Having run away only months after she turned eighteen with the express purpose of killing herself, the girl who would become Liz O'Connell did not expect to see the new year. A bookworm history nerd who believed in nothing, the very last thing she expected that frozen November night was to kill a man with an iron garden fairy post to save a family of Loup Garous. But that's exactly what happened; accosted by a hysterical child, she chose to take out the man threatening a family instead of the snarling woman. Literally snarling. With fangs.

With that as her introduction into the Hunting life, it's no surprise that she's one of the few human hunters to take on other humans in defence of the preternatural. Thanks to her choices that night, Liz earned the favour of the Wolfes, a sprawling, supernaturally inclined clan made up of Loup Garous and psychics (as well as outliers and baseliners) that claimed an old, nature-reclaimed plantation as their home (Liz has never asked the providence of the land--it is not her place--but man does she have some suspicions). Staying only long enough to be bullied into something approaching good health, Liz left the Wolfes as a free-lance hunter, bouncing around the midwest until she stumbled across a boy roughly her age, only a few years her junior, slowly starving to death in the dilapidated rancher she was hunting a poltergeist in. Paying the good deed done to her forward, Liz took the boy out to eat; over greasy hashbrowns and stacks of surprisingly good pancakes, he told her about how he'd met a girl in Tijuana on his spring break; told her about how it was like being black out drunk, how nothing felt real until the brain matter from his best (crush) friend sprayed him across the face, how he'd tried to save him but it was too late so he'd jumped in his best friend's car and ran. 'Sounds like a succubus,' Liz told him, not unkindly. 'I can tell you how to kill them, if you like. Or help you hunt her down. Whatever.'

It was the start of a beautiful friendship. They hunted together for the better part of a year before splitting up, Marc going on to meet Lyle and Liz going on to meet Carey and get fully enveloped into the Wolfe clan. During this time, Liz caught the attention of a very old and crafty god. For daring to use her name in rituals, Liz was marked as Her Warrior; when she died, everything that she ever was and everything she could ever have been would become forfeit, sacrificed so that the Morrígna could live on. Needless to say, this really cheesed her off.

Still jumping between names at this point, Liz didn't get saddled with 'Liz O'Connell' until she went on a hunt just outside Chicago. Something was submerging children in the lake; it was only a matter of time before someone ended up dead. Unfortunately for Liz, it wasn't just a Jenny Greenteeth--it was a whole pack, with a trio of Lamiae as their leaders. They broke her leg and left her in an old sunken cellar to die, throwing in a freshly-turned vampire as a guarantee. But Marie, being not a dick, had no desire to kill the delirious woman in the cellar with her and proceeded to save both their asses. Because the ID that Liz happened to be carrying on her was under the name 'Liz O'Connell', she became somewhat mode-locked into it (going around and systematically beheading and de-fanging each and every one of the Lamiae that had tried to kill her also had something to do with it). Marie took Liz into her home, where she still lives to this day. When Liz showed up with a babe in arms and missing six months of her life nearly a year later, Marie sighed, and got to setting up a crib.

Marie's apartment building, unbeknownst to her when she originally moved in, is something of a hotspot for the preternatural. The Owner's a ghost who's been dead since the 1930's, a yuki-onna's lived on the third floor for at least a decade by now, a swan maiden on the first, and the pub located in the basement shop across the street is a local meeting ground for it all. Liz finds herself happy there, living with magi and preternatural alike. Alec becomes fast friends with a girl on the third floor, an old soul who prefers to be called 'Sky', as well as an empath on the fourth named Jaime, and Liz herself falls in with the two magi nearly five years her junior on the fourth, spending many nights getting wasted and picking apart magical theory. It is a hoot.

In the spring of 2015, Liz gets a call from a contact in NYC. The various supernatural elements in New York--human and non-, baseliner and non- alike--were disappearing. Good folk, those who were just trying to live their lives in peace. Therese's sister had disappeared, taken right from her own doorstep after work. Time being of the essence, Liz left without back-up, confident in her own abilities to solve this mess. When Therese herself was snatched right under her nose, Liz re-evaluated the situation and found herself in way over her head. She called out for help, but it was too late: before anyone even got her message, she too was taken, her braided charms ripped from her scalp, her face broken in the slam of a trunk and her body shackled to a wall. For three days, she hung there, watching as a small family of hunters with a rivalling philosophy killed those she had tried to protect, watched as they tortured them in the name of efficiency. Finally, Kayla Greene, a cursed magus and apprentice-level hunter Liz had half-heartedly trained found her; before getting Liz down, Kayla and Nox found themselves in a confrontation with The Family.

Nox took a bullet to the brain-pan. Kayla opened her mouth and screamed.

When she came to, when she came back to herself, Liz still hung from the manacles on the wall; she and Kayla were the only solid things in the room still breathing. The other hunters, the bodies other than Nox's had all liquefied, turning into a sea of blood. Her vision red and tacky and ears still ringing from the abuse, Liz ripped her left hand through the manacle completely, her fragile skin giving under the pressure (it took weeks for bruises to stop forming from the brush of fabric against skin, for the coating of blood to leave her nose and throat). Dragging a catatonic Kayla (and Nox's corpse, locked tight in Kayla's grasp) with her, Liz ran right into Marc and Lyle just outside. They'd been only hours behind.

New York was the start of it all. The two largest families in the American hunting world, the Wolfes and the Croix-Rouge, always at odds due to their differing philosophies, each took offence at what had happened. The Wolfes due to the murder of thirty-three innocents and the abduction and torture of one of theirs, the Croix-Rouge due to the murder of their 'brothers'. And Liz was the lynch pin. As she was trying to get back to Chicago, back to her son, the Croix-Rouge struck again, this time catching not just her but Marc and Lyle in the crossfire. They abducted Lyle, intending on using him as leverage to force Liz to surrender herself. When Liz and Marc took understandable issue with that plan, they forced Lyle into a car to try and buy themselves safe passage. They didn't take what Lyle wanted into account. Taking them by surprise, he crashed the car, killing the four Family members. Unfortunately, not even his heightened durability and regeneration could save him; Lyle died in Marc's arms, his chest open and shattered as everything burned around them. To this day, neither Liz nor Marc can stand the smell of cooking flesh. Marc, upset and unreasonable, ditched Liz after one spectacularly bad night, leaving her stranded and injured over three hundred miles from home. They've since reconciled, but it took the better part of a year (and Marc shooting his mouth off in a bar and getting whammied with god-knew what) before they spoke again.

Despite the war that's starting to rip the country apart, life has actually started to settle down for Liz. She hasn't sustained anything worse than some deep bone bruises in weeks, Alec's managed to not get himself into any trouble, Marie's wedding is proceeding on schedule, and Marc's actually been somewhat sober (he's got a girlfriend and everything).

So of course, that's when she finds herself on an alien planet, an ocular implant shoved into her skull and no fucking clue where she is or what took her there.