Emma Bailey
From DevilshireWiki
| Emma Bailey | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Lena Headey as Emma Bailey | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Emma Bailey is a Watcher hailing from a family of demon hunters in Huddersfield, England. She's been tapped to serve as Zhou Zhen Ji's Watcher and also works at Devilshire University as a librarian.
Contents |
Background
World War I
The Bailey family have run a farm in Huddersfield for as long as anyone can remember, even the vampires. All three of them. And while the Baileys have a history with werewolves, it actually has nothing to do with their sheep and everything to do with the family’s lesser-known business, that of demon hunting.
It began in 1915, during World War I, in the trenches. Casualties were mounting and there were rumours of a particularly brutal troop of Germans infiltrating the trenches at night; whispers of soldiers torn limb from limb circulated. Edward Bailey, the son of a sheep farmer in Huddersfield, made the unfortunate discovery that the German troop was no troop at all; it was all one creature, one beast-thing that clawed, bit, mutilated, and mauled anything it came across. Edward and his fellow soldiers fought bravely that night, and when the werewolf finally fell there were only three soldiers left: Bailey, Booth, and Rhodes. They made an enemy that night. They had killed the daughter of Torsten Müller, also a werewolf.
Müller made it his mission to hunt down the final three, and by the end of the war he’d slain both Booth and Rhodes. Edward Bailey survived and made his way back to Yorkshire. He never forgot what he’d seen and he made it his mission to protect others from werewolves.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Bailey became a hunter; he was horrified to discover the world of demons and vampires and took up arms against them as well, trusting nothing supernatural. He married a sturdy girl who could take care of herself and started raising children that would be able to continue the fight after he was gone. It took a long time for Müller to find Bailey again, and it was Edward’s granddaughter Lilly he killed. Müller didn’t finish with her. He made it a point to kill one daughter in every generation of Baileys from then on, and they weren’t a large family to begin with.
The Bailey Family
And the generations continued; the Baileys fought, the Müllers killed. They didn’t manage to kill a daughter every generation, but they made a good show of it. Presumably, Torsten’s descendants carried on his tradition. The periods that bore only sons were a relief to the Baileys. It was a relief to Cameron Bailey, who’d lost his sister when he was nine, when his wife Olivia gave him only a son, William. William had one son, Brandon, and Brandon in turn had a son, Owen. And then, quite accidentally, there was another Bailey girl. Her name was Emma.
Her great-grandfather, recalling his sister’s death, cautioned Brandon about the Müllers. It was Brandon’s opinion that Torsten’s descendants weren’t very likely to try to kill his daughter. Maybe he was brash, maybe he was cocky.
Owen Bailey overheard Cameron and Brandon’s conversation regarding Emma, and he remembered. In the true fashion of an older brother, he took care to tell Emma a werewolf would eat her up whenever he felt like scaring her. Emma grew up very, very frightened of dogs.
Little Emma
Emma also grew up a hunter, just like her brother. Schooled from a young age on the occult and then, when they were a little older and more coordinated, on the killing of the monsters they’d read about, the Baileys were a potent force protecting Huddersfield.
While dogs were her personal phobia, Emma was otherwise well-equipped to deal with the family business. She saw lots of awful things growing up. She was more than a fair shot with a rifle and she took care to have a supply of silver bullets on hand. And a silver knife. Okay, two silver knives. She also loved books. Her mother Amelia was a librarian, and she encouraged Emma to read anything she could get her hands on. Emma found it really easy to get her hands on books about demons.
The life of a demon hunter is a pretty shitty one for a teenage girl; she had her duties. It was hard to come up with excuses not to go out with friends after school; she couldn’t very well tell the girls she had an appointment with a nest of Hazrath eggs. Math tests on two hour’s fitful sleep were difficult. Despite being a very bright girl, her grades were mediocre. Relating to other kids her age was hard as well; she had little sympathy for the day-to-day problems of her peers. When she was fifteen she just gave up trying in annoyance and kept to herself.
What she was good at doing was reading, and she pursued a career in library sciences in university, spending her days cataloguing, organizing, and peering at books through her reading glasses. Her evenings were generally filled with activities involving some sort of weaponry and things that didn’t bleed red.
The Big Bad Wolf
Her first encounter one-on-one with a werewolf occurred when she was twenty-two during a late shift at the library she worked at. She was the last one out of the building, she was tired, and the werewolf managed to surprise her. Even down the sights of her rifle, she had felt her heart beating too fast, her hands a little shaky. Up close and personal, all alone, it was much, much worse.
Her silver knives saved her; she landed a nasty strike in the creature’s eye. She lost her favourite knife night, though that was far preferable to losing her life. Once she’d stabbed the thing in the eye, she’d made it to her car, gotten in, and sped away while it was still howling in pain.
Ruby Baker
She was twenty-seven. The Baileys were investigating the disappearance of a seventeen year old girl named Ruby Baker. There were five purple-robed vampires, and when they found Ruby, she was also clad in purple robes with a fresh bite mark on her neck and fighting alongside the vampires. Emma, forced to make a split-second decision as to whether or not Ruby had been turned or not, made the wrong choice: she shot the girl in the head, and when Ruby died, she left a very real body and not dust.
Mistakes happen. Horrified, Emma insisted on turning herself in, though her father and brother convinced her not to. She wasn’t a murderer. It had been an accident, and they couldn’t explain it to the authorities. Reluctantly, she buried the teenage girl and Ruby Baker remained a missing person.
While she was steely when facing monsters, they revisited her in her dreams. While she could deal with the horrible things she’d seen and done in her waking hours, it all came spilling out again at night. Ruby was a frequent visitor in her slumber, eternally getting her head blown off. So was the one-eyed werewolf. He found her in her dreams, tore her eye out, killed her. That was her life for years, and it began to wear on her. Huddersfield was not the same now that she knew she’d taken Ruby from the community, knew she hadn’t saved her. She saw Ruby’s friends, she saw Ruby’s mother in church, praying for the safe return of her daughter, she worried someone would find the body and half-wished they did. She dreamt of leaving Huddersfield and traveling to other places and countries, but she didn’t get her chance until 2003.
| Devilshire Character Sheet | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ||||
The Council
The Watcher’s Council headquarters was demolished by a bomb, the Potential slayers were gathered, and a great war was fought in Sunnydale, California. When the dust settled there were suddenly more Slayers in the world than the tiny handful of remaining Watchers could handle; they needed to outsource, and that time when they came to the Baileys, Emma accepted.
Now she could travel; she crossed the globe for the next few years, finding Slayers, working with some of them, picking up and leaving again. It was different from Huddersfield, which was doing fine in the care of her father and brother, though they were distinctly unhappy with her. Eventually she was looked upon as a Watcher by the new Council. By the beginning of 2009, they were fairly certain they’d found most of the Slayers they were going to find, and Emma could take on another assignment. The Council decided to send her to a very strange town called Devilshire, which had some most unusual activity and a problem keeping Watchers.
Powers and Abilities
Due to her training as a librarian, Emma has developed a mighty shush.
Personality
Not the most well-socialized of people, Emma can usually just pass for being shy and nerdy. She's a lot more at home with a shotgun in her hands on the hunt or poking around a stack of books than she is in a bar or at a party. She does take a little too much delight in hurting the monsters she hunts; she's seen too much not to feel some joy when she causes them pain.
Emma is more active than the usual Watcher; while intelligent, she's not the typical super-genius and relies more on her experience than most might. Also, she really doesn't like dogs. At all.
People
Watcher-Related
- Zhou Zhen Ji, her Slayer charge.
Peers
- Phillip Harget, highly knowledgeable regarding mythology.
Allies
- Adam Camden, very reluctantly. Annoying enough just due to his lasciviousness, but anyone who deals with demons is not worth helping in Emma's book.
- Louis Laroche, psychic.
- Ringo, again reluctantly. Emma considers him something like a poster child for what happens when you use too much magic, but while he's admitted to being a coward he will still step up to the plate when needed.
Logs
- Miss Bailey: Emma's first appearance.
- Meet the New Watcher: Emma makes first contact with her Slayer, Zhou.
- Moving Day: About as close as Emma gets to explaining her background to her Slayer.
- A Routine Patrol: Emma goes Zhou on patrol to assess her charge's methods.
- D is For Demon Biology... Maybe: Emma geeks out with a professor named Conrad about his occult library. B is for Bloodworm, they'll drain you bone dry!
- Why's Everyone Playing Slayer?: Why does it always have to be dogs? Emma and Zhou on patrol. (PRP by Desmond)
- Nobody Likes Scrapbooking, Ms. Bailey: Emma fails at normal hobbies.
- Nine Thousand Years of Shadow
- Earth: While on a nightly stroll (see: patrol), Emma encounters a strange man with a strange warning.
- Fire: Another day, another weird message from some elemental being.
- The Golem Gap: Emma explains golems.
- Professor Gargesh to the Rescue: A visit to a visiting scholar specializing in fairy tales proves enlightening.
- Glimmer Glass: Emma explains what she knows to one of the guardians of the artifacts from Gargesh's tale.
- Modern Applications: The story of the cursed princess is told again.
- Stone: The finale of the episode. The investigators enter a fairy tale and end the shadow threat.
- The Boy Who Cried Wolf: Keggers and werewolves.
- Monster of the Week v. 49: Vampires attack!
- Monster of the Week v. 54: Skeletons attack!
- Knives in the Woods: Emma and Zhou interrupt a cultist ritual.
- Of Seizures and Visions: Emma tracks Louis down to talk psychic visions with him.
- Monster of the Week v. 56: A river monster attacks!
- The Dark Carnival
- Act Two: Emma goes to a carnival because carnivals are evil. AND SHE IS CORRECT. (This time.) Mirror mazes? Evil.
- Act Three: Ferris wheels? Evil. Sort of.
- Act Four: Just hanging around the carnival means evil happens. Anger runs rampant; Emma shoots Zhou. Almost.
- Carry a Torch: Emma, Phillip, and Louis talk carnival of death and maybe burning it down. Fire solves everything...
- Act Five: ...except when it's not the good guys using it.
- Finale: A journey to the center of the carnival leads to the severing of an extradimensional entity's link to this plane.
- 12 Days of Devilmas
- Wild Times: A chance encounter with Ringo at the church leads Emma to investigate the legends of the Wild Hunt.
- The Wild Hunt: Emma doesn't manage to protect Ringo, the Lord of Misrule, in time to prevent his abduction by the hunt.
- Unfunny People: Emma informs Mitchell and Zhou about the Lord of Misrule and the Wild Hunt as best she can.
- Might, Magic, and the Mundane: Zhou suggests enlisting a witch's help; Emma's demon hunter prejudices show.
- Optimism Has No Nosebleeds: Talking to Louis about the Wild Hunt provides a little hope for Ringo still being alive.
- Rumours of My Death Have Been Slightly Exaggerated: Anna comes to Emma in tears, having been told Ringo is dead; Emma vaguely tries to comfort her while trying to find out what information she's gained from the Appletons. Phillip and Louis come by to confer with some new information of their own.
- I'll Be Home For Yulemas: Rescue!
Miscellany
- Emma's Journal: Pen and paper. Feel free to make OOC comments.
