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quantumvelvet
Other Characters Currently In-Game: N/A
Character Name: Yelena Belova
Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Age: ~36 chronologically, ~31 physically (being erased from existence for 5 years complicates things)
From When?: At the end of Hawkeye. In canon, she walked out of her final conversation with Clint unscathed. For the Barge...well, there were a lot of idiots with guns around, and she was unlucky enough to catch a stray bullet.
Inmate Justification: Yelena is a spy and assassin. Yelena is a very accomplished spy and assassin, who has hurt or killed a lot of people. And while much of that was done under duress or straight-up mind control, it's a life she chose to return to in the shock of the post-Blip world. She does have her own moral compass, but it's decidedly skewed.
Arrival: Unwilling.
Abilities/Powers: Athletics - Yelena is in peak condition, and is incredibly agile and acrobatic. She's an excellent climber, and is skilled at free running and wire work. While it's unlikely to come up, she has some training in ballet.
Piloting - Yelena is a capable helicopter pilot, even in adverse conditions. Like, say, an avalanche.
Spycraft - Yelena has been trained in espionage since childhood. She's skilled in stealth, infiltration, surveillance and counter-surveillance, and subterfuge. She knows how to establish a false identity (though she doesn't have the skills necessary to forge documents on her own), and is familiar with bypassing both physical and electronic security. She speaks multiple languages fluently.
Combat - Yelena is an incredibly effective and brutal fighter. She favours hand-to-hand combat and knifework in close fighting, though she's also quite skilled with a staff. She's an excellent sniper, a good shot with a handgun, and is familiar with the use of heavy weapons such as grenade launchers. She's also good at improvisation in combat, using her environment to her advantage and employing improvised weaponry if caught unarmed.
Partial immunity to mind control - While she's completely human, Yelena has been inoculated with a substance that altered her neural pathways to render her immune to chemically-induced mind control. This does not provide immunity against any other mind control methods, or convey immunity to drugs that would merely make her suggestible.
Inmate Information: Like many Widows, Yelena was taken by the Red Room in infancy, and knows nothing about her birth parents. At three years of age, she was assigned to play the younger daughter of Alexei Shostakov and Melina Vostokoff, with Natasha Romanoff as her four-years-older sister. Young as she was, Yelena saw them as her real family, and their three years in Ohio as her real life, and was confused and traumatized when the assignment came to an abrupt end in a violent flight from the authorities.
With the mission over, there was no reason for the family unit to stay together, and Alexei handed the girls back to Dreykov's operatives, and they were separated and returned to the Red Room to be trained in espionage and murder.
Yelena was excelled in her training, enough so that she was sent into the field - as an active operative, and not a living prop this time - when she was still a child, racking up a high enough kill count to be considered "the greatest child assassin the world has ever known". She was a model operative, known for ruthless efficiency. Like all Red Room candidates who survive the program to become Widows, she was forcibly sterilized once she'd finished puberty. Between the brutality of her life and her sense of abandonment, she's developed a cynical worldview, skeptical of altruism and heroism, and inclined to believe more in people's darker natures than in any kindly facade.
Then, in 2008, Natasha defected and attempted to assassinate Dreykov. He survived the attempt, and the Red Room went further underground - and, to ensure that none of his remaining Widows ever made a similar attempt, he employed a mind control drug that left them completely obedient - fully aware of their actions, but unable to go against him, or even, over time, to fully differentiate between their orders and their own impulses. Yelena remained under this control for eight years.
In 2016, Dreykov found out that a substance had been created that could break the mind control and render anyone innoculated with it immune. Yelena was sent as field leader with a small team of Widows to track down and eliminate a former Widow who had the only existing doses of the cure. The target managed to dose Yelena, but not before Yelena fatally stabbed her, leaving her confused and on the run, with only the promise that she would free the other Widows to guide her.
Yelena's first attempt to keep her promise involved sending the remaining vials of the cure to Natasha, reasoning that Natasha was now a member of an international group of superheroes, who were far more equipped to synthesize more and take down the Red Room than a lone, hunted woman, no matter how well-trained. Despite her resentment of her sister for - in her mind - leaving her under Dreykov's control, Yelena is at heart a practical person, aware of her own limitations, and willing to seek assistance where she needs it, even if she doesn't like it.
Unfortunately for her plans, Natasha decided to track down the source of the vials, and brought them straight back to Yelena. While Yelena was initially reluctant to make a direct attempt to end the Red Room, she had nowhere to go, no guarantee of safety while it still existed, and harboured a deep rage both at the brainwashing and mind control she was subject to, and at the continued abduction of children into the program. It didn't take much for Natasha to convince her to help kill Dreykov - for real this time - and bring the Red Room down for good.
In order to do this, they had to find the Red Room facility, which forced them to team up with Alexei and Melina. The little family infiltrated the airborne facility, freed the Widows on board, and rigged an explosion to knock the craft out of the sky. Yelena was determined enough to make sure Dreykov didn't escape that she was willing to sacrifice her own life to destroy his getaway helicopter, and only Natasha's intervention saved her.
The reunion was short-lived. Natasha returned to the Avengers, and Yelena, with help from Alexei, Melina, and the newly-freed Widows began a campaign to find the remaining Widows who had been on assignment across the world, and free them from the mind control drugs as well. The mission gave Yelena a sense of purpose, and she found it both difficult and rewarding. For a time, it gave her something she could do that was good, that let her be something other than the trained killer she saw herself as. She began to grow into herself, to stretch her sense of curiosity and enthusiasm about the world and parts of life she'd been denied. She and one of the other Widows she was working with even joked that once the mission was finished, she'd go join up with Natasha again.
And then the Snap happened, and Yelena watched herself disintegrate, along with (unbeknownst to her at the time) half the universe's population.
And then the Blip happened, and she was back, only to find that five years had passed, that her sister was dead, and that the world was in shambles.
Shocked, grieving, angry, and severed once again from any sense of purpose, Yelena returned to her roots, and took up the mantle of assassin once more, this time working for pay rather than under the Red Room's control. Much of her work was brokered by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, and while she didn't like Valentina, she grew to trust her intel. So when Valentina sent her after Clint Barton, with the claim that he'd been responsible for Natasha's death, she had no reason to doubt it.
Yelena tracked Barton to New York, and ambushed him in what turned into a three-way fight between her, Barton and his would-be apprentice Kate Bishop, and Maya Lopez, who also wanted revenge against Barton. Yelena attempted to get Kate out of the way, and after opting to abandon the fight because she was outnumbered and reasoned that she could make another attempt when Barton was alone, she tracked the girl down to warn her off. While she didn't believe Kate's claims that Barton was a good person - he'd been a government assassin for years, and a violent vigilante during the five lost years, and her natural skepticism and cynicism prevented her from believing that he might have changed, rather than just having good PR - she did decide to look into who'd hired her through Valentina. And, once she'd found out that it was Kate's mother, she opted to inform her, perhaps due to her own history of feeling betrayed by the parental figures who'd handed her back to the Red Room and sent her down this path in the first place.
Yelena's second and final attempt to kill Barton came closer to success. It was only the revelation that Natasha had frequently talked to him about her, enough that he knew their secret childhood whistle code, that Natasha had loved her and had sacrificed herself to not just prevent his death, but to save Yelena everyone else who had died in the Snap, that made her stay her hand and walk away.
(And then death, Barge, etc.)
Path to Redemption: The main hurdle standing between Yelena and redemption is the fact that she doesn't believe redemption is possible. She expresses this in several ways throughout canon, stating that she and Natasha are both trained killers, with the only difference between them being that people view Natasha as a hero, and saying of Clint Barton that words don't define someone, actions do. While the solution to this may seem simple on its face - if actions are what count, change your actions - she sees herself at her core as a killer. The weight of action that would be needed to shift the needle on that is monumental, and that makes it easier for her to revert to those patterns when she feels lost and hopeless.
There are a couple of approaches that could be useful for setting her on the path to redemption. The first - and the harder sell - would be to help her to come around to seeing redemption as a process rather than a goal. Transformation may be impossible, the weight of her actions may always be hers to bear, but incremental change is both more manageable and more forgiving. The second is helping her to find a purpose. She got close to this while freeing the other Widows, but that was time-limited even before the Snap - eventually, there would be no one left to free. Either helping her find an ideal to uphold, or helping her develop the skills to find a new purpose when she achieves or fails at a goal, rather than just feeling adrift, would help her begin to redefine herself - again, without feeling required to completely transform who she is.
Before either approach can be fully successful, her Warden - or other CR - will have to be able to help her grapple with the issue of just how culpable she is for the actions she took as a Red Room operative, both before and during the years in which she was mind controlled. While she is aware that she didn't have full agency, she still has difficulty untangling which impulses and actions were hers, and which were coerced - and she cherishes her freedom enough that admitting just how fully she was controlled, even before the drug was administered, will be painful and ugly. A Warden who has experience with being the victim of mind control, or with having undergone other forms of brainwashing or indoctrination, might have an easier time getting through to her if they've had similar difficulty separating what they've done from what they were responsible for. Conversely, a Warden who's been similarly victimized but absolves themself completely would have a much harder time bringing her around on the topic.
As far as her reaction to the Barge itself goes, Yelena will initially be deeply suspicious and cynical, both about its purpose and its efficacy. She will dislike being under anyone's control, and distrustful of the motives of people who claim to be there to help. It will take some doing to get past her guard and convince her to trust that anyone has her back - at best, she will initially see people as allies of convenience, or as entertaining social distractions.
She will not respond well to anyone who dismisses her suspicions, or insists that she should be grateful for her position. Wardens who attempt to exert hard control will have a difficult time with her, as further constraints will just make her resentful and unlikely to cooperate on more than a surface level. Wardens who attempt to manipulate or therapize her will likewise have a difficult time, as she's adept enough at social manipulation herself to show them what they want to see while not making any actual progress.
A Warden who understands her suspicions and is willing to put in the work to actually demonstrate they can be trusted will have an easier time getting past her guard. A Warden who is more lenient and willing to negotiate terms and give her relative freedom once she's demonstrated she won't prove a threat will likewise be more likely to earn her cooperation. Someone who's able to recognize and call her on her deflection may be beneficial to her - but that depends very much on their approach, and whether they're able to learn when to push, and when to leave well enough alone.
History: Wiki
Sample Network Entry: TDM thread
Sample RP: Yelena is from Earth. Yelena is from an Earth that, while it's had first contact with alien civilizations, hasn't really achieved deep space travel. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that when left to her own devices over the time since she'd arrived on the Barge, she's tended to gravitate towards the deck, and the view of the vast starfields beyond. She wouldn't class it as enjoyment, exactly - she doesn't want to enjoy anything here, on the wrong end of a second death that has, somehow, managed to be even more disorienting than the first. Fascination, though - that, she'll admit to.
She has so far kept her feet on the deck, obeying the rail and the implied request to please not dive overboard. That it's more out of a desire not to be confined any further than she already is than out of any real concern for anyone's heartrate is inconsequential.
Today, though, she's straddling the rail, one leg dangling on each side, back straight and balance easy, the natural confidence of someone for whom heights have long since ceased to hold any terror. If you can truly call it a height, when it's endless, empty space that yawns beneath the nets. One hand dips into her pocket, producing a trio of small, brightly-coloured plastic balls - ping-pong balls, the sort of thing that's easy enough to cajole out of someone who wants to be seen as a bleeding heart.
They're harmless, after all. You can't hurt someone with a ping-pong ball.
(You can absolutely hurt someone with a ping-pong ball. It just takes a little creativity.)
Not that she has any intention of hurting anyone. No, she's interested in the nets. Or rather, in the alarms she'd been told on her first day were in place. Not so much out of any desire to circumvent the nets themselves - not when she has no idea whatsoever of how she'd survive in what appears to be deep space - but because it's a way to test the security, its sensitivity and the response time.
And because it's a way to test just how the people here might react to the hint of a crisis.
With that in mind, she lobs the first ball out in an arc, beyond the rail toward the vastness below.
Special Notes: Anything else not covered here that you'd like us to know!
User DW:
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: N/A
Character Name: Yelena Belova
Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Age: ~36 chronologically, ~31 physically (being erased from existence for 5 years complicates things)
From When?: At the end of Hawkeye. In canon, she walked out of her final conversation with Clint unscathed. For the Barge...well, there were a lot of idiots with guns around, and she was unlucky enough to catch a stray bullet.
Inmate Justification: Yelena is a spy and assassin. Yelena is a very accomplished spy and assassin, who has hurt or killed a lot of people. And while much of that was done under duress or straight-up mind control, it's a life she chose to return to in the shock of the post-Blip world. She does have her own moral compass, but it's decidedly skewed.
Arrival: Unwilling.
Abilities/Powers: Athletics - Yelena is in peak condition, and is incredibly agile and acrobatic. She's an excellent climber, and is skilled at free running and wire work. While it's unlikely to come up, she has some training in ballet.
Piloting - Yelena is a capable helicopter pilot, even in adverse conditions. Like, say, an avalanche.
Spycraft - Yelena has been trained in espionage since childhood. She's skilled in stealth, infiltration, surveillance and counter-surveillance, and subterfuge. She knows how to establish a false identity (though she doesn't have the skills necessary to forge documents on her own), and is familiar with bypassing both physical and electronic security. She speaks multiple languages fluently.
Combat - Yelena is an incredibly effective and brutal fighter. She favours hand-to-hand combat and knifework in close fighting, though she's also quite skilled with a staff. She's an excellent sniper, a good shot with a handgun, and is familiar with the use of heavy weapons such as grenade launchers. She's also good at improvisation in combat, using her environment to her advantage and employing improvised weaponry if caught unarmed.
Partial immunity to mind control - While she's completely human, Yelena has been inoculated with a substance that altered her neural pathways to render her immune to chemically-induced mind control. This does not provide immunity against any other mind control methods, or convey immunity to drugs that would merely make her suggestible.
Inmate Information: Like many Widows, Yelena was taken by the Red Room in infancy, and knows nothing about her birth parents. At three years of age, she was assigned to play the younger daughter of Alexei Shostakov and Melina Vostokoff, with Natasha Romanoff as her four-years-older sister. Young as she was, Yelena saw them as her real family, and their three years in Ohio as her real life, and was confused and traumatized when the assignment came to an abrupt end in a violent flight from the authorities.
With the mission over, there was no reason for the family unit to stay together, and Alexei handed the girls back to Dreykov's operatives, and they were separated and returned to the Red Room to be trained in espionage and murder.
Yelena was excelled in her training, enough so that she was sent into the field - as an active operative, and not a living prop this time - when she was still a child, racking up a high enough kill count to be considered "the greatest child assassin the world has ever known". She was a model operative, known for ruthless efficiency. Like all Red Room candidates who survive the program to become Widows, she was forcibly sterilized once she'd finished puberty. Between the brutality of her life and her sense of abandonment, she's developed a cynical worldview, skeptical of altruism and heroism, and inclined to believe more in people's darker natures than in any kindly facade.
Then, in 2008, Natasha defected and attempted to assassinate Dreykov. He survived the attempt, and the Red Room went further underground - and, to ensure that none of his remaining Widows ever made a similar attempt, he employed a mind control drug that left them completely obedient - fully aware of their actions, but unable to go against him, or even, over time, to fully differentiate between their orders and their own impulses. Yelena remained under this control for eight years.
In 2016, Dreykov found out that a substance had been created that could break the mind control and render anyone innoculated with it immune. Yelena was sent as field leader with a small team of Widows to track down and eliminate a former Widow who had the only existing doses of the cure. The target managed to dose Yelena, but not before Yelena fatally stabbed her, leaving her confused and on the run, with only the promise that she would free the other Widows to guide her.
Yelena's first attempt to keep her promise involved sending the remaining vials of the cure to Natasha, reasoning that Natasha was now a member of an international group of superheroes, who were far more equipped to synthesize more and take down the Red Room than a lone, hunted woman, no matter how well-trained. Despite her resentment of her sister for - in her mind - leaving her under Dreykov's control, Yelena is at heart a practical person, aware of her own limitations, and willing to seek assistance where she needs it, even if she doesn't like it.
Unfortunately for her plans, Natasha decided to track down the source of the vials, and brought them straight back to Yelena. While Yelena was initially reluctant to make a direct attempt to end the Red Room, she had nowhere to go, no guarantee of safety while it still existed, and harboured a deep rage both at the brainwashing and mind control she was subject to, and at the continued abduction of children into the program. It didn't take much for Natasha to convince her to help kill Dreykov - for real this time - and bring the Red Room down for good.
In order to do this, they had to find the Red Room facility, which forced them to team up with Alexei and Melina. The little family infiltrated the airborne facility, freed the Widows on board, and rigged an explosion to knock the craft out of the sky. Yelena was determined enough to make sure Dreykov didn't escape that she was willing to sacrifice her own life to destroy his getaway helicopter, and only Natasha's intervention saved her.
The reunion was short-lived. Natasha returned to the Avengers, and Yelena, with help from Alexei, Melina, and the newly-freed Widows began a campaign to find the remaining Widows who had been on assignment across the world, and free them from the mind control drugs as well. The mission gave Yelena a sense of purpose, and she found it both difficult and rewarding. For a time, it gave her something she could do that was good, that let her be something other than the trained killer she saw herself as. She began to grow into herself, to stretch her sense of curiosity and enthusiasm about the world and parts of life she'd been denied. She and one of the other Widows she was working with even joked that once the mission was finished, she'd go join up with Natasha again.
And then the Snap happened, and Yelena watched herself disintegrate, along with (unbeknownst to her at the time) half the universe's population.
And then the Blip happened, and she was back, only to find that five years had passed, that her sister was dead, and that the world was in shambles.
Shocked, grieving, angry, and severed once again from any sense of purpose, Yelena returned to her roots, and took up the mantle of assassin once more, this time working for pay rather than under the Red Room's control. Much of her work was brokered by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, and while she didn't like Valentina, she grew to trust her intel. So when Valentina sent her after Clint Barton, with the claim that he'd been responsible for Natasha's death, she had no reason to doubt it.
Yelena tracked Barton to New York, and ambushed him in what turned into a three-way fight between her, Barton and his would-be apprentice Kate Bishop, and Maya Lopez, who also wanted revenge against Barton. Yelena attempted to get Kate out of the way, and after opting to abandon the fight because she was outnumbered and reasoned that she could make another attempt when Barton was alone, she tracked the girl down to warn her off. While she didn't believe Kate's claims that Barton was a good person - he'd been a government assassin for years, and a violent vigilante during the five lost years, and her natural skepticism and cynicism prevented her from believing that he might have changed, rather than just having good PR - she did decide to look into who'd hired her through Valentina. And, once she'd found out that it was Kate's mother, she opted to inform her, perhaps due to her own history of feeling betrayed by the parental figures who'd handed her back to the Red Room and sent her down this path in the first place.
Yelena's second and final attempt to kill Barton came closer to success. It was only the revelation that Natasha had frequently talked to him about her, enough that he knew their secret childhood whistle code, that Natasha had loved her and had sacrificed herself to not just prevent his death, but to save Yelena everyone else who had died in the Snap, that made her stay her hand and walk away.
(And then death, Barge, etc.)
Path to Redemption: The main hurdle standing between Yelena and redemption is the fact that she doesn't believe redemption is possible. She expresses this in several ways throughout canon, stating that she and Natasha are both trained killers, with the only difference between them being that people view Natasha as a hero, and saying of Clint Barton that words don't define someone, actions do. While the solution to this may seem simple on its face - if actions are what count, change your actions - she sees herself at her core as a killer. The weight of action that would be needed to shift the needle on that is monumental, and that makes it easier for her to revert to those patterns when she feels lost and hopeless.
There are a couple of approaches that could be useful for setting her on the path to redemption. The first - and the harder sell - would be to help her to come around to seeing redemption as a process rather than a goal. Transformation may be impossible, the weight of her actions may always be hers to bear, but incremental change is both more manageable and more forgiving. The second is helping her to find a purpose. She got close to this while freeing the other Widows, but that was time-limited even before the Snap - eventually, there would be no one left to free. Either helping her find an ideal to uphold, or helping her develop the skills to find a new purpose when she achieves or fails at a goal, rather than just feeling adrift, would help her begin to redefine herself - again, without feeling required to completely transform who she is.
Before either approach can be fully successful, her Warden - or other CR - will have to be able to help her grapple with the issue of just how culpable she is for the actions she took as a Red Room operative, both before and during the years in which she was mind controlled. While she is aware that she didn't have full agency, she still has difficulty untangling which impulses and actions were hers, and which were coerced - and she cherishes her freedom enough that admitting just how fully she was controlled, even before the drug was administered, will be painful and ugly. A Warden who has experience with being the victim of mind control, or with having undergone other forms of brainwashing or indoctrination, might have an easier time getting through to her if they've had similar difficulty separating what they've done from what they were responsible for. Conversely, a Warden who's been similarly victimized but absolves themself completely would have a much harder time bringing her around on the topic.
As far as her reaction to the Barge itself goes, Yelena will initially be deeply suspicious and cynical, both about its purpose and its efficacy. She will dislike being under anyone's control, and distrustful of the motives of people who claim to be there to help. It will take some doing to get past her guard and convince her to trust that anyone has her back - at best, she will initially see people as allies of convenience, or as entertaining social distractions.
She will not respond well to anyone who dismisses her suspicions, or insists that she should be grateful for her position. Wardens who attempt to exert hard control will have a difficult time with her, as further constraints will just make her resentful and unlikely to cooperate on more than a surface level. Wardens who attempt to manipulate or therapize her will likewise have a difficult time, as she's adept enough at social manipulation herself to show them what they want to see while not making any actual progress.
A Warden who understands her suspicions and is willing to put in the work to actually demonstrate they can be trusted will have an easier time getting past her guard. A Warden who is more lenient and willing to negotiate terms and give her relative freedom once she's demonstrated she won't prove a threat will likewise be more likely to earn her cooperation. Someone who's able to recognize and call her on her deflection may be beneficial to her - but that depends very much on their approach, and whether they're able to learn when to push, and when to leave well enough alone.
History: Wiki
Sample Network Entry: TDM thread
Sample RP: Yelena is from Earth. Yelena is from an Earth that, while it's had first contact with alien civilizations, hasn't really achieved deep space travel. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that when left to her own devices over the time since she'd arrived on the Barge, she's tended to gravitate towards the deck, and the view of the vast starfields beyond. She wouldn't class it as enjoyment, exactly - she doesn't want to enjoy anything here, on the wrong end of a second death that has, somehow, managed to be even more disorienting than the first. Fascination, though - that, she'll admit to.
She has so far kept her feet on the deck, obeying the rail and the implied request to please not dive overboard. That it's more out of a desire not to be confined any further than she already is than out of any real concern for anyone's heartrate is inconsequential.
Today, though, she's straddling the rail, one leg dangling on each side, back straight and balance easy, the natural confidence of someone for whom heights have long since ceased to hold any terror. If you can truly call it a height, when it's endless, empty space that yawns beneath the nets. One hand dips into her pocket, producing a trio of small, brightly-coloured plastic balls - ping-pong balls, the sort of thing that's easy enough to cajole out of someone who wants to be seen as a bleeding heart.
They're harmless, after all. You can't hurt someone with a ping-pong ball.
(You can absolutely hurt someone with a ping-pong ball. It just takes a little creativity.)
Not that she has any intention of hurting anyone. No, she's interested in the nets. Or rather, in the alarms she'd been told on her first day were in place. Not so much out of any desire to circumvent the nets themselves - not when she has no idea whatsoever of how she'd survive in what appears to be deep space - but because it's a way to test the security, its sensitivity and the response time.
And because it's a way to test just how the people here might react to the hint of a crisis.
With that in mind, she lobs the first ball out in an arc, beyond the rail toward the vastness below.
Special Notes: Anything else not covered here that you'd like us to know!