Born and raised in Manhattan, Laurel Halifax could be considered coming from an upper Middleclass family, fairly well off. Both of her parents worked in business administration, and her father became a vice president of his marketing firm when she was still a child. By her teenage years, he took over as president. As an only child, she could be considered spoiled, with private schooling in the same area, and much of what she wanted provided for her at one point or another. This included figure skating lessons, a sport she competed in for a few years, but never seriously.
In school she completed classes with moderate to high level grades, considered to be fairly sharp minded, with an eye for the visual arts. It was her eye for visual arts that decided her college career, where she went into photography and digital design. From then on, her career path became fairly obvious. Her parents knew the importance of photography and digital design in business practices, especially marketing, so they supported her choice, and assisted with her tuition, saving her a future of student loans. Still, she had to take on part time jobs in various fields to pay for basic things, since her parents didn't continue to pay for everything.
Socially, she'd always been fairly well-liked growing up, at least among a few core groups of friends. Sometimes those friends changed, and they grew apart when many of them left for different colleges and universities, but she formed a new group of friends as she moved on in her life. These friends often include men who she'd become involved with and date seriously, but her longest relationship would last only a year, and never became as serious as engagement. The last boyfriend she'd had ended after graduation, leaving them both free to pursue their own personal lives, and discover who, or what, they wanted to be.
The first big job that Laurel got involved in outside of training and internships, was a professional marketing photo shoot for the Bronx Zoo. It was through this job that she met Daphne Rousseau, a woman who worked with in the raptor section with the birds. Hitting it off well, the two of them fell into a friendship that continues to this day. Only there's something that they don't share, even with each other.
One thing that Laurel has kept to herself the last few months has been an odd phenomenon that happens at times around her. Unsure if it's her doing it, or if she's going insane, but it all started when she did a photo shoot in Central Park with a would-be graduate from high school, when someone riding a bike nearly hit the tripod that she'd set up. Nearly— because the bike hit something else first. The wheel bent inwards, the rider flew off, but the tripod and camera remained undamaged, with no one who'd been around sure what the bike had ran into. A rock, maybe? That'd been the fall-back theory, since there'd been a handful of witnesses and no one saw anything else.
But then a few weeks later, when she'd gone out drinking with one of her old college friends, a rather insistent drunk who'd wanted her phone number kept walking into something— like there'd suddenly been a glass door between the two of them. Dismissed as being a little buzzed herself, and remembering it wrong, she almost didn't think much of it at all… Until she got mugged.
Living and working in New York, getting mugged became a statistical possibility. After a particularly late photoshoot at a wedding reception (which she got paid handsomely for), she left to find a cab, in the nice dress and shoes she wore to blend in with the wedding, as well as her digital camera equipment in a rather hefty bag. The mugger, who she never did bother attempting to identify at the police, because— she'd rather not explain how he got stopped— came upon her and demanded her bag, threatening with a knife. Terrified, she moved to drop the bag and hand it over, hoping that he wouldn't just stab her anyway— but the bag ran into something solid and invisible between them.
It'd happened again. Whatever it was. And it didn't just form in front of her, it formed all around her, keeping the man from going around it, and keeping her from being able to leave, as well. Only when the cab she'd called pulled up, did the man leave— and whatever it is that raised up to protect her vanished. Never a religious girl, she still thanked God for whatever had protected her, and her equipment… but despite the oddity of the situation— she's never mentioned it to a single person, afraid they'd think she was crazy, or lying.