[@Naril] Here is Mandy's sheet, take two! I hope it has all the information you need--I added to the skill and backstory sections. I also wanted to ask: would it be plausible that someone at PHI might have seen to it that she got some of the required field training, if they knew they could use her in other ways?

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

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

[b]Race/Species:[/b] Half-breed, poor thing. Amanda’s mother was a [i]cait sidhe,[/i] 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.)

[b]Age (Real and apparent, if applicable):[/b] 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.

[b]Appearance:[/b] 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 [i]tries[/i]. 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.

[b]Personality:[/b] 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 [i]wants[/i] 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.

[b]Powers, Traits, and Abilities: [/b] 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 [i]trying[/i]—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 to defend herself by older kids that believed 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, [i]cait sidhe[/i] 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.

[b]Background: [/b] Just as with “real” cats, the kittens in [i]cait sidhe[/i] 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 [i]cait sidhe[/i] 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...
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