When Shit Gets Real

Adrienne was born in Paris, 1932. Her mother was a teacher at an elementary school which helped pay for her father’s work; he was an artist, famous around the city for his surrealistic paintings. While their family was close, the busy lifestyles of her parents meant that Adrienne’s older brother, Patrice, played a part in looking after her. She was raised a Catholic, and she and her family lived in peace.

Any illusions of safety were shattered during the beginning of World War 2, in 1940, when the Nazis invaded France. Adrienne and her family would proceed to spend the next two terrifying years living under Nazi occupation. They struggled with food shortages and malnutrition became an increasing problem for Adrienne and Patrice. Then people started to disappear. Jewish families were taken from their homes across France in the hundreds – their fates remained a chilling mystery.

But even these dark times, the Desmarais family still held fast to their moral compass. When rumors spread of German soldiers searching schools for Jewish children, it was Adrienne's mother who hid Jewish students beneath their house, for fear of what might become of them at the hands of German soldiers. Her father worried that such actions might risk their own children's safety, but his religious beliefs prevented him from denying the need of the children - after all, what man could live his life knowing that his hesitance to act would cost so many children their lives? For several months the Desmarais family was able to care for the students in secret, but with many more mouths to feed it became harder than ever before to scrap together a living.

It was the mysterious lack of food in the Desmarais household that eventually drew the suspicions of neighbors and patrolling soldiers. In November of 1942, soldiers raided their house and discovered the hidden children. All occupants in the house were immediately arrested, including the four Desmarais family members and the seventeen Jewish children they had hidden. Adrienne, now ten years old, and her sixteen-year-old brother, Patrice, were immediately taken from their parents upon arrival at Drancy internment camp. They, along with all seventeen Jewish children, were crammed into a small cattle car and deported to Auschwitz. Adrienne and Patrice would never saw their parents again.

The journey to Auschwitz was a miserable one. The children were packed together so tightly that there was very little room to move amongst the sea of bodies. There were no washrooms, and it wasn't long before the thick stench clouded the air and human filth clung to their bodies. They were given no food for days and very little water, and a few of the younger children died before they reached their destination. Adrienne herself barely clung to life - it was thanks to her brother that she even survived the trip at all.

On arrival at Auschwitz the passengers in the train were separated into two lines: Adrienne and the surviving children were placed in line with the elderly, woman and other small children, while Patrice was placed in a line consisting of older boys and men. While Patrice and the men were sent for registration, the other line was told that they were to be disinfected in the showers. As it had been with their parents, it was the last time the two siblings would ever see each other.

Adrienne and the others in her line were crammed into a metal chamber, and carbon monoxide filled the room. Within several minutes over four hundred bodies covered the floor of the chamber. There were no survivors.

Until one of them – a ten-year old girl – woke up.

Adrienne's body had recovered from the gas, and the girl woke up surrounded by the hundreds of bodies of those who did not awake. Her miraculous recovery attracted the attention of Auschwitz scientists.

It was realized that a previously-unknown form of energy had been triggered in Adrienne's body, an energy which allowed her cells and tissues to repair themselves unnaturally quickly and efficiently. To determine the limits of her cellular regeneration a number medical experiments of unspeakable horror were performed on Adrienne. These included experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia, injections of supposedly lethal diseases and germs, and attempts to use of chemicals to attempt to change the color of her eyes - which were slowly becoming silver in response to severe trauma; which would only release more of that mysterious energy. Over time her hair began to change color too, from the rich black it was before to a shining silver identical to her eyes. Her cellular regeneration barely allowed her to endure, healing wounds within weeks, but grew more potent the more energy was released into her system. When it became clear that her stay at Auschwitz would be longer than a mere trip to the gas chamber, Adrienne was registered into the camp, and a number – AU4906 – was tattooed into her left wrist.

It was starvation of all things that nearly ended her. While deprived of food and water Adrienne's body was barely able to scrap together the energy required for such advanced cellular regeneration. She was forced to lick fresh mop water off the floor in an effort to stay hydrated, but would have starved to death anyway had tales of her regenerative powers not reached the ears of a group of German alchemists working for the Third Reich.

They were a secret society, devoted to unlocking the secret of eternal life through studying a strange blend of modern science and the old practices of alchemists centuries ago. Hitler, in his obsession with the occult, had hired them to work with his top military engineers to research and design new forms of weaponry. The leader of these alchemists, Diedrich Falkenrath, had the foresight to use the funds given to him to buy a once abandoned factory and hire workers to build these prototype weapons. Naturally most of these weapons were proved a failure and never made it onto the battlefield.

But Falkenrath's "discovery" of Adrienne would bring him great fortunes in the years to come.

Adrienne was transported to Berlin, but her torturous stay at Auschwitz had left its mark. No ten-year-old could take so much pain and come out intact. Her body could heal her physical scars, but her mind was left broken. Starving and nearly-skeletal, she was brought back from the brink of death by the scientists and alchemists under the orders of Falkenrath, who had realized such healing abilities would require energy, and therefor nutrients. Over the following months she was nursed back to physical health – but this did not mean an end to the pain that would continue to be inflicted on her.

The torture became psychological. Adrienne was treated more like a lab rat than a human being, a living, breathing anomaly of nature of which to be poked and prodded and tested. They called her: “Subject-4906”, after the camp registration number forever imprinted on her arm. She lived in a small crate for over a year, kept locked up until tests were needed or food and water was given to her. Still, no matter how many blood samples they collected; no matter how many tests they ran; the alchemists couldn’t replicate the mysterious energy that now coursed through her veins – an energy they called “aether”.

The final days of World War 2 brought a temporary end to Adrienne’s torment. After the death of Hitler and the fall of the Nazi’s, Falkenrath became desperate. To ensure that the research he collected on aether and the secret to human immortality would not go to waste, he managed to secure a last-resort deal with the American government, using the knowledge he and his men gained on Subject-4906’s healing abilities as leverage. The ramifications of it’s potential use in the medical field, and the tantalizing mystery of aether itself, persuaded the American government to transfer Falkenrath and his best men to the states, along with Subject-4906. With the knowledge that she would no longer be forced to live in the cruel heart of Nazi Germany, Adrienne’s heart flared with hope for the first time in nearly two years.

That hope would soon be crushed. Falkenrath was granted immunity by the US government in exchange for his contributions, and within months he was given his own laboratories, staff, and was allowed to continue his research, under the top-secret project titled Operation: 4906. Adrienne was met with no sympathy – those few who had seen her silver hair and healing abilities thought her an abomination. Her torture would continue for years to come…

Eventually, Falkenrath would discover that there were vast amounts of Aether in the depths of the earth. In 1951, a US base was established in Antarctica, near the pole of inaccessibility; where large pools of aether were believed to be located under the thick layer of ice. Falkenrath sent in laborers and resources for the construction of a huge drill capable of reaching solid land beneath the two-kilometer thick ice, where the enormous energy readings were located. In 1952, a now twenty-year-old Adrienne was transferred to the Antarctic base, as the remote location offered security far beyond the government’s greatest technologies.

Placed in charge of handling Subject-4906 was an American bioweapons engineer named Dr. Cyrus Hassler, a man who strived to weaponize aether, rather than unlock its potential medical secrets.

In 1956 the drill was completed, and a cavity was successfully pierced into the massive ice layer. Expecting to find aether, the expedition team stumbled upon something else: Dozens of mysterious crystals, blacker than black and throbbing with energy unlike any other. In some ways it was similar to aether, but when released from the crystals it destroyed anything it came in contact with. Upon further study, Falkenrath realized that the energy was both the polar opposite of aether and at the same time the same basic force, just as heat and cold were measures of temperature. He named this new energy “Nether”.

In quickly became apparent that experimenting with what little samples of nether they had was a very dangerous prospect. It destroyed nearly any material upon contact – steel containers, liquid, and even air particles – devouring the very atomic structure until nothing remained. Only the crystals could contain nether safely. Yet its potential as a weapon was obvious, and Dr. Cyrus Hassler salivated at the thought. But how to create a weapon that wouldn’t be destroyed by its own ammunition? Creating nethereal bombs using the crystals wasn’t an option; their supply of crystals was limited. Hassler sought to instead use it as a gas-like weapon – one far more deadly than any poison or acid. But energy within had to be somehow siphoned from the crystals, safely stored in a container that could allow the energy to be studied, and perhaps reproduced. Dr. Hassler theorized that perhaps only nether’s opposing side, aether, would be able to prevent its raw destructive force.

As such, only one known source of aether existed.

Adrienne – Subject-4906 – was the only living thing yet capable of surviving with aether in her body, yet while it provided her an impressive healing factor, it hadn’t prevented her from aging. Falkenrath considered that the secret to true immortality might still lie in the little-understood nether, which could balance out the aether in Adrienne’s blood. Dr. Hassler, desperate for a source of aether to contain the nethereal energy, agreed. If Subject-4906 survived an injection with nether, Falkenrath could take another step forward in his quest for the perfect human; if she died in the process then at least Hassler would be able to further prove the lethality of nether, capable of killing where disease or poison failed.

Locked in a chamber of solid steel walls three thick, Adrienne was infected with the lethal energy, siphoned straight from the crystals. As it entered her blood, she fell immediately unconscious; but rather than dissolving her body, the nether bound itself to her cells as if drawn by the aether within. A startling mutation on the microscopic level began to occur; Hassler’s theory was correct.

But he hadn’t considered the side effects.

One might think nether has a mind of its own. While not malicious, it is inherently destructive, and what it does not destroy it twists and changes and blackens. The cellular mutations had gifted Adrienne with new abilities. Powerful abilities.

Fourteen horrifying years of torture and abuse both physical and psychological had left Adrienne a broken, empty shell, and an ocean of toxic, black hate swept in to fill it. The nether twisted her unconscious mind into the very monster she had been treated as, and as her body was obscured in a massive inky cloud of nether, fourteen years of pent-up rage lashed out at world. A great black beast of pure darkness exploded from the chamber and stretched its cloudy wings across the sky, and the base and everyone inside was consumed by the fully realized, unbridled power of nether.

To the United States government, it was as if the base had disappeared without a trace. Unaware of the truth, they assumed a failed weapons experiment had destroyed the area. Only Dr. Hassler and Falkenrath, fortunate enough to be off-site at the time of the event, held any suspicions.

Adrienne woke up in an unfamiliar place: inside an ancient temple, deep beneath the ice. The eruption of nethereal energy on the surface had attracted the attention of a mysterious being that lived in a long forgotten city deep beneath the Antarctic ice, not far from the site. There she had found Adrienne’s body in the snow, amid the ruins of the base.

Her rescuer was Kadrah, the last of the allari. Although both years of terrible abuse and the nether that coursed through her body had poisoned her mind with hateful thoughts, Kadrah took sympathy on the broken girl. While she was no healer, she did what she could to nurse the girl back to physical and mental health. Through the passage of many long years, and with Kadrah’s aid, Adrienne made a gradual recovery. The breathing and meditation exercises of Tal’u mal Liamate (an ancient allarian martial art) became important grounding techniques for Adrienne, helping her “stay present” when distressed by a memory of her past.

During her journey to recovery – and perhaps her redemption – Kadrah became a mentor for Adrienne. She was given the honorary title of: “Vesyka”: an allarian word that could be roughly translated as “disciple”. Using Tal’u mal Liamate techniques to block her emotions in times of severe stress, Vesyka was able to prevent the nether within her body from further influencing her mind. When she was ready, Kadrah began to teach her how to use her newfound powers safely. So long as she were able to keep her emotions at bay, Vesyka learned to keep control over her darker side, even while in the phantom form.

Eventually the time came for her to be slowly rehabilitated, yet Vesyka still held a deep-rooted fear of other humans. Over the course of the early 1970’s (or at least what would have been the 1970’s if not for the Cataclysm), Vesyka was occasionally taken to remote human settlements to slowly increase her exposure. Overcoming this fear was no simple task, and took Vesyka nearly two decades. Eventually she grew confident enough to stay in a town for an entire day, then an entire week. In time she found herself able to leave the safety of Kadrah’s side and go off on her own for short periods of time. By 29 AC, Vesyka was even able to engage in small conversation with other strangers.

Though her phantom form blended in near-perfectly with the night sky, her presence did not go entirely unnoticed. Over the years, rumors of a mysterious creature spread among cryptozoologists. They called it the Dark Hunter, though nobody really knew anything about it – nor did anyone know what it looked like. These stories were labeled as nonsense by most sensible folk, but a few chose to believe.

Since being stranded in Lemuria, Vesyka has met and, to her great surprise, befriended the elusive thief known as the Fox, as well as her allies T.J and Hartwin. Having the benefit of social interactions in her life again has notably strengthened Vesyka’s resolve and mood, and she has become a valuable partner in crime for the Fox.