Background

[nearlyunmade]

The Place

The city isn’t London, but it isn’t entirely unlike London. A beautiful city, glass and chrome — at least if you’re lucky enough to live in the rich parts. The gulf between the haves and have-nots is as wide as ours, perhaps a smidgeon wider. Widening daily. But the haves do look stylish. And since surveillance is omnipresent, their stylishness never goes unremarked.

The Company is a business, a government and a controlling interest in the Church. They elected themselves after the world tore itself apart in war, and no one else has much say. The trains run on time and streets are clean and the people are very, very safe. Everyone wants to live in a world where their children are safe, after all. As long as you don’t think too much about where the people the Company deems objectionable have gone. If something doesn’t work, it doesn’t need to exist.

The Family

The Hawdon family crest: a pair of falcons in green and gold.

Lord Ambrose Hawdon - A high-placed member of the Company. What he does now isn’t known to even his closest, except that it certainly has major effects (and that it certainly causes collateral damage). Deeply devoted to his family but unafraid to decide he knows best without their input. Rumored to want to break up his son’s marriage, which strained Nicolas’ relationship with his parents.

Lieutenant-Colonel Anya Evans Hawdon - A semi-reclusive war veteran. Not active in the Company in her own right, but known to be obsessively loyal to her husband. Doesn’t appear in public much.

Lord Nicolas Hawdon - Has been working for the Company since graduating high school (part-time in college, full-time since). Has a reputation as something of a playboy, which was partially organic when he was younger; he’s since been ordered to use his liaisons to gather information on the Company’s behalf. In some cases, if that information indicates someone is a problem, he also takes care of it in a … more direct fashion than blackmail or creating scandal. One part of a well-oiled machine.

Lady Margaret Hawdon - Nicolas’ wife, formerly an aspiring actress. They married after, and because, he got her pregnant. (There were some nasty rumors that the child wasn’t his, that she’d said that it was to seize the money and power the Hawdon family had to offer.) Now, she mainly focuses on their son and doing her best to ignore the gossip that fear of Ambrose mainly keeps to a whisper.

Michael Hawdon - Nicolas and Margaret’s young son. The hope for the next generation.

The Rebellion

Once, Nicolas had a twin sister named Sarah. She was fast, thorough, and sharp as a tack. Lady Sarah was in medical school, destined for a prestigious position in a research laboratory. She was going to cure deadly diseases. She was going to change the world.

And then she had a rotation on the South Side, a poorer part of the city. No one expected Sarah Hawdon would be working in an emergency room once she graduated, of course, much less one in a poor hospital. She didn’t need to work at all. But it looked good to give back; her father had encouraged her impulses to offer support to the less fortunate as long as she did so in carefully sanctioned ways. One evening, she got off a shift and decided to walk home despite the cold. No one took cars in this part of town. It was quite cold, though, and eventually she ducked into a lit meeting hall to get warm. She heard a young man speak. Someone shoved a flier into her hand, and she didn’t report them. She didn’t even throw it in the trash.

She met a man named Marcus, who felt people should stand up and object to the Company’s steady consolidation of power. She made a choice.

For a while, she could offer information and access that most of their number could never dream of. But her family was observant, and paranoid, and prized loyalty above all else. Even her brother, much more trusting than her parents, couldn’t be fooled forever. Eventually it was too risky to stay. After about a year of working undercover, and weeks of quietly moving money in small amounts that wouldn’t draw attention, Sarah decided to kill herself.

Sarah Hawdon fell off of a bridge, seemingly an accident while trying to catch a scarf the wind had blown away. Three witnesses saw her fall, but no one would jump into the river after her in the dead of winter. By the time the professionals arrived, there was no sign of her. The body was found a week later, unrecognizable, but a DNA match. Her brother insisted there must have been foul play, but no concrete evidence surfaced. Her father pulled enough strings that it was a tragedy rather than a scandal. They held a funeral and, for her father’s sake, many people pretended to be very broken up.

Meanwhile, a woman with Sarah’s face named Stella Willoughby began working for the revolution. She helped coordinate medical support for those who couldn’t afford care or who sustained injuries due to brushes with law enforcement. She contributed what knowledge she could about the men and women (mostly men) in her father’s inner circle. She stayed off the front lines out of practicality; she could still be recognized. But she did a great deal behind closed doors.

About six months ago, Marcus took a bullet making sure Stella didn’t get caught. Ever since then, she’s been less focused on healing and more focused on destruction. Her father believed in hunting for sport, and he also believed in his daughter knowing self-defense. She’d learned a crossbow for one and guns for the other. Now she’s fond of both ... though crossbow bolts are easier to poison.