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Determined, ambitious, and somewhat unscrupulous when it comes to advancing her own aims, Emily inherits her political acumen from her mother and her sense of humour from her father, which makes it somewhat unfortunate that her father was the politician in the family. She knows exactly what she wants from life and isn't shy in how she goes about getting it, prepared to formulate all sorts of bold strategies and to carry them through if necessary. She is calculating by nature, ready to weight up the pros and cons of any decision before taking it; certainly, she is a proponent of the idea that one should look before one leaps, but having conducted a thorough survey of possibilities, she will not hesitate to make major decisions or life choices, even where they involve an almost complete change to her way of living. Concealment and manipulation are innate to her personality; making friends is something that she does easily but usually more scientifically than emotionally, on the basis of what they can offer her or perhaps simply because it makes her life easier to be friendly with someone than it does to be an enemy to them.


An only child, Emily grew up very close to her parents, frequently sitting in a corner of the office while one or the other of them worked, or listening to them explaining the complexities of their day's work over dinner, and so perhaps it was no surprise that she grew into a serious girl, her eyes always to the future and more occupied with what she would do when she left school for good than she was with what she would do when she got home that evening. It was a trait which might have meant that she had some trouble in making friends had she not been a skilled actress even then; she actively worked to engage with the people around her, which won her both friends and enemies in the usual course of things and by the time that she found herself in high school, she was one of the key characters in her year. All was going according to plan, until suddenly, all plans came off the rails.

At the time, she didn't really understand quite what was going on. Of course she read the newspaper articles, the website reports- though she had to do both away from home since her parents were doing their best to pretend that none of it was happening- but frankly, none of them seemed to know what was happening either; they simply kept repeating the few facts that they did know, and at such length that Emily sometimes felt like screaming as she read them. All that she really knew was that her father had lost his job, had lost the benefits which he had enjoyed for so many years, had been lucky not to be prosecuted for some obscure crime that not even he fully understood. It wasn't until much later, when Emily had gained her degrees in law and media studies, when her father had long since got himself appointed to a foreign posting in the Department of State, that she fully understood what had been going on, and even that was by dint of breaking into the filing cabinet he had left behind.

It made for interesting reading, there was no doubt about that. The schemes in which her father had become embroiled were complex and yet solid, well thought through; there should have been no possibility of anything going wrong. But go wrong they clearly had, and it took Emily many hours of research to discover why- but she realised, in the end, that she could lay the blame squarely at the feet of her dearly beloved uncle; a man who had made a critical mistake and had then sacrificed his own brother in order to save his skin.

Had she not been personally involved, Emily would probably have admired it as a masterly piece of work. But such theorising was irrelevant; she was personally involved, and that being the case, she couldn't admire it. Instead, she resented it; she resented the man for what he had done, perhaps for being more competent in doing it than her own father, but irrespective of that, she had decided that something would have to be done, and she would have to do it.

Quite what it was going to be, she had not yet decided, but it was apparent that being in the right city would be the right place to start, and so she packed up her things, put in her application to work in the Lethford city government's media department, and sent her uncle an email begging his hospitality. It would form a good basis to start from.