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[11 Dec 2009|05:59pm] |
It's going to be a good day today. That was the thought that crossed Natalie Bishop's mind on May 20th, 2003; the day the scales in the fight of good versus evil tipped considerably. As one of the Potentials that the Watchers Council hadn't managed to find, her upbringing was relatively normal. She had a mother and a father whose marriage wasn't perfect, but wasn't broken, and an older brother who teased her mercilessly and still showed her the way of the world when he could. And since Natalie lived in what she considered "the real world", a world that no fifteen year old freshman looking forward to the upcoming summer vacation would ever worry about demons and vampires, the jolt of power that went through her when Willow Rosenberg's spell was a success was interpreted as just sheer optimism. She was feeling strong, powerful, unstoppable. It was going to be a good day. However, the good days were limited. The Council in disarray, working hard to locate all the newly called Slayers still hadn't managed to find her until an ambitious new vampire did – and it was only sheer luck that she managed to fight him off. Realizing that she was like, a superhero or something (being able to throw a pretty hard punch into some guy's incredibly deformed face was a good indicator, since she had never been in a fight before), she packed her bags and left home in the middle of the night, having no desire to jeopardize her family. After all, if there was one thing that she learned from her brother's comics, it was that superheroes had a kind of lone-wolf thing, or a super-team, but families tended to end up unable to accept or dead. For a somewhat spoiled girl, life on the move was hard. Fighting demons and vampires without any training on her part, when she found them, was hard. The outlook was more than grim – if the newly reformed Council hadn't managed to find her, she likely would have never made it to her sixteenth birthday. Once her first watcher managed to a) find her, b) earn her trust, c) give her somewhere nicer to live (and loaned out the funds to change her surname to Thouvenel -- a great, great grandmother's maiden name -- so that it was harder for her to be located) and d) re-enroll her in school, acting as a proper guardian and all, Natalie began a rigorous training in the art of slaying the vamp-ires, which ... she didn't really take to. Not that she didn't enjoy the fist-fighting aspect of things, but with the new watcher to look over her came a new set of rules and regulations and expectations and, as far as she was concerned, she had been doing just fine on her own. It was exactly that sort of blind bullheadedness that got her watcher killed just a couple years later – her slayer productivity had increased dramatically while her near death experiences had also decreased dramatically since she was under the Council's care, but Natalie still had to do things her own way. Admittedly, now that she's received training and had years of experience under her belt, her own way is more competent than one might like to think (she did, after all, get assigned to the active Hellmouth in Cleveland), but just the same, it also made a casualty out of watcher number one. The ensuring clusterfuck of blame and guilt was almost enough to make Natalie go rogue again – not bad, of course, she was a little too righteous for that, just solo. Instead, she was reassigned to Chuck ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) badsworth, as the council believed that someone equally as stubborn could temper a little humility and caution into the headstrong young screw up. It didn't. It just gave her someone new to argue with and occasionally disobey... for three years. Yet, in their own right, Badsworth and Thouvenel make a good team. A team that loudly bickers for hours on end over this tactic or that, but a formidable team nonetheless. |
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