Yelena Background
Yelena Petrovna Talinovsky was born on may 23rd, 2011 to parents she never met and never knew. She would have been an ordinary Russian child except for the pointed ears, snowy white hair, and violet eyes but these features put her in the category of freak. Her parents had two "healthy and normal" children already and did not want this....thing.......in the house. The state had been broadcasting information for days about something called Unexplained Genetic Expression or UGE, informing all that these abnormals must be turned in to the state. Her parents, afraid that they, too, would be interrogated for just having her, unceremoniously dumped her on the steps of the small church in the next village. The priest there realized that he had a UGE on his hands, but had heard rumors of what was being done to those unfortunate enough to be given to the state. Ivan Yerovik was a simple man, but a devout one, and he prayed for an answer to his dilemma, receiving what he believed to be divine guidance. He showed the infant a kindness rare in humanity at the time and did not turn her in keeping her in a special secret room in the small church and arranging for milk from a local girl that had lost her son in childbirth. He told the young woman that he was giving the milk to a girl in the next village who could not breast feed. He gave the infant a name because she had none, drawing on one of his favorite children's stories for inspiration. He was there when she learned to crawl and walk and talk and tried to pass on as much to the little girl as he could about God and what a miracle she was. Of course, most young children do not really grasp such concepts, but Ivan felt that he was getting through to her in some fashion. To Yelena, the priest was both mother and father and her entire world was a small room and the bit of road that she could see through a chink in the wooden wall at the back of her cubicle. When Yelena was three, the priest let slip to a close friend that he was caring for a UGE child at the church and this "friend" repaid the confidence by contacting the authorities to collect the reward for unregistered abnormals.
Three men of the State Security Service showed up in a large black car and forcibly removed Yelena from the secret room over the protests of the priest. One of the large men drug Yelena screaming from the church and put her across his shoulder. Yelena reached out her arms to the priest, who was the only other person she knew, and called out to a God that was determined to not listen to the plaintive cries of a young Elf. The last of the state goons out the door turned to the priest, drew his gun, and shot the kind man four times. Yelena stopped believing in God and started hating humans in that same moment. Although she was too young to really know what hate is, the sight of her father bleeding to death on the steps of the church would stay with her for a very long time and would help fuel her actions. Yelena was thrown into the back of the car and taken to one of the state-run "re-educational camps", where she was put into confinement with others of "her kind". These camps were old gulags converted to a new use; a place to contain the genetic abnormals. Yelena was originally confined with 33 other Elves and 25 Dwarves in Camp 14. Some hints of the atrocities that occurred in these camps have trickled out of Siberia, but the real horrors were much worse. The Russian state was determined to find out what these creatures were and, more importantly, how they could make use of them. Physicians and scientists dissected and conducted experiments on these children, determined to unlock the secrets of their existence. Every week brought more UGE children to camp 14 and soon the place housed four times as many abnormals as there were beds to put them in. There was also less food than necessary and the children were subjected to privation and near starvation. Of course, that was part of the experiment, too.
Yelena fought and scrabbled as hard as any of the others; certainly harder than those who gave up and died. During the seven years that Yelena existed in Camp 14, she saw 189 Elves and 67 Dwarves die either at the hands of the doctors or from simple starvation and disease. The horrors of their existence forced some to become cannibals to survive. And Yelena survived. She suffered through her own series of tests and the experiments the doctors did to her, as well as the abuses from the barracks guards, who were overly fond of withholding food just to see what the kids would do. When she was six, Yelena found an answer, one that she would carry with her for the rest of her life. She had made the mistake of becoming friends with another young elven girl, Siga. The two became as close as it was possible to be in a place like camp 14. When Siga was singled out by one of the guards for a beating, Yelena made the mistake of being noticed trying to help her friend. The guard began beating both girls, punching and kicking their small bodies again and again, damaging internal organs but Siga and Yelena refused to let go of life. The guard beat them senseless before throwing both girls out into the freezing temperatures of a Siberian winter and left after warning the other kids in the barracks that trying to help either girl would bring them the same beating. Yelena, able to only see from one eye due to the blood flowing into the other from the cuts on her face, could barely make out the limp form of her friend next to her but she managed to stretch out an arm that had been broken in the beating and clasp the hand of her unconscious friend. The cold stole in on the dying girls and Siga woke up enough to smile once at the girl who had been her only friend. "It is OK to die. I am going back to God." With those words, Siga left the mortal world. Yelena watched her friend die then said, more to herself than to the corpse next to her, "There is no God, Siga. I hope you go somewhere warm where there is plenty of food." As the bitter cold seeped in and threatened to finish what the guard had begun, Yelena struggled to remain alive, fighting against her injuries and the weather. And losing. As she slipped into unconsciousness she could not talk but silently railed, not against how unfair all of this was, but against death, still fighting the inevitable. Then a voice came to her, promising to help her if she accepted the Shadow. Without hesitation she mentally responded "Yes." and died.
Only she did not die. Somehow she survived and managed to crawl back into the barracks. Some of the kids wanted to throw her back out, afraid that they would be accused of helping her and so face the wrath of the guard, but others helped the girl to a bed and gave her what warmth they could share. Siga's body was also brought inside and used to provide some nourishment to the others. Many of the kids were hoping that Yelena would also die from her injuries but she stubbornly clung to life, drawing on the shadow to heal her. In the morning, the guard returned and simply asked if the girls had been tenderized enough from the beating he had given them. He did not recognize Yelena when he saw her; to him she had been just another nameless and faceless child that he had killed. He was brutish enough that the killings had long ago stopped bothering him and one dead child was just like the next and the next. Yelena remembered the man and marked him for justice for what he had done, not that she had much chance of getting justice here, but it helped give her a purpose for living. The experiments and examinations continued, but she was often overlooked when the guards came to select their victims, something she quickly put down to the help of the shadow.
Yelena was 10 when Goblinization hit in 2021. "Goblinization". Another humanity term to try to explain what they could not understand. Orks and Trolls appeared everywhere, making UGE seem tame in comparison. The state's reaction was familiar; round up the new abnormals and take them to the camps. Unfortunately for the Russian State, adult Orks and Trolls were not as pliant as the Elven and Dwarven children had been. A group of guards escorting some of the new freaks to Camp 14 made the unfortunate decision to try to kill one of the trolls when he resisted going through the gates. The troll broke free of his restraints and killed the four men in the truck he was in. In a frenzy of bloodletting, he freed the rest of the prisoners on the trucks and led a rampage through the camp, setting the prisoners free, including a grateful Yelena. The young Elf, although only ten, picked up a rifle from a dead human guard and refused to give it up when an Ork demanded it. A passing troll by the name of Nikko saw the exchange and allowed her to keep the weapon and even gave her some bullets for it, which she gratefully used to kill several of the guards. The first man to die at her hands was the guard who had killed Siga. Yelena put bullets into the man's knees before putting one through his head. The young girl smiled to herself, completely convinced that the shadow had worked it out to allow her to bring justice for her friend. In the chaos, she found Nikko surrounded by humans who seemed to be close to overwhelming even that mountain of a man. Yelena killed three of the men, allowing the Troll to finish the others. A grateful Nikko took the young Elf with him into the Siberian wilderness, where he formed a gang of bandits and began to prey on the surrounding human villages for food, weapons and money. The small Elf with the too-long rifle was allowed to train with it and discovered that somewhere in her DNA existed some genes for a natural ability with guns. She was......talented. Within a few weeks she was the gang's long range support for their raids. She delighted in sending her small messengers of death into human bodies. Have I mentioned yet how much she hated humans in those days? Many was the time that she would pass through a gutted village and watch impassively as she walked past a small child standing near his dead parents outside a burning home, knowing that she was leaving him to a certain death from cold or starvation. Back then it was just another human and what did she owe humans anyway? These days she cannot drink enough vodka to get the faces out of her memory.
Nikko was always careful to limit the size of the gang to 20 metas. "Less is ineffective and more is unwieldy." And for almost 13 years his caution and care paid off. The gang moved from one remote area of Siberia to another, always staying a step or two ahead of the authorities. Yet for all his care in selecting just the right metas for the gang he slipped up in the summer of 2034. The hole left by a death was filled by an Ork who was part of a state anti-crime unit and the gang was betrayed during a raid. Yelena and the others fought like lions, knowing that death waited for them if they were captured. The thenty-three your old woman was knocked unconscious during the fight and woke up in the back of a transport truck being raped by one of the guards. During the three day ride to the detention center she was raped by each of the four men in the truck several times. She stopped resisting after the third beating. Have I said before how much she used to hate humans? She found out from one of the other prisoners that only she and the other three in the truck had survived the firefight and that Nikko had to be killed four times before he was finally put down for good. She was tossed to the ground at the detention center, a fenced compound that bore a striking resemblance to Camp 14. It appeared that the Russian State was not original when it came to their prison camps.
From the detention center to prison was a short trial and sentence. Life without parole was the judgment passed down and she was sent to a real prison, a facility that made the earlier camps look a lot like paradise. The state had grown tired of trying to understand metas and just threw them in prison now, relying on the harsh life there to save them a bullet. Yelena was determined to survive and found that there were men and metas alike who were willing to give her a degree of protection for the privilege of having sex with her, at least until the her newness wore off. In short order, she learned learned the ropes and slept her way to the underboss of the toughest and most brutal gang in the prison. These people did not care if she, or anyone else, was human or metahuman. They just cared about loyalty and ability. She had found the Vory, or Russian mob, and they pretty much ruled the prison. She found that she needed to do more for them than just sex and set herself up to be needed. The Vory was family and honor and everything she thought she needed and she realized that she wanted to make a place for herself with them. She earned the first of a number of Vory tattoos by killing a member of a rival gang. She had her Vory oaths inked onto her upper arms in scrolls and she would recite the words to herself every day. The prison ink artist added a large sun on her left breast where it was centered on her nipple and was marked with the number of the prison. More killing and more sex kept her near the top of the gang. The prison tattoos she added indicated her rise and her achievements. Each year, a ray would be added to the sun, indicating her survival of another year and containing the number of the people she had killed for the Vory that year. She grew proud of each tattoo she earned, knowing that they bought her respect in the only currency the prison inmates were likely to understand. She showed that she could be as vicious and cruel as any of the rest of the Vory in the prison and was admitted to the inner circle when her lover, Nicolai, became her mentor, teaching her what she needed to learn of the mob and their brand of justice and loyalty. He was a brutally sadistic bastard and Yelena easily took to the sort of life he offered her. Nicolai was the man at the side of the Vory Bratva boss of the prison, responsible for enforcing the decrees of the boss and Yelena became his primary tool. He would send her out into the prison to carry out his ruthless orders, and she did everything she was told to do. In ten years she had 73 kills, each marked on her chest. She learned that all humans were not bad, just most of them. She also learned that being in prison gave her more freedom than she had experienced for most of her life. Sex, drugs, and vodka flowed into and through the prison and Yelena experimented with all of it. It was here that she was first introduced to Bliss and she would use it to unwind after a mission, enjoying the feeling almost as much as she enjoyed the killing. The prison was her home and the Vory was her family, but this life was not meant to last.
The prison erupted in gang violence in 2045, when several small gangs banded together to end the rule of the Vory. Much of her Bratva died amid the confusion and devastation, but so did many others. The prison superintendent became one of the early victims of the riot when his office was firebombed and ransacked. An enterprising hacker managed to gain access to the files and wipe everyone's record before he, too, died. Yelena managed to escape with Nicolai and a handful of other Vory confederates and all made their way to Moscow, where they were accepted into the local Bratva. She fell into the new gang with ease, even convincing the boss that she was good with a rifle. After a test, she was made the group's sniper and given additional practice and training. it was during this time that she fell in love with the Ares brand of weapons, swearing that they were the only ones who knew how to build a decent gun. For a while she had nearly the same freedoms as she had experienced in prison, only without the bars. Two years after entering the Bratva, she replaced Tsina Molovna as the boss' mistress. This human woman pretended to accept the change in status, but secretly vowed vengeance. She waited patiently for seven months before contacting a rival gang and putting her plan into operation. Nicolai had been sent to meet with the representatives of several other Moscow Bratvas, giving Tsina the opening she had been waiting for. She had contacted a non-Vory gang whose boss desperately wanted vengeance against the Bratva boss for having his wife and daughter killed. Tsina gave them the codes and passwords to bypass the security features of the Bratva's safe house. In a night of brutality, the gang was wiped out to a man. Tsina captured Yelena and the Hellfire, her former boss and lover before dousing the man with gasoline and setting him on fire so that Yelena could watch him die. She then told Yelena that her protecter, Nicolai, had been assassinated at the meeting then she personally shot Yelena three times in the chest and dumped her body in the frigid river. Yelena drew upon the shadow again and forced it to serve her as she had been promised. Somehow she refused to die and managed to crawl from the river and to a place of safety unknown to her rival. To her knowledge, every one of her family was dead, including Nicolai. Her world had ended and she needed a new one. With that in mind, she left Moscow, but kept Tsina's face close to her hardened heart, vowing to get justice for her fallen family some day.
