[attr="class","rcappleftic"][attr="class","fa fa-user"]

[attr="class","rcappleftnick"]

NAT, IVETTE

[attr="class","rcappleftstuff"]

AGE: thirty

DATE OF BIRTH: march 18

HOMETOWN: seattle, wa

GENDER: female

ZODIAC SIGN: pisces

RELATIONSHIP STATUS:[break] single

SEXUAL ORIENTATION:[break] heterosexual

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION:[break] heteroromantic

OCCUPATION:[break] beat cop

[attr="class","rcappleftfc"]

[b]SKULLGIRLS, filia[/b] as [i]natalia ivette[/i]

[attr="class,"rcappper4"]



Despite a typically bland wardrobe both in and outside of work (although, really, the police uniform can't be helped), Nat manages to stand out if only due to her taste in rather... eccentric hair accessories. Anything ranging from bizarre wigs to headbands that look like teeth protruding from the back of her head can be found stashed away in her home. These usually aren't worn in public, thankfully, but it does raise the question of why she has them at all.[break][break]

Has not actually heard of any political, or really any news worthy activity from her brother since her arrival in the city. Reminding herself that they haven't found a corpse does its job in keeping her from thinking the worst, but the longer the wait to ensuring his safety, the more she wonders if she's missed a missing persons report somewhere along the way – namely one that belongs to him.

[attr="class","rcappbio2"]

LAZY EYES IN THE SUMMER HEAT

Stories always begin simple.[break][break]

She isn't the sort to read, books a delicate craft that she thinks from the earliest stages of her life to be beneath her, but even one with a greater fixation on tossing a rubber ball to and fro across the school grounds can tell you that the introduction is always but a lull before the inevitable storm. What interest, after all, would a tale where the the climax is your doorway and the simplicity your tour guide manage to stir? In these early days, she doesn't think much about how similar her own life story may be to those that are scrawled across millions of pages throughout time and space. Why would she? She's little more than a child, the first days of a twelve-year-long endeavor through the education system sprawled out before her and only thing to occupy her mind being what on Earth she can do that will pump her full of more excitement than what she'd just done last. Home houses for her two loving parents, the school yard carrying with it a dozen children that she'll make friends with this week, break off with in another, and repeat for years to come, and everything is so – so easy. Mommy, Daddy, and little Nat playing their parts in a play that is picturesque, the textbook definition of a stable family that so many others would murder to have. The days go on like clockwork, a repeat of the last and the one before that still, and each one is what any normal person would call bliss. Her parents, themselves, couldn't seem to be happier about the happy routine they've all fallen into. And, she thinks with the sharp end of her stick digging spirals and hexagons into the dirt of the preschool playgrounds, that she was more than pleased with it herself. For a while, anyway. Because while it may take her years, decades to realize that her life follows the trope of any classic hero story (with all of the excitement taken out, that is, and with dragons replaced with expectations too frightening to face), it doesn't take her much time at all that repetition will be her grave. In short: It's boring, and she wants out.[break][break]

Escape comes in the form of a younger brother, brought into the world by pure chance four years and one month after his big buff sister. The gift of a decent night's sleep is lost in nightly fits of screaming from the nursery down the hall, pristine meals ruined by regurgitated carrots and beans flung by the flailing spoon of an infant who knows no better, and the endless attention award to any single child being plucked from her plate and flopped onto that of another. Anyone would have expected her to be vexed, livid. Once had it all, and for a girl of a mere five years of age, she's lost just about everything her mind can properly comprehend. What they don't understand, though, is that she's not; she's spent far too long living what others might have called the dream, and curiosity has made her immune to the horrors the nightmare that follows provides. She loves this banshee, this red-faced screaming thing, at first because it brings new color to a world that had long since seemed to fade to monochrome (something artsy like that, she thinks upon reflection years later) and then because she comes to find his charms in between those moments of aggravation. Sometimes, she'll doubt. Fists will rub into sleepless eyes, stomach will growl at the loss of a meal she refused to eat after it was soiled by the half-chewed contents of another's plate, and she will doubt. But then she'll look to him, the one variable she'll never be able to peg, and all will be forgiven. He's the wrench in her system, randomness in a sea of predictability – he is her only sibling, and she loves him more than anything she ever has or ever will love.[break][break]

FRESH FROM OUT OF TOWN

Natalia has never put much thought into what is that her mother and father do for a living. To say that she does not vaguely recall hearing their names spill from the mouths of others, more often than not from the television screaming what's long since become white noise to her in the background wouldn't be a truth, but her mind has always been elsewhere, and so long as the income allows them to live beyond comfortably, she doesn't think she quite finds it in herself to care. Such apathy, however, earns her an extra slap on the wrist, it seems, for every day that goes by, and by the time she has been interred into the dramatic theater popularly referred to as “high school,” she's all too aware that she should know by now. That being said, she's not terribly surprised to learn that they share a profession – more than a bit put off, maybe, by the fact that it is a profession held by her grandparents, as well, and generations after generations preceding them – nor that they make their way in life through the practices of politics. The publicity stunts are shined in a new light, one noticeably less arrogant, but aside from that, she can't bring herself to... really care, much less fathom why they have not only bothered to tell her this, but insist that she know. It is the youngest of their quartet of a family who, always the brain to her brawn, has to instruct her that it's somewhat of a legacy, and that these last years of her public school are wisest spent preparing for more preparing for following in their shoes. “It's in your blood, Natty,” her father sometimes says, “so you'll do fine!”[break][break]

How long will it take before they realize that she doesn't want to do fine?[break][break]

What was once a distant fantasy morphs itself into a defiant goal. She's scene the dramas, studied the basic terms; she familiarizes herself with the policemen that frequent her school and egg them into telling her about the job. It's not hard to understand that her mother and father believe that they are doing good for their peers, and maybe even their country, and she comes to find through self reflection that there's nothing she wants to do more than just the same. Problems lie, though, in the fact that their goals and their dreams for her are just too passive. They'll pass laws they find just and shut down those that aren't, but making laws can only do so much to protect the people at the end of the day. She wants to be there for them, with them, digging survivors from the rubble or tackling thieves on their way down the alley after a “successful” purse snatching. This, the police work, the detective work, law enforcement is what she has had her heart locked on for years prior without ever quite knowing what it was, and even as her parents preach to her the wonders of what a pre-established name will do for her image from the start or her brother prattles on about recent elections and latest horrors of public policy, she knows that nothing they do can deter her from a path she hasn't chosen to walk.[break][break]

Senior year ends in a fire, and she tells them that she's going away – far, far away – to college for its reputation. (Not because she needs to get away from their judging eyes, the disappointment in their voices that try and never succeed to convince her that they don't think of her as the family failure. Not at all.) In secret, the raven-haired girl begs her brother to come with her. She knows how to sweet talk the right people into transferring him over, and while she used to think that she'd do anything to be free of Seattle and the grip her family name has on her, when it comes time to abandon him to the wolves, she's not sure that she can follow through. But he is the wrench in her system, the randomness in a sea of predictability. Her plans involved sneaking him off with her, and she'd assumed that he would be more than pleased to play along. But he isn't. She may be a stain on the Ivette name, but he knows what is expected of him and he has every intention of seeing it through. If she will not be the politician Mom and Dad had hoped for, someone must pick up on her slack. It sounds heartbroken, the words of a martyr making his greatest sacrifice.[break][break]

Natalia kisses Seattle goodbye, and she thinks that it feels like betrayal.[break][break]

NOW SHE'S WORKIN' ON THE STREETS

It's easy, not feeling homesick, when caught in a storm of classes, part-time jobs, and a future of crime fighting ahead of her. It's easy, but not always successful. She graduates at the age of twenty-two, half a country away from the parents who raise her and the brother she deeply, deeply misses, and not a single Ivette bothers to arrive to congratulate her. She has to remind herself not to be angry with them, though. After all, she was the one who took the scissors to their strings, slicing ties in two in her mad dash to freedom, and if she ever wants them to be mended, she can't expect it to be done on the other end. Instead, she parties will new found friends, drinks until she forgets her own name, and lets the hangover that comes with the morning after cover up whatever sort of loneliness might have been there to take its place.[break][break]

Nat lands a job in her field, everything going just as planned (ignoring the noticeable lack of her younger sibling, that is), and she's doesn't miss home, she doesn't, she doesn't -[break][break]

SHAKIN' POOR BOYS DOWN

It isn't as though she pays much attention to the city she's left. If it ever crosses her mind, it's only ever to be the backdrop of fond (or, rarely, less-than-fond) childhood memories, or a fleeting thought when she realizes how far from people she'd once held close she is. With all of the tasks she's given here in her new city, anyway, it would be more difficult than it was worth to attempt to keep track of home and a place she's long since left behind, and she'd decided from the very start of moving away that it was something she wouldn't even bother to entertain. The only reason she learns of the murders at all is through a co-worker, who claimed to have stumbled upon such things by chance, and it's only an irrational spark of fear that captures her attention. She learns of the heinous act almost as soon as they find it, and at that point, there isn't a single shred of identification for the John Doe; mutilated beyond recognition, a true act of inhuman violence. A horrifying moment asks her if he might be her brother, smashed to all oblivion and no longer wearing his own face, and while she manages to shove most of it down, deep where it cannot hurt her, apprehension still ghosts around her thoughts for days to come. In the end, it is DNA that spares her and pins him as a man she hasn't so much as heard the name of – but only two weeks have gone by before another one turns up dead, and the fear stirs anew. Sad, maybe, that she hasn't focused on the happenings of the rainy Washington city this much before in her life, living there or otherwise, but when spotty, seemingly unrelated killings slay those in and out of her profession, the worry that one of them might turn up to be her brother has her mind cast out thousands of miles away. When they become more organized, when the police begin to think that these are no isolated incidents, she knows that she can't stay. He's Natalia's little brother, and she's always been the one to protect him.[break][break]

They throw her a going away part at the closing when fall is nearest its death, all cakes and embraces and more “good luck!”s than she'd care to count. All of the festivities in the world, however, can't keep her mind from casting itself out to where her only sibling may or may not be bleeding out in an alleyway, and its with more haste than she'd used to get out of her hometown that she uses to return to it. It won't be long now, she tells herself; she'll find him, and she'll save him, and nothing in the arsenal of these... these thugs can harm a hair on his precious head.[break][break]

She'll make sure to harm a lot more than that if they do.

[attr="class","rcapprp2"]OTHER CHARACTERS

[attr="class","rcapprp4"]