Victoria O'Connell

"I used to hate what my life had become. 'Why am I always fighting someone else's battles?', I would ask myself. Why do I always put myself into the line of fire, so all the greedy, twisted, corrupted politicians and so-called leaders can escape the Covenant with their lives, while there are countless civilians scrambling for evac shuttles, hoping that they're not the ones who'll get shot down? Why let some spook decide who deserves to live and who deserves to get glassed, or blown up, or gunned down in the streets? See, I know how ONI thinks. It's all numbers to them. It doesn't matter if these people are children, men, women, elderly...people with a family they could have returned to if it wasn't for the UNSC playing God with their lives—the ones that were supposed to be protecting them—giving me the order to turn my back and let them die. Just a whole bunch of fucking numbers without faces. Well, it took me a while, but I figured it out. That's exactly it, isn't it? I've gotta keep fighting, because I see how many people have been abandoned when they could have been saved. When the Covenant find the next planet, it'll be the same thing all over again, with everyone believing that the UNSC will protect them up until the point when they finally realize they're doomed. Dead civilians can't point fingers at the ones that failed them, now can they? But I'm still here, and I know this. And that's what I'm going to fight. When there's a planet under attack, I'll be there to save the ones that the UNSC has cast aside. I'll show them that you don't need a uniform or a title or some damn ONI spook whispering in your ear to serve your kind."

- Victoria O'Connell

Major Victoria O'Connell, born Victoria Corin Church, is the second daughter of Allison O'Connell and Dr. Leonard Church, and unbeknownst to her, the younger sister of Linda O'Connell. In 2536, Victoria's memory was wiped by Dr. Church and she was conscripted into phase 2 of the, but escaped as per his intentions after four years of hard training. In 2549, she joined Dr. Church's new supersoldier program, project FREELANCER. Taking on the name Agent Carolina, Victoria would earn a reputation as one of the best subjects in the project, and become a supersoldier with a skill rivalling that of a SPARTAN-II's. During this time, her relationship with Director Church would become strained as the Freelancers began to question the integrity of their work. In addition, Victoria would develop a tense rivalry with Agent Texas, one of the other "soldiers" in the program. The Freelancers would eventually discover the atrocities committed by the Director and rebel against him, with Victoria and Texas spearheading the pursuit for his capture. Following Dr. Church's arrest and incarceration in 2552, Victoria would serve the UNSC in the last few battles of the Human-Covenant War as a UNSC field officer before going rogue for personal reasons. In the years following the war and the new conflicts that arose, Victoria would act as a benefactor and guerrilla soldier to humanity alongside her fellow former FREELANCERs, taking arms against the enemies of the Interspecies Union on their own terms and keeping distance from the UNSC.

Childhood
Victoria was born to at a time when her parents' relationship had become distant, with Allison serving as a Staff Sergeant in the Marine Corps and Leonard working as a UNSC scientist. Unaware of their first child, Linda, whom they believed had died in 2517 (but in reality was conscripted into the SPARTAN-II program and replaced by a flash clone), Victoria never figured out why there was always a certain coldness to Allison whenever she came home to visit. However, Allison had always cared about her and acted rather protectively of her, as if afraid that Leonard would find some way to hurt her. She always told Victoria one thing as well: "If you don't say goodbye, then you're not really gone. You're just not here right now". It would be something Victoria would tell herself whenever her mother returned to service, waiting for the next time she would come back.

When Allison was killed in action during the in 2535, Leonard entered a state of shock to the point where he halted his work for the UNSC. Victoria was also very grief-stricken, although she did notice that there was an ominous change that had come over her father. Despite the previous estrangement to their relationship, she tried to become closer to him and ease his mind. However, Leonard only reacted bitterly to this and distanced himself from his only remaining daughter.

Memory Wipe and SPARTAN-II Conscription
In 2536, Leonard learned that Michael Colegrove, a good friend of his, had lost his son Oscar to a series of medical complications very similar to that of Linda's, Leonard became intrigued and requested to look into the matter of the child's death. After digging further into the matter, he discovered that Oscar was one of thirteen children on New Constantinople to have died of similar symptoms within the last six months. What was more, every one of the children were around the same age, and upon additional research, Leonard managed to confirm at least three hundred nearly identical deaths on numerous other colonies in the last year. He confided this to a skeptical Colegrove, who was convinced that the matter was simply coincidental and that there was no real connection. Undeterred, Leonard sought out many individuals that the children had known, including their parents, friends, and teachers. He eventually gathered that all the children were noted to have an intellect higher than average, and in several instances, was told that the child in question was approached by "adult strangers" weeks to months prior to their death.

Thoroughly convinced that the matter had something to do with ONI, Leonard decided to act on his own will and expose their actions. Having completed both the development of his memory agent and a second, less stable chemical based hormones found in the human brain, he implanted Victoria with both substances against her will, successfully erasing concise parts of her memory without damage to her brain. He replaced her missing memories with the belief that she was an orphan, and that her name was Victoria O'Connell. Dr. Church kept her unconscious throughout the entire procedure and when she had recovered sufficiently, cut his ties to her and abandoned her on New Constantinople. He drew attention to her with Colegrove's help, and within two months, Victoria appeared on ONI's radar and was listed as one of the potential candidates for phase 2 of the SPARTAN-II program.

Before Victoria was conscripted, however, New Constantinople was attacked by the, in which the UNSC responded with a massive task force as well as the entire collection of SPARTAN-III. Also present were several members from SPARTAN-II, led by Linda-058. Victoria was running through the city alone when she was caught in a heavy crossfire on the street between a squad of Marines and a Covenant ambush team. Linda soon arrived to help pull the Marines out, and against their protests, forced them to stand their ground while she rescued Victoria and escaped the ambush with her and the Marines. Victoria was awed by Linda's skills as well as her sharpshooting abilities. She told Linda of her desire to join the military and "be just like her", who did not dissuade her but clearly didn't think much of the idea. Not long after, one of the Marines in the squad was shot by a Kig-yar sniper, and Victoria actually snatched up the injured trooper's M6 sidearm and exchanged shots with the sniper long enough for Linda to locate it and take it out. The incident was later filed by every soldier witness to it, and two weeks afterward, Victoria was conscripted into the SPARTAN-II program.

Breakout
"Despite the mixed results of this batch of candidates, subject 174 shows great promise as a future SPARTAN. If out of the three-hundred fifty candidates we manage to train just ten others to her standard, then perhaps this second phase would not have been a mistake after all."

-, personal files

Victoria performed outstandingly and impressed Dr. Halsey even in the early years of training, outstripping just about every other candidate in the second phase. However, she was deemed unsuitable as a team leader for one reason; her refusal to accept help from others often caused her to fall short of accomplishing training tasks as well as she could have. Despite the attempted persuasion from trainers and fellow candidates alike, Victoria remained solitary and no amount of physical threat, punishment, or scorn from the other trainees would convince her to do otherwise.

Leonard, who had been keeping tabs on Victoria, figured out the training procedure and the fact that the subjects were due to undergo risky augmentations by 2544. Satisfied that Victoria's training would make her useful in the next step of his plan, and not wanting to risk her becoming crippled through the augmentation procedure, he triggered the chemical hormones inside her brain in 2540, causing her to experience an overpowering urge to break into the program's personal files and escape. Having become familiar with both the entire facility's layout and the access codes she had seen Dr. Halsey entering, Victoria managed to obtain data on not only her augmentation procedures, but also the basic blueprints to the, and escaped with both.

After retrieving Victoria and the data, Leonard was angered to discover that Linda had indeed been kidnapped by ONI and replaced by a flash clone. He blamed Dr. Halsey for making him believe he had killed his own daughter, and was determined to ruin her when he got the chance. Having created a flash-clone of Victoria himself, he killed the clone in a staged accident, and left her for ONI to find, while arranging for the actual Victoria to lay low for several years. In this time, he planned with Colegrove a new project that would suit his needs as well as that of the UNSC's.

Training and New Identity
By 2549, Leonard had renewed ONI's interest in his work, having contributed several "improvements" to the MJOLNIR suit and proposing a possible redesign for as early as 2551. He had also formulated several hypotheses where an artificial intelligence could become self-sustaining, or as he called it, "human". After proposing the possibility of creating entire armies out of nothing but fragments of an AI, ONI immediately authorized funding for a new project, codename FREELANCER. Leonard suggested that the project take the appearance of nothing more than a supersoldier program, to which ONI agreed to keep all Freelancer subjects involved out of the war until the true purpose of the project was fulfilled. With ONI's authority, Leonard was given command of the UNSC frigate Mother of Invention and several variants to fifty cut-down MJOLNIR suits. Soon afterward, he created the Alpha AI to test his fragmentation experiments on, with the by-product AI Beta serving as the prototype "artificial combat trooper".

Around this time, Victoria resurfaced and accepted Leonard's offer for her to join Project FREELANCER. Assigned with the new name of "Agent Carolina", she assisted ONI in searching for other candidates for the project. On one occasion she met 22-year old Clyde Dawson, a locksmith and unemployed university graduate, in 's. When another civilian started to hit on her, Clyde tried to discourage him but managed only to start a bar fight. Victoria fought her way out of the club with him, and becoming impressed with his unexpected knack for hand-to-hand combat, asked if he would be interested in joining Project FREELANCER. He agreed, and the two soon became fast friends.

Trivia

 * This character is the very same Agent Carolina from Red vs Blue, with a timeline divergence starting after Season 10, episode 15.
 * Victoria's birthday is the same as that of 's, as a reference to the fact that she plays the role of Agent Carolina in the infamous Red vs Blue shenanigans.
 * The name "Victoria O'Connell" was fabricated by Ladylaconia in episode 9 of the Red vs Blue shenanigans.
 * Victoria's middle name, "Corin", translates into the Latin word "spear".
 * This character scored 9 on the Universal Mary-Sue Test, and is not considered a Mary-Sue.