the case files of nancy drew

sideblog to S1EUTH.

[kestrelfiles]

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙳𝙰𝚄𝙶𝙷𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝙾𝙵 𝙹𝚄𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙲𝙴 — PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS VERSE.

raised by her lawyer father in a small town in illinois, nancy didn't learn the truth about her maternal lineage until the age of thirteen, when it was revealed to her by a psychic that her mother was a goddess. nancy dismissed this as silly superstition, a gag or a con by the supposed fortune teller, and gave it no thought until a series of unexplainable events led to her father confessing the truth to her. due to his worry for her safety, nancy's father chose to send her to camp half-blood, hoping to protect her until something could be done about the threats against her now that her parentage was known to her.

MORE INFORMATION PENDING ...

[kestrelfiles]

𝙽𝙴𝚆 𝙵𝙴𝙰𝚁 𝚄𝙽𝙻𝙾𝙲𝙺𝙴𝙳 — THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES VERSE.

the invitation had said she was selected for her inquisitive nature and knack for getting out of sticky situations. nancy wasn't sure what pool of candidates the institute had found her in, but the allure of the unknown had never been easy to ignore for the young sleuth. that was how she found herself traveling to london, a one way ticket in one hand with the magnus institute's address in the other, no idea what she was walking herself into.

it wasn't her first internship... hell, it wasn't even the first where she had almost died. it was, however, the first time she'd found herself locked in a filing room with three other people, in her first week no less, hiding from an onslaught of insects that had come from the walls... and, she would come to find out, there was a very good reason for the fear and terror in her new coworkers.

the strange and unusual didn't stop there as nancy finds herself entrenched in a battle between her determination and fear itself, plagued by the avatar of the vast for getting in its way and desired by the hunt to fulfill it's mission. for the first time in her life, she realizes she might actually be in over her head.

[kestrelfiles]

𝙱𝙰𝙻𝙳𝚄𝚁'𝚂 𝙶𝙰𝚃𝙴 𝟹 — 𝘛𝘏𝘌 𝘐𝘕𝘍𝘌𝘊𝘛𝘌𝘋 𝘙𝘖𝘎𝘜𝘌.

RACE: half (wood) elf CLASS: gloom stalker ranger (8), thief rogue (4) BACKGROUND: noble LANGUAGES: common, thieves cant, elvish ALIGNMENT: true neutral

BIOGRAPHY:

raised within the city, nancy was well known — not only for her human father's noble status, but also for her elven mother's criminal past. a part of the underground thieves' guild that lurked beneath the city's surface, kate was revered by many within the guild and wanted by those outside of it until her untimely and suspicious death. this tragedy set her daughter on a path that, while much like her mother, was destined to get her into trouble.

trouble came in a different way, however, when nancy found herself abducted by a nautiloid attacking the city. within the ship, she found herself flying through the hells, fighting for survival against mindflayers and cambions alike, and was forced to make an alliances to escape, before crash landing the ship back on her world and miraculously surviving the ordeal.

now she finds herself with a whole group of strange allies, a parasite worming its way into her brain, and a single mission — understand what's happened to her and why, before the parasite takes hold and changes her forever.

[kestrelfiles]

𝘍𝘐𝘓𝘌 #002 — 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚂𝙸𝙻𝙴𝙽𝚃 𝚂𝙿𝚈, 𝙺𝙰𝚃𝙴 𝙳𝚁𝙴𝚆

while years late in being received and covered in the scribblings and notes of a potential-terrorist, the letter that nancy finds in scotland is invaluable to her from the minute she realizes what it is. her mother’s handwriting — one of the few things that nancy can remember about her — stands out to her as if it’d been written with a neon pen; a flashing signal of something nancy had so desperately been yearning for, especially in light of the notes and letters she’d uncovered that kate had sent to other people during her final days.

“be good. be a little bad. be who you are.”

the advice kate offers in the letter, while as tongue-in-cheek as usual for the elder drew, gives a good picture of how similar the two women are, even after years of kate being gone. all throughout her trip, nancy is shown more and more how she and kate possess the same characteristics, skill sets, and ideals, but it isn’t until nancy reads the letter that she feels the connection at last.

the words are endearing, even if they are a joke on nancy and her horse sweater and childhood dorkiness, because they’re one more way that kate gives nancy another chance to relate to her. the more they shared, the easier it becomes for nancy to hold kate closer in her heart and mind, so she doesn’t lose more of her mother than she already has.

kate put everything she could into the letter, trying to say a lifetime’s worth of love and advice and apology in just a few pages. for nancy, it would never be enough, but the things kate got to say, that nancy had never heard before, make her proud to be kate’s daughter, proud to be herself, and more determined than ever before to live up to kate’s name. it might not have made up for everything, but it was more than enough of a start.

[kestrelfiles]

𝘍𝘐𝘓𝘌 #001 — 𝙿𝙷𝚈𝚂𝙸𝙲𝙰𝙻 𝚃𝚁𝙰𝚄𝙼𝙰 + 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝚁𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙻𝙾𝚂𝚂.

while nancy might be incredibly talented in her field, especially for an amateur, she hasn’t always had a flawless track record. no matter the case, she’s always managed to find herself in some kind of danger. some people will go to any lengths to stop her, other times she’s pushed too far and landed herself in trouble. regardless, she’s seen her fair share of hospitals and had enough concussions and near-misses to see the ramifications of her actions at a very young age.

she couldn’t pinpoint a single event, in all honesty. of course, the first time nancy had been hit hard enough to rupture her eardrum would have been a good guess as to when things started to go downhill for her hearing. it seemed after that, each hit to the head and every explosion in her vicinity only effected her that much more, decreasing her ability to hear to the point of being unable to keep up with normal conversation. she was given her first set of hearing aids at the age of twenty, after a case gone wrong where nancy didn’t hear the culprit escaping ten feet behind her. a seemingly small thing, but bothersome enough that she knew she had to make a change.

medically speaking, the degrees of hearing loss vary between her two ears. while her left ear experiences only moderately severe hearing loss — around 50 dB — her right hear experiences a far more profound loss at nearly 70 dB. with hearing loss that severe and so much damage to her inner ear and ear drum, nancy wears hearing aids, especially when she’s working. with the hearing aids in, she’s able to function as if she has minimal hearing loss, though things like wind noise and high frequencies can cause issues with the devices. even without them, nancy becomes proficient at reading lips in one-on-one conversation. she doesn’t let the loss slow her down, but it does take time to adjust, and she rarely speaks of the hearing aids to anyone she works with, not wanting anyone to think she was less than capable.

[kestrelfiles]

𝙳𝚁𝙴𝚆'𝚂 𝙿𝚁𝙸𝚅𝙰𝚃𝙴 𝙸𝙽𝚅𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙶𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝙰𝙶𝙴𝙽𝙲𝚈 —

all grown up and beyond her days of being dismissed as a wide-eyed, naive youth, nancy has found success as a private detective. set up in a little office, a building purchased all on her own in new york city, the sleuth has made a name for herself in the city as the type of woman who can get answers and uncover the truth — no matter how dirty the work. and while she grows her notoriety, she also evolves her career in the underground aspects of the world. cathedral continues to be an important ally and revenant is always in her sights, even if her day job keeps her busy and focused in other places. that’s okay with nancy.  slow and steady were perfectly acceptable ways to win the race, in her mind.

[kestrelfiles]

𝐀 𝐏𝐄𝐄𝐊 𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐈𝐃𝐄 — 𝟷𝟿𝟹𝟶 𝙱𝙴𝙽𝚂𝙾𝙽 𝚁𝙾𝙰𝙳 - 𝚁𝙸𝚅𝙴𝚁 𝙷𝙴𝙸𝙶𝙷𝚃𝚂, 𝙸𝙻.

the drew residence is one of the oldest homes in river heights; passed down generationally from one drew to another, it became carson's when his parents finally passed in his early twenties — only a handful of years before nancy was born.

a bit on the old fashioned side in some ways, carson was hard-pressed to part with his parents things. it became so that the house felt like a grab-bag of lives already lived; the armchair his mother loved still sat by the stairs where their house phone went mostly ignored, but the kitchen had brand new appliances every decade. some of the portraits were older than certain rooms in the house while others were a clear snapshot of the nineties and nancy's youth. let it not be said that the drew house did not have a life of it's own.

nancy's bedroom was yet another room that some would say stayed a bit outdated — but they'd quickly find that that had nothing to do with antiquity and everything to do with her style, or lack thereof. maybe in her adolescence, it had seemed more childlike; a doll house where her desk used to be, toys scattered around, books in every nook and cranny... but now the books she read were neatly on the shelves, her desk was a little packed but always tidy, and her bed stayed made as she spent less and less time at home and more and more time on the road for cases.

𝐁𝐎𝐍𝐔𝐒 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓: 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙰𝚃𝚃𝙸𝙲.

if you pull out the small staircase leading to the cramped third floor of the drew residence, that is where you'll find the truth behind the detective living just below. stacks of books and files, photos and maps and red string dotting the walls, a desk overflowing with various paperworks on her many cases... the attic became nancy's personal office after her mother's death. it became a room of solace, somewhere to run and hide, and eventually where she would work out the details of a case. by the time she opened drew's detective agency in river heights proper, most of the things up there had started to collect dust, but no one living in the residence ever considered packing any of it away. after all, that was her legacy waiting upstairs.

[kestrelfiles]

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙸𝙽𝚀𝚄𝙸𝚂𝙸𝚃𝙸𝚅𝙴 𝚁𝙾𝙶𝚄𝙴 — 

PLACE OF BIRTH: yrrosa, in the zemni fields RACE: half elf CLASS: rogue (7) / ranger (3) COMPANION: a black dog (unidentified species) named togo ALIGNMENT: true neutral

LANGUAGES SPOKEN: common, marquesian, elvish, & thieves’ cant PROFICENCIES: thieves’ tools, cartographers’ tools, perception, & persuasion EXPERTISE: deception +9, investigation +11, sleight of hand +8 SPELL LIST: alarm (1st level), hunter’s mark (1st level), longstrider (1st level)

born into the hub of the myriad - a smuggling company being protected by the town’s leadership - nancy had few choices about what to do with her life. the zemni fields offered little besides farm life or a life of crime... but nancy’s parents were originally of noble status. they upheld justice in their own ways and believed that yrrosa could become a home to be proud of. 

instilling these lesson into their daughter from a young age, nancy grew to have a very defined sense of right versus wrong, and the intelligence and skills to put those believes into play. she quickly made herself a thorn in the myriad’s side, thwarting smuggling operation, uncovering identities, and created enough of a mess that, by the time she was approaching adulthood, she had a target on her back. 

with little to do but hide or die in her own home, nancy took to the road. there was a whole world outside of the dwendalian empire, outside of the continent she was born on, and she’d be damned if smugglers stopped her from seeing it all by taking her out young. 

she could see the world, make new acquaintances, and... maybe one day she’d be strong enough to turn her home into something her parents would be proud of.

[kestrelfiles]

𝙶𝙾𝚃𝙷𝙰𝙼 𝙲𝙸𝚃𝚈 —

growing up on the streets of gotham gave nancy an edge she might not have gotten elsewhere, and a habit of getting into business that required that edge to keep her alive. in a city full of vigilantes and villains, she's interested herself in enough problems to have gained a small amount of notoriety — to the heroes, she's a nuisance, but to the villains, she's a problem.

[kestrelfiles]

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚁𝙴𝚅𝙴𝙽𝙰𝙽𝚃 𝙵𝙸𝙻𝙴𝚂 —

it takes years for nancy to learn that, sometimes, when you make an enemy, that enemy does not just go quietly…

it’s been seven years since nancy laid her father to rest. seven years since she watched her boyfriend die, since the love of her life vanished without a trace, since her best friend was taken and killed for her ‘crimes’. seven years since loss permeated nancy’s life so thoroughly that she was run from her own home in river heights, just in the hopes of sparing one more life.

revenant picked her family apart bit by bit, hacking away relentlessly. her father, ned, bess... she’d always known her meddlesome ways would come with costs but, young and naive as she had been, nancy never realized what she was involving herself in until it was too late. but the question remains;

what can revenant do to an enemy with nothing left to lose?

[kestrelfiles]

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙰𝙼𝙰𝚃𝙴𝚄𝚁 𝚂𝙻𝙴𝚄𝚃𝙷 — 

she’s come a long way from high school mysteries and traveled across dozens of countries to learn all the things that brought her to a case she never thought she’d solve; the truth of her mother’s death.

what she thought had been merely an accident turned out to be so much more nefarious, revealing secrets kept by both of her parents, family friends she never knew existed, and a secret government agency that knew far more about nancy than nancy had ever known about them. with cathedral at her back, and revenant in her way, nancy unlocked more than just the truth —

she finds a whole slew of new questions that need answers.