As most great stories in history, this one begins on a stormy night in Seattle. A very pregnant and terrified Lorene Castiel and her husband Larry rushed through the streets of the city and to the nearest hospital, desperately trying to make it there in time before their unborn daughter came into the world in the front seat of their car. In the blink of an eye, however, the officer and his wife were struck by a drunk driver, rendering Lorene unconscious and Larry dead.
Fast forward 16 years to find Isla Castiel, brunette bombshell in training -- the striking image of her mother and father combined, angrily packing her bags and stuffing everything she owend in them. From the day her father died until now, Isla was blamed for his death and her mother had never forgiven her. Even the quiet resentment of what happened that night was palpable when Isla was a mere child. She tried. Everyday of her life, Isla tried to be a good daughter, to make up for something she wasn't old enough to understand. The older she got, the more resentful her mother became, and the more she pushed Isla away. Halfway through her sophomore year, Isla had finally reached her breaking point. A face to face screaming match with her mother ending in the three words and eight letters she always feared hearing the most.
If it wasn't for the generosity of her extended family, Isla knew she would find herself without a proper home, with nowhere to go, and with no real chance of survival. Her mothers sister, Lilian, offered a helping hand a place to crash while Isla figured things out. They had spent countless hours and days attempting to reason with Lorene, but the truth was, Isla was never going to go home. There was never going to be a day when that door opened and her mother welcomed her back with open arms. After the proper emancipation papers were signed and dated, Isla was officially no one's. lillian and and Ted kept their door open for her and more often than not, she'd find herself curled up on their couch at the end of the day. She lived with them throughout the rest of high school and was able to experience having a family in a way her mother had never shown her.
After high school, the plan was for Isla to move on to college full time and helping her uncle run his gym whenever it was convenient for her. As much as he loved having her around, he knew the blonde needed to move on and get an education before she found herself stuck in the city of Seattle like so many of his students had in the past. Isla was for this idea for a long time, having made plans to attend college nearby and help on the weekends when it was busiest.
Isla went on to study botany for years, splitting her time between helping her uncle run his gym and heling her aunt run her florist business. her love of plants and the environment made her into a voracious florist herself, using her work at her aunts shop as a creative outlet on the days she wasn't using the gym as an outlet to release anger. She spent all her time between the two jobs, hungry to make change wherever she could, especiall at the gym with her uncle. Her eager and bright mind full of ideas on how to expand and make it into something bigger than they could have imagined. With a business degree in one hand and plans for the new gym in the other, Ted and Isla set out to Boston and began building their dreams from the rubble up, combining their visions and ideas into one of the cities most prominent martial arts training centers. They were easily recognized as a team and their excellent community work from back west had brought plenty of inquiries from all over the greater Boston area. It was no time at all before this branch of Wildecat had blossomed into what it is now, one of the most impressive training centers on the east coast. Something Isla and Ted have both been proud of for a very long time.
It goes without saying that when a presence as large as Isla's enters a city, people notice. Although she had often kept to herself early on in their cross-country, more focused on her work than anything else, the attention she was grabbing hadn't gone unnoticed by her. She knew, and she used it to her advantage, too. Isla's guile and intrigue caught the attention of some well known names in the business, and before too long, she was under contract and doing what she loved more than anything.
It took a while to get used to the traveling and constant attention all over again, but eventually Isla soaked it all in and reveled in the fact that only a handful of years ago, she was a motherless orphan and now she was on the path of making something of herself. If one were to ask Isla to look back on her career as a fighter, she would say these were some of her best years and really molded the person she would eventualy become.
A time came when Isla's life began to derail slowly. Her attentio became split again when she met someone she immediately fell in love with. With distractions like these, her attention began to slip and her training would become sloppy. Little did Isla know that this would lead to her inevitable downfall at the age of 26 when an injury in the ring forced her to break her contract and quit fighting.
Dejected and broken hearted, Isla spent months in a deep depression as she healed. A lot of speculation on her injury believes that it was foul play and likely to have been done on purpose, but not once did she ever entertain the idea. Many people believed that her opponent knew she was distracted and was offered a substantial amount of money to go beyond the realm of normal fighting in the ring. To this day, many years later, Isla refuses to believe that.
There came a time when her aunt dragged her back to work, hoping to get Isla out of a funk, and the two of them worked together at ivy farms. Her aunt designed floral arrangements and Isla delivered them and hosted a weekly flower bar, where people would get classes on how to make their own floral arrangements. In 2015, she had a vision on how to expand the brand, and three years later they are thriving and doing something that has been otherwise unheard of.
