AND I NEED TO KNOW

Character Basics
Character name: Emily Prentiss
Character Journal: needstoknow
Canon: Criminal Minds
Canon Point: Season Six; Episode Lauren
Age: 40
Icon: http://v.dreamwidth.org/3914204/1650954

Canon Character Information
Appearance:
Emily stands 5' 8" tall. She has a trim figure, kept in shape because of her job working for the FBI. One sometimes needs to be able to chase after Unsubs after all. She has a conservative look about her. She tends to dress more formal, usually wearing pants and a shirt with a collar. Add to that the cut of her hair that has severe bangs and falls just past her shoulders in a layered style. It is brunette but at times looks darker under different lights. Her eyes are brown and she often wears mascara and eyeliner along with a light lipstick. Aside from that, she does have her ears pierced and apparently has two tattoos before Doyle gave her another. The location of the aforementioned have not been revealed although by process of elimination, they are clearly not on her arms, face or chest. And, she usually bites her nails, especially when she is nervous or troubled. She was tattooed by Doyle with a four leaf clover, above her left breast.

History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Prentiss
http://criminalminds.wikia.com/wiki/Emily_Prentiss

Emily is the daughter of an Ambassador and as such, she spent a lot of time moving around as a child. She doesn't look back on her adolescence with much warmth. To her, Emily always wanted to fit in, but they never stayed in one place for too long. By the time she made friends, her mother's posting would move and she would have to start all over again. She says that she just became what people expected her to be.

When she was fifteen, Emily became pregnant. Not sure what to do, Emily spoke to the priest in Rome, where her mother was currently located, and brought up an abortion. She was told if she did so, she would not be welcome back in the church, and that shock Emily's faith. Her friend Matthew ended up standing by her side and Emily did go to an abortion clinic. She states that she rebelled in her teen years.

She would attend and graduate from Yale before joining the FBI. She worked there for ten years before coming to join the BAU. During that ten-year stint, she was a member of a multi-country joint effort with Interpol, bringing down Ian Doyle. In that, Emily took on the name of "Lauren Reynolds", and she was Doyle's type. She managed to get close to him, and when the time came, she made sure to get his son safely away from him so that he would never be able to raise him in his image.

Emily joined the BAU under slightly shady circumstances, as Hotch did not know she was coming. Yet, Emily eventually proved herself. Strauss tried to get her to spy on the team and especially Hotch for her, but Emily instead turned in her resignation. This never went through, and the team eventually came back together. Emily would work with the team to solve various cases and it was in the sixth season of the show that some of her past came back.

Ian Doyle escaped and started to hunt down and kill those who had been in the joint Interpol project. When her team started to realize the truth, Emily went after him alone, leaving her badge and her gun behind. She attacked him, but ended up being captured. He wanted to know about his son Declan and he wanted to pay her back for that. Emily eventually pointed out that she hadn't killed his son.

Personality:
Emily is a woman who believes in herself and her skills. She is a confident woman who gives an air of being able to handle herself and anything that happens to be thrown her way. In fact, she doesn't seem to take well to offers of help, often telling her fellow co-workers that they don't need to shield her and that she can take care of herself. Emily is an intelligent woman and handles herself well under pressure. She is fluent in Arabic and also seems to know Russian, French, Italian and Spanish. She is as quick on her feet as she is in her mind. She believes that it is her skills and accomplishments that get her places as she has worked hard to do the things she has done. In the first episode, she states that she is not here on a free ride from her mother (as she is an Ambassador) but that she deserves her position. While this isn't actually the case as she had been brought in to spy on Hotch without her knowledge, she does prove to Hotch and the rest of the team that she does deserve to be there.

She is an observant person, and while she might not be a genius like Reid, she does have her own skills and is able to piece things together. In the team, she is one part of the whole that makes it work so smoothly. Yet, despite the fact that she does work well with the rest of the team, Emily isn't exactly the most open of people. She can handle professional situations well, rarely cracking under the pressure. This has been known to happen when she is close to the situation and has a personal connection with it and especially when she knows that someone is lying or holding something back. Otherwise, she keeps herself at hands-length. While she does share little tid-bits of information about her life, such as saying that she goes salsa dancing or that she reads cosmo, they are just cosmetic things, nothing too substantial. That being said, she is a friendly person. She likes most people and is able to connect with them. She teases her fellow co-workers, kindly mocking their own little quirks and she sympathizes with victims, letting them be at ease around her. She also has a quirky sense of humour, delighting in odd things. When hit on with a nickname, she is more than happy to snap some comeback right back at the person and she delights in bringing the man who claimed to be an FBI officer over to Garcia and JJ so that they can get one over on him. Yet, there is that distance to her that she keeps around herself.

She is the daughter of an Ambassador and moved around a lot as a child. She was a bit of a wild kid because of that, rebelling but at the same time wanting desperately to fit in. That is all that any child wants but it was hard when she moved around as often as she did to make any lasting connections. Her youth wasn't all sunshine either, as at 15, she ended up pregnant. Her relationship with her mother was never the strongest connection and she didn't know how to tell her. She ended up getting an abortion and one of her friends helped her through it. When she wanted to bury her head in the sand and run away, he was there for her. The priest at the church would have thrown her out, but she was told to keep her head high and she sat in that front pew. Needless to say, her faith was shaken then.

Emily proclaims that she is a nerd. She states that even though she tries to hide it, that sooner or later it comes out and the person she was with will just stare at her. She doesn't give off the nerd vibe. She is poised, confident and sure of herself, but her hobbies do run in that regard. She is a person who speaks her mind. She calls out her friends when they are acting odd, like with Reid, and she will speak her mind whether or not she was asked for it. She doesn't shove anything down their throats though, but does sometimes upset people with the way that she acts. She doesn't intentionally ever seek to harm others and backs down when she knows that she has taken a step in the wrong direction.

Her work is her life but it isn't all that she wants to be. She does have a maternal side to her and even once debating adopting a child who she thought didn't have anyone else. She doesn't talk down to people and she often gets on their level. With children this is especially helpful as she often earns their trust, which makes her job and everyone else’s job a whole lot easier. She's not above crouching down or speaking in soothing words to calm and reassure them. Although she doesn't like help, she is always there to help her friends, but she doesn't press. This is a theme with them, that even though they might see that something is bothering someone else, they don't keep pressing until they get an answer. Of course, there are times, such as near the end of season six, when they do start to pressure Emily about answers. She tells them not to worry, and when they continue to press, she does snap at them. This is definitely something that is not characteristic of Emily and she's only done it when she was under extreme pressure.

Although she trusts her co-workers with her life, and they have saved her on more than one occasion, she has never fully opened up to them about who she was before joining the BAU. A vast part of this is because she was sworn to secrecy, but even when things start to go south, she doesn't tell anyone what is happening. Even though she does snap at her team, her intentions are well meant. She knows that Doyle is serious and that he would kill all of them if given a reason too. She also knows that it is only she that he is after and she doesn't want to give him a reason to harm her team. He took away important things from people, and since Emily only had herself and no family (as she was never close with her mother), she didn’t want Doyle going after them. In a way, she is self-sacrificing like that. Although she knows that her friends would have come to her aid, as they have helped her in the past, she also doesn't want them to be killed. She wants to protect them, even if that means leaving them behind.

She is level-headed, often thinking on her feet, and picks up on things that people are hiding. She might not always be right about what it is that they are hiding, but she is generally correct that they are hiding something. She tends to keep a calm demeanor at the scenes, like nothing troubles her. When asked about it, she just states that she has a good constitution about these things. It is likely more that her past and the things that she has done have steeled her against it. Still, there are times when she questions the world that they live in. Every day she is surrounded by the worst that the world has to offer. When Hotch tells her that he needs to know that she can still be an agent, she replies that she needs to know that she can still be human. She does lose it when she finds her friend dead, after she had told her to get to the safe spot, and she ends up puking outside the gate by the crime scene. This is a first for Emily as she has never been shown to be physically sick at any other crime scene, and a lot of them have been much worse.

She is a private person. She hates politics and tries to stay out of them or avoid them. This likely stems from growing up with a powerful mother like she had. When she realized that the Director had used her, Emily backs down. She hands in her resignation, not wanting to play the game that she's been thrust into. She doesn't want to spy on people and she won't. In the end it did all work out, but she is a person who sticks to her morals. It might be hard to believe, but she was a bit of a problem child, but she's clearly grown out of the worst of it. She was never a truly bad child like some of the ones out there. She didn't rob or steal, but she did test her boundaries. She is an efficient person now, quick to do what needs to be done but she is still human. She bites her nails, after all, when she is under pressure. She does want to have a family, but working in the BAU tends to take up a lot of time. Most people don’t understand the sort of schedules that they have and instead of trying to find a guy, Emily ends up getting a cat, naming him Sergio.

Overall, she is sociable to a degree. She is intelligent and witty and even though she was brought into the BAU under false pretenses, she has shown that she deserves her position. She does keep to herself and some of her team do get very annoyed at her when they find out that she had led a whole other life before coming to the BAU and they question just how much they know about her. But, she knows what is at stake and even cries when she hears Garcia’s message. She is a woman who likes to do good though. She made sure to get Doyle’s son out of the life that Doyle had intended for him, making him (and others) think that she had killed in while in reality, she had put him on a plane. She is willing to take the hits and punches for the team and while she might not laugh or smile easily, she does when she genuinely means it.

Powers/Abilities/Talents:
Emily's talents are not at all supernatural and just natural things that anyone could learn. She is fluent and able to speak in several languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, French and Italian, as well as some Russian. She has worked for several agencies, including JTF-12 of Interpol, the CIA and the FBI. As such, she knows how to use a gun, and being a profiler with The Behavioral Analysis Unit, she is able to provide behavioural analysis based on investigations of individuals. Emily is also a trained spy. She is a skilled chess player and she is also pretty good at poker.

What 4 items would you like your character too have with them on the island during their stay?
1. her cat, Sergio
2. her Glock 19 with spare ammo
3. bulletproof vest
4. necklace and ring from Doyle