BYRON, Norah

[Norah Byron]

[app] Eleanor Diana Byron [/app]

[app]Full Name:[/app] Eleanor Diana Byron
[app]Preferred Nickname/Alias:[/app] Norah, Rah (only to her bandmates)
[app]Gender:[/app] Female
[app]Age:[/app] 19
[app]Sexual Orientation:[/app] Straight
[app]Member Group:[/app] Civilian
[app]Canon or Original:[/app] Original

Taken piece by piece Norah isn't pretty, not in any conventional way. But she's one of those girls where the whole is more than the sum of its parts; attractive and appealing without being beautiful. She's tall, over 5'10", and skinny to the point of boniness, with pale skin and dark hair that she dyes deep, vivid shades of red. She has a softly roman nose, which she hates but is too proud to look into getting a nose job, and large, expressive eyes in an unusual shade of green/gray/blue. She works to play up the hair and eyes in her makeup, with a fair bit of success.

At the encouragement of the stylist that the label sent her to a few times Norah tends toward a vintage/anachronistic style of dress; lots of forties and fifties inspired dresses and complicated updos. She's also got a deep love for very short dresses and notably tight jeans.

[app]Face Claim:[/app] Susan Coffey

[app]Likes:[/app]

• Old music
  
• Old cars
  
• Altoids
  
• Travel
  
• The quiet hours between 4 and 7AM
  
• Her Strat
  
• Bacon cheeseburgers
  
• Expensive makeup
  
• Top Gear
  
• Her brothers and bandmates (usually)

[app]Dislikes:[/app]

• Being cold
  
• Raw fish, including sushi
  
• Music with no musicality to it
  
• Luke's episodes
  
• Psycho fangirls
  
• Going too long without calling home
  
• Fights with her Dad about putting off college
  
• Cheap shoes
  
• Being underestimated
  
• Her brothers and bandmates (occasionally)

[app]Strengths:[/app]

• Intelligent
  
• Strong musical talent
  
• Emotionally confident (especially with her family and bandmates)
  
• Psychotically friendly
  
• Well-hidden mechanical aptitude

[app]Weaknesses:[/app]

• Naive
  
• Overly involved with her brothers
  
• Overfocused
  
• Psychic null
  
• Has lived a privileged life and doesn't really understand what it is not to be wealthy

[app]Fears:[/app]

• Losing her family, in any capacity
  
• Big, aggressive dogs

[app]Secrets:[/app]

• Her brother Luke is both a psychic and has a TBI (see history) and she's terrified of either his episodes from the brain injury or the truth of his abilities coming out to the general public.
  
• She suspects that Doro isn't going to stick with the band and has been very secretly laying in preparations for bringing in a replacement drummer.

[app]Habits and Quirks:[/app]

• Not even Norah is sure she remembers her natural hair color any more.
  
• Drinks cranberry juice because she likes the color more than the taste.
  
• Utterly refuses to read reviews because they always talk about her appearance, either good or bad, and she can't handle it.

[app]Overall Personality:[/app]

Singer, songwriter, clean thing in a dirty world. Norah's a nice suburban girl moving through a world that ought to be making her hard but which hasn't succeeded yet. Friendly, optimistic, accepting, more intelligent than she comes off at first meeting; she's a genuinely good person who just wants to make music with the people she loves.

Norah herself stands at a cusp in her life. Balanced on the knife edge between girl and woman, sheltered by her nature and circumstance to allow her to remain a naif for at least a little while longer, new enough to the games of fame and celebrity that she doesn't take it seriously. Perhaps even more perilous is where she stands with the world of gods and monsters. Her brother Luke is psychic, a medium, but until very recently none of them had any idea that there were other kinds of supernatural creatures in the world.

[app]Family:[/app]

• Father: Max Byron - Alive
  
• Biological Mother: Diana Springer Byron - Dead
  
• Stepmother: Rebecca Woodward Byron - Alive
  
• Stepbrothers: Alexander and Lucas Byron (Identical Twins) - Alive

[app]Overall History:[/app]

Norah and her brothers have grown up hearing the story of how their parents met and fell in love; a sort of suburban fairy tale with all the right elements of tragedy, good fortune, and unlikely timing but lacking only a villain of the piece. How the widowed father of three-year old Norah had taken his daughter to a play group sponsored by the local gym and the toddler had immediately bonded with a pair of blond twin boys just her own age who happened to be the sons of a single mother named Rebecca. The funny coincidence of the twins' birthday being exactly eight days before Norah's, and how Max and Rebecca had bonded a bit over the ridiculous snobbishness of the other yuppie parents in the group. How play dates for the three kids had turned into real dates for the young parents and Max and Rebecca had married just before the kids all turned five and created the perfect American blended family.

Growing up in the Silicon Valley in California surrounded by the trappings of suburban privilege and recent wealth, Norah and her brothers were sent to the best schools, always had the newest computers and cell phones, and were instilled early with the expectation that whatever they do in their lives, they should excel at it. All three siblings gravitated early toward music, which their parents supported in fine upper-middle-class yuppie style: Suzuki Method lessons in piano and violin, vocal coaches, summer enrichment classes at the local college in performance and and composition, the whole gamut.

The band, Lorica, started as a way to keep Luke from moping after a skating accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury when he was thirteen. He couldn't surf, ski, or skate, but he could play his guitar and so Alec and Norah came up with the idea of a garage band. It started with the three of them fooling around in the back bedroom, then as they started writing songs together they recruited Peter and Doro to come play along with them. Putting videos of their rehearsals on YouTube was somewhere between an honest attempt to gain local fans and a joke. Over the course of a couple of years they gained a decent local following, at least as far as you can gain a following playing all-ages clubs, even in a decent music scene like the San Francisco Bay Area.

Even so, nobody was more surprised than Norah when Lorica actually attracted the attention of a producer who'd seen them on YouTube. A dizzying six months of flights to L.A. and New York, meetings between the label's lawyers and the high-powered shark that Norah and the twins' Dad had hired, flashy parties, and long hours in the recording studio and Lorica's self-titled debut album hit the shelves and the airwaves.

The band is currently on their first nationwide tour, playing large club venues and a few small ampitheater shows. Lorica's the headliner, which is exciting even if they're being opened for by local talent and the label's third-string groups. The contract that their Dad's lawyer negotiated for them being long on royalties and residuals and short on immediate perks, the band tours in a five year old Winnebago being driven by the drummer's older brother (custom paint job, at least, and they've been promised they get a real band bus on their next tour) and stays in motels except in cities where they're doing the more heavily-publicized ampitheater shows. It's not the endless round of glamour that people think of when fantasizing about being a 'rock star', but the band's young, full of energy, and treating the whole thing as a grand adventure. More exciting than college anyway, right?

[app]Member Title:[/app] singing lost songs

[app]Roleplaying Sample:[/app]

It wasn't the touring that had Norah's sleep schedule all twisted-around and strange; she'd always been this way. Run and run and run all day, crash out hard for a few hours, then up for a couple of hours around dawn and nap a little more in the early morning. Sometimes when things were really mad she'd try to grab an hour or two in the afternoon too, but mostly she seemed to do okay on five or six hours of sleep in total, so she didn't worry about it.

When she woke around four-thirty she could feel the thrum in her pillow that meant that they were still running. Poor Mickey was going to be blasted tomorrow in...where the hell were they going to be tomorrow? Somewhere in Ohio, she thought, but she'd have to check the schedule in her phone to be sure and quite frankly right in that moment Norah couldn't make herself care. It was a club show, she knew that, and she'd be sure to figure out the name of the town before show time so that she could shout it from the stage, get a cheap pop.

She rolled out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a lightweight hoodie over the camisole she'd been sleeping in, gathered her hair into a ponytail and called that good. Padding barefoot up to the front of the RV, weaving her way expertly between the pull-outs and the sleeping boys on them, Norah dropped into the co-pilot's chair next to Mickey and gave him a sleepy smile. "You're gonna be a corpse tomorrow."

Mickey, whose real name was Miguel and who was shaved bald and heavily-tattooed and looked exactly like the semi-reformed gangbanger that he was, gave his kid brother's bandmate a one-shouldered shrug and a quick grin. "We got enough help on this gig, for a change, I aint gonna be haulin' equipment around and doin' sound checks. I can grab a nap before I gotta run security for the show," his other real job duty besides driving the bus. "And we're in a motel tomorrow night."

Norah hummed softly as she considered that. "Okay, but I'll make you up some eggs or something. You can't run all night on coffee and those energy shot things. You want cheese and salsa in 'em? Some kind of breakfast burrito thing?"

And this was why Miguel allowed Little Miss White Bread to do things like call him 'Mickey'. Norah mothered the people in her immediate circle endlessly and effortlessly, it had started with her brothers and extended to cover first Alejandro and Peter and then Miguel, the pair of roadies that took care of the band's equipment, and anyone else who stayed in her circle for longer than a few days. It was her nature to take care of the people around her, and she adapted that to whatever the situation required. At home it had been making sure that Luke took his meds and Alec didn't lose his car keys, on the road it was making eggs in the middle of the night and sneaking condoms into the top drawer in the bathroom because boys will be boys but they can at least be safe with it.

"Sure," Miguel said, sliding open the side window and lighting a smoke. "Sounds good. Thanks, kid." And he wasn't even surprised when she kissed the top of his head before making her way back to the tiny kitchen to start the eggs. It was just her way.

---

[app]Player Name:[/app] Briar
[app]Player Age:[/app] So old. So very, very old.
[app]Years Roleplaying:[/app] Almost 20 years. Holy crap I'm old.
[app]Where You Found Us:[/app] I followed Devi like a puppy.
[app]Other Characters:[/app] Castiel, Ed Zeddmore, Adam Milligan, Jophiel, Zee Kerrick
[app]Favorite Supernatural Episode:[/app] Mystery Spot
[app]Favorite Supernatural Character:[/app] Castiel

[Devi B.]