#honestly if i wanted to officially make that change to opbagi's backstory and pre-paranormal occupation

[becauseplot]

hi i have a question! i’ve been listening to the ordem au playlist and thinking about this au recently.

in things we lost in the fire au, how did bagi get involved in the paranormal? was her team formed before she joined them, and how long have they been together?

Question!! Okay!!! (scrambling to gather all my notes.) @factorialsotherfandoms Get in here we've got mail!

Bagi's backstory isn't detailed, but Factorial and I have discussed in the past that her story is that Bagi (who works for the police doing digital forensics*) was working on what seemed to be a normal criminal case that quickly went sideways into the Paranormal. Some of her coworkers probably (definitely) died in the process. This is how she first met some members of the Order, who she ran into during this whole ordeal. She was officially recruited by Fit. Fit's main job is training and recruitment, so once she was settled, her team was usually just her, Etoiles, and Walter Bob, with Fit and/or others joining in occasionally if it's obvious they need an extra set of hands.

((*Yeah, digital forensics. This was a choice made mainly to avoid writing op!Bagi too closely to Liz Webber, a forensic scientist who worked with the police, but honestly op!Bagi being a police detective could still work, given that's different from forensics. She still would have gone to school for digital forensics, though, then ended up landing in detective work once she joined the work force. Going to school for one thing and doing something different---it happens. It's hard for me to imagine any version of Bagi sitting behind a computer for most of her job, is my point.))

Bagi has been part of the Order for less than a year by the time the events of Relative happens. Walter Bob and Etoiles were already pretty firmly seated in the Order by this time, and of course Fit has been here for years. (Fun fact: Etoiles was Phil's last recruit before he cut ties and retired! Phil still asks how Etoiles is doing whenever he calls Fit to say hello.)

After that case gone wrong and joining the Order, Bagi is...well, at her normal job, she's not particularly close with anyone. He coworkers (fed an "official story" cooked up by the Order's cover-up team) know that the case went sideways, that some of their colleagues died, and she doesn't like talking about it. She pulls away from them when it proves too difficult to look at them knowing that they don't know and can never know.

The people at the Order tell her it's a normal thing to feel, that it happened and happens to a lot of people when they're exposed to the Paranormal for the first time, but even so, by the time Relative happens, the only people she feels close to are still exclusively other members of the Order. She has her colleagues at work, but she doesn't have much of a social life with any of them. Finding a balance is proving to be difficult for her. And once again, she's told that's normal too.