Rachel "Cider" Pearce

=• Background •= Cider is an accidental recruit to the Illuminati, having been doing her laundry while some nutjob in the corner was ranting about All-seeing Eyes. Perhaps it was just the topic of his diatribe, but she came to realize that there was a camera watching her. Her first thought was that she'd become the target of some weirdo upskirt website and she went looking for the source of the surveillance, to give them a piece of her mind.

In retrospect, that was an uncanny bit of prophecy.

She was caught in a sweep of several potential "awakened" Illuminati recruits running around the New York underground. It wasn't until she was pumped full of narcosynthetics and tripping like a jaguar on atropine that the Illuminati realized that Rachel's magical potential is--well, techinically present. But if unlocking the affinity for magic is an awakening, then Rachel hasn't had her coffee yet.

Still, the Illuminati isn't a group to waste a perfectly good spinal microchip implant, and she did give one of the guards a good shiner to remember her by when they strapped her down in the lab. So they've forwarded her on to Ægir Communications in the "Highly Expendable" category of fresh meat.

So Cider is caught up in what she herself would describe as "the kind of book you put down because, eh, stuff like that just doesn't happen in the real world." And not being the type to get maudlin, she's playing the hand she's been dealt. But honestly, she wishes she'd decided to just skip the laundry that day.

=• Personality •= What Cider lacks in actual skill, she makes up for in grit and gumption. She doesn't give up on things easily, and bounces back from adversity well. She doesn't get much respect from her supervisor, Jean Martinique, who views her main asset as her slow running speed--because it will increase the odds that her companions will be able to escape an unfavorable situation while she is messily devoured.

She doesn't like her supervisor very much.

Still, she maintains a ferociously optimistic attitude and does her best to be useful--and in fairness, she's not a bad shot with a shotgun. She also wields a New England accent like a weapon and in combination with an arsenal of rustic down-home platitudes, she can be lethal.

Given a choice between Team Jacob and Team Edward, she prefers team rotations.

=• Experience •= Cider has spent most of her employed time trying unsuccessfully to sneak into places, and getting caught and imprisoned. At the time of this writing, she's trapped in an Illuminati library, wondering how edible the books are. Still, she prefers this to the Orochi prison she was just in, where the only company she had was a zombie that she had to keep bludgeoning down ever time it would get up again.