Iron Nails Nate
(a.k.a. Iron Nails Nate)
Factory foreman at Freedman's Forge, Iron Nails Nate is a legend in her own right. Respected by her employer for what he considers her strength and devotion, her power over the factory floor and the lives on it has become legendary, and stories and rumors swirl around her.
Omnipresent on the factory floor, Natria meets new recruits with a grandmotherly air, exhorting them to dedicate themselves to the job and presenting her own success as evidence of the potential presented to them by their gracious employers. In her mind, she seeks to encourage that potential, to remind the workers of Freedman's of the lessons she herself learned in pain and grief: life has no mercy, and neither can you. She rules the floor without an iota of kindness or consideration. Quotas and the success of the factory are her only goals. Rumors say that the factory is the only child she ever loved, and like any good mother, she will kill, cheat, and torture to ensure the success of the child she cares for.
Tenets of Faith
Natria's father was a veteran of the Firebrand campaign, serving through the campaigns in the Easten Fire Pits. He came home with a medal, a promise of veteran's benefits and honors, and an endless supply of stories. His medal went in the box with his mother's portrait and the meager family savings. His veteran's benefits went up with the smoke from the stacks of the embers, burned away with the unsavory memories of a conflict that no one wanted to remember except in gilded song and story.
His stories, however, remained, and Natria grew up hearing tales of the mighty Orc fire god who imbued his followers with the strength to perform impossible feats, defying death with supernatural potency. The stories always ended with the brave soldiers of Elderforge triumphing over the supernaturally powerful orc enemies, but it was the power of the tribal fire god that remained in Natria's memories. Working for Denholm Freedman summoned the ghosts of those childhood stories, gradually solidifying into the unspoken belief that Freedman was the inheritor of the priesthood of a new facet of the fire god. Not a spirit of the Eastern flames, but a roaring, smouldering force of the forges. Like the being from her father's tales, it demanded sacrifice and it gave strength. It offered endurance and a dark glory in outliving those who refused its transformation, and silently and without conscious choice, Natria offered her service to the Children of the Brazen Forge and the one she saw as its priest.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
A large-framed woman, Natria nonetheless always seems gaunt. There is the air of something missing, something lost that has hollowed her out in some way that, while perhaps spiritual, is nonetheless reflected in her the way she holds herself. In spite of her age and obvious life of hard labor, she holds herself with strength and determination, head high, eyes piercing as they keep watch over the miserable flock of Freedman's.
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.
Mental characteristics
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.
Current Location
Church/Cult
Children
Gender
female
Eyes
Bright blue
Hair
Salt and pepper, ash gray with streaks of dark brown
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Dusky tan, lined
Height
5' 10'
