[hider=Mandy]
[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.

[hider=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 [i]tries[/i]. Without any proper role models to follow until recently, her concept of “business casual” is a work in progress (and sometimes difficult to master on her limited budget). [/hider]

[hider=Personality:] If there’s an ounce of the stereotypical feline standoffishness in her genetic makeup, Mandy doesn’t know it—she’s less of a hardened alley cat and more that friendly stray that hangs around your back door until, somehow, you realize that [i]you[/i] 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. [/hider]

[hider=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 [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 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. Her dominant human blood means she has a much greater resistance to iron than the pureblood fey, but direct contact with it will still weaken and/or injure her.

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.[/hider]

[Hider=Background:]
In a comfortable leather chair in a small, carpeted office sat a skinny girl in a too-large sweater, not quite meeting the eye of the doctor seated across from her. She looked tired, as if she should be on her way to bed or had just been woken up, though she could not stop restlessly fidgeting with the familiar gold-embossed business card she held in her hands.

It was a nervous habit, the doctor had noticed. The card was already a little worn at the edges, showing signs of frequent handling, though he knew she’d received it less than a week before. 

The doctor continued to study her—the subtly pointed ears that showed only when she pushed back fine brown hair from a shy, youthful face; the way she refused to occupy the whole chair, sitting with legs crossed and elbows pulled in. He’d volunteered to do this evaluation when her file was being passed around the department. Even without taking her heritage into account, it would have been interesting.

It wasn’t often that one of their old charity cases came knocking at their door; even rarer that she should do it almost twenty years after the fact.

But then, the girl had always been a little lost, hadn’t she? A glance at her file was enough to tell him that: a childhood spent in the company of other unwanted children and a rotation of overtaxed volunteers; five years at a community college, wandering through areas of study until she came out with enough credits for a cobbled-together humanities degree; a job as a research assistant that had mostly fallen into her lap. The latter had only lasted as long as it had taken her to find this place.

And then there was the thing she was least willing to talk about: a full-blooded mother who hadn’t known what to do with her half-blood daughter, and so, when the opportunity arose—in the form of one similar gold-embossed card—had given her up with guilty relief.

The doctor did not have the heart to bring this up directly, especially when they both knew the information was printed right in front of him. Priest & Hawthorne kept [i]everything[/i]. Instead, he said, “There’s something I noticed here. Your name—” he tapped his pencil thoughtfully against the folder he held, “—is actually Amandine. But that’s not what you picked when you enrolled in school.”

She bristled, and his first thought was of a kitten baring its teeth—but then she tilted her chin, and her eyes caught the light. For the first time, there was something unsettling about the girl sitting across from him; for the first time, he got a sense of the uncanny, of something that was only mostly human.

“That’s not my name,” she said. Her voice was taut, but small, pulled tight over a pain she was used to ignoring. Her gold-green eyes were narrow, glinting in a way that human eyes shouldn't. “Nobody calls me that.”

[i]Nobody but one person, and you haven’t seen her in nineteen years.[/i] It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks.

Amanda Staten dropped her eyes, and with them, any sense of the otherworldly. She was once again just a girl, nervous and eager—almost desperate—to be liked. Quietly, she added, “Please.”

“Noted,” the doctor said evenly, and moved on to the next part of the interview. [/hider]


[hider="Secrets"]
Mandy is reasonably fond of [i]all[/i] of her coworkers at PHI, though still feeling a little out of place both as the "new kid" and as someone who isn't used to belonging.

Emma, Morgan, and Beth all intrigue her, both as strong women who seem very comfortable in their skins and as people who have three different kinds of magic in their blood. Emma's logical approach to things is both soothing and intimidating; Morgan's roll-with-the-punches attitude is something Mandy aspires to, while her sometimes obvious "otherness" makes Mandy tentatively see her as a bit of a kindred spirit. [b][More on Beth to go here soon; Fizzy and I are still discussing things in PMs!][/b]

Mandy is fascinated as much by the fact that Jacob's a father as by his magical talents. He's probably been a frequent recipient of her anonymous coffee gifts, because he always seems so very tired.

Though she's new, Mandy's general feeling for the Priest & Hawthorne office is that it is something like home—these were the first people who wanted her, and so she sought them out when she finally could. [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebNDJF-LhUI/]Her theme[/url] ("Holding On and Letting Go," by Ross Copperman) is a good reflection of her feelings—about leaving her family behind, growing up in a sort of supernatural orphanage/halfway house, and finally finding PHI. [/hider]

[/hider]