly crooked, and so are a couple of her fingers, all of the above having been broken and healed not terribly well (her nose a couple times, actually).
There are two long, thick scars on her back, tracing along her shoulder blades, marking the place where her wings come out. When extended, her wings are thin and tapered, much longer than she is tall, and blue-gray with barred black-and-white undersides.
Abilities/Powers: Nate is an angel, which in her universe is a weird subspecies of human, no special holiness or connection to God included. She's not entirely mortal - with a lot of luck, she could live for upwards of a thousand years - but she's not immortal either. She can get sick or injured, and she can absolutely be killed - she bounces back faster than a human would, if she survives the initial wound, but at the base level, she is as fragile as an ordinary human.
More than being an angel, she's an archangel - which isn't a special position, it's a classification. What it means, primarily, is that she feels compelled to kill any demon she runs into... which may or may not extend to demons of other universes, and probably depends on how she interprets them. It's a psychological trigger, not one tied to the actual biology of the demons; if she thinks you're a demon, she will probably feel the need to kill you. This doesn't mean she'll act on the compulsion, but it's always going to be there.
So that's the downside of being an archangel. The upside? She's a natural warrior: faster, stronger, and with much better reflexes than your average human, or any other kind of angel. (Actually, she's stronger than anyone her size ever has a right to be - she just shouldn't have the muscle mass for it, but that's magic for you. Even so, her size is still a disadvantage in close combat, even against normal humans, and against pretty much anyone else with greater-than-average-human strength, she tends to be overpowered.) She has some training in unarmed combat (no specific style, as her training was weird and eclectic) and knife fighting, and she's pretty damn competent with a handgun. She has a working knowledge of how to combat most supernatural threats in her universe, but that won't be terribly helpful here.
The most noticeable feature of angels - and, presumably, what led them to be called angels in the first place - are their wings. These wings are retractable, folding into a small pocket of reality concealed in her back when she pulls them in (and yes, that's weird and creepy; she tries not to think too hard about it). When extended, all her superhuman abilities - speed, reflexes, strength, healing ability - are at their strongest. They also afford her a limited ability to sense magic and the supernatural, though it's not strong enough to pinpoint who or what she's sensing, just that it's there. She can not fly with her wings, though she's small enough and her wings big enough that she can sort of glide, in a pinch. She has done this a grand total of once, and plans to never do it again.
Inventory • Brown leather jacket
• Gray sweater
• Blue long-sleeved shirt
• Blue jeans
• Gray tennis shoes
• White socks
• White sports bra and underwear
• Silver knife with sheath
• Analog watch
• Cellphone
• Messenger bag containing: Three notebooks, two textbooks (psychology and Latin), one ridiculously detailed day planner, a collection of pens and highlighters, a water bottle, two granola bars, bottle of ibuprofen, some tampons, a small first aid kit, hand sanitizer, packs of tissues and wet wipes, a pocketknife, two lighters, a small flashlight, and a ziploc bag of... some kind of powder Tamara made for her for repelling most minor supernatural nastiness.
• Wallet containing: NY state driver's license, Columbia school ID, credit card, thirty dollars and twelve cents in cash
Personality: The first impression most people get from Nate is that of the quintessential archangel: confident to the point of arrogance, extremely driven and goal-oriented, not terribly friendly and more than a little violent. All of these are true, to a degree, but they're only a small part of the whole picture.
Nate is certain of herself and her abilities, carries with her a particular air of self-assurance generally seen in apex predators - but just being certain of that isn't really enough for her. It's important to her that other people acknowledge that she's capable and good at what she does, too. Blame her mother, who managed to tie her self-worth into her ability to excel at a young age - it doesn't matter so much that people like her, it matters that they know she is competent and worthy of respect. She'll do everything she can to prove herself if necessary, and dismissing her out of hand is the fastest way to piss her off.
She is a perfectionist and an overachiever, throwing herself completely into whatever she does, and she excelling at it. That excessive competence is rarely due to natural talent, though, just intense focus and the near-compulsive need to keep working on something until it's right. There's no such thing as "good enough" for Nate: it's either perfect, or she's not done yet.
She has little tolerance for those not quite so competent, too. Put her on a team with people who meet her standards, and she's fine - make her work with people who don't live up to her expectations, and she'll probably try to take over their job before long so someone will do it correctly. It's not surprising, then, that she tends to overestimate her capabilities rather frequently, taking on more than she can handle and then running herself ragged to make sure it gets handled anyway.
This perfectionist streak doesn't stop at school or work, either. It extends, quite naturally given her calling, to her monster-hunting hobby, but also to her home, where everything is obsessively ordered and organized, and even to personal relationships. If she perceives a problem in a relationship, she'll either hammer at it until she feels better about it, or she'll discard the relationship as not worth salvaging. Although... to be fair, she's only taken the latter course twice, and one of those times was with her mother, so that one might not count.
Nate doesn't make friends easily, or often. It's a common misconception about archangels that they're loners by nature - they're actually more like pack animals. Most form their pack of other archangels, but Nate grew up without the company of other angels, and so she builds her family out of whoever she gets close to... which she is very selective about. When she likes someone, she'll let her guard down a little, and they'll get to see her friendly and teasing and showing concern about people instead of her usual cold politeness, but until and unless she feels like she can trust someone unconditionally, she will keep them at arm's length.
When she does trust someone that much, though, she is fiercely protective of and loyal to them, and there's almost nothing she won't do for them if they really need her. She is openly affectionate with close friends, and often expresses it physically - usually small gestures, leaning against them, grabbing their hands to drag them somewhere, giving them little "love taps", but contact is important to her, and it's a distinct departure from how physically restrained she is with most people when she's not trying to make them bleed.
Her close friends are also the only people she'll confide in, and who ever get to see even a hint of her being scared, lonely, sad or hurt. Even then, it's not usually intentional; she just lowers her guard around them enough that things slip out. It's not repression, exactly. It's more that Nate doesn't take her own negative emotions very seriously most of the time (except for anger: that one she embraces fully and often violently). She assumes that they're not that important, and they'll go away before long if she just ignores them, and in the meantime she throws herself even more into whatever task is at hand - the more emotional she is, the more focused and obsessive she gets about it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it all just builds pressure until she explodes and ends up crying on Tamara's shoulder (or alone in her closet). It's about even odds either way.
With the exception of her quick temper (which usually fades nearly as quickly as it's triggered), she's not generally someone who makes decisions based on emotions. She'd like to think that her motivations are all based in cool, dispassionate logic instead, but the reality is, she's driven by two different and sometimes conflicting motives: a strong sense of fairness and need for justice, and her calling, an instinctive compulsion to hunt and kill demons.
She may not much like the majority of humanity, but she does firmly believe that innocent people deserve to be protected from all the dark things out there in the world. And on the flip side, real monsters deserve to be put down, and people who behave like those monsters deserve to be brought to justice for it. And since she has the power and the knowledge to do those things (provided your definition of justice doesn't involve courts or a trial or anything), she really can't not hunt the creatures that live in the dark corners of her world.
On the other hand, she was both bred and trained to be a very efficient, absolutely ruthless hunter, and when she recognizes a demon, there's a part of her that wants to kill it so badly it almost physically hurts to resist. In the normal, non-supernatural world, people like that are called serial killers. She knows, intellectually, that many demons are perfectly good people, just as innocent as the people she's theoretically protecting, and that even the ones who aren't rarely deserve to die for whatever they may have done - and none of that perfectly good logic makes her calling go away. At best, it buys her a little breathing room.
She avoids fighting demons because she's afraid of what she'll do to them, and diverts the impulses triggered by her calling into hunting monsters, which can be very clever but can't be classified as people under any definition. So not all of her need to fight the darkness is about protecting people from bad things - a very large part of it is about making sure she doesn't become one of the bad things herself.
History: Nate was born in Boston to a single mother, Alicia Cavanaugh. She never knew her father, and in fact doesn't even know his name - Alicia never saw fit to put him on the birth certificate, and Nate never got up the courage to ask. Growing up, her mother was both distant and demanding at once: as long as Nate's grades were excellent, her room was clean, and she didn't demand too much attention, Alicia didn't much care what her daughter did. Nate met all of her expectations flawlessly, excelling in both school and sports, never getting in any kind of trouble. She was basically the kind of child most parents dream of, and if she never made many friends... well, Alicia managed to overlook things like that.
When Nate was fourteen, just before her freshman year of high school, she and her mother moved to Manhattan. Nate did not take the move well - she hated New York and everyone in it. And then one day, walking home at twilight, she was attacked by a spectre, one of the more minor magical threats of her universe, and rescued by two flashlight-wielding classmates: Tamara Crews, a witch, and David Kaplan, who... wasn't anything special except fabulous.
Nate went home that night shaken but determined to pretend none of it ever happened... except the next day at school, David had apparently decided she needed a friend and just kind of adopted her, and where there was a David, Tamara was soon to follow. And with the two of them came all sorts of magical weirdness, including Tamara's pet fire sprites, a pair of dead twins with an unsettling fondness for the trio, and her own new-found wings. Before long, Nate was forced to admit two things: first, that magic, angels, fairies and the rest of it were all real, and second, that Tamara and David actually were her friends and not just some weird people who kept following her around all the time. Guess which of the two was harder for her to accept.
Coming into her own as an angel made Nate considerably more interesting to the supernatural element of the city - mostly nasty creatures with lots of teeth... and other angels. She was approached by a man called Michael, another archangel, who offered to help her work out the whole angel thing, and since no one else could explain any of it to her satisfaction, she accepted. He and his friends were the first to train her to fight, the first to explain her calling to her, and as she'd never met any demons before, their explanations gave her a somewhat warped idea of what demons actually were. (ALL EVIL ALL THE TIME, AND ALSO THEY MIGHT EAT BABIES. ...this is only slightly an exaggeration of what they told her.)
At some point, Michael decided it was time she killed a demon, sort of an archangel rite of passage, and sicced her on a demon they'd identified - a young one, about her age, so it should have been an easy kill. Except that demon happened to be one of her classmates, Jack Delaney, a far cry from the monsters Michael's gang had been trying to convince her demons really were. She balked and refused, and ended up having to protect Jack from the other archangels. No one got killed, but it was a close call a couple times, and eventually everyone - Nate, archangels, and demons - backed down and made a reluctant truce to just ignore each other as best they all could.
It wasn't until after this incident that she met some other angels, who informed her that yeah, Michael Barnam and his friends were kind of crazy. Thanks, guys. Could have used that information a little earlier. But that group was more than happy to continue her training, with a much less psychotic bent this time, and the only things they ever asked her to fight were the actual monsters of the city - dangerous magical animals, not people.
So Jack joined what David referred to as the Scooby Gang (none of the others ever agreed to that name, for the record). They all had more adventures with monsters, and fairies, and various other magical stuff, and did their best not to flunk or get kicked out of school in the meantime. Nate started dating Jack, which on reflection was the dumbest thing she's ever done, but logic doesn't work so well when you're a teenager and in love. Tamara and David graduated, a year ahead of Nate and Jack, and though they were still in the city... it still left the younger two to face their senior year alone.
This would have been fine, except that senior year brought a new student to their school, another angel. A vengeance angel, to be precise, with a vendetta against archangels, and he set his sights on Nate. That made the entire school year something of a running battle, as Nate really did not want to hurt some kid who just got screwed over by fate... but she also really didn't want to let him kill her. It's a miracle she managed to graduate, under the circumstances, though not without incident.
The vengeance angel took one last shot at her, and... fights where someone's intent on killing you while you really don't want to hurt them too badly just never work out well. Jack ended up stepping in and killing the kid for her, which... There's a way to see that as sweet(ish), but Nate didn't exactly see it that way. A demon just killed another angel in front of her, and the facts like that demon was her boyfriend and the angel was trying to kill her really don't even factor in when it comes to an archangel's calling.
She nearly killed Jack that night... but instead, she made a few (mostly bad) deals with various members of the city's supernatural element to make sure he didn't get arrested for saving her life. Now she's in debt to several very unpleasant people, Jack's tied to the local demon mafia (a fate they'd both been hoping he'd escape), some of the archangels who work in law enforcement have been starting to give Nate weird looks, and Nate and Jack are not so much together anymore.
She just started school at Columbia, where she is trying very hard to just have a normal life that doesn't involve fighting monsters for a while. The universe, however, apparently doesn't think she deserves a normal life: she's about to meet a crazy Barnam half-sister she didn't know she had, get dragged out of the city before she even realizes what's going on, and end up on the longest roadtrip ever unless your last name is Winchester. But before any of that can happen... the Wood steps in.
First Person Sample: Okay, I'm willing to believe that this isn't actually the shadow world. I guess. If nothing else, the existence of sunlight and the relatively linear geography is pretty convincing. But if that's the case, I'm not buying the 'fairyland' theory I keep hearing - it's both or neither, guys, they don't really come separately.
[A deep breath, and a pause. There's a very slight wobble in her voice when she starts to speak again, a hint of strain, but it's gone in a moment.] Someone mentioned that there are angels here. Archangels. I'd like to speak with whoever's the commander here. If... they're available.
Prose Sample: Nate scrubbed at her hand with a grimace, and tried to ignore the state of her shirt. She was almost certain she hadn't replaced her set of spare clothes at Kara's place since the last time she ended up covered in blood. On the very faint bright side, at least whistler blood didn't tend to alarm most people - disgusting, yes, a sort of pale pink viscous slime, but it didn't look much like blood.
"I'm not doing this again," she snapped, tossing the wet wipe onto the damp cobblestones at her feet. Some small, fuzzy creature immediately scurried out of a crack in a wall and made off with it. "I had actually planned to sleep tonight. Or at the very least spend my night in my room. Or a nice, warm, dry library..."
She pulled her wings in, shuddering at the chill of wet feathers sliding through skin. There were probably worse sensations - the slick film of whistler blood she hadn't managed to get off her hands, for one - but not very many that she could think of.
Kara stopped in front of a door Nate didn't recognize, and turned to face her, dark gaze intent and absolutely impenetrable. "I asked."
It took Nate a moment to work out what she was actually saying. "That's... not... I came when I thought that..." She trailed off with a soft growl, and pressed the palm of her clean hand to her forehead. She was sure Kara had a point of some kind here, but deciphering Kara-speak was difficult enough when she was well-rested and well-caffeinated, never mind tired, sore, and damp from the rain. "What time is it? Back in the real world?"
Kara sighed and pressed her hand flat against the door beside her. Nate flinched as steam coiled out from the place her palm touched the battered steel, but Kara didn't seem to even notice, tilting her head to one side with a vague frown. "Almost dawn."
"...are you kidding me? Open the door. Now, before I get stuck in here all day." She'd been hoping to at least have an hour or so to sleep when she got back. So much for that. If she left right now, she could probably manage a decent shower and a detour for coffee before she had to be at class...
The door swung open under Kara's hand seemingly of its own volition, and Kara stepped away from it quickly as warm air, the sound of traffic and the smell of the city flooded through the gap. Nate let out a breath of relief and stepped quickly past her, hoping the door came out somewhere not too far from where she meant to be. She paused in the doorway, and turned to face Kara, hands braced on either side of the door frame.
"I'm serious, Kara. Normal people - living people - need sleep. Unless it's the actual, literal end of the world, this is the last time."
"Yes," Kara said quietly, something almost pitying in her eyes and her smile, "it is."
She reached out, grabbed Nate's shoulder gently, and spun her around to shove her out onto the sidewalk, too quickly for Nate to protest. The door slammed shut behind her before she had a chance to ask what the hell that was supposed to mean.