LEHANE, Faith

• Improved Strength & Endurance: Faith is strong enough to lift and throw cars, punch through metal and duel vampires and most demons with little effort. It also takes a lot for her to get hurt – her bones and muscles are stronger, so she doesn’t bruise or break easily.
  
  
• Improved Speed & Agility: Faith can run far and fast without tiring, and can hold the speed of a top level Olympian athlete. She can also jump two storeys from a standing position, and can land safely from such a height as well. Her dexterity is so fine tuned that she can dodge bullets and arrows, from a point blank range if she is concentrating.
  
  
• Healing Factor: Faith has a low level healing factor that clots her blood quicker. This means that she recovers from wounds and breaks twice as fast as the normal human. She is not impervious to having her blood drained, however (and it is said that the blood of a slayer is like ambrosia for vampires), and she could still bleed out if a wound was severe enough. She does not get sick very often.
  
  
• Prophetic Dreams: Like many slayers, Faith has prophetic dreams. However, they tend to come in sensations rather than actual images, and they can be rather random and vague. She also has no way of telling how far into the future the event will happen.
  
  
• Improved Senses: Faith’s senses are naturally better than most humans. After years of training, she can now fight with her vision obscured, relying on her other senses to tell her where her enemy is and how they intend to attack her.

Faith stands at a fairly average five feet and seven inches tall, and compliments this height with a weight of one hundred and forty pounds. Most of this is muscle, though she retains her feminine curves.

Her skin is tan, partly from her genetics and partly because of her love of being in the great outdoors. It is marked with some scars – most significantly, one in her abdomen from being gutted with her own knife, and a matching pair of ragged circles on her neck from a vampire bite. She also has the Mark of Kakistos tattooed on the bicep of her right arm.

She keeps her dark hair long, though ties it up if it’s really getting in the way. She is not girl-next-door or model pretty, but she exudes a raw, primal sort of beauty. Faith is untamed and feral, and this shows in her body language – chin tilted up in defiance against the world, a mischievous, wild spark in her eye.

Faith’s typical style is not dissimilar to that of a punk or biker. She favours tank tops and tees that flatter her figure. She shows a definite preference towards bold, eye-catching colours. With this, she wears jeans or leggings and ass-kicking boots. She also loves leather jackets, within which she hides a huge assortment of stakes and small knives. In fact, any kind of jacket will do her just fine. She quite likes belts as well.

She wears an assortment of holsters and sheathes on her person. Around her waist, she will normally wear a ‘utility belt’ of sorts, where she keeps knives and stakes. She has a shoulder harness that straps over both shoulders and diagonally across her front and back – here, she keeps either a longer knife against her chest or her crossbow and quiver on her back. Now in Aldeon, she also keeps a sheath for a shortsword on her hip.

Faith also wears a silver crucifix around her neck that has been blessed by a priest, as a last resort against any vampires who happen to get close enough to her neck where it might actually become an issue.

• Living fast
  
• Dangerous men
  
• Killing vampires and demons
  
• The idea of a family
  
• Angel
  
• Freedom
  
• Fighting

• Most demons and vampires
  
• Cowards and idiots
  
• Emotional intimacy
  
• Being confined
  
• People talking down to her
  
• People who think they’re better than everyone else
  
• Her past ‘exploits’

• Physical Strength ~ Physically, Faith is extremely strong. She is also well trained, and the two together make a deadly combination. When she fights, she is very sure-footed, which means she can focus her power where she most needs it very easily. It also takes a lot to wear her down in most cases, as she can withstand quite a battering.
  
  
• Decisive/Good Tactician ~ Faith isn’t afraid to make tough decisions or to take the mantle of being a leader. She’s a bit of a lone wolf usually, but if someone desperately needs her help or needs her to take charge of something, she’s more than up to the task. She has co-ordinated attacks before, and she could do it again without much trouble.
  
  
• Quick Learner ~ Faith picks up new skills quickly. She is a gifted fighter because of this, as she can quickly adapt her strategies in a split second to deal with her opponents’ attacks. She is also fairly unpredictable, which makes her a good person to have on your side in a fight.
  
  
• Unshakeable ~ It is very difficult to scare or startle Faith. She has years and years of experience, which means she can keep a cool head in most situations. Even if she is shaken, she is very good at hiding it so her enemies can’t see when they have the upper hand.

• Grey Morality ~ Faith is decidedly undecided on where she lies in the grand scheme of things. Generally, she does good things, but she’s hardly a paragon of the light; if the price is right, Faith’s loyalties are available to anybody. She is ultimately selfish, and won’t do something if it holds no interest or gain for her.
  
  
• Untrusting ~ Thanks to years of being messed around by people, Faith doesn’t trust easily and treats most people with flippant disdain, which makes it hard for people to get close to her and for her to find allies when she needs them.
  
  
• Lone Wolf ~ Faith mostly works alone. She doesn’t really know how to get on with people, as she lives with the constant fear of being stabbed in the back by those she calls her friends and companions. This does bring up the issue that she is so independent that unless she was at death’s door, she wouldn’t call someone for help.
  
  
• Holds Grudges ~ Faith has been known to hold grudges for years against people if they have wronged her and she feels it isn’t the best time to exact vengeance. She is also always prepared for those who might hurt her, and has contingency plans for everything, which isn’t actually a nice way to live.
  
  
• Needs a Purpose ~ Faith’s biggest secret desire is to be a part of something or to belong, and this has caused her to be used in the past several times – notably by Gwendolyn Post and the Mayor. If someone appeals to this side of her and succeeds, they could essentially do what they wanted with her.

• Nicknames ~ Faith gives nicknames to almost everybody she meets, even if their name is already quite short. It’s just her way of being familiar with someone, though they don’t always like the names she assigns to them.
  
  
• Phrases ~ Faith’s upbringing means that she will often come out with phrases or analogies that confuse other people or just don’t really make all that much sense.

• Small spaces ~ Not really a fear, but Faith isn’t a huge fan of being confined.
  
  
• Her past ~ Faith has done a lot of things that she isn’t proud of, and she’s pretty sure that some day they’re going to come back and bite her in the ass.
  
  
• Betrayal ~ No matter who she is with, how long she has known someone, or how close she is to someone, Faith is privately afraid that everyone she knows will turn on her at some point.
  

• Survive ~ Faith’s main prerogative is staying alive, and if that continues to happen, she will be pretty grateful
  
  
• Redemption ~ Perhaps because she has done so much bad in her life, Faith aches to be accepted and in that, to be redeemed.

What if, instead of growing up in a loving family environment, a Slayer were born to abusive, unstable parents?
This would be Faith. Where Buffy had the strength of her family and friends to fall back upon, as a child, Faith had nothing, and this shaped her later personality. Faith has a huge distrust of most people – specifically authority figures and those who are older and have more control than she does. She has never been able to deal with her upbringing, and instead chooses to lash out against those she fears might hurt her in some way – once upon a time, she even claimed to have an addiction to causing pain, though this is no longer a real issue.

Faith is something of a hedonist – she enjoys drinking, partying, and having sex. She is not averse to taking drugs, fighting or joyriding. She lives life to the fullest, and her general disregard for her own life means that she will do dangerous things just for the thrill of it. She is ultimately a selfish person, who looks out only for herself. She is impulsive and reckless, often leaping head first into danger before she assesses a situation, or even if she has done it, overestimating her capabilities and believing she can take on more people than she is actually able.

She comes off as quite promiscuous, due to her inability to form attachments or trust men completely. She does not really understand the intimacy and emotion associated with sex, and is often confused if people attempt to reach out to her after they have done the deed. This has changed somewhat lately, with her slowly coming to understand the connections people have to each other – this is all thanks to Angel. Though she hasn’t been physically intimate with him, he is one of the only people she trusts completely.

Faith is quite blunt with everybody, and often shortens peoples’ names if she feels they are too stupid to say fully – Buffy, for example, is just ‘B’ in her head. Though she has a lot of street sense, she occasionally shows her lack of a real stable education in her lack of understanding when it comes to certain complex words and large vocabularies. It doesn’t really trouble her; Faith is very good at being laid back and unbothered by the world in general, though her hot temper sometimes comes to the fore and contradicts this.

When Faith is close to someone and manages to open up to them, they see a completely different side to her. She is protective and exceedingly loyal – she will literally fight someone to the death to defend a person she loves. She is also very fun to be around, and warm to those she likes – Faith’s deepest desire is to belong in a family and to be valued, and if someone were to work hard with her and give her that opportunity, she would be eternally grateful to them.

Though Faith projects a face of being completely cool with herself and happy with who she is, she hides her insecurities and guilt behind a strong façade. She believes that she will always be atoning for her crimes, and she accepts it when bad things happen to her – no matter how awful life is, she sees it as karma. She occasionally gets very down when things seem to be too much for her, and it takes a lot to break her out of this funk of isolation and bitterness.

Faith is well versed in the use of most medieval weaponry, though she favours shortswords and crossbows. She can also use longbows, shortbows, staves, polearms (such as halberds), daggers, longswords and maces or flails. She usually keeps a stake or two on her person, just out of habit. She keeps a sheath on her hip for her sword, and a case on her back for her crossbow.

Faith was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to an alcoholic mother and an abusive father. From her birth, her mother essentially ignored her existence, and her father was physically very harsh towards Faith. She had few friends in the world, and instead of seeking company outside; she played with her imaginary friend, Alex. Her father was imprisoned when she was four years old for murder.

Though Faith would not be activated as a Slayer for many years, her prophetic dreams manifested when she was just a teenager. She would often envision herself and Alex fleeing from a group of women, and then she would be tortured by the leader of the women, a man named ‘The Father’. Though this never came to pass in the real world, Faith was actually revisiting the life of a Slayer in Ancient Greece called Artemia, and Alex had the place of her daughter, Alexandra.

Faith ran away from home many times, often living alone or in groups of runaways. She was eventually suspended from high school after one too many fights, and discovered her mother had also been arrested (though she didn’t know why). Following this, her guidance counsellor sent her to a foster home. The home was owned by Mr and Mrs Jones, who had a secret – their vampire son, Robert, was in their attic, and they kept him happy by feeding misbehaving foster children to him. This was to be Faith’s end; only she was able to kill him before he could attack her – this was her first encounter with a vampire.

She escaped the foster home and found that her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Gable, were out of prison. At his insistence, her mother was working as a prostitute, and Faith was driven into a blinding rage, upon which she smashed Gable’s head against concrete. The police arrived on the scene almost before the fight had begun, and managed to restrain Faith. Because she was still quite young, she was sent to the Belmont Centre – a mental institution – where she was kept under observation. After a few months, she was released into the care of a Professor Diana Dormer.

Dormer began to tutor Faith in martial arts and weapon training. Unbeknownst to Faith, Dormer was a Watcher, one of the people assigned to Slayers to guide and study them. Faith had been marked as a potential Slayer from birth, but she did not actually come into her true calling until the death of Kendra Young. Kendra herself had been a replacement for Buffy Summers, who had died very briefly the previous summer, but had been revived thanks to CPR.

She stayed in Boston, performing her Slayer duties there for several months. Her powers came to her in full – she was stronger, faster, more durable and more aware of the world around her. Around this time, she also began to have internal conflicts, which manifested in her dreams. This eventually came to her confronting and fighting Alex, and being possessed by the spirit of Artemia, who sought revenge on The Father for killing Alexandra millennia previously. Thanks to Dormer and another friend, Artemia was successfully removed from Faith’s body.

Unknown to any of them, however, The Father still existed. His real name was Kakistos, and he was a vampire so old that his feet were cloven like those of a goat. He tracked Faith down and kidnapped Dormer to bait the slayer into finding him. When Faith arrived, Kakistos ripped Dormer clean in half. Blazing with vicious rage, Faith slew dozens of Kakistos’ minions, but was unable to deal a finishing blow to the old vampire – she managed to cleave his face in half, leaving him with a permanent scar across his eye.

Knowing that she could not defeat Kakistos alone, and now without her Watcher, Faith left Boston for Sunnydale, California – the site of one of the Hellmouths (a portal from Earth to a demonic dimension). It was here she met Buffy Summers, who would become her longtime rival and oftentimes an enemy.

The two of them had very different views on life; Buffy was methodical, a strategic Slayer. Faith was wild and reckless, running into trouble before she really knew what was going on. Despite their obvious differences, the two of them did manage to connect over the dusting of Kakistos, which served as closure for Faith. She was also aided by Buffy’s own Watcher, Giles, who took well to having two Slayers under his care.

From day one in Sunnydale, however, Faith had felt isolated and unable to trust anyone. Buffy nor any of her friends really trusted her either – they saw her as a wild card. This was heightened further when Gwendolyn Post, a woman who posed as Faith’s new Watcher, arrived in Sunnydale. Under the pretext of helping Faith progress, she secretly sought the Glove of Myhnegon, a powerful and magical gauntlet. Whilst protecting Gwendolyn, Faith battled Buffy’s … boyfriend … Angel, and had a one on one fight with Buffy. Gwendolyn turned out to be a fraud, and was killed.

Again thrown on the tracks by someone, Faith decided to show Buffy how to have some fun. She encouraged her to skip school so that the two of them could lure vampires out of their nests in broad daylight, took her dancing at the Bronze (the local club) and stealing weapons from a sports store. This adventure took a huge turn when Faith accidentally killed the deputy mayor, believing him to be a vampire. She immediately went into denial for her actions, unable to comprehend what she had done.

After Giles confronted the two of them about it, Faith lied and told him that Buffy had killed the deputy mayor. Giles knew this to be false instantly – he followed along with her lie, however, to prevent her from withdrawing even further to herself. Disgruntled with the lack of action against Faith – now a murderer – Buffy sent one of her friends, Xander, to Faith’s motel room to convince her to turn herself in. Things quickly turned violent, and were only broken up by Angel, who took Faith to his home.

Angel, a vampire with a soul, knew what it was like to kill someone. He attempted to get through to Faith and almost succeeded, only for them to be rudely interrupted by Wesley Wyndham-Pryce, the Watcher who had replaced Giles after the latter’s insolence towards the Council of Watchers. He had brought what was basically a SWAT team with him. Faith managed to escape from him, but with nowhere else to turn and feeling completely alone in the world, she secretly went to Mayor Wilkins, who was in actual fact, evil. She acted as a double agent; whilst she worked as the Mayor’s right hand, she also fell back in with the Scoobies (Buffy’s friends), pretending to be repentant.

During this time, she gave the Mayor information about Buffy’s actions and the vampire activity. Buffy, Giles and Angel soon grew suspicious of her, and her true alliance was revealed. Following this, Faith descended further into the dark, slowly developing a mental illness and turning wilder with each step. She had lost the Scoobies and Buffy entirely – Buffy, the only person in the world who could really relate to her. The Mayor reached out to her in this period, becoming a friend and a father figure – two things that she had never really had.

In her allegiance with the Mayor, Faith killed multiple times, and kidnapped Buffy’s best friend, Willow Rosenberg. The Mayor intended to perform a ceremony known as the Ascension, whereupon he would become a true demon. He couldn’t do it with Buffy in the way, however, so he gifted Faith with a precious and rare knife, and an arrow that was dipped in a poison made specifically to kill vampires. To distract Buffy, Faith shot Angel with the arrow. The only thing that could save him was the blood of a Slayer.

Buffy came to Faith’s home, intent on killing her archenemy to save Angel. The two of them had an enormous fight, and though Buffy was unable to kill Faith, she stabbed her in the gut with the knife the Mayor had given her. Faith escaped the battle by leaping off the roof of the apartment building and into the bed of a passing truck. However, the fight left Faith in a coma that doctors said she would never awaken from.

‘Never’ lasted about nine months.

After waking up, Faith tracked Buffy to UC Sunnydale, where she was disgusted to learn of Buffy’s real motives behind gutting her – sacrificing her for Angel. And even more when she found out that Buffy wasn’t even dating Angel anymore – she had quite happily moved on to a college senior, Riley Finn. She flipped out when she discovered that the Mayor was dead, and lashed out at Buffy before running off when Willow called the police. She went to Buffy’s house, confronting her mother and taking her hostage.


When Buffy arrived, Faith used a device that had been a gift from Mayor Wilkins before his death. It switched her mind into Buffy’s body, and vice versa. Buffy, in Faith’s body, was captured by the Watcher’s Council, whilst Faith plotted to leave America. She kept up the appearance of being Buffy so that the Scoobies wouldn’t realise anything was wrong, but Tara (Willow’s lover), was still suspicious. She flirted with Spike the vampire, slept with Riley and hung out with the Scoobies. For the first time in her life, Faith knew what it was like to have something you were scared to lose. And it was all fake.

Perhaps Buffy’s body had an effect on her, for Faith soon found her desires torn between leaving the country and saving a group of people who had been taken hostage by vampires in a church. She opted for the latter, but halfway through the fight, Buffy arrived. The two of them duked it out, with Faith screaming at her body, revealing her self-hatred and anger.

Tara and Willow managed to undo the body swap, and Faith fled Sunnydale, jumping aboard a freight train on it’s way to Los Angeles. When she reached L.A., she continued to fight and kill demons and vampires, stealing from humans and even murdering them. She was soon approached by the evil law firm, Wolfram and Hart, who hired the rogue slayer to hunt down and kill Angel, who was now living in L.A. and running a private detective agency called Angel Investigations. He had been joined by the ex-Watcher Wesley, and Cordelia, a girl who went to Sunnydale High with Buffy.

To get his attention, Faith captured and tortured Wesley. He soon came to find his missing associate, and the two of them fought; Faith pushed him into a corner, though could not get him to fully submit as he acted completely defensively, not wanting to hurt her. By the end of the fight, Faith was in tears, begging him to kill her for all that she had done.

He refused. Instead, he felt like he could help her be redeemed as he had once been redeemed for his actions as the evil vampire Angelus. He let her stay with him, and supported her through the good and the bad times. Many people tried to kill her during this period – mostly assassins from Wolfram and Hart, but eventually, Buffy tracked her down to end her once and for all. On the day that Buffy arrived, the Watcher’s Council also came to arrest her, as did Detective Kate Lockley.

Buffy and Angel stopped her from being killed by the Watcher’s Council, and in return, Faith gave herself up to the police. Thanks to her connections, she was sentenced with only two counts of murder and was imprisoned for a length of twenty-five years. Although she could have broken out if she wanted, Faith came to like prison life, noting that at least she was mostly safe, had three meals a day and could watch a movie occasionally. Angel regularly visited her, which helped keep her grounded.

Two years later, she was attacked in prison by a woman named Debbie, who happened to be an agent of the First Evil, which had arisen in Sunnydale. The First Evil was bent on eradicating the Slayers, and though Buffy was aware of this, she had decided that Faith was safe in jail. She was able to fend off her attacker. Soon after, she was approached by Wesley, who informed her that Angel had lost his soul again and had reverted to his evil self, the vampire Angelus. Los Angeles was also in turmoil, as a creature called the Beast had risen and brought an eternal night onto the city, which meant that vampires were able to be around all of the time without fear of the sun.

Faith broke out of prison, determined to save Angel as he had saved her. She hurried to L.A. and met with the rest of Angel Investigations – a man named Gunn, a scientist girl called Fred, and Angel’s son, Connor. Word of her return spread quickly, and she set up a hunting party with Gunn, Wesley and Connor, who she removed from the team almost instantly because of his recklessness and insistence that he would kill Angel rather than incapacitate him, as Faith intended.

She managed to find Angelus, but he was also with the Beast, a supposedly unkillable demon. She fought hard and long, but was taken out. Angelus revealed his ace in the hole – he stabbed the Beast with a piece of the Beast’s own bone, which killed him and brought back the sun. He then fled. Faith was carried back to the Hyperion Hotel, Angel Investigations’ base, and recovered there.

With Wesley, she tracked him down again, and convinced him to bite her. When he did, she injected herself with a highly potent drug called Orpheus, which knocked them both out. Willow, who had also been called in to save Angel’s soul, worked to do so whilst Faith and Angel went on a psychic adventure. Faith was taken to significant moments in his life – the time he arrived in America, the day he saved a kitten, and the day he decided to go to Sunnydale. In this last vision, the dream version of Angel battled the version of Angelus who had accompanied Faith, winning against him.

Faith was ready to die at this point, but Angel believed in her again and convinced her to not give up. His soul returned, the two of them awoke and Faith went back to Sunnydale with Willow to fight the First Evil. When she arrived, she met the Potential Slayers, who were girls from all over the world who were marked to become Slayers when the new ones died. They were being trained by the Scoobies to fight vampires.

Though their old rivalry reared it’s head once more, Faith followed Buffy’s orders until they lost a fight against the First Evil’s right hand, Caleb. The Scoobies and Potentials lost faith in Buffy’s ability to lead, and so Faith was shoved into the unlikely role of boss. At first, things were cool – the Potentials liked how Faith was so much more chilled than Buffy, letting them go to the Bronze to dance. Things backfired, however, when Faith unwittingly led them into a trap, and several of the Potentials plus Faith were critically injured by the ‘pure’ vampires, the Turok-Han.

Faith willingly gave Buffy her leadership back.
Many of the Potentials disrespected her after this, and claimed that they were being punished by God for following Faith instead of Buffy. Surprisingly, the latter defended the former, and, at last, the two of them reconciled. She posed the question that perhaps two Slayers were not meant to get along at all – there was only meant to be one in the world at any time.

Weeks after this, the Battle at the Hellmouth commenced, whereupon Buffy, Faith and the Scoobies, along with the Potential Slayers, all took up arms to fight the First Evil and his army. During the fight, Willow managed to activate the full power of the Slayer Scythe, an ancient artefact, that turned all the Potential Slayers in the world into full Slayers. The battle was won; the Hellmouth, and Sunnydale, fell into the Earth.

Though they lost friends that day, Faith and Buffy came out unscathed. And there were a whole new crop of Slayers to train.