Elena Zaytseva

Childhood (2479-2497)
Elena was born and raised in Yakutsk, Russia to a single mother, Liliya Volkova, leaving her to take her mother's patronymic as her own, Nikolaevna. As a young child, she spent most of her time with her Aunt and Uncle at their house and mechanic shop, rather than her mother, as, at the time, Liliya had to work two jobs to keep up with the bills. By the time she had turned seven, however, she was back to living with her mom, who had since gone back down to one job with better hours and pay. However, due to a combination of factors, such as her mother being out of the house early in the morning for work, Elena still being too young to go out to the stop for school on her own, and the frigid cold outside temperatures during the winter, Liliya decided to put her daughter through cyberschool, leaving her to remain at home for most of her childhood and begin to develop a relationship with technology almost to the point of dependence.

This relationship with technology developed further during her preteen and early teen years, when she began to tinker with various technologies, even getting to the point where she was building her own drones out of various spare parts, such as from her uncle's shop. In exchange for being allowed to utilize the parts, and in an effort to get her out and about more, Elena's uncle started taking her out on hunting trips, utilizing the family's dogsled team as well as Elena's drones to assist with the hunts.

These trips began to be the main focus of Elena's life due to the remote nature of the city she grew up in. With few friends due to being cyber-schooled her whole life and not much else to do on her own, Elena began, around age sixteen, to go out on hunts on her own, taking her uncle's dogsled team and her drone purpose-built for lifting and hauling the animal's she killed back home with her. This pattern continued up until she turned seventeen.

The day after her birthday, she took the team and drone out for what would've been like any other hunt. However, as she was focusing in on a musk deer she had been tracking, she failed to notice a trio of wolves, half-starved to the point of aggression, stalk up on her. Just as she was about to pull the trigger to take down the deer, she was attacked by the small pack of wolves. Knocked to the ground, her face and body were pretty badly mauled. Fortunately, her sled dogs were able to fight off the wolves, even attached to the sled, due to numbers and the malnutrition of the wolves.

Despite her injuries, Elena was able to crawl into the sled and direct the sled team using her drone back home. Upon making it back home, she fell unconscious shortly afterward from her wounds and was checked into a hospital where she began the recovery process. Fortunately, as she recovered, it became apparent that no serious damage had been done, and, after a month or so in the hospital, the only lasting mark of the attack was a scar on her cheek.

Despite this, when she checked out of the hospital a short while later, her mother banned her from going on any more hunting trips, confining her to the house except for the direst of situations or when directly escorted by Liliya herself. This situation continued up to the point of Elena's eighteenth birthday. By that point, she was fed up with being stuck in her home, and her sense of adventure was once again budding. Packing her bags, Elena set out in the early hours of the day after her birthday and made her way to the Yakutsk spaceport, using a portion of the credits she had been saving up to buy her way off-world, striking out on her own, hopping from planet to planet.

Reach
The first step along her travels was. Been quite popular and relatively close to Earth, Elena managed to get an affordable ticket out to the mining world, setting out on a civilian transport. Arriving in system a relatively short while later, the transport docked with one of the space elevators and Elena descended to the surface of the world for the first time. Making her way into the city, Elena found herself enamored with how large and pristine it was compared to her birthplace, spending her first day wandering around the concourses and sky bridges just taking in the sights. It wasn't until nightfall that she remembered she didn't have a place to stay. After spending a couple hours going from hotel to hotel, she finally managed to find one with a free room that was cheap enough for her to book for a few weeks with credits left over for other expenses during that time and moved into the room. While the room was fairly small, Elena hadn't brought much with you, and the hotel offered both and  services.

For the first week, Elena spent her abundant free time exclusively in New Alexandria, taking in much of what the city had to offer, from the more pleasant weather compared to her hometown, to the sights by the docks, to the various stores. Though her limited funds prevented her from spending too much on shopping, with most of what remained being budgeted for food, she did indulge herself from time to time, such as a titanium heirloom necklace wrought from the metal abundant on the world. As time went on, she grew to be a bit bored with just the city itself as the overwhelming nature of it died down and she grew used to the location. By the second week, she had started to venture out more to various sites across the planet, from some of the publically accessible shores of to a ski resort in the.

However, by the end of the second week, Elena was running dangerously low on funds and, with her adventuring spirit nagging again, she signed up as a deckhand on a merchant's vessel after a short while looking through various openings. With her mechanical and technological skills, she managed to settle in as a mechanic on the vessel, working in the engine room along with the ship's chief engineer and the other mechanic on board, filling out the ship's engineering rost. With the ship having to spend a week on the ground before departing, she had already learned the computer system, which wasn't too different than those she had worked on before, and had started on the sublight engines, with the slipspace drive being reserved to the more senior mechanic and the chief engineer for now.

Sirona
Finally departing from Reach on August 17, 2497, the ship set course for the inner colony Sirona, delivering an order of mining equipment from Reach to a mining company on the destination world. Arriving in the Groombridge 1618 system on September 1, 2497, the ship Elena was now working on landed in Maponos City to complete the delivery and pick up a shipment of medical supplies for their next job. With the supplies due to be picked up on September 7 and the ship to leave early in the morning September 8, the crew was given free time each day to take in the planet, returning to the ship only for their duty shifts.

Elena, using the credits she had earned so far from her first three weeks with the ship crew, took advantage of this allowance to leave the ship to explore the new world she found herself on. Sticking to Maponos City on the first day, she found the experience to be similar to her time in New Alexandria on Reach, albeit with more conventional road systems rather than the elevated walkways common to the other city. On the second day, while she did take in the sites, she stumbled upon the city's transit station and decided to look into the other locations on the world.

By her third day on Sirona, Elena had once again grown bored of the city experience and decided to take a maglev tour through the nature reserve, starting in Maponos, going through the reserve, and ending in Esos City. Embarking on the first tour of the day early in the morning, Elena enjoyed a relatively leisurely ride through the nature reserve, taking in the sights of Sirona's fauna and Flora, and arrived in Esos by mid-afternoon. With several hours left until she had to go back, and tickets for the high speed maglev to return, Elena took advantage of the time she had to explore the culture of the smaller city on Sirona, finding it much more exciting than the larger cities she had been in previously, with Esos being even smaller than her hometown of Yakutsk.

Namely, she was first introduced to marijuana during her short few hours in Esos. With the town known for growing it, and several shops for the drug in the small city, she found herself curious about the drug and, with plenty of disposable income left to her, considering her lack of any real expenses, she dropped a few credits in one of the local stores and soon after found herself smoking for the first time.

While she enjoyed the high, Elena recognized that she had to be back to the ship soon, and probably shouldn't be too impaired when she returned and, as such, kept herself to one smoke for the day, though she did go back and make some more purchases to build up a small stock going forward. However, despite limiting herself to one smoke, her small stature and only having three hours to recover by the time she had finished her first try left her still visibly impaired by the time she returned to her ship. However, she managed to successfully hide her purchase from the ship crew and, when questioned about it, she was functional enough to work up an excuse that it was from secondhand exposure due to the quite high public use of the drug, especially in the enclosed spaces onboard the various maglev trains.

The next day, Elena headed back out into Maponos, this time heading to the spaceport to take in the variety of individuals coming to and leaving the world from the lobby, having little else she wanted to do at the moment. With a large number of the natives in the spaceport smoking, Elena decided to join in, partaking in some of the stock she had purchased the previous day. Having spent a good portion of the morning smoking and people watching, and growing hungry as lunchtime approached, Elena headed into a pub just outside the spaceport for a meal. Sitting down at the bar, she started to look over the menu when she was approached by a slipper who struck up a conversation with her. Young and inexperienced, and a bit impaired already from smoking, it took Elena a while to realize the stranger's advances, though she did take well to him regardless. However, realizing how much time she was spending in the bar, she exchanged contact information with the slipper and left by mid-afternoon, taking the time for a walk around the city to clear her head from the long day she had experienced up to that point and the lingering effects of having smoked that morning.

With night falling and Elena due to report back to the ship in a couple hours, she stopped by the spaceport pub for another quick meal before heading back home and ran into the slipper once more. This time, she was the one to strike up a conversation, eventually leading to the pair having their dinners together. Sober this time for the interactions, Elena found herself truly growing attracted to the man physically and definitely starting to connect with him on a more social level. While they definitely started to hit it off at this point, Elena had to refrain from any after-dinner activities due to needing to return to the ship and, instead, set a date with the man for two nights later, on September 6, 2497. Following this, Elena returned back to her ship and settled in for the night, looking forward to two days from that point.

Facing the next day with little in mind on how to fill the time, she spent the morning wandering around Maponos, before eventually returning to the ship several hours early just after lunch. With little else to do, she spent the rest of the day working over the various ship systems, getting to know the workings of the vessel a little bit better. Specifically, during this time, she focused on the ship's computer system, her previous experience working with programming leading her to be quite interested in how the various parts of the computer worked. Through this exploration, guided by the chief engineer later on in the day, she began to further develop her skills and expand her areas of knowledge from the one language she had known and used back on Earth to several different programming languages, finding the adjustments almost intuitive, though she was still quite new and prone to errors with the new languages and the differences in their syntax and how they worked. Despite this, by the end of the day, Elena found herself with a newfound drive to continue pushing forward with her advancement in the field.

However, the next morning, this interest once again sat on the backburner as Elena prepared for her date later that evening. Spending the morning out shopping in Maponos, she used a portion of her remaining spending money to buy herself a new outfit, fancier than any that she had owned and brought with her from home, though she tried to keep it relatively lower-end to both save money and to match more with the look and attitude of the slipper. Additionally, she took the time to get her hair cut and dyed to match the darker brown color the slipper had told her earlier would go with her eyes. By the time lunch rolled around, she had finished her preparations, and thus took the afternoon to work herself up for her first date and try to ease the nervousness. Meeting the slipper at the arranged place early in the evening, Elena topped off her outfit with the necklace she had bought earlier that week, before even having plans for the date.

For the next few hours, the date itself proceeded quite well, with Elena continuing to hit it off well with the carefree, daring attitude of the slipper, finding within it a parallel to her own decision to run away from home, and the slipper taking well to her youthful sense of adventure to match his own and the changes she had made to her hair and outfit. However, by the end of the dinner, with the evening drawing into the night, her date finally dropped an invitation back to his ship on Elena. Although she had prepared for the possibility, facing the situation for the first time in reality caught her off guard and, in a brief moment of panic, Elena ended up telling the slipper that she wasn't ready to go any further forward and, to push the point home, she said she had to return to her own ship, dropping her credits for the dinner on the table and walking out of the bar.

While for the remainder of the night she managed to convince herself she had done the right thing, she found a certain amount of regret gnawing at her starting when she woke up the next morning. Spending the day on the ship again, working in her room on her programming skills, it eventually got to the point where, late in the afternoon, Elena decided to contact the slipper. Apologizing for the previous night and explaining her decision, to which the slipper responded positively, understanding Elena's young age and newness to the dating scene, Elena found herself more relaxed as the call went on. Eventually, after talking for a few minutes, the slipper once again invited Elena over to his ship to spend the night. Deciding at that moment that she would rather stay on Sirona with him than continue on with her crew, she agreed, packed her travel bag, and snuck off the ship, heading across the spaceport to the hangar the slipper told her to meet him in, and spending the night with him, fully committed to leaving her life on the cargo freighter behind.

Unfortunately, when the next morning came and she found herself regretting the rash decision, it was too late to take it back. Running out of the slipper's ship with her bags, Elena made it back to where the freighter had been too late, finding only an empty hangar and a message from the captain that she had been let go and that the ship had to depart without her to keep up with deadlines. To top it off, when she attempted to return to the slipper, she found him turning down her request for her to stay with him, revealing that he had always assumed the relationship was going to be a temporary thing, having had his own deadlines to meet and expecting Elena to have kept to hers. With him turning her down, not knowing that she had been left behind by the other ship already, and departing himself, Elena was once again left jobless on a world far from home.

Still in a bit of shock from being stranded, Elena managed to make it through the rest of the day relatively effectively, even finding a cheap hotel to stay in on the outskirts of Maponos. From her hotel room, she managed to send out a few job applications for openings she had seen on the way through the city, and, from there, went on to compose a message to send home to her mother. Spending about an hour working on the letter, she explained all that had been happening to her, that she was safe, and that she wouldn't be returning home for a while, but that she still loved her mom. Sending out the message for delivery, the calmness she had been experiencing all day finally broke down, and she resorted to just smoking and crying in her room before eventually falling asleep.

For the next few days, the story was similar, with Elena keeping tabs on her job applications in moments of clarity and lesser levels of sadness, but occasionally falling back into simply smoking and wallowing away for up to hours at a time. During this time, even while she found it in herself to be more content and happier with her situation, she still rarely went outside, only venturing down to the hotel lobby for food and perhaps a few short walks here and there. This cycle lasted her just over a week before, all but one of her applications falling through, until that last application came back asking her to interview for a waitress position. Excited over finally finding success and potentially a way to save up some funds to continue her life. Setting the date for two days later, Elena spent the time leading up to the interview getting herself more put together in terms of clothing, reading guides off the ChatterNet and waypoint, and just generally treating herself.

Unfortunately, the interview came and passed and, despite all the preparation, she didn't manage to nail the position down. Still jobless and running low on funds both due to the continual drain of the hotel room and having spent a lot prior to the interview, she began looking for more job openings, growing desperate and even applying to positions in some less reputable bars and clubs in the slummier areas of Maponos. Once again running into little luck, she was only asked back for an interview on a single application, one of the lower class nightclubs known as the Indigo Relaxation Club. Wary, but still desperate at this point, Elena went in and, despite some initial embarrassment marking her as an off-worlder due to referring to the club by its full name rather than the more commonly used (among Maponos residents) abbreviation "the irk," she actually managed to get through the interview fairly well and, a few days later, was informed she was hired as a barback.

Showing up for work the next week, she was given her uniform, thankfully avoiding the more exposed outfits of the waitresses and bartenders due to working in the background, and began her training, quickly adjusting to holding a job for the first time in her life, though still slightly off-put by the atmosphere of the nightclub, even getting a few comments from the patrons despite being out front less and being dressed more conservatively than any of the people expected to be seen doing their jobs. Slowly, though, she adjusted to that too and eventually fell into the schedule of coming to work at the start of the evening, working through the night, and sleeping through the next morning, keeping her expenses down as her first paycheck wouldn't arrive until the end of the second week.

However, when that day finally came and she got her paycheck, she was shocked at how low the amount was, having forgotten how much was to be taken out as taxes, especially on a colony so close to the capital of the UEG and thus easier for the government to subject to harsher measures. Realizing that the amount she was being paid wouldn't be enough to truly survive on, and not wanting to be stuck living paycheck to paycheck, never getting off-world, she finally reached a breaking point in her desperation and, the next day, after finishing up her shift, she waited after and snuck her way into the manager's office, knowing he kept a safe with some local physical currency and valuables inside. Locating the safe, she took note of its model, the general type of electronic lock it had, and potential methods of connecting a personal computer to it. Unable to do anything that night, she left and, over the next few days, used the information she had gathered along with her skills with technology and programming to attempt to build up a tool and algorithm to hack open the safe out of the computer she had brought with her.

Finalizing her device by the end of the week, and not wanting to have to live through any more days at the nightclub, the comments have gotten worse from a particular few of the regular customers, she stayed after once more, sneaking back into the manager's office and, in a rush, leaving the door open behind her. In the room, she carefully removed the front of the electronic lock, hooked up her hacking device, and set the algorithm running, eventually managing to get the safe to open. However, as she was leaving the nightclub with her ill-gotten gains, she found one of the patrons that had been making comments toward her waiting for her outside the establishment. Pinning Elena to the wall, the man held a hand to her mouth to keep her from screaming and told her to come with him if she didn't want the manager to find out about her stealing, quite obvious in his intent. Luckily, however, another patron of the nightclub, one who hadn't been making comments, showed up and scared away the man who had been assaulting Elena.

Before she even had the chance to thank the man, however, he made Elena an offer. Explaining that he was a member of a local hacktivist group that worked to reveal corruption within the UEG, fight against unfair practices, and call for more individual governance of the colonies, the man stated that he saw what Elena had pulled off with the safe and was willing to help her develop her skills as a hacker, playing off her lack of funds, need of a group to clean her stolen items so she could actually use them, and growing dislike of the government that had left her to be in this situation in the first place to get her to play along, managing to convince her to leave the life of a bar-back behind after only three weeks and join the group, even giving her a place to stay with some other members that would be cheaper than her hotel and give access to more discreet forms of communication and computer activity than even the ChatterNet.

The next day, October 13, 2497, she gathered her luggage out of her hotel room, checked out, and moved into the place the hacktivist group was providing for her for a small cut of the amount she had stolen, taking an additional cut for the service of flipping the goods, leaving her with only about half of the payout she had been expecting. Despite this, it was still larger than she had made in her first paycheck working at the irk, and with the living quarters, and even meals, already paid for with that initial cut and provided by the group going forward, she was able to save it all for personal use.

After getting settled in, with plenty of hours left in the day, the man who had recruited her took her to the computer room on the building's premises. Here, she was introduced to the systems in use by the hacktivists, quite sophisticated for an allegedly lowkey, underground organization, though, grateful for the opportunities being provided, she didn't question it at the time. Eager to get to work exposing the corrupt facets of the UEG, she sat down at an open station with her recruiter's permission and familiarized herself with the system. However, when she got settled in and ready to work, she was informed that, being new, she would be given her tasks for the first few weeks. Though disappointed, she understood the need to develop trust with the group and accepted her first task, a simple instruction to develop her intrusion program further to the point where it could be used to crack more sophisticated systems using the group's tech.

Gallery
 Elena_Zaytseva.PNG| Durban Police Department Photo ElenaSmoking.png| Elena Smoking in a Hotel Room on Sirona 

Appearances

 * Shattered Lies
 * Awakening
 * RP:Imperium