Naomi Mitchell was born in Cairo and lived there until the age of 9, her father being attached to the US Embassy there. Naomi's youth was therefore a peculiar combination of American custom and Egyptian culture; she is as fluent in Arabic as in English, and a fair amount of Egypt's influence can be seen in her personality to this day.
When Naomi's maternal grandfather was diagnosed with terminal cancer, her mother decided to move back to the states and bring her daughter, too. It was during an outing in Miami, her mother introducing Naomi to the society she wasn't very familiar with but belonged to somehow all the same, that the nine-year-old girl discovered people can fly. (Paragliding technically isn't flying, but Naomi insisted. She also insisted she get to learn how.) Hoping that interest would help Naomi settle into American culture more easily, her mother agreed. Children adapt, and Naomi did just that. Her adolescence was fairly typical, aside from summer trips to Egypt, rare return visits by her father at other times of year, and her ongoing passion with everything unpowered and aerial. Sailplanes. Hang-gliding. She didn't skydive until she could celebrate her graduation by it, but it's hang-gliding that became Naomi's major hobby.
Her profession was entirely unrelated; a college degree in International Studies at 22, with the mandatory study abroad semester occurring in Saudi Arabia; she followed her father into the civil service, though Naomi became an assistant. She originally had her sights set on 'Foreign Affairs Officer', but that got derailed after a couple of years. Plans change, sometimes for the least well-defined reasons; there was a boy, and a recruiter that Naomi didn't actually talk to herself, and a half-joking 'what if' that somehow wandered out of the realm of 'if'. Naomi applied to the FBI Academy in 2004 and was accepted for training. Formally became a Special Agent after an intense 20 weeks of training.
Naomi wound up in the 'Civil Rights Program', that branch of the FBI which predominately addresses hate crimes. The FBI can't deal with hate crimes on the immediate level, since most are 'local' matters, but they do get involved under the interpretation of hate crimes as 'civil rights violations' or 'domestic terrorism'. This equates to something approaching 400 cases a year nationwide, investigated in close cooperation with local agencies. Naomi, of course, didn't deal with all or even a substantial fraction of those herself.
She remained with the FBI for three years. Business seriously picked up after November 2006 and the Manhattan Explosion — Naomi was one of many who were relocated to NYC to address the rash of violence there. By summer 2007, however, Naomi was out of the FBI — she transferred to Homeland Security's nascent Evolved Response Division. FBI involvement in investigating hate crimes was necessary but something of a kluge — a poorly-grafted add-on to the role of local agencies. Homeland Security had shouldered primary responsibility for Evolved crimes across the nation; Naomi saw a chance to make more of a difference and took it.
One thing Naomi learned about when she joined Homeland Security was their little quid-pro-quo with the Company. Talk about something that rubs her every which wrong way — while any bureaucratic federal organization, any human organization, including the foreign and civil service, has its under-the-table deals, they usually don't approach anywhere near the scale of the HomeSec-Company arrangement. Unfortunately? Shed the Company and Homeland Security will be so far out of its league, even with the suppressant drug and the holding facilities currently in place, that it won't be able to do anything effective. Fortunately, Naomi treats and has always treated Company agents the same as anyone else — amiably. Don't mean she likes them, but it'd take an empath to tell.
February 2009 brought a new revelation of its own, though less widely earth-shattering than the Petrelli Conference of two years prior: when tested for an Evolved ability, Naomi's blood came back positive. She still doesn't know what her ability is, and is currently Registered as Tier 0.
