Bridging the Divide:NepentheBio
BIO
Julia Ward was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. Her parents, Daniel and Eileen, were both from old money families and successful in their own rights, he an author and she a clinical psychologist. Julia was not planned; indeed, she came along late in her parent's lives when they'd both already gotten comfortable with the idea of remaining childless and focusing on themselves. Being the devout catholic she was, though, Eileen would hear no talk of her husband's 'alternatives'.
The pregnancy was difficult and full of complications, as they often are for a woman in her mid-forties. Julia was born on a crisp November night, the fifth, into the waiting arms of exhausted and apathetic parents. Eileen suffered from severe postpartum and could hardly stand to be in the same room as the baby, and Daniel's approach to childcare involved a steady stream of nannies while he holed up in his study. After a few months Eileen decided to return to work, and Daniel left on a tour to promote his new book. Only the nannies stayed.
Julia was a clever child, independent and willful, but without a strong presence from either of her parents in her life she grew increasingly aloof as well. She learned early on to keep people at a distance. Daniel and Eileen happily provided for whatever material whims or desires she had in lieu of any actual parenting, and so she came to find comfort in things instead of people. She also excelled academically, so they had plenty to brag about with minimal effort.
As she grew and advanced through her schooling, Julia came to see the value in having other people around. Her clique of girlfriends, the boys that chased her, her parents who viewed her as little more then an achievement... they all had their uses. She learned to both cultivate relationships and how to use those relationships to best benefit herself. She approached people as if they were puzzles to be solved, and once she'd figured them out getting them to do what she wanted was simple enough.
When it came time to start looking at universities, Eileen insisted that Julia attend the same ivy league she had. She majored in law, with a focus on business. The complex intricacies inherent to large-scale operations fascinated her to no end. With an eager mind and a 'flexible' set or morals when it came to other people, Julia was consistently at the top of her classes and graduated summa cum laude. There were a plethora of job offers awaiting her, but it was a position with Keystone Pharmaceuticals that drew her attention. It wasn't so much the pay (though it was certainly adequate), the benefits, or the nature of the work; no, what interested the ever-ambitious Julia was the fact that Keystone was a subsidiary of The Cheiron Group, one of the largest conglomerates in the world. Keystone was merely a starting point. Her sights were set much higher.
It didn't even take Julia a year to draw corporate's attention. In '99, after Cheiron came under heavy fire and legal challenge from religious groups who claimed the company promoted satanic practices, she was chosen to be part of its defense team. They were exceptionally successful, eviscerating their accusers in court and crushing them with countersuits. The company made a killing from all the press. The board of directors was quite pleased with the outcome, and it meant a huge leap forward for Julia's career. She was given a position with Cheiron's corporate legal department... and that was when things started to get strange.
It started slowly at first, which she later learned was part of the company's vetting protocol. She handled a joint lawsuit from the families of two Jaun-Klein-Beauchamp employees who'd been somehow completely exsanguinated on the job at a manufacturing plant in Quebec. She was asked for council on the legal specificities of importing mummified remains, which could only be defined to her as 'indeterminate' when she asked if they were human or animal. She oversaw the purchase of a number of properties in Louisiana which, she discovered after some digging, had all been owned by the same serial killer.
Things were clarified quite drastically the day she signed her official contract. She was taken to a dimly-lit room somewhere in the bowls of The Barrett Building, Cheiron's headquarters in London. and told the truth; there were things out there in the darkness, monsters were real, and Cheiron was at the forefront of their study. That miracle antibiotic gel that The Pleseus Guild patented last year? Derived from enzymes found in the bloody ichor that kept vampires up and walking. Those workers she'd convinced a court had gotten their hands caught in machinery? Drained dry by some kind of scaly, quadrupedal horror that the company called Asset #0782. They didn't just tell her these things. They showed her the proof.
They made another thing quite clear as well; the point of no return had already been passed. The language they used was measured and precise, but Julia knew warnings (and threats) when she heard them. She understood. Most large corporations aggressively guarded their secrets, and this was one hell of a secret. As the shock of it all began to subside, the opportunities that the situation she was in offered started to come into focus. The salary and benefits were almost vulgar. The NDA was pretty severe, but Julia hadn't had much of a life outside her career for years so who was she going to tell? The opportunity to work in an area where there was no rulebook, where she was designing all the plays from the ground up out of necessity, was the most attractive thing of all.
Julia Ward was on board. At the end of the day, what other choice did she have?
For 18 years she did Cheiron's dirty work, keeping the secrets buried deep and the company free of tarnish. During that time she was involved in many things that gave her pause, things that caused her to question herself. Many of those 'things in the darkness' had very human faces. Human names, human lives. Families. For every 0782 there was a Cheryl Miller who had the unfortunate luck of being born a werewolf or an Ed Roberts whose undead slavemaster forcefed its foul blood to keep him under thrall. Cheiron didn't distinguish between assets on criteria other then danger and usage potential. Neither did Julia at first, but the higher up she climbed on the ladder the further she could see. The more she knew, the harder it was to justify. Not that she ever voiced these concerns; the company was ever vigilant for signs of cracks in their employees.
Julia had been a senior executive with Cheiron's legal department for three years when everything went to shit. It started with a knock on her condo's door at three in the morning, and the delivery of three mid-sized file boxes filled with what appeared to be hand-written journals. There was a letter from the board accompanying them, relieving her of her duties for the next several days while she examined and documented the contents of the boxes. She was confused, since that sort of work was generally under the purview of the Field Projects Division, and a little concerned. Why was the board saddling her with this?
The answer was even more disturbing then she'd anticipated. It took her the better part of a day to read through the first box of journals. They were jumbled and incoherent, clearly the work of an ill mind. The strange diagrams and pictographs laced throughout were almost painful to focus on, let alone attempt to understand. It seemed to be written in some kind of code, and those few parts that made any sense seemed to focus variously on the habits of particular individuals and details relating to what appeared to be seaborne ships. It made no sense... until she opened the first journal from the second box and, halfway through, found her own name printed there clear as day. The passage contained a detailed account of her daily routines from back when she was in university, down to her meal choices and how frequently she called her mother. Someone had been watching her. Very, very closely.
Why?
It struck her then... that was what the company was wondering as well. That's why they'd sent the journals. They'd probably been monitoring her the whole time she'd been reading. She'd entered the experiment. A cold thing coiled in the pit of her stomach.
In lieu of other options, Julia continued reading the journals. Her name would reappear occasionally, with continuing details about her life. Others were so documented as well. Some basic google-fu connected the names of the ships. The Mary Celeste, Ourang Medan, København, Teignmouth Electron... all ghost ships. The journals did nothing to explain what correlation the writer was trying to make between the people he or she was following and the mystery of the ships, if there was one at all.
As she continued to read, things got even stranger. The pictograms on the pages began... shifting. It was subtle at first, almost attributable to a twitch of the eye, but soon they were erratically jerking about on the page like a pinned butterfly that was still alive and straining for freedom. Julia tried to keep her cool, unsure if it was lack of sleep or if her mind was on the precipice of snapping of if she'd already careened over that ledge, but she struggled to hide hide any signs of distress from possible observers. The images began to luminesce in colours that seemed at once too beautiful to describe and too terrible to comprehend. She felt something starting to slip and then... nothing. It stopped. She slammed the journal splayed across her lap closed.
The next morning Julia left early. She was grateful for the driver. She wasn't sure she'd be able to drive in the state she was in. Her focus was shattered. Her thoughts somehow felt too big for her head, as if she were trying to contain ten gallons of water in a five gallon jug. She just knew that she had to find out who'd written the journals, and why.
She pulled a few strings at the office and called in a few favours, but it was equally likely that Cheiron was allowing her access as part of the experiment. He was Asset #1533, acquired little over a week prior. Field Projects were holding him in the the city, Chicago, at a safehouse. That had a few implications, none of them good. She went immediately.
He was nothing like she expected. She wasn't entirely sure what she expected. A long scraggly beard, maybe... the wild eyes of a madman. He was handsome, strikingly so, with short black hair and vibrantly blue eyes. Besides a few clear signs of the violence of his 'acquisiton', he was impeccably dressed and well kempt. She struggled to place his age. He looked as if he might be in his early 30's, but there was something about his eyes that made him feel much older.
He smiled as she entered the small apartment kitchen where he was securely bound to a chair. He greeted her by name, introduced himself as Corvus, lamented the state of his appearance, then complimented a recent change she'd made to the cut of her bangs. She attempted to launch into her cross-examination but all he seemed interested in talking about was the status of his journals. When she assured him they were safe, he asked that she insure they stay that way. She told him she'd read them, and he said that he knew. That he could see it in her eyes, and all around her. She asked him why he'd been following her, keeping tabs on her. He said a funny thing then; he said she'd told him to. She assured him she hadn't, and he told her 'not yet'. Her head was swimming, and he seemed to sense it. He asked her to sit down, and she told him she was fine. She wasn't. The last thing she heard clearly was Corvus calling for the Field Projects team that had been nervously pacing in the other room, then the world fell away.
Julia could see Corvus's face grow more and more distant as she drifed back into the darkness, like peering through a window framed with the amber iris of her own eye. She was falling back into herself, into her own depths, and she was gripped with a primal fear of what she would find at the core. Nothing pleasant was the answer. For what seemed like an eternity she relived every experiment she's ever been party to, though this time she was the one strapped to the table. Over and over they replayed, her tormenters faceless but mocking her in her own voice. Just as she began to lose herself to the suffering, she found herself before the Iron Watchtower. Her awakening was complete.
She came too with a Field Projects agent kneeling beside her, one hand around her wrist taking her pulse, the other holding the phone he was busily denying responsibility into. He was visibly relived when he realized she was conscious. Everything was still a daze as they pulled her from the room, her eyes meeting Corvus's for a brief instant before the door slammed shut. It was the last time she'd see him.
They took her back to the condo, but she knew she couldn't stay. It was only a matter of time before someone came asking questions she couldn't give passable answers to, and so she packed up the journals and a few personal effects and fled. Cheiron wasted no time in pursuing her, but she knew all the tricks they used. For several months she managed to evade the agents they sent after her, so they turned to alternate methods. They'd let law enforcement do the heavy lifting and deal with her after she'd been apprehended. With that in mind they framed Julia for the murder of a young woman in San Fransisco, one Madison Lucas, whose name also appeared in several of Corvus's later journal entries.
Now desperate, Julia is still on the run. She needs to find a way to clear her name before she runs out of time, all while avoiding detection by Cheiron and trying to get a handle on the tangled mess that is Awakened society.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Nepenthe is a caucasian woman in her early-mid fourties. Her mostly Irish heritage is betrayed by a pale complexion, naturally copper-red hair, and the smattering of freckles that appears across her face and arms if she spends any amount of time in the sun. Her deep-set eyes are a dusky hazel, her cheekbones classically high, her small nose slightly upturned. She stands at 5'8", fairly tall for a woman, with a voluptuous figure that curves pleasantly into an hourglass.
She typically wears her long hair in a neat chignon, or perhaps a ponytail if she's feeling particularly casual. Since going underground she frequently dyes it, most commonly blonde. When it comes to clothing, her style is actually fairly conservative. Skirts, blouses, blazers. She isn't afraid to show a little skin if she feels a situation might warrant it, but she dislikes having to rely on her body to open doors or solve problems. She favours functionality in her wardrobe choices.
CONTACTS & OTHERS
At one point in her career, Julia's list of contacts would have been near-infinite. With the ugly stains Chieron has left on her reputation, though, only a few remain that she trusts enough to reach out to.
D'Arcy Evans (Business Contact) - 44. A senior operations executive at Creed Industries, an engineering and manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit. D'Arcy was Julia's roomate and sorority sister at university, and is the closest thing she has to a 'best friend'.
Kev Walsh (Law Contact) - 45. Senior partner at the Boston-based firm of Leroy, Leroy, and Walsh. Julia dated him off and on for a year while they interned at the same law firm, and they remained friends afterwards. A prominent defense attorney, Julia believes Kev is her best hope of freeing herself from the false murder charge Cheiron has saddled her with.
Eileen Ward - 83. Julia's mother. A retired clinical psychologist, Eileen suffers from a form of dementia known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and resides at a care home in her native New Haven.
Corvus - ??. Assumedly a mage, Julia encountered him as an 'asset' aquired by Cheiron. It was through reading Corvus's many journals, which had been given to her by the company after her name was found to appear in them, that Julia came to her Awakening. She only had the opportunity to speak to him on one occasion, shortly before her Awakening occured. Although she was told that he did not survive one of Cheiron's test procedures, part of her believes that he's still out there somewhere.
Madison Lucas - Deceased at age 24. A native of San Fransisco, Madison was found dead by a custodian not far from the iconic Ferry Building. She had been shot once in the back of the head, and twice in the body. A handgun was found in a nearby trash bin, registered to Julia Ward, though the clip was missing. The gun did indeed belong to Julia; it had been among the possessions she'd abandoned when she'd fled Cheiron. A woman matching Julia's description was seen in the vicinity by several witnesses. Even a motive appeared; a series of texts between Madison and Julia, sent throughout the weeks before the murder, implied that Daniel Ward had secretly fathered Madison out of wedlock and that she was intending to pursue a half share of the inheritance that would otherwise have been Julia's alone. Shockingly, the police publicly confirmed that the claims in the texts had been determined through DNA testing. Madison Lucas was, apparently, Julia's half sister.
ON MAGIC
Like most Libertines, Nepenthe doesn't see her magic through the lens of archaic Atlantean mysticism. To her, magic is just another tool in humanity's belt. A powerful tool, yes, but a tool. She doesn't consider herself as anything other then human, and her Arcanum are closely tied to that. Being primarily focused on Mind, her magic is inherently entwined with that which she considers to be the true essence of humanity; the ability to think, reason. To remember... and to forget. And what is Space other then how we relate to the world around us or, perhaps more precisely, how it relates to us?
