Eleanor Darke

"[I'm mute, not dumb.]"

Summary
A brilliant detective and crack shot who can speak to ghosts, but not the living. Her most iconic powers are her Brilliant Deduction and her Spectral Voice, and her most iconic traits are her muteness and her stern but motherly demeanor.

Child
Eleanor Sexton was born in London, and spent the first 18 years of her life in Britain. She was a clever child, but without the ability to speak with her peers, she had little interaction with them, and sunk into learning, reading, and writing... and speaking with the spirits that constantly found her. From those spirits, she learned how to interact with people, and how to help them.

Helping lead spirits to their ultimate rest often required a great deal of investigative work - figuring out from what the often-fragmented spirits could recall who they were, how they died, what they needed in order to pass on... and she discovered that she both enjoyed and was good at it.

Investigator
Elle decided to put her talents to work as a journalist, and applied to high-quality journalism courses in several prominent universities - she settled on Starlight City University, across the pond in the US, because it had a program for high-performing students to intern at the city's paper, the Starlight Sentinel. She earned a place in that program, and did well enough at the paper that they hired her directly out of school, sponsoring her continued visa.

She worked as an investigative journalist at the paper for a few years, writing several notable articles during that time - the biggest being an expose of corruption in the office of the then-mayor, which led to him losing the next primary election to Elizabeth Ashton. As she worked, she continued to help as many spirits as she could.

After a few years, however, she felt that her skills were wasted at the paper - particularly after her expose, the paper wanted her to pull back and not get involved with politics. Instead of wasting her time and talents, she left and joined the SCPD, becoming a detective.

Family
Eleanor was much more satisfied working with the police - while she rarely touched anything as big as the mayor's corruption, even smaller cases were making the world better. She even had an outlet for her desire to write - as many spirits simply wanted to be remembered, she began writing historical fiction, novels that most believed were meticulously-researched but which were in fact fictionalized versions of the lives of spirits she interviewed. Her life was good.

She didn't even really realize what she was missing until, while pursuing a case on a supervillain called Anumerous, she ran into a man called Henry Darke. The two clicked, and only a year or two later they were married - and, a year or two after that, she gave birth to their daughter, Violet. Henry was extremely supportive of her, a wonderful father to their daughter, was able to be the primary caregiver as he worked from home... her life was perfect.

Present
...at least, until a new lead on the now-cold Anumerous case helped a few oddities in her head click, and she realized that her husband was, in fact, the very villain she had been pursuing when they met.

The argument between them wasn't harsh or violent, barely even qualified as an argument. But when it was done, she knew she couldn't stay in their home with him - not when he had hidden his past from her. They worked out the necessary details for how to share custody of Violet, and... she left.

...at least, until she figured out if she could still trust him.

Trivia
TRIVA

In-Fiction: Night Sky Comics
In the context of Night Sky Comics, Eleanor is one of the older characters in the world's publishing history. She dates back to the late 1950s, and was originally included as a side character in early issues of Starshine, as an investigative reporter with a little something extra, whose ability to speak to ghosts often got her into trouble. At this time in her history, she wasn't depicted as mute - however, through some coincidence, she had never been shown speaking to a normal living character, only to ghosts and magical characters.

As a result, when she was revived and given a limited-run solo series in the early 1980s, the writer was able to introduce the idea that she could only be heard by ghosts and those with magical senses. This solo series featured her hunting down corruption in the then-mayor of Starlight City - Elizabeth Ashton replaced him after the expose that Eleanor wrote. While the limited-run didn't sell well enough that the company extended it to a continuing series, it was popular enough that she continued to appear, occasionally getting spotlight issues in ensemble books.

In the late 2010s, she had become a popular enough character that it was decided to give her a recurring role in a continuing series rather than simply having her appear in other people's books - the series chosen was the recently-started Starlight City Blues, a smash-hit limited run starring Kodai Kazumi that had been chosen to be extended. As Starlight City Blues focused on the SCPD, and Commissioner Campbell's quest to clear out corruption from it through the lens of Officer Kazumi, Eleanor - who, for all her popularity, hadn't made many appearances recently - was declared to have joined the SCPD as a detective a few years previous, allowing her to be a more experienced lens than the recently-joined Officer Kazumi.

This series also showed the development of her relationship with her husband, Henry Darke - prior to this time, Eleanor had never been shown to have any romantic relationships, and had been named Eleanor Sexton. Darke, however, was introduced as her boyfriend of two years in a plot that involved her trying to make up her mind about his recent proposal. The early years of their relationship were shown only later, through flashbacks, after it was decided that he was a (former) supervillain.