Appearance

Physical Description

Body Features

Years in the heat, dust, and chemical-saturated atmosphere of the factory have left Natria's skin darkened and leathery, a testament to her survival traced in the lines of her face.  She often wears gloves, particularly when meeting new hires to the factory, as a means of hiding her hands. Long exposure to the chemicals used in the factory have thickened and gnarled her nails and fingertips into something that no longer looks human.  Her nails have become hardened and curled, silvered-yellow talons arcing over the tips of her fingers. Hard as iron, her willingness to use those claws in correcting the errors of the factory workers gave rise to her nickname of Iron Nails Nat.  True or not, some workers whisper that she is cursed, fallen from the grace of the One and swearing alliance to some older power that transformed her and keeps her alive, even as her very presence kills those around her.

Mentality

Personal history

Natria came to Ashen Row the same way most of the workers in the Embers do - she fell on hard times, and she was willing to do whatever it took to survive. Like most of the people of Glaive, she had been raised on the notion that good people worked hard, and the One smiled on those who were faithful and industrious. She worked long hours, took the shifts working with chemicals that the other employees feared to touch, and she survived. She endured. She succeeded.
 
The chemicals in the factory were indeed toxic, but they were not enough to kill a full grown woman of Nat's stature. Instead, she built up a gradual immunity, her blood roiling with the defenses it had built up to fight off the deadly poisons she was exposed to day in and day out. Her children were not so lucky. The toxins had seeped into her body, her blood, and her breast milk. One by one, six tiny infants sickened and died in her arms, for reasons that she could not explain. Doctors are scarce in the Embers, and even the poor excuses for physicians that haunt the ash-laden corners cost money that she and her husband could not spare. A little bit of her heart died with every one of those infants, and when her husband called her cursed and walked away from her, she had no tears left to cry, only ashes falling to coat the baby blankets neatly folded away in her cupboard.
 
A few years later, when the Smudge Black rolled through the Embers, a plague of black-clotted lungs and slow wheezing crimson death, Nat watched her husband and his new family sicken and die. She survived. She always survived because she was strong. They died, because that was how Justice truly worked. It wasn't about good and evil; it was about strength and endurance. Freedman understood that, and although she and her employer have no fondness for one another, they have an understanding and respect. Both view themselves as self-made survivors, inured to empathy by the pain and loss they have endured.

Employment

Originally a worker at Freedman's Forge, Nat rose to Line Overseer and then Foreman.  She has remained in that powerful position for almost a decade, watching injury, death, and dismemberment with a dispassionate eye and ensuring that, at the end of the day, the factory makes its quota at the lowest price in the city.

Mental Trauma

Losing six children and watching her erstwhile friends and neighbors die around her was no easier for Nat than it would have been for anyone else.  She spent a life working in unspeakable conditions, suffering physical and mental depravations that left her deeply changed.  Such trauma inevitably serves as a watershed - either one learns empathy and longs to prevent other from enduring the same thing, or one leaves empathy behind, abandoning feeling in favor of callous cruelty.  Nat took the latter path, and walks it with an assiduous dedication that makes her a legendary terror often used to curb the behavior of rambunctious Embers children.

Morality & Philosophy

Over the years, the rumors and legends that have grown up about Natria's connection to the factory have seeped into her blood as surely as the chemicals with which she works.  She has come to believe that the factory is a power in its own right. The Embers are far below the lofty towers of the Upper City, and the One cannot or does not see through the smoke and the charnel house dust.  No gods watch over the people of the Embers save one: the Factory itself.  Iron Nails Nate has come to see the Factory as a deity in its own right, determiner of the worthy and unworthy.  In her mind, the iron claws with which she oversees the floor are no more than the servants of a higher power.  The Factory demands sacrifice and service. It is an unrelenting and merciless god, but those who serve it, those who are strong enough in its service are given the only thing that matters in the Embers - survival and power.

Personality

Social