Astrid Athena Smith
Astrid is one of two alphas of the Philadelphia Pack. She rose to her position for being an organizational mastermind. She's neurotically organized and detailed to the extreme. Her calendar is color coded. Her notebook uses every trick in the book from colors to lightlights to underlines and symboles to categorize, organize, sort, and pack more information into an already tiny amount of space. In regular day to day life, it's hard to find someone better organized.
Unfortunately, this comes at a bit of a cost. Astrid is neurotic about things being organized and doesn't cope well with disruptions. She has a perfect order, a place for everything and everything in its place. She has a time for this and a time for that. Things happening outside that schedule have caused her to become extremely irritable and short tempered. Her rigid system and thought process makes it very, very hard to rapidly accomodate change. She's a perfect administrator when times are good, and a raging tyrant when they aren't.
She takes on all this chaos to make life better for the pack, at the cost of her own wellbeing. Before she was bit, she was the big sister of her family, and their chief caretaker. Her parents were never home and she had 7 brothers and sisters who needed to be taken care of, driven to ballet, boy scouts, soccer practice, you name it. She took it on herself to take care of them. After she was bitten, the pack wolves pretty much became her adopted family, and got treated as her pups to an extent. The building chaos however, has takne its toll on her. There are to many things to plan for, too many things to worry about. Her mental health has deteriorated.
Physical Description
Astrid is a business professional and dresses accordingly. She often wears dressier clothes, business dresses and some suits with a slight fashionable flourish. She's known to have a fairly extensive wardrobe and a fair habbit of frequently acquiring new clothes for it. She aims to always present herself in the best looking light for her business work. In that line of work, she's all smiles to business partners and occasionally flaming rage when someone tells her a deal fell through.
Around the pack, she wears jeans and a cheap T-shirt. She's had to shift far too often while still dressed, torn far too many clothes. She has a few drawers just full of 'disposable' clothes because she doesn't expect them to last long. A fight or something will come up and she'll need something to wear.
As a wolf, she's a touch above average for the girls in the pack, coming in just over 8' tall. She's bigger than Daisy, better able to go one on one in a fight of straight, brute force. Years of training has helped her improve her fighting abilities, making her a decent adversary in a hand to hand battle. Her fur is a lighter brown with darker patches around her shoulders.
Mental characteristics
Astrid's life started out pretty well. She was born into a loving family and well cared for during those first few years. She was four when she got a little brother. Five when she got two sisters, twins. Seven when there came twin brothers. Nine when she got an adopted brother and sister. Her dad's best friend had died on deployment as the war in the Middle East started up, and her dad was the Godfather. Their mom drank her pain away, a little at a time shortly after his passing. There was nothing for her dad to do but care for the kids, a promise he'd made and one he'd keep.
The calm, loving atmosphere of her toddler years was replaced by absolute chaos. None of them got the attention they deserved from either parent. After the terrorist attacks, her Dad was forced to pull fourteen hour shifts on base. Her mom was forced into longer and longer hours at the base hospital. They were already treating soldiers sent home from the war. Some were being treated through the Veterans Administration. Others were active duty soldiers recovering from extensive, but not immediately lethal injuries. They were having surgery to remove shrapnel, losing limbs, and so on.
At first, young Astrid did her best to help Mom and Dad around the house. As she moved into her teenage years, she grew to be more and more a replacement for them. Her sweet sixteen was celebrated driving a hummer and a few days later followed up with her learners permit. She was chauffeuring her brothers and sisters to sports, ballet, and all before she even had her license. Illegal, sure, but her parents weren't available. It really is remarkable that she was never caught. She thinks the MP's turned a blind eye.
A little over 17 and she got bit. Her youngest sister had to do a walk in the woods and gather some random, unrecognized plant for them to identify in biology class. It was an Army base, it was assumed generally safe, and a parent would be going with them. The soldiers all knew the woods on and around base. There couldn't be anywhere safer. In principle, anyway. The reality was slightly different.
Astrid took her to some woods near a park and a playground, base housing was a halfmile down the road. There had been talk on base of a bear wandering close to the housing area, but she really wasn't worried. The car was right there, they weren't going deep in the woods. Bears were pretty easy to scare off with loud noise. She even had a pie pan or two in her backpack to make some noise. What she wasn't ready for was a werewolf.
The fight started out with her turning her back to find a man, trying to abduct her sister. Any argument of an Army base being safe was ended there. It wasn't safe. She charged on him, her sister fell, and she screamed for her to run. The man was unarmed, it was a fist fight. Astrid wasn't necessarily helpless, but fighting was not her field of expertise. She retreated, stepping back, just trying to distract him long enough for her sister to run, then she would run. Maybe she wasn't a fighter, but she was decent at running. Years of taking care of everyone without having the luxury of a car had paid off.
When she ran, he couldn't keep up. Not on two legs anyway. He couldn't afford witnesses. He shifted and came after her. She went down, torn to shreds. His only real mistake was assuming she was dead. He left her body there, while slowly the curse spread and healed her. Her sister's screams eventually got the MP's, the Military Police's attention. They found Astrid on the brink of death and rushed her to the base hospital. She had bruises from the brief fight with the man, but a later investigation refused to consider this anything more than a bear attack. It could have been a cover up. There's no way to know now.
Astrid was still in the hospital when the full moon came. She broke out that night, slipping out the door. Her first shift came in the woods, alone. By morning she was found, naked and curled up at the back door of her home. There were three more animal attacks that night. She isn't sure, even to this day, but she believes only two of them were her own doing. After the break out, the hospital put guards on her, eventually determined she needed mental care, and transfered her to an out of state hospital. At least by then, her siblings could mostly handle themselves.
A few transfers and break outs later, a doctor, Ben, with the Philadelphia Pack learned of her condition. He managed to discretely get her transferred to his care. A few years of work and they got her under control. She misses her family terribly, but they never call her. She's called them a few times, but it always seems they're eager to get her off the phone. They offered her no support when she needed it most and now? They've cut off contact for the most part.
Astrid has a GED and a Bachelors in Management. While she recovered with the pack, she managed a dual-enrollment program with her online schooling. She would take High School classes in the morning and college classes in the night, before transitioning her focus solely on college. The management courses all came easily to her. She's put it all to work running businesses for the pack and keeping all their finances in perfect shape. A few have pushed her to pursue a masters degree, but it seems pointless to her. She already has the knowledge and she has no intentions of working for an ordinary employer any time soon.
Astrid's childhood still haunts her. She never had a chance to really just be herself, never had time for hobbies or dating or interests of any kind. The past nearly 20 years has been nothing but one breathless sprint. She ran from thing to thing for her little brothers and sisters, then proceeded to do the same in the wolf pack. She's a person who almost isn't a person. She has her skill and talen, but there's nothing in her, about her, that is actually for her. Over the years, the pack has tried to get her to slow down, relax, and find out what she really likes, what she wants to truly do, but it's never worked. She's always running, and perhaps, always will be running, from one meaningless task to the next.
Astrid is potentially not as smart as she seems. She has incredibly well developed skills for processing, numbers, and organization at large, but that's it. She doesn't have applicable knowledge or much interest in it. She might know that Shakespear was great, but the magic in his words is completely lost on her. She might know that something is important, she might know why it's important, but not the how. The werewolves' silver-cure is important, she knows to use it, it saves lives, but she could never wrap her head around how it works. She sits at the center of complex webs where she can understand the politics of what's going on around her, but stands no chance of ever replacing any of her underlings. She's a beaurocrat to the death.
At the end of the day, Astrid probably has no true morals. She will do whatever it takes to protect and save the pack. In application, this can make her more willing to take someone out altogether rather than spare them. If negotiating will achieve the same goal as a more violent act, but take longer, she might go for the more violent act. What morals she seems to display, come from the pack. Through her connection to them, she can feel more of their emotional unease when she considers a drastic action. She can feel their reluctance and hesitance.
Probably her softest spot is when she encounters other wolves in a bad situation. She will consider adopting them, taking care of them. This plays a role in why she was gentler to
Ashlynn than to
Alex Winship. One was a wolf and the other wasn't. Alex was in need of something to eat and somewhere safe, he was perhaps even more compatible to the wolves' chatoic-good morality, but she didn't see him as anything but a threat to remove, immediately.
History
Following the events of the October Rebellion, Astrid was on a vacation from all matters of the pack. She's had minimal pack contact, though continued to operate and organize the pack's businesses. In her words, no one else within the pack would be capable of taking over without compromising drastically on their position. A management change would have the pack taking a financial stumble.
It wasn't exactly a happy spot for her. She attempted to escape to the usual pits of human misery: cheap bars. It wasn't as much for the booze as it was the atmosphere. A place with a depressed attitude, the absence of all joy, and so on. She didn't want the upbeat attitude of another bar. Didn't want the happy or the loud music.
In the process, she encountered Alex Winship. There was no good blood between Alex and the The Philadelphia Pack. He had previously invaded pack territory for food and been chased off. They had been content with him wandering and killing things in far-flung Centralia, but violating pack borders closer to home was a good way to get shot. And they did shoot at him. When it comes to the pack, Astrid had a policy of giving no ground. If you lose an inch, someone will take a mile.
Alex Winship spent his time at the bar digging under Astrid's skin. And then following her between the bars. She began to move towards more dangerous territory, intending to lead him where he couldn't possibly follow: The Lab. This however, didn't quite work out. He kept digging, she snapped, and stabbed him with silver.
Afterwards, Astrid decided to save him. The pack has a cure for silver poisoning, a chelation agent which will bind to the silver and extract it from the body via the kidneys. In Alex's case, the poisoning was extensive and would require an extended recovery period. It gave them time to start dating.
Nicknames & Petnames
Names for Astrid
Relationship Reasoning
There isn't a lot of logic to the relationship other than timing and random chance. Astrid is lonely, particularly with her separation from the pack. There is ample evidence to indicate she had isolation issues prior to her vacation from the other wolves. Having an injured Alex around has given her an outlet for some of the energy no longer going to the wolves and organizing the pack. It's also given her an opportunity for a relationship where she need not worry how someone will react to her lycanthrope nature or necessarily worry about beng hunted for such.
For Alex, she represents a relationship where he wouldn't be the sole person bearing the weight and doing the work. In his prior relationship with Rei, he was the one saving her, chasing her, working to make things better. Astrid is a sharp departure; self motivated, independent, and able to return gestures of affection. The farthest difference being Astrid is turning Alex away from eating humans, whereas Rei was ready to sacrifice Alex's sanity to grow his strength further through cannibalism.
Overall the relationship has benefitted Alex the most between them. The amount of stability has allowed him to slowly begin to work back into a civil lifestyle rather than feral. Alex remains unfriendly and confrontational, but strikes out far less. He shows capabilities in showing compassion to others, and gives in to his guilt rather than enjoy the emotional destruction he may have caused. Humans will remain a struggle for him to be around, but he's doing much better. This is in part of Astrid becoming his anchor not just for his hunger but his aggression as well. Admittedly, Alex feels just as protected by her as he ensures she's protected by him, something lacking from his relationship with Rei. The mutual sense of protection aligns more with Alex's wendigo background and takes off a ton of stress at the same time.
All of this hasn't gone unnoticed by Alex, and has turned him fiercely loyal and protective. If anyone can twist his arm, it's Astrid.
Commonalities & Shared Interests
Both enjoy movie nights. The two also like to go on runs through the woods.
Legal Status
Married
Former Girlfriend (Trivial)
Former Boyfriend (Trivial)
History
Archy and Astrid both rose rapidly in the ranks of the pack following the attempt of their former Alpha to get the entire pack killed. In the power-void that followed, the pack gravitated to the two who did the most: Archy in uncovering and fighting the Alpha, Astrid in helping to organize the pack. Combined with the death of several older members of the pack in the failed self-destruction, they were the most obvious choice to lean towards.
At the time, there was an expectation that the leaders of the pack would be a mated pair. It can't be said that they weren't interested in each other, but their lifestyles didn't mesh. At the time, Archy was wild and free, cut loose from the ties of family and overcoming a great many fears. Astrid was constrained and clinging to the pack more than ever, having nearly lost them. One wanted to be more active in the world, a hero. One wanted to take the pack deeper underground for fear of what may happen next.
Ultimately, they were not compatible in that way. Their differing views of the world ultimately poisoned any chance for a relationship to last between them. As it stands, they're not entirely friendly towards each other. Archy has been separated from the pack to ensure any attention he gets doesn't lead a threat to the others. Astrid has given him what support she can, in a logistics sense. What lies between them now, is a minefield of complexity.
Commonalities & Shared Interests
They're both werewolves with a fondness for reading, movies, games, and niche entertainment. Both love to cook and prefer an evening quietly sitting together doing something. Both share some interest in music, country and rock.
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