Growing up in the Kennedy household wasn't always easy. Phoenix was born on an ungodly hot July afternoon to a cold and abusive father, and a mother who worked far harder than she should have as a waitress. Nix was the youngest of three siblings, and for the two sisters life was tolerable. Their mother clearly favored the girls, to the point that this doting often saved them from their father's wrath. Whenever he was in one of his moods, they rarely suffered at his hand – something that Phoenix's older brother did not escape.

Out of all of her family members, her brother was the one she was closest to. When she was young, he would look after her, and never complained about it. It was his room she'd go to in the middle of the night if she had a bad dream, and he who'd make sure she got to school on time when their mother was at work. Phoenix's earliest childhood memory comes from when she was six – maybe even younger – watching from the kitchen table as her father yelled at her beloved brother. It had frightened her; she had never seen her father acting like that before. He had been grumpy a good many times, often brushing her aside when she wanted to share a drawing with him, or tell him a story about her day at school. After witnessing the horrible fight, she had followed her brother to his room and talked to him, comforting him to the best of her childish capability. And when she hugged him, chubby little arms flung around his middle, she noticed the bruises on him. She didn't even have to ask, she knew that it was her father who had left the ugly marks. She cried then, because while she knew that there were terrible people in the world, she realized then that her father was one of them.

After that night, she became more aware of what was going on. It was never done directly in front of Phoenix or her sister, and the abuse was never something that was talked about, but she knew. Phoenix was eight the first time she put herself between her father and brother, which only got her knocked aside and a command to stay out of it. She did it again a year later, and soon she did it whenever she got the opportunity, not caring about the consequences and only focused on keeping her favorite person safe. Not long after, on her fourteenth birthday, her brother was sent to live with her maternal grandfather, which seemed to eased the tension in the household. But things were never the same in the Kennedy house, and she started counting down until she was old enough to get away. Her home didn't feel safe anymore, and was much colder without her brother's presence.

It was around then that she began to draw. She had always been an artistic child, but it hadn't been anything more than doodles and school art projects. After her brother left, she wanted something to keep herself occupied. Soon she started noticing little notes around the edges of her drawings. Notes written in handwriting that could have been hers, but was just a little bit... different. And the thing was, she didn't remember writing them. And often, they didn't really make sense. Sometimes they were even in languages she didn't speak a world of. She had always believed in ghosts, and had read many stories about communicating with the dead, and knew immediately that she was channeling spirits through her writing. This didn't bother her at all. In fact, she was excited about it. She had something to concentrate on, something to take her out of her own head and distract her from the gray, mundane life she lived. Soon, she became obsessed, and tried to force her automatic writing. She became frustrated when it didn't come exactly when she wanted to, and by the time she was in her senior year of high school, she had gone from one end of the spectrum to the other. Now she didn't want this ability, because she couldn't control it, and couldn't help the spirits who had things they wanted to say to her. She was frustrated, and moody, and hated that familiar itch in her fingers that meant a message wanted to come through.

Senior year, she tried to focus on her schoolwork so she could graduate. But because she'd spent so much of high school locked in her bedroom with a pad of paper, trying to get her automatic writing to work, that almost didn't happen. She had done horribly the years prior, passing only by a few decimals of a percent. Except for her art classes, of course; they were the only classes she always excelled in. She managed to scrape her grades up by working her butt off all year, just enough to get admission to New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. She'd wanted to get away from home for so long, but the best she could do was leave Shreveport for New Orleans. Still, it was five hours away from the prison she'd lived in for eighteen years, so she took it and ran. With the five thousand dollars she had saved from Christmas, birthday, and graduation gifts, and the horrible little car that her father had passed on to her after he bought something suitible for a midlife crisis, she fled her parents' home and never looked back. Life in a dorm room with a girl who smelled like sweat and lemon pledge wasn't perfect, but it was better than listening to her father scream whenever something displeased him. And hey, it was cheaper than renting her own apartment, letting her bulk up her savings by working at a store that sold art supplies. Whenever she wasn't sleeping or in class, she was working. Because if she kept busy, she wouldn't get so many messages from spirits that she could do nothing about.

She had been living in New Orleans for a year and a half when she discovered the Ridge. She had never thought of what she could do as a psychic ability, but after following a breadcrumb trail on an internet forum, she found someone posting about a community – an entire community! – of psychics who had set up camp in a gated community in New Orleans. Right in her own back yard! Feeling like it must have been fate that brought her here, she decided to check it out. And after hanging out around the gates so she could talk to a few of the residents, she made the decision to rent one of the smaller houses in The Ridge, happier than ever that she had been living in a dorm and could build a nest egg. Because of that, she got to live in a place way nicer than anywhere she'd ever lived, and be among people who would understand her. Life was finally looking up. She took a couple years off of school, because she didn't really know what her end goal was, and focussed on just drawing and painting for herself, and also joined a local burlesque troop. She recently went back to school, finally deciding on getting her BA in fine arts. Just because it was a thing to do. Her current tentative plans are to try her hand at being a freelance artist/illustrator.