Natalie was born in Somerville, TN on May 17,1980. Her mother was a legal assistant and her father a deputy sheriff of the town. Growing up, she was instilled with a deep sense of right and wrong, as well as a need to help out in her community. For a long time, she wanted to grow up to be an officer of the law just like her father.
In school, Natalie excelled at science and math and with some helpful advice from a guidance counselor and her favorite biology teacher, she began to turn her thoughts to medical practice. When she graduated from high school, she enrolled at The University of Colorado in Denver to study nursing. She graduated with high marks and a bachelors degree in nursing as an RN. Not long out of college, she began to work for a private practice run by Doctor Wesley Masters in Grand Junction, CO.
Dr. Masters was a good employer, giving her plenty of hours, fair wages, and good benefits. She enjoyed the community feeling of working with the same local faces all the time, as opposed to the random faces she'd met during her hospital interning. The only tiny glitch in her otherwise perfectly normal life was Dr. Master's "favorite patient". This patient was a man named Paul Franks. Whenever Mister Franks came in to see the doctor it was always with some sort of strange injury that was never discussed with the nurses, nor charted properly.
Something about the man unsettled Natalie. It wasn't that he was unpleasant. He was an older man with proper manners and a polite smile, but he was cagey. He didn't offer information and only spoke freely when he was alone with the doctor. The visits were infrequent enough not to cause her any real worry, but she still couldn't shake the feeling that something significant was happening just outside what she saw and understood.
One evening, returning to the office to check on some charts she'd neglected in the rush of the day, she heard strange sounds from one of the exam rooms. Hesitantly sneaking down the hall and peeking into the room, she found Doctor Masters working frantically on a very badly injured Paul Franks. Her sound of surprise and dismay alerted the doctor to her presence and he enlisted her help.
The man was injured badly... he seemed to have almost been mauled by something. The wounds were bleeding faster than the doctor could stitch them up. Natalie wasn't licensed to perform emergency medicine, but she found herself handed a needle and sutures anyway. Even as she pleaded with the doctor to call 911, she bent her head to the task and began to sew. Miraculously, Franks survived.
In the morning, while they cleaned the exam room and monitored Franks's condition, the doctor revealed that Paul Franks was a hunter of supernatural creatures. Years back, when Masters was fresh out of med school, he was working rounds at the local hospital when a rash of strange injuries began flooding the ER. Right behind those injured came a man named Paul Franks who claimed to be FBI researching the attacks. Masters gave him all the information he had and the man left with thanks. It seemed like that would be the last he saw of the man he thought was an FBI agent.
Until two nights later when, while leaving a late show with his wife, doctor Masters was attacked by a creature he would never have believed if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. An enormous, shadowy thing with blood red eyes, and snarling jaws. If not for the timely intervention of Paul Franks, they'd both have been killed. In gratitude, the doctor and his wife gave Franks a place to stay to recover from the injuries sustained in his fight with the black dog and when Masters opened his own practice not long after, began treating the man's hunting injuries at no cost.
Even with the doctor's story and the man's injuries, Natalie had difficulty believing what she was being told. Still, she helped the doctor get Franks home to rest and continued to assist in the man's recovery, keeping the things she'd seen and been told to herself. A few days later, when Franks was awake and lucid, he asked to see her. She listened while he explained who he was, what he did, and how he came to be on that exam table the night she helped the doctor save his life. He showed her the news clippings and other research he'd used to track the werewolf who's clawed him up. He explained about moon phases and the bodies with missing hearts. Being in the medical community, she'd heard of those deaths and the strangeness of the missing hearts. And looking the man in the eye, she could tell he was telling her the truth.
Natalie stayed on with doctor Masters, working for his every day medical practice, as well as tending the injuries of Franks and his associates. Every so often, a hunter working the area would come in for treatment with the words: "Franks sent me." They were treated without question and without charge.
When Franks was healed up enough, Natalie came to him for information. She had no interest in doing what he did. Medicine was her way of saving people, but she wanted to know what was out there and how to handle it, should it come looking for her one day. He agreed and trained her in the tools of the trade: lore, mythology, research technique, firearms, knife skills, and everything else she'd need to keep herself and others safe.
Four years later, she still lives in Grand Junction and still works for Doctor Masters. She salts the doors and windows of her home daily and sleeps with a silver knife near to hand. She networks closely with the medical community in her town and the surrounding areas, always on the lookout for information about strange happenings to pass on to Franks. Every so often, she'll get a call from a colleague who's got "another weird one."
