Beta (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
no_missing_piece) wrote2022-08-27 02:39 am
no_missing_piece) wrote2022-08-27 02:39 am
Entry tags:
OOC: Infopost!
Going up super late because I kept getting distracted during my gif hunts but look, it's the new girl. And she... happens to be genetically identical to a former, now returning Fandom student?
Also, please have a content warning for below-the-cut mentions of child neglect/abuse, some torture, and the resultant trauma of all of the above.
Beta
Meet Beta (she/her), from Guerilla Games's Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn that's currently a PlayStation exclusive but getting ported to PC eventually.
My fabulous canonmatenot_of_the_nora has already given the rundown of Zero Dawn and thus kindly spared you my endless rambling about it, so I'm just going to jump straight into the crash course on Forbidden West.
The Canon
Picking up 6 months after the events of HZD end, HFW finds Aloy in a race against time and the elements: as a result of GAIA's destruction and the dispersal of her classics-themed, capslocky subordinate AI functions the Earth's biosphere continues to spiral out of control. Storms are getting bigger, more destructive, and more frequent, and an invasive toxic plant growth colloquially known as the Red Blight has been spreading at a rapid rate. The only way to stop this is to find a backup copy of the GAIA AI kernel, reboot the Project Zero Dawn terraforming system, and get the biosphere stable again.
Or... well, maybe it's not that simple. GAIA needs to be able to control and design the machines in order to repair and stabilize the biosphere, and for that she needs to reintegrate the HEPHAESTUS subfunction AI. But in order to do that she needs the additional processing power of at least some of her other subordinate AIs before she can subdue and reabsorb the rogue HEPHAESTUS, which unlike the other subfunctions isn't contained to a single data core in the terraforming system's network.
Which means that Aloy needs to go hunting for subfunction AIs, only this time her friends are bound and determined to help her and god damn it, she will Like It. Or at least tolerate it. And as if it wasn't bad enough that Varl and Erend insisted on following her out west and some of her other friends keep popping up, she gets saddled with new ones:
Zo, a certified badass who is 300% Done with the Utaru tribal leadership's unwillingness to be proactive about the Red Blight's threat to their survival.
Kotallo, a grumpy Tenakth warrior learning to come to terms with the loss of his arm but also a secret teddy bear.
Alva, the cutest most excitable nerd ever, there as part of an overseas research mission by the Quen tribe. (Full disclosure: I came very close to apping her instead because hello nerdy queer girl, but I don't have enough energy for her level of enthusiasm. Was this section fully just an excuse to post a picture of Alva's adorable face? Maybe.)
And then there's Beta, but we'll get to her shortly, because I'm supposed to tell you about the rich immortal assholes first.
You see. In the mid-21st century when it became obvious that life on Earth was imminently doomed unless drastic and immediate measures were taken (*insert hollow laughter here*), a bunch of the richest CEOs on the planet formed an organization that was ostensibly a private space program for the good of humanity but in reality was a whole project where they were going to fuck off and start a new colony away from a doomed planet ([HOLLOW LAUGHTER INTENSIFIES]).
This organization, which dubbed itself Far Zenith, did trade some technology with Project Zero Dawn; as it happened one of their members was Tilda van der Meer, a computer engineer and art connoisseur who also happened to be Elisabet Sobeck's ex. Supposedly their ship exploded on its way away from Earth, but that was a fakeout and this bunch of ultra-rich assholes swanned off to the Sirius system (with a copy of Zero Dawn's APOLLO knowledge archive in tow) to found themselves a little colony and research a way to make themselves immortal. They also got the brilliant idea to create an AI out of copies of their own brains only to decide the project was flawed and abandon it.
It, uh. Did not handle this very well.
I mean, you'd think a sentient AI cobbled together from a bunch of narcissistic sociopaths' brains could handle rejection gracefully, right? Right? Oh wait, no, it named itself NEMESIS (subtle), destroyed the Far Zenith colony, and then chased them back to Earth, sending an Extinction Signal to make all the subordinate AIs go rogue so that Zero Dawn's terraforming systems could render the planet uninhabitable before they got there. Except, well. Aloy happened and stopped the world from ending that time.
Yeah. Far Zenith is responsible for kicking off the chain of events that led to GAIA's self-destruction, the Derangement of the machines, and the impending collapse of the biosphere. A bunch of rich assholes almost ended the world (again) in the selfish pursuit of their own goals. Who's surprised?
Not to be deterred, the surviving Far Zenith colonists made a plan to steal a backup copy of GAIA and -- not repair the Zero Dawn systems and prevent Earth from destruction. Why would they do that when they could fuck off and terraform a whole new planet just for them?
Seriously. Assholes.
But to do this -- to gain access to the Zero Dawn facilities that might house a GAIA backup kernel -- they needed Elisabet Sobeck's Alpha security clearance. So... they made their own Elisabet Sobeck clone and called her Beta, because why bother giving the clone a real name when she's just a means to an end, anyway?
Beta was created en route to Earth, told that her purpose would be to rebuild the terraforming systems, and given access to only the parts of the APOLLO archive deemed necessary for her very specific education. She was raised by mechanical and virtual caretakers, told only that she might get to meet the Zeniths if she did well enough, and otherwise spent all her time studying. (For a brief period of time, she could access a secret virtual reality channel created by Tilda van der Meer, who A) wanted her to have some kind of arts and cultural education in defiance of the other Zeniths' wishes, and B) wanted to assuage her own guilt about the way a clone of her ex-girlfriend was being treated. But then Tilda decided that Beta wasn't enough like Elisabet to be worth the risk of getting caught, so [shrug emoji].)
But Beta isn't the clone of a brilliant scientist for nothing. Far Zenith wanted her to retrieve GAIA's subordinate functions much like Aloy was doing but it wasn't long after their arrival on Earth that she started to suspect that the Extinction Signal had something to do with Far Zenith, and after watching them brutally wipe out the tribal people they encountered she started looking for a way to escape.
And then the HADES Proving Lab happened. Aloy had just beaten Beta and the Zeniths there, and gotten a hold of one of the two GAIA backup copies stored in the facility. Aloy definitely got the worst of that encounter, because the Zeniths are dirty fucking cheaters with impenetrable personal force fields, but Beta saw her as her best shot at a way out.
So she convinced the Zeniths that the next time they sent her out to retrieve one of the other subordinate AIs, it would be a lot easier and faster if she had the GAIA kernel with her. Then she stole their copy of APOLLO, piggybacked a coded distress signal out to Aloy's GAIA when she transmitted ELEUTHIA back to the Zenith base, distracted her Zenith handler, and hid herself and the GAIA kernel inside an ectogenic chamber in the facility in the hopes that Aloy would find her.
Which she did, of course. Suffice it to say they did not get along at first; Beta had expected Aloy to have captured several of GAIA's subfunctions by now, and upon learning that not only did Aloy not have any of them yet, she was a lot less technologically advanced than anticipated, Beta had a full-on panic attack. Which was understandable, but so was Aloy's annoyance at her immediate spiral into "it'll never work" pessimism. As you can guess they eventually got past this and were able to work together which was good since it turned out to be necessary, but it took some work.
The Character
So about Beta.
She's awkward and anxiety-ridden and has literally only been around actual people for a few months, and even then it was just the handful of people in the GAIA Gang on the few occasions she ventured out of her basement room into the rest of the secret mountain base.
Yes, she has a physical resemblance to Aloy, but it is very, very hard to mistake them for one another upon observation. Beta grew up on a spaceship in a largely virtual-reality environment where she spent all her time learning science and engineering and then was kept cloistered indoors at the Zenith base. So she's significantly paler and scrawnier, plus her hair is much shorter, without the braids and ornamentation that Aloy wears. It shows in her body language as well: her movements are awkward and nervous, and she tends to stay drawn in on herself, although when she gets worked up she gestures with her hands a lot. Her voice is also pitched higher than Aloy's, as you can tell in this clip, and seriously, Ashly Burch absolutely killed it; she voices both of them as well as Elisabet Sobeck, and they all sound distinctly different.
Also, she wears her Focus, a small triangular metal device, on her left temple instead of on the right, like Aloy does.
(A quick sidebar about the Focus if you don't want to click the link: while not a computing device in and of itself, it is able to interface with any technology in the vicinity and project a holographic interface that only its user can see, so if someone were to see Beta using it this way, they would just see a purple circle of light around her Focus and her interacting with thin air as if she's looking at and using a giant touchscreen, except it's... not... there? It can also scan the environment for irregularities, do biometrics scans, slap convenient holographic signposts that only she can see on things... a lot of funky little things, but nothing really god mode-y.
It just... sticks to the side of her head somehow. Don't ask how; it hasn't been explained. She thinks it's primitive technology compared to the implant she used to have, though.)
Like Aloy, Beta possesses the same genius-level intellect that Elisabet Sobeck had, and thanks to Far Zenith's alpha-build copy of the APOLLO knowledge archive she has probably a couple of college degrees' worth of STEM education. So she's very, very book-smart, with an aptitude for logic and strategy, but she doesn't have a whole lot of practical life experience to round that out and isn't great yet at, say, improvising on the fly.
She's also... yeah. She really doesn't know how to people yet. It's broadly implied that the Zeniths didn't even indirectly interact with her except to inquire about her progress or her usefulness, and that they used a VR simulator to make her experience negative emotional feedback whenever she didn't cooperate. This whole thing where people might want to... talk to her? Like for no specific reason except to be nice and/or social? Instead of just wanting to see if she's being productive enough???
Yeah, she doesn't know what to do with that.
Anyway, having gone through the events of HFW and dispatched the rest of the team to go round up allies, Aloy and Beta have a little time to prepare before the next apocalyptic crisis arrives. And since Beta really needs to learn how to people... what better place to do that than at Aloy's old school, with the added bonus of Fandom time weird?
As for the others, have the quick bullet-point recap.
Steph Gingrich (drumsticksandd20s, she/her) | Life is Strange (Before the Storm, True Colors, Wavelengths) | Townie
Yasha Nydoorin (notarockharpist, she/her) | Critical Role, Campaign 2 | Townie
Beauregard Lionett (notallbluemonks, she/her) | Critical Role, Campaign 2 | Expatriate
Tahiri Veila (weetuskenraider, she/her) | Star Wars Legends | Alumnus
Kennedy (brat_inslayage, she/her) | Buffy the Vampire Slayer | Alumnus
Shanie (me, they/them) | perpetually tired
Also, please have a content warning for below-the-cut mentions of child neglect/abuse, some torture, and the resultant trauma of all of the above.
Meet Beta (she/her), from Guerilla Games's Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn that's currently a PlayStation exclusive but getting ported to PC eventually.
My fabulous canonmate
not_of_the_nora has already given the rundown of Zero Dawn and thus kindly spared you my endless rambling about it, so I'm just going to jump straight into the crash course on Forbidden West.The Canon
Picking up 6 months after the events of HZD end, HFW finds Aloy in a race against time and the elements: as a result of GAIA's destruction and the dispersal of her classics-themed, capslocky subordinate AI functions the Earth's biosphere continues to spiral out of control. Storms are getting bigger, more destructive, and more frequent, and an invasive toxic plant growth colloquially known as the Red Blight has been spreading at a rapid rate. The only way to stop this is to find a backup copy of the GAIA AI kernel, reboot the Project Zero Dawn terraforming system, and get the biosphere stable again.
Or... well, maybe it's not that simple. GAIA needs to be able to control and design the machines in order to repair and stabilize the biosphere, and for that she needs to reintegrate the HEPHAESTUS subfunction AI. But in order to do that she needs the additional processing power of at least some of her other subordinate AIs before she can subdue and reabsorb the rogue HEPHAESTUS, which unlike the other subfunctions isn't contained to a single data core in the terraforming system's network.
Which means that Aloy needs to go hunting for subfunction AIs, only this time her friends are bound and determined to help her and god damn it, she will Like It. Or at least tolerate it. And as if it wasn't bad enough that Varl and Erend insisted on following her out west and some of her other friends keep popping up, she gets saddled with new ones:
Zo, a certified badass who is 300% Done with the Utaru tribal leadership's unwillingness to be proactive about the Red Blight's threat to their survival.
Kotallo, a grumpy Tenakth warrior learning to come to terms with the loss of his arm but also a secret teddy bear.
Alva, the cutest most excitable nerd ever, there as part of an overseas research mission by the Quen tribe. (Full disclosure: I came very close to apping her instead because hello nerdy queer girl, but I don't have enough energy for her level of enthusiasm. Was this section fully just an excuse to post a picture of Alva's adorable face? Maybe.)
And then there's Beta, but we'll get to her shortly, because I'm supposed to tell you about the rich immortal assholes first.
You see. In the mid-21st century when it became obvious that life on Earth was imminently doomed unless drastic and immediate measures were taken (*insert hollow laughter here*), a bunch of the richest CEOs on the planet formed an organization that was ostensibly a private space program for the good of humanity but in reality was a whole project where they were going to fuck off and start a new colony away from a doomed planet ([HOLLOW LAUGHTER INTENSIFIES]).
This organization, which dubbed itself Far Zenith, did trade some technology with Project Zero Dawn; as it happened one of their members was Tilda van der Meer, a computer engineer and art connoisseur who also happened to be Elisabet Sobeck's ex. Supposedly their ship exploded on its way away from Earth, but that was a fakeout and this bunch of ultra-rich assholes swanned off to the Sirius system (with a copy of Zero Dawn's APOLLO knowledge archive in tow) to found themselves a little colony and research a way to make themselves immortal. They also got the brilliant idea to create an AI out of copies of their own brains only to decide the project was flawed and abandon it.
It, uh. Did not handle this very well.
I mean, you'd think a sentient AI cobbled together from a bunch of narcissistic sociopaths' brains could handle rejection gracefully, right? Right? Oh wait, no, it named itself NEMESIS (subtle), destroyed the Far Zenith colony, and then chased them back to Earth, sending an Extinction Signal to make all the subordinate AIs go rogue so that Zero Dawn's terraforming systems could render the planet uninhabitable before they got there. Except, well. Aloy happened and stopped the world from ending that time.
Yeah. Far Zenith is responsible for kicking off the chain of events that led to GAIA's self-destruction, the Derangement of the machines, and the impending collapse of the biosphere. A bunch of rich assholes almost ended the world (again) in the selfish pursuit of their own goals. Who's surprised?
Not to be deterred, the surviving Far Zenith colonists made a plan to steal a backup copy of GAIA and -- not repair the Zero Dawn systems and prevent Earth from destruction. Why would they do that when they could fuck off and terraform a whole new planet just for them?
Seriously. Assholes.
But to do this -- to gain access to the Zero Dawn facilities that might house a GAIA backup kernel -- they needed Elisabet Sobeck's Alpha security clearance. So... they made their own Elisabet Sobeck clone and called her Beta, because why bother giving the clone a real name when she's just a means to an end, anyway?
Beta was created en route to Earth, told that her purpose would be to rebuild the terraforming systems, and given access to only the parts of the APOLLO archive deemed necessary for her very specific education. She was raised by mechanical and virtual caretakers, told only that she might get to meet the Zeniths if she did well enough, and otherwise spent all her time studying. (For a brief period of time, she could access a secret virtual reality channel created by Tilda van der Meer, who A) wanted her to have some kind of arts and cultural education in defiance of the other Zeniths' wishes, and B) wanted to assuage her own guilt about the way a clone of her ex-girlfriend was being treated. But then Tilda decided that Beta wasn't enough like Elisabet to be worth the risk of getting caught, so [shrug emoji].)
But Beta isn't the clone of a brilliant scientist for nothing. Far Zenith wanted her to retrieve GAIA's subordinate functions much like Aloy was doing but it wasn't long after their arrival on Earth that she started to suspect that the Extinction Signal had something to do with Far Zenith, and after watching them brutally wipe out the tribal people they encountered she started looking for a way to escape.
And then the HADES Proving Lab happened. Aloy had just beaten Beta and the Zeniths there, and gotten a hold of one of the two GAIA backup copies stored in the facility. Aloy definitely got the worst of that encounter, because the Zeniths are dirty fucking cheaters with impenetrable personal force fields, but Beta saw her as her best shot at a way out.
So she convinced the Zeniths that the next time they sent her out to retrieve one of the other subordinate AIs, it would be a lot easier and faster if she had the GAIA kernel with her. Then she stole their copy of APOLLO, piggybacked a coded distress signal out to Aloy's GAIA when she transmitted ELEUTHIA back to the Zenith base, distracted her Zenith handler, and hid herself and the GAIA kernel inside an ectogenic chamber in the facility in the hopes that Aloy would find her.
Which she did, of course. Suffice it to say they did not get along at first; Beta had expected Aloy to have captured several of GAIA's subfunctions by now, and upon learning that not only did Aloy not have any of them yet, she was a lot less technologically advanced than anticipated, Beta had a full-on panic attack. Which was understandable, but so was Aloy's annoyance at her immediate spiral into "it'll never work" pessimism. As you can guess they eventually got past this and were able to work together which was good since it turned out to be necessary, but it took some work.
The Character
So about Beta.
She's awkward and anxiety-ridden and has literally only been around actual people for a few months, and even then it was just the handful of people in the GAIA Gang on the few occasions she ventured out of her basement room into the rest of the secret mountain base.
Yes, she has a physical resemblance to Aloy, but it is very, very hard to mistake them for one another upon observation. Beta grew up on a spaceship in a largely virtual-reality environment where she spent all her time learning science and engineering and then was kept cloistered indoors at the Zenith base. So she's significantly paler and scrawnier, plus her hair is much shorter, without the braids and ornamentation that Aloy wears. It shows in her body language as well: her movements are awkward and nervous, and she tends to stay drawn in on herself, although when she gets worked up she gestures with her hands a lot. Her voice is also pitched higher than Aloy's, as you can tell in this clip, and seriously, Ashly Burch absolutely killed it; she voices both of them as well as Elisabet Sobeck, and they all sound distinctly different.
Also, she wears her Focus, a small triangular metal device, on her left temple instead of on the right, like Aloy does.
(A quick sidebar about the Focus if you don't want to click the link: while not a computing device in and of itself, it is able to interface with any technology in the vicinity and project a holographic interface that only its user can see, so if someone were to see Beta using it this way, they would just see a purple circle of light around her Focus and her interacting with thin air as if she's looking at and using a giant touchscreen, except it's... not... there? It can also scan the environment for irregularities, do biometrics scans, slap convenient holographic signposts that only she can see on things... a lot of funky little things, but nothing really god mode-y.
It just... sticks to the side of her head somehow. Don't ask how; it hasn't been explained. She thinks it's primitive technology compared to the implant she used to have, though.)
Like Aloy, Beta possesses the same genius-level intellect that Elisabet Sobeck had, and thanks to Far Zenith's alpha-build copy of the APOLLO knowledge archive she has probably a couple of college degrees' worth of STEM education. So she's very, very book-smart, with an aptitude for logic and strategy, but she doesn't have a whole lot of practical life experience to round that out and isn't great yet at, say, improvising on the fly.
She's also... yeah. She really doesn't know how to people yet. It's broadly implied that the Zeniths didn't even indirectly interact with her except to inquire about her progress or her usefulness, and that they used a VR simulator to make her experience negative emotional feedback whenever she didn't cooperate. This whole thing where people might want to... talk to her? Like for no specific reason except to be nice and/or social? Instead of just wanting to see if she's being productive enough???
Yeah, she doesn't know what to do with that.
Anyway, having gone through the events of HFW and dispatched the rest of the team to go round up allies, Aloy and Beta have a little time to prepare before the next apocalyptic crisis arrives. And since Beta really needs to learn how to people... what better place to do that than at Aloy's old school, with the added bonus of Fandom time weird?
As for the others, have the quick bullet-point recap.
Steph Gingrich (
drumsticksandd20s, she/her) | Life is Strange (Before the Storm, True Colors, Wavelengths) | Townie- Nerdy punk lesbian who is good at hitting things (drums) and is afraid to get attached to people but does it anyway. Drummer, tabletop RPG and LARP enthusiast, and former indie radio DJ. Runs the Magpie Emporium, Fandom's friendly local game store.
- Post-True Colors canon.
- ...is getting completely unexpected new canon in March, when the first LiS official novel comes out.
- From the version of Arcadia Bay, Oregon that got destroyed by a freak storm because Max Caulfield chose to save Chloe Price instead. Lost her mom and a lot of old school friends in the storm. Found out shortly after that another friend who'd gone missing had been buried in the junkyard for months. Moved to Seattle, got into the punk music scene, eventually ended up in Haven Springs, Colorado after a mid-tour breakup with the other half of her band, Drugstore Makeup. Became kind of a legend on the local radio station.
- Lost her best friend in Haven Springs to a mining accident-that-wasn't, helped his sister get justice for his death, crushed on her pretty hardcore, and skipped town when that didn't pan out.
- Has kind of a complex about losing people and a bad habit of pushing them away that she's doing pretty well at unlearning.
- A notoriously devious GM who doesn't go easy on her players.
- She and giveittoyoursister are very into each other.
Yasha Nydoorin (
notarockharpist, she/her) | Critical Role, Campaign 2 | Townie- Awkward, seemingly stoic lesbian who is good at hitting things (people, with swords) and is afraid to get attached to people but does it anyway.
- Currently off-island in the middle of canon catchup limbo because my brain suddenly didn't want to work on it. I'm working on fixing this, I swear. Works at Covent Garden Flowers when she's actually here; travels with her adventuring party, the Mighty Nein, when she's back home in Exandria.
- Nearly six feet of musclebound goth barbarian who also happens to be half fallen angel. Carries a gigantic fucking sword.
- Goes into a berserker rage when she fights; when she gets really angry, she can bust out a pair of giant skeletal bat-like wings for about one minute, with the side effect of possibly terrifying everyone in her immediate vicinity.
- Is actually a soft-spoken teddy bear who loves flowers, reading, and cute fuzzy animals. Also, awkward af.
- Recently had new canon backstory material that BROKE MY FUCKING HEART and will definitely come into play when she gets back.
- Carries a lot of guilt over running away when her wife Zuala was executed for defying the will of their tribe's leader as to who they should marry.
- Has a lot of unrequited Feelings for her teammate notallbluemonks anyway, and feels guilty for that too.
Beauregard Lionett (
notallbluemonks, she/her) | Critical Role, Campaign 2 | Expatriate- Abrasive, foulmouthed, scrappy lesbian who is good at hitting things (people, with her staff and fists) and is afraid to get attached to people but does it anyway.
- Also currently off-island in the middle of canon catchup limbo.
- Lives in southern California of the Marvel 616 universe with her girlfriend Karolina Dean and
theirJester's blink dog Nugget; goes to college, argues with her criminal justice professors a lot, and occasionally does stuff with the Runaways. - Sometimes takes breaks to go adventuring with Yasha and the Mighty Nein back in Exandria.
- Is a super badass monk martial artist with killer abs and an allergy to sleeves; not that strong physically, but fast as hell. Can run up walls, punch ghosts, fall a very long way without dying, catch arrows, and literally punch the truth out of you.
- Ran away from the monastery that her father paid to have her kidnapped to, which is how she originally ended up in Fandom, but got a new mentor there who's training her to be a spy in an order that specializes in rooting out institutional corruption.
- Incredibly intelligent and observant, though she often covers this up by acting like an obnoxious frat boy.
- Acts like an asshole but doesn't know how to love people any way except with her entire being.
weetuskenraider, she/her) | Star Wars Legends | Alumnus- Force-sensitive, smart-mouthed cannot-possibly-be-straight woman who is good at hitting things (people and objects, with the Force and her lightsaber) and is too old to be bothered with being afraid to get attached to people.
- Is from a version of the same decanonized timeline as solo_sword. Is not from the actual same timeline as Jaina, though.
- A Tatooine orphan who was raised by a tribe of... yes, Tusken Raiders; was BFFs with Jaina's little brother Anakin from their childhood in the Yavin 4 Jedi academy.
- Has three vertical scars on her forehead from being kidnapped and having a Yuuzhan Vong personality, complete with memories, implanted in her brain. Has a very special relationship with pain now, as a result.
- Lost Anakin shortly after they realized they had feelings for each other, and was severely fucked up by this for a long time.
- Dated Ben Skywalker while they were at school together. Yeah, it was a little weird.
- Is handwavily from some point after the Dark Nest Crisis, except she never became a Killik Joiner and never ended up exiled to Dagobah because it makes no goddamn sense for her to willingly let yet another species and culture fully subsume her identity, okay.
- Has had all kinds of UST with Jaina (the one in her timeline and the one from Fandom) for a long-ass time now.
- Her PB is Emilie de Ravin, so yes, she looks a lot like Belle.
brat_inslayage, she/her) | Buffy the Vampire Slayer | Alumnus- (Possibly overly) Assertive and confident, occasionally pushy lesbian who is good at hitting things (mostly demons, with her fists, a stake, and a slew of medieval weaponry) on account of being a veteran Vampire Slayer, and outgrew being afraid to get attached to people a long time ago.
- As you might infer given that she's married to Willow now.
- Mostly retired from the active Slayer game; she still helps track down new baby Slayers, but her primary focus is on taking care of the girls who don't want to fight demons but are stuck with this super strength and speed now.
- To that end, she runs a highly specialized private security firm staffed by women who just happen to be really good at fighting. What a coincidence! Her old high school friend Emma Frost hires a lot of them for the Hellfire Club.
- Dated Tara Maclay while they were at school together. This got very, very weird for a while when she got to Sunnydale.
- Is friends with Raven from way back. GOD, RAVEN.
- Anxiety-ridden, rambly queer nonbinary person who is occasionally halfway decent at hitting things (in video games or with a bow and arrow, or at the gaming table with a sufficiently high attack roll).
- Lives life entirely at the mercy of their cats, and in the Pacific time zone.
- Doesn't get to work from home, and doesn't have internet access at work, so weekday availability depends entirely on what tiny phone internets pings can be snuck, and how much brainpower is left for words.
- Can be found via email or on the FH Discord and is always happy to ramble or be rambled at.
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