Eleanor Black

## Overview

### Summary

A student at Valerian Preparatory Institute, Nora works as a junior library assistant at the McCandless Hall Memorial Library and currently serves as the 2nd Chair in the school's Disciplinary Committee. She is the youngest of four children, including her brothers Santiago and Mateo, and a sister who has yet to appear. Her father's identity also has not been disclosed, but in passing conversation, it has been hinted that he is a criminal of some kind. Nora's mother is the late Dr. Annabelle Black, a former instructor at Morning Glory Academy, and it has been suggested that she is the reason Nora came to Poppy Valley. She is a talented urban explorer, where she goes on expeditions with her cat, Diego.

In her student file, Nora is said to be an otherwise model student "save for incidents of trespassing, breaking and entering, and pickpocketing," which suggests that she has adopted some of her father's criminal talents.[1] She is also said to excel at solitary activities and is able to grasp such topics as theoretical physics and biochemistry, although her grades show a distinct weakness in mathematics.

#### Appearance

Nora has golden eyes and short, fluffy black hair, which is always dyed a soft pink. She is 5'2", making her on par with most of her female classmates, although she is notably self-conscious about it, having shown resentment at being called things like "kid," or "sis," as a result. The latter was later explained to be more towards people who express an inclination to "adopt" her as a little sister figure.

During the 2022 Fall Semester, Nora wore a white, short-sleeved uniform shirt with a pink bow. Once the Disciplinary Committee received their uniforms over the 2022 Winter Break, she adopted it as her standard dress. The uniform is Valerian Blue with gold accents, with the top closely resembling a cross between a Japanese sailor suit and a formal four-button suit jacket.[2] She has taken to wearing a pair of white knee-high spats and black gloves with her new uniform and carries a pink parasol at all times, which she received from Avram Scotch as a gift. In both of these uniforms, she favors a skirt, tights, and penny loafers.

During the Masquerade, she wore a purple dress with a minimalist version of a traditional Spanish layered skirt and black knee-high high-heeled boots.[3] She is almost never seen without her star necklace, which it has been hinted that she received as a gift from her mother before she died.

## Investigations

### The Observatory

In November of the 2022 Fall Semester, Nora volunteered to assist during the #WhereIsRobin investigation, although she accidentally split from the rest of the search party and proceeded to investigate an abandoned observatory on Valerian's campus.[4] As part of the Tillinghast Science Center, the observatory had previously only been a rumor, but she was able to find a walled-off entrance through the first-floor janitorial closet. Inside, she found where a strange individual had set up a base of operations with scrawled-out notes and a possible map of Valerian's campus.[5][6] When she returned, the notes were gone and she started to receive texts from the Messenger known as EYES-ON-YOU.[7] She later received texts from another Messenger, called CRY-TO-ME, who warned her that EYES-ON-YOU was dangerous.[8]

### Tillinghast Fields

Nora later returned to investigate the Observatory further and accidentally flipped a switch, activating the observatory's telescope and triggering a campus-wide blackout when it created a Tillinghast Field, which she later referred to as T-Fields.[9] Although the field lasted only a moment, Nora witnessed strange figures and places that weren't there. She soon became focused on studying Tillinghast Fields and discovered the identity of Jack Tillinghast, a former psychiatric surgeon at St. Vassil's Hospital in Poppy Valley.[10] Through horrific experimentation, Tillinghast was able to build upon the work of his father and grandfather, stimulating the human pineal gland to open one's perception to other planes of existence.[11] It was later discovered that a strong enough field could actually provide a gateway between planes, although Nora admitted that she wasn't sure how to focus where precisely a field would lead.

While visiting Aurora Naski, she discovered that a key had mysteriously appeared in her jacket pocket during the Observatory blackout.[12] When the key was in her possession, she began emitting a low-grade T-Field, which caused her severe headaches and allowed her to perceive and interact with objects from another plane. Soon, her injuries became so severe that she was afraid to leave her room, although she later determined that the key was the cause of it all and stopped carrying it with her.[13][14]

Using the key, Nora enlisted the help of Giana Jo Graves from Morning Glory to build a Tillinghast Projector, which they used to successfully generate a T-Field within the Observatory. However, the field only lasted for a few seconds before a debilitating headache caused Nora to have a seizure, but not before the team was able to capture a video of what was on the other side of the field, although it was badly corrupted. Before passing out, Nora began reciting lines from the nursery rhyme, "The Crooked Man," although she did not remember having done so later.

### #BackroomsRescuePV

After Luna Gardner disappeared into the Backrooms, students all across Poppy Valley began no-clipping through into the alternate dimension with seemingly no hope of escape.[15] . With help from Malcolm Locke, the Valerian Prep Survival Club was able to recover a single frame of footage from the test video and learned that the T-Field they created had indeed opened into the Backrooms, but it showed a horrific monstrosity lurking within, which the group determined must be The Crooked Man that Nora had spoken about.[16] With this information, Nora and the Survival Club decided to try and use a T-Field to open a gateway to the Backrooms and rescue the students still trapped there.

Assembling a team of Diego, Pairu Hinode, Zarza Mora, and Aurora Naski, the group opened a Tillinghast Field into the Backrooms with the help of a device created by Malcolm which would offer a single round-trip there and back.[17] However, he warned Nora that there was a near-certainty that using it would cause a cerebral hemorrhage, a symptom shown to have killed all of Tillinghast's previous test subjects and potentially his predecessors. Believing the risk was worth it, the team entered field and set out to rescue as many people as they could, including Avram Scotch and Noah Hart. Despite interference from the denizens of the Backrooms and The Birdwatcher, the group successfully returned to Poppy Valley, but not before Malcolm's predictions came true and Nora was hospitalized after suffering an aneurysm.[18]

### Venganza

At the start of the 2023 Spring Semester, Nora's confrontation with the Shadow Parliament came to a head when she was trapped by three Parliament members within the Observatory holding cell and barraged with increasingly personal questions. Many times throughout the interrogation session, Nora was referred to as "Daughter of Morning," a phrase which she did not recognize. As the Student Council finally made their way in, Nora's secret history was texted to the entire Poppy Valley School District -- Nora Black was Eleanora Alacrán. Revealed as a thief and as the daughter of a crime lord, the situation threw the Valerian Student Council into disarray and resulted in the end of her and Avram's relationship. Despite concerns that this was all orchestrated by the Parliament for this very purpose, Nora was dismissed from the Disciplinary Committee.

## Trivia

* Nora is badly lactose-intolerant and can get sick from even a small amount of cheese.
* It has been alluded to that Nora is from the town of Night Vale, by Commonplace Books.
* In her About Me, she expresses that she likes cats, books, cold weather, and socks, while she dislikes sugary drinks, loud talkers, being messy, and hot weather.
* Nora's favorite color is pink and her favorite food is almost anything with fruit. During her birthday, she said she favors strawberry cake.
* She frequently recommends people read "A Brief Treatise on Locksmithing" by T.K, Chapins, a fictional book named after a friend of the admin.
* Nora is half-Spaniard and half-Irish.
* In a thread regarding whether students had stories behind their names, Nora stated that she was named after Lenore from the Edgar Allan Poe poem, "The Raven", and that naming the girls in the family after Poe characters was a tradition started by her great-grandmother.[19]
* As stated in a "fun facts" discussion on the PVSD Discord server, Nora nearly drowned when she was younger, and has had a deep-seated fear of open water ever since. It took years before she would even get into a pool.

## Notable Quotes

* "It's a whole thing."
* "I slapped a god, I do what I want!"
* "I'm a helper!"