Working on updating the character sheet for Yelena for BBB. I will add it all in there when I am done.
Dead to all who knew her, Or rather all who had known her being dead, Yelena was free to go anywhere. During the long days that led to her physical recovery, Yelena's heart turned to the Vory and she considered taking her case to the ruling judges, but it would be her voice against that of Tsina Molovna and the Vory judges would need more than Yelena's word to rule against her rival, so she decided to just let herself remain dead and become someone new. Still, in her heart she remained Vory and still recited her oaths every day. After she was strong again, she gathered a few resources, thanked the man who had healed her, and left Moscow, wandering from Russia into the countries of Greater Europe, picking up work where she could. She found that there are many criminal gangs that are willing to take on a free lance sniper for a time. She took on the identity of Wanderer and moved from city to city across Europe, spending a few weeks in Germany before moving on to live for a few months in France and Italy then over to Spain. She made useful contacts wherever she went and her policy to remain neutral and never get involved in the politics of the gangs she worked for helped her move from one gang to the next once a job was completed. By the time she made it to London, she had been on the road for two years and her reputation had expanded with her, making her sort of a star of the dark side. She was one of the go-to people if a gang wanted someone dead and it did not matter to her who she was paid to kill. Politicians, policemen, bankers, gangland turncoats, and even witnesses about to testify came under her scope and died after receiving one of her messengers of death. Oddly enough she still recited the Vory oaths to herself every morning, giving part of her sanity something to grab hold of. The shadow took an important role as well as she slid further and further into darkness.
Of all the countries of Greater Europe, Yelena loved England the most. The gangs there were more than willing to make use of her talent with a rifle and she had access to all the sex and drugs one could want and then some.
She was tempted to try to find a steady employer in London but took a job in Oslo, Norway while considering her options. The job was an easy hit on a banker who had decided to turn evidence of certain money laundering activities by some politicians over to the Norwegian police. The man was under police protection, but Yelena had discovered years earlier that people make mistakes if you give them enough time to do so and the banker made a fatal one just two weeks after the Keeb assassin arrived in Oslo. The job complete and Yelena paid, she debated returning to London straight away, but decided to remain in Norway for a few days; a decision that would change her life. Yelena was eating outside a street café in a district of the city that saw few tourists when she first heard it. Jazz. Something in the music touched what was left of her soul and she went inside to listen to more of it and saw Brent Leans for the first time. He was just one of four people playing in a quartet on a small stage, but the soft music flowed from his saxophone like pure magic and she only had eyes for the middle aged man. She did not know him, but she wanted to. She did not know the music but she wanted to hear more of it. Yelena stayed late that night, hoping to be able to talk to the saxophone player, but he had company so she did not interrupt, although she did ask the barman about him and was told that he was some sort of hot shot, world famous musician over from the UCAS who had apparently burned out on concerts and the pressures of the business. The barman had not heard of him before, but he was a friend of the owner, who had given him a gig at the cafe. He winked when he told her that the man was quite friendly with the women who came to listen to him. Still interested, Yelena returned to the café night after night for several days in a row, letting the music talk to her in ways nothing else ever had. Brent finally noticed her and talked to her over drinks, thinking at first that she was some groupie of the sort of life he had left behind him. When he found out that she had never heard of him until a few nights earlier, he asked her to stay on for a bit. She stayed. And five years passed by. Yelena put her rifle case in a closet in the small walk-up she shared with Brent, pulling it out only to do routine maintenance on the rifle and pistol inside it when Brent was away from the apartment. The neighborhood was not London but she grew to love its quaint charms and seediness more than she had ever loved the bright lights, clubs, and casinos of the larger city. She loved and was loved for the first time in her life. He sat at her side as she went through the painful withdrawals from Bliss, giving her someone and something to cling to during the hardest of times. He fed her when she was recovering from the ordeal and too weak to lift a spoon or fork. She felt that he completed her and she was willing to trust another person as she never had before.
He played the saxophone like almost no one on earth could at the time. When he was home and sober, he taught Yelena to love and to play the sax, giving her a love for jazz and how to forgive herself. The forgiving part was the hardest because he had apparently never forgiven himself for something in his own past, but he managed to get Yelena to forgive herself. He never told her exactly why he was in Oslo, but she knew it was a woman. Yelena had used simple research tools and found out that he had been married and had two sons, but had divorced his wife two years earlier after a very public breakdown on the stage of a large arena while giving a concert. Charges of rampant infidelity flew from both husband and wife but the news articles of the time listed "irreconcilable differences" as the cause of the divorce. Yelena could read between the lines and knew that there was something more to it. She had her hints when Brent would come home reeking of alcohol, strange perfume, and sex. She put up with his cheating because he always did come home to her and she believed that he did love her more than the others. Her hope was that perhaps he would realize that some day and stay away from the other women. She was good enough with the sax that she was soon playing with him on the small cafe stage and sometimes instead of him when he was off drinking and sleeping around on her. She had a natural talent with the instrument and the music and she poured her years of suffering and pain into the music and it came out as something altogether different; something good and worth listening to. He taught her his greatest piece and she learned to play it with him. It was the best thing he had ever written and he shared it with her, making it their song. Then he died.
Yelena had left the house in the morning to go shopping for groceries at the local market and returned to a quiet house, which was strange, as Brent was fond of spending the mornings practicing his music. She put the groceries on the table and went to their bedroom, finding him sitting at the small desk there. He had apparently had a massive heart attack and died in the chair, a letter from the morning post in his hand. Reading it, she found that Brent had been planning for some time to return to the UCAS and try to get back together with his wife. According to the letter, the planning had been going on for several months and his wife could not wait to take him back. Brent had kept a drawer of the desk locked and had asked her not to pry into it, but it was now open and she looked inside, finding a number of letters from Brent's wife inside it, along with a single one-way ticket to New York. As she scanned several of the letters through her tears, she caught one phrase in particular. "My love, I know that you refer to the woman you are living with as your penny ante whore, but you have to remember your promise to give up all your whores when you get home." Yelena had to read the words four times and her world crashed in on her when she fully understood the implications behind them. His love had been all a lie but the betrayal was real enough. She had loved a man who had used her even while he was professing his love for her. Deadened, she went through the motions of calling the police and the ambulance and went through the process of clearing up his affairs. Everyone was very sympathetic and someone took up a collection to have Brent buried, raising enough to allow Yelena to throw a small party at the cafe, where she played the sax that had been his. At the end of the evening, she played what had started as his song then became their song and was now her song. Everyone present agreed that she played it better than he had and she smiled at the congratulations. He was dead and gone and the music was now hers. She took his sax, no, it was hers now, her weapons case, and the small amount of money she had managed to save and left Oslo for England.
In London, she fell in with a man named Scott Torrence. Torrence was a sometime citizen of the UCAS and he was dashing and debonair and knew how to show a woman a good time. He was also a shill for a group of casinos and used his looks and wit to bring well-heeled clients to places where they could lose lots of money and feel good about it. He was handsome and talked well and showed Yelena how she could have a good time. Starved for something, she found that she loved everything about games of chance, no matter what the game was. She won some, she lost some, but she had to have more of it. She was perfect for the role Scott Torrence used her for.
Even though Yelena is not beautiful, she can clean up well and can look very nice in a fancy gown. She was more than willing to trade her body for a good time and Scott was not above using her body as a come-on for his clients. He would work his charm on a client then bring Yelena in to seal the deal with sex and drink. She would show the man or woman a good time in bed then take him or her to a casino where she would help Scott's friends strip the client of large amounts of money. Yelena would be seeded with money from the club and encourage the target to bet large sums. For Yelena, it was a win win scenario, as she got to gamble without needing to worry if she lost it and she was paid to do it. This new habit was almost as bad as any of her older ones and, combined with drinking vodka to excess, was her low. She was able to remember the pain and agony of coming off Bliss and managed to resist getting back in the clutches of the drug, but that was about all she managed to do. For five months Torrence took her from London to Paris to Monte Carlo. Her weapons and her sax remained in their cases, although she would take both out once in a while and look at them. She kept the rifle and pistol clean and operable and the sax in tune and frequently wondered at how her life had turned out. One day she woke up in the bed of another man whose name she could not remember with empty bottles of vodka and Champagne littering the floor of the expensive hotel room. Worse, she did not even know where she was or when it was. After throwing up in the bathroom, she looked in the mirror and realized that she did not like what she saw. She left the room with a few thousand nuyen she took from the nearly comatose man in the bed and stopped in hers long enough to pick up her sax and her weapons, along with the money she had managed to squirrel away. She fled Monte Carlo for Italy and reached out to a man she had met years earlier who had specialized in creating identities and bought one from him, fleeing across the ocean to the UCAS for a fresh start at a new life.
Most of her money was used up to buy her new identity and the plane ticket, so she needed a means to survive. She fell back on her old ways, using her body and her talent with a rifle. The UCAS was not really all that different from Greater Europe in the gangs and crime, except that they usually paid better, which was an unexpected plus. She managed to keep off the bottle long enough to get a decent cyber commlink and some other gear, including a nice Harley to carry it all around on. She tracked down a true maestro of the body ink craft in New Orleans and had him work a tapestry on her back. It started with a huge dead tree in the middle of her back, its limbs draped with chains that held the skulls of people she had killed. The number proved too numerous for the chains and she had to have the man put skulls in stacks on the ground around the tree. Rats and serpents moved among the skulls and a host of ghostly forms fills the background. She has had other artists add additional skulls as she travels about and the whole thing is a work of art. Other than her tattoos and an occasional bit of implant repair, her needs proved to be fairly minimal and all she owned fit into the cargo boxes on the Harley, which suits her just fine as she had no thoughts of settling anywhere.
She took to working freelance for the UCAS mobs but decided that she needed someone to arrange things for her. Searching in the right places, she found that she should contact someone going by the name Virtual Goddess. The entity uses some sort of voice modulation when talking in person, but most of the communications are by text and suddenly Yelena had a fixer who would contact her with the details of who wanted her and who the target was. Yelena preferred working with gangs and she set limits on who her targets could be, refusing to kill any more innocent people. Still, even with that sort of prerequisite, there was plenty of work for Yelena once she proved herself. Gangs from New York, Detroit, Chicago, Denver; and other places needed people to take out competitors and traitors and Virtual Goddess was frequently able to work out a contract that paid Yelena better than what she had been making while arranging her own contracts in Europe, even with the standard cut back to the Fixer. The work paid the bills and bought her new equipment. She even ventured outside the UCAS to New Orleans and Los Angeles and returned to Europe several times on assignments. She has proved to be an excellent assassin and is good at her work, a consummate professional when on the job. Still, no matter where she goes, she finds that she cannot escape the demons in her life and still often goes to the bottle when they get too loud in her head and the ghosts of her past try to drag her into their own hell. It is almost impossible to walk past a casino without going in for "just a flutter". She is addicted to the games and knows it, but for now it is under control......maybe. She wins enough that her losses are offset and then some, but that could certainly turn nasty in a short time. She is very much into sex and has taken many lovers in many places but the only real love she allows herself to experience is jazz. Yelena looks for jazz in all its forms and keeps her ears to the ground for a local jazz club wherever she works. She still carries around the sax that she had taken from the apartment when Brent had died. She keeps it because it is a fine instrument, not from any need to keep some sort of link to a dead man who betrayed her trust and her love. Sometimes she can stay away from the bottle and the games for long enough to think she can be normal again, but then the faces of the people she has killed come back and she falls off the wagon yet again.
She had just finished a hit in Seattle for the Ancients, an Elven gang and had hoped to have a few days of relative calm before hitting the road again, but that did not happen. She was hired by a mysterious contact named Sam to hunt down and kill a blood mage that was terrorizing part of Seattle. The fee Sam promised Yelena was better than money. He showed her pictures of a living Tsina Molovna and said he would divulge her location if Yelena took the job he was hiring for. She took the job. In the process of completing the mission, Yelena witnessed a neighborhood pull together to save itself from a horror they should have run from. But this was their home, no matter that it was the Redmond Barrens, where it would be hard to find a building standing that was not in some serious state of decay or already in ruins. People lived in these buildings, even the wrecked ones, and they had nowhere else to go. For them this was the last stand and they stood and fought it, ganger and common sprawl dweller working together. Yelena found things she had cut from her life; things like friendship and a sense of belonging. A human woman named Arc saved her life when she did not have to, cementing a bond that Yelena strangely enough did not want to sever. The Keeb assassin rode with Arc into the battle with the blood mage and managed to kill the spell slinger but as she died, the mage released a lot of potent energy, critically injuring both Yelena and Arc. She might have died there on the street where others fought and and died to destroy the monstrous minion/master of the blood mage, but other survivors found the women and took them to a hospital to recover from wounds. She was in a coma for a bit and might still have died if Sam had not intervened with the hospital staff to give Arc and Yelena the best care possible, which seemed to include not letting them die. When she woke up, she found that her roommate at the hospital was Arc and they struck up a friendship she had not experienced since Brent. Something clicked in her mind and she found, surprisingly, that she wanted to stay. Arc must have felt the same way because she offered to let Yelena stay at her place. Over the next few days in the hospital room, they shared stories about their past, about the friends and enemies that had come together and given their lives in defense of their neighborhood, and about what they wanted from life going forward. With a few words and a shared near-death experience, the two women had become friends; Srui'ken, or Srui, in Or'Zet or something roughly like blood sister in English. Very roughly, as it means far more than that to the Orks. Yelena is now a partner of Arc and has moved in with her. Perhaps this phase of her life will not end as poorly as the others have.
Sam had put in an appearance at the hospital just as Arc and Yelena were congratulating themselves on surviving the fight with the blood mage and the spirit and sharing stories with some friends who had shown up. His appearance was very much like a succubus of myth and perhaps that is what he really is because Yelena felt a pull from him that she had not felt in years. He offered them a new job and promised that it would be easier than fighting the blood mage. Feeling chuffed and good about themselves, they agreed to meet and talk to him about the new job when they were released from the hospital. At the meeting, they were told that there was something fishy about a new nightclub, The Stardust, that had opened on the edge of the Barrens. Sam suspected that the owners were using drugs to kidnap people and wanted the team to go inside the building and find out. He introduced Arc and Yelena to some new associates to replace some old friends who had decided that this sort of life was not for them.
