Ravenna Mitchell

Ravenna Christine Mitchell grew up in Manhattan with her family and befriended Damian and Derek Lawrence and Eddie Dodson in school. As a teenager, she witnessed the death of her brother Bryce when he fell into a frozen pond and drowned. Ravenna was scarred by this event and left home as soon as she graduated high school, moving to Chicago by herself. There, she met Roman, who saved her from an attacker on the street and took her under his wing, training her as an assassin.

Ravenna considered herself an agent of justice, taking out only targets who were guilty of crimes themselves, as Roman did. When Roman was shot and killed, Ravenna continued her trade alone, traveling across the country as she was needed. While tailing a mark in Manhattan, she ran into old friend Damian Lawrence, with whom she rebuilt a relationship. The two quickly fell in love and were engaged, and they were planning to make a public announcement on the subject when Damian was murdered on July 25, 2232. Ravenna was shattered by this loss, and though she had turned away from killing while she'd been with Damian, she decided to return to it when she was hired by Desi Lawrence to go after Lila, who was believed to be Damian's killer.

Early Life
Ravenna Christine Mitchell is the oldest child and only daughter of Aiden and Leah Mitchell. She was born in Manhattan on October 16, 2202, and she continued to live in the city with her parents and her brother Bryce throughout her childhood. Ravenna was in the same class as Derek Lawrence in school, and she quickly befriended both him and his brother Damian, who was a year older. When Ravenna was in third grade, a fourth person entered her friend group in the form of Eddie Dodson, who had just moved to Manhattan from Illinois and was in Damian’s class. The four were often inseparable, though Ravenna sometimes grew jealous of the bond between the three boys; she wasn’t able to join them at the sleepovers the Lawrences’ parents often held, but she did come over frequently to play. Of the other three, Ravenna considered Derek her closest friend.

During summers, she often spent weeks at a time with her aunt Clarisse in Washington, D.C. Clarisse was the senior advisor to President Isabella Hartley, and Ravenna adored having the chance to visit the White House. In her early teenage years, she befriended the president’s daughter, Rachel. In her, Ravenna found the connection she’d envied in her other friends, and though the girls didn’t see each other often, they remained close for several years. Ravenna slept over at the White House occasionally and came to admire Rachel’s mother, as well. Looking through Aunt Clarisse’s desk, Ravenna once discovered plans for an android designed for the military. She told Derek, Damian, and Eddie about this when she returned home, unwittingly sparking the idea that led to the three of them eventually creating Lila and founding Lawrence-Dodson Enterprises.

Her life as she knew it ended one night when she was visiting her grandparents’ home with her parents and brother. It was nearly Christmas, and since the pond was frozen over, Ravenna and Bryce wanted to skate on it. Bryce reached the ice first when the two of them raced, and Ravenna had just finished lacing her skates when she heard a sickening series of cracks. She watched her brother fall through the ice, and despite the efforts of Ravenna and her parents, they were unable to save him. Ravenna carried this guilt with her from that day onward—she had watched her brother die and had been powerless to protect him. She pulled away from all of her friends, including Damian, for whom she’d developed romantic feelings. As soon as she graduated high school, she bought a plane ticket to Chicago with money she’d saved and left Manhattan behind.

Career As An Assassin
Shortly after her arrival, Ravenna was walking alone through Chicago’s streets after a trip to Navy Pier when she was attacked and pulled into an alley by a man with a gun. He unzipped her jacket, and she attempted to fight him. All at once, she heard a gunshot, and the man fell to the ground, dead. A second man hurried down the fire escape of a nearby building and introduced himself as Roman. He said he’d been hired to kill her attacker and walked with Ravenna out of the alley as she tried to gather as much information as she could. Roman told her he was paid to kill people who deserved it, and Ravenna was intrigued. She’d never seen the possibility for justifiable killing, but she understood that Roman had saved her life. She hadn’t been able to save her brother, but if she followed Roman’s path, she reasoned, perhaps she could save others from unjust deaths at the hands of criminals and help bring some sort of karmic balance to who lived and who died.

Roman trained her for a few years until he was killed on a mission gone wrong. Ravenna later shot the woman who had killed him, and she continued on her path alone. This eventually led her back to Washington, D.C., where she was hired to take out a man named Ra. Though she usually required more information from potential employers, this one had only given her Ra’s name, description, and where he would be on the night in question. The price was too high to pass up—$500,000. Ravenna waited for Ra in an alley, and when she started to follow him, he spoke to her, having noticed her on his trail. He told her she wasn’t bad at this job but wasn’t fantastic at it, either. The two fought, and Ravenna noticed that her target moved too quickly to be human. He took the bracelet from her wrist that her aunt Clarisse had given her, twin to one Clarisse herself had, and after a struggle, she managed to shoot him. He didn’t fall after the first shot, and she fired over and over, aware that if he was an android, she would need to work hard to kill him. Ra eventually fell, and before Ravenna could retrieve her bracelet from his hand as he lay in the street, a group of tourists approached the scene, and she fled.

She continued her work as an assassin, though she never again took a job with so little information from her employer. She worked alone, though she made a few friends in assassins’ guilds across the country, including Naomi, her contact within Laurea in Manhattan. Naomi passed her a job there, and this was the first time Ravenna had returned to her home city since high school. She took out her target by shooting him on a crowded sidewalk and blending into the crowd, but as she was fleeing the scene, a purse-snatcher ran into her and knocked her to the ground. She was approached by a man who offered to help her up, and she grudgingly accepted. When the light from a passing car hit his face, she recognized this man immediately—Damian Lawrence.

She’d kept tabs on Damian and the others from afar, and when she’d seen that they had gone into robotics, she’d felt a surge of pride that she might’ve influenced that decision. She’d hoped they hadn’t forgotten her, and when she immediately rekindled a relationship with Damian, she learned that she’d gotten her wish. She also learned that Damian had shared her romantic feelings back in school, and while neither of them had acted on those feelings then, he was determined to make up for lost time now. After they had spent a short amount of time reconnecting, Damian asked her on a date, and the two quickly fell in love. Ravenna insisted that Damian not tell the others about her—she was afraid of how they would react if they knew what she had become. Damian was shocked upon learning that she had killed, but he still loved her, and he began a campaign to persuade her to reconnect with Derek, Eddie, and his younger sister Desi. Ravenna was strongly opposed to this at first. Desi accidentally discovered their relationship one night when she came to visit Damian, and she didn’t judge Ravenna for her actions, instead jumping at the chance to have this surrogate sister back in her life. After this, Ravenna slowly warmed to the idea of telling the others, and a few months after Damian proposed and she accepted, she agreed that they could tell everyone else after he returned from a business trip.

July 2232
Unfortunately, Ravenna never saw Damian alive again after that trip. She learned on the news that he had been killed at LDE the night he’d returned, before he’d had the chance to come home. Ravenna was shattered. Damian had been the one to see the good left in her after everything she’d done, and he’d been helping her try to find another career path. He’d been the reason she’d stopped killing.

She received a call from Desi, who begged her not to disappear again. Ravenna felt obligated to leave, as the police would surely come looking through the house she’d shared with Damian, and she didn’t want to tarnish his memory of her secrets came to light. Desi convinced her to stay for a little while, however, and told her they could meet soon to talk about Damian. She later called Ravenna over to her apartment, and while Ravenna said there was nothing to be said that would make things right again, Desi insisted that she had something that was as close to a solution as they could ask for. The police had shown her a security video in which she’d seen Damian’s killer, and she asked if Ravenna would consider coming out of retirement if she had the name. Ravenna agreed enthusiastically, stating that she would chase that person to the end of the earth and make them suffer. Desi told her that Lila, LDE’s first android, had killed Damian. Ravenna was livid, and Desi begged her to capture Lila, whom no one had seen since, and bring her back to face the consequences of what she’d done. She begged Ravenna not to kill Lila, telling her that would destroy Derek. Ravenna grudgingly agreed, though she said that if she did end up killing Lila, she would deny that Desi had had any knowledge of her plan.

That night, Ravenna went to visit Derek. She snuck into his apartment while he slept and tried to calm him when he woke screaming from a nightmare. He was panicked until he turned on the lights and saw that it was her. He said he was glad to see her again but that he didn’t understand why she’d come now, in the middle of the night, years after they’d last spoken. She said she’d come to warn him about her plan to go after Lila and that she would do her best not to kill the android. She revealed to Derek that she and Damian were engaged before she disappeared out the balcony doors.

Ravenna hunted Lila, searching the area around LDE and outward through Manhattan. She ran into an auburn-haired woman who seemed to know who she was, and the woman mentioned Ra, which sent Ravenna into a panic. She forced herself to focus, and when she spotted Lila on the street, she hurried after her, trailing her back to the hotel where Lila had a suite. By the time Ravenna found the suite and managed to get into it, Lila had escaped to the balcony, and the android jumped off of it before Ravenna could reach her, hurtling down fifteen stories to the ground. Frustrated, Ravenna called Desi to update her, and Desi told her that there had been someone else in the room when Damian was killed and that Derek was convinced Lila might not be completely at fault. Ravenna argued against pausing her hunt, reminding Desi that she’d hired her, but the conversation was cut short when two police officers arrived to search Lila’s suite. Ravenna hung up and climbed over the balcony railing, moving carefully along a ledge to the one next door, where she pretended to be making a call when one of the officers exited Lila’s room and looked at her for a moment too long.

That night, Ravenna returned home and reflected on her situation, wondering how Lila could have turned against Damian so severely and finding herself thankful that Desi had told her of Lila’s guilt before Eddie had told the media. The next day, she continued her search. She thought of Bryce and Roman dying too soon and remembered how she hadn’t been able to save either of them, and she vowed that Damian would see justice. Later, Desi visited her at home to try to persuade her to abandon her search, and after pulling her away from the paparazzi outside, Ravenna snapped at her, saying that Desi had gone from mourning Damian to rushing into his best friend’s bed quickly, as she’d seen Desi and Eddie together at LDE and had put together that they were seeing one another. When Desi pointed out that Ravenna shouldn’t be the one to criticize her for snap decisions, Ravenna asked Desi whether she’d actually cared about Damian. This wounded Desi deeply, and she turned to leave. Ravenna followed her, apologizing and begging her to understand that bringing Damian justice was all she could do for him now. When Desi opened the front door, the paparazzi were still present, as was detective Harry Masters, whom Ravenna had seen outside Lila’s hotel room. He asked whether they had new information and asked what Ravenna’s relationship to Damian had been, and she reluctantly told him the truth. He said he would appreciate the women’s help in getting Derek and Eddie to contact him and that he would be in touch with both Desi and Ravenna.

The next time Ravenna thought she saw Lila, she dragged a woman into an alley, and when the woman fought her with superhuman strength and Ravenna saw her face, she realized this wasn’t Lila but another android who spoke like she knew her. The woman told Ravenna she was lucky it wasn’t time, and when Ravenna asked her for what, the woman laughed and disappeared. The night of Damian’s visitation and public funeral service, Ravenna knew she couldn’t attend without people asking too many questions. Instead, she went to Derek’s apartment on a hunch, and she saw the lights on though Derek was at the service. She went up to the apartment, certain that Lila was there. She shot the door open and saw that she’d been right—Lila was here, visibly panicked. Ravenna fought her, attempting unsuccessfully to shoot her before hitting her over the head with the gun. Lila insisted that she’d never wanted to hurt anyone, but Ravenna refused to listen to her. Lila twisted her arm behind her back and disarmed her, and after the blow to Lila’s head caused her to remember a few flashes of her past, she told Ravenna what she’d seen: Eddie and an android woman had reprogrammed her to shoot Damian.

When Derek arrived, Ravenna told him they needed to go now to find Eddie. The three of them traveled together to the LDE warehouse on Fifth Street, where Eddie had told Derek he would be, and they were quickly found by Mia, whom Ravenna recognized as the woman who had mentioned Ra to her on the street. Mia attacked Lila, and Ravenna shot at her, though Mia moved too quickly and the shot missed. Lila insisted Derek and Ravenna go find Eddie while she held off Mia. Derek shot Mia in the hand, and then Ravenna pulled him away into the warehouse to do as Lila had said. Eventually, Ravenna split off from Derek, knowing he would blow his cover too quickly to get in a good shot. Eddie and Desi, who had arrived earlier after figuring out the truth on her own, were in a large storage room where he held her at gun point as Derek tried to talk him down. Ravenna snuck through the shipping crates filling the room and, unseen, managed to shoot Eddie in the knee. Eddie released Desi, and Ravenna rushed over to keep her gun on him, asking him to give her one reason not to kill him. He said he wasn’t alone. At that moment, Mia rushed in and tossed Ravenna aside, lifting Eddie and carrying him from the warehouse.

Ravenna was present at Damian’s graveside service the next morning along with Derek, Desi, and Lila. She asked for a moment alone at Damian’s grave, where she told him that she was pregnant with his child and that she would always love him.

Appearances

 * Lacrimosa (narrator)
 * Veritas (narrator)
 * Shadows of the Mind (short story collection)
 * "Bird of Prey" (narrator)
 * "Legacy" (narrator)
 * "Lila"
 * "Fated"
 * "Shattered"
 * "Duality" (mentioned)
 * "Convergence"
 * "Vessel"
 * "Mother" (mentioned)

* In the Shadows of the Mind podcast, Ravenna is played by Lindsey Carda.
 * Shadows of the Mind (podcast)*
 * "The Co-President" (narrator)
 * "Control" (narrator)
 * "Until Proven Guilty"
 * "Line of Fire" (narrator)
 * "Proximity"
 * "Surrender" (narrator)
 * "I'm You"
 * "Lacrimosa" (narrator)
 * "Broken" (narrator)