| This article, Amy-G094, was written by slowfuture. Please do not edit this fiction without the writer's permission. |
- "I feel myself ebbing away. I am but cinder."
- ―Amy writing in her journal, 2559.
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Amy-G094, or later Hera, was a member of the SPARTAN-III project; Gamma Company. She was born into a white-collar family, who were killed when her homeworld of Alluvion was glassed by the Covenant in 2542. After being thrust from her comfortable life and into the hands of her Grandmother on Reach, who, distraught at the loss of her only child, would only been able to take care of Amy for a short time before herself dying, would then force Amy to be moved into an orphanage where she would spend the rest of her non-SPARTAN life. Due to her gene markers, at the age of seven Amy would be chosen by ONI as a candidate for the third generation of SPARTAN-IIIs and subsequently lifted and taken to Onyx.
On Onyx, Amy would create a strong friendship with a fellow Gamma Company trainee, Joshua. She would be folded into his team because of this strong bond. While originally singled out by both Kurt Ambrose and Chief Mendez as one of the candidates with the best potential, Amy would quickly fail to live up to their expectation due to the fragmentary nature of her fireteam, Xiphos. Following several disastrous results in the 'Trial by Fire' exercises, she would quickly become the team's unofficial XO after Joshua's successful leadership. However, Amy would quickly become a crutch for the young Spartan and as a result, Amy's stature with Kurt and his trainers would began to fall before completely falling off their radar. Despite this, Mendez would take her under his wing and in the hopes of helping her achieve her potential. Amy would become an excellent CQC fighter, and had a customised knife presented to her by Mendez after her augmentations. She, like the rest of her team and Sword, would be cycled out of Gamma Company, on what was supposed to be a temporary basis; though this agreement would become more permanent after the mission to New Asia, in which most of Sword was killed, and OPERATION: Contagio Purgatiio, where most of Xiphos would be killed.
After recovering from her horrific wounds, Amy and Josh would be moved into the ultra-secret Headhunter division of the SPARTAN-III project, joining up again with the survivors from Sword to form one group: VIOLET-III, Amy would gain the callsign: Violet Two. Almost immediately after the Guardian Crisis began, Josh was killed by the Kru'desh Legion led by fellow Spartan Amber-G330. Amy spent almost five days inside her ship's escape pod before being rescued by a UNSC ship. During the battle, she had received severe injuries to her spine and legs. While her legs would be repaired, Amy's spine would by replaced completely by a cybernetic equivalent - this allowed for ONI to install a new sophisticated, but prototype model, of a neural interface. After recovering, ONI would give her free reign to operate behind enemy lines to disrupt the activities of Cortana's Created and their allies. Following being given her task, Amy began to become dissociated with her Spartan identity given her new role. To correct this, she adopted her old VIOLET-III codename, Hera, as her name for the rest of her active service.
Biography
Early life
- "I don't remember much of my early life. There are just glimpses in dreams: indistinct with no context. Bright blue flashes followed by an ungodly heat. Then... Then there are the screams; the long, loud, shrill screams: enough to puncture your ear drums. After that, it's just black with the faint hum of a slipspace drive. Every night it's the same dream."
- ―Amy to fellow trainee, Simon-G294.
Amy Scullion was born on the 18th September, 2537 to a pair of civil servants, who had long debated whether or not it was right to have a child in the midst of a genocidal war. By working closing with the Colonial Government on Alluvion, an Outer Colony world, they were acutely aware of how disastrous the war had become. In the end, Amy's birth was accidental but not unwelcome. Amy's father left the civil service to raise her, while her mother, who had a much more pivotal role in the government's war effort, was forced to return to work almost immediately after giving birth. Amy's father provided her with a stable and loving atmosphere to grow up in. Her mother, who saw her much more infrequently, also contributed to this atmosphere. It was because of this warm environment that helped foster the compassion that would become so innate within her. By 2542, Amy had become a precocious young girl who excelled at her school work. By the middle of the year, her life was changed irrevocably as the Covenant arrived at the planet and proceeded to besiege it. The Fall of Alluvion was a protracted affair, taking as many as seven weeks. Amy's parents were killed within the first week of the conflict. Amy herself was only able to survive by the kind actions of her neighbours who took her in as they fled the planet. As she and her carers had been one of the last transports to leave, Amy was able to witness the glassing of her home planet from the relative safety of a colonial transport; the event was to have a lasting effect upon her. Upon arriving on Reach, Amy was torn from her surrogate family as Reachian law dictated that an orphaned child must be taken in by family if at all possible. She had one surviving relative on the planet; her grandmother.
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| Amy was one of the thousands of refugees who arrived on Manassas when the Outer Colonies fell. |
Life with her paternal grandmother, Audrey, was short and exceptionally difficult for Amy. Her father had been her grandmother's only surviving child and his loss affected her greatly. Already sickly, Audrey was unable to adequately provide for her. Food began to become scarcer and scarcer as her grandmother became incapacitated by grief. Amy quickly became malnourished and was forced to taking what she could find from the bins in her neighbourhood. Occasionally, someone would take pity and give the starving child food. After four terrible weeks with Audrey, her grandmother passed away. However, Amy was forced to live with her grandmother's corpse in the house for another several weeks before someone finally contacted social services. She was collected by social services in November, 2542 and transferred into a care home later that month. The toll taken physically on Amy in the nine weeks she had lived with Audrey were astronomical. The child was severely emaciated; in particular suffering a Vitamin B12 deficiency and an Iron deficiency; her teeth had begun to rot away from a lack of fluoride and sores had erupted over her entire body. She spent almost six months in the hospital next to the orphanage and, for a time, many doctors doubted whether or not she would survive. The resilience of little Amy shone through, and she was able to beat the odds and survive, eventually thriving in her new environment. Despite the neglect, Amy would not be effected psychologically by the affair; keeping her sociable nature. The glassing of her home planet, which the directors of the orphanage were unaware of, would have a delayed affect - Amy suppressed the memories until they resurfaced some twenty years later.
Unlike most other orphans recruited to serve with Gamma Company, Amy had the luxury of living in a fully funded orphanage on the de facto capital of humanity. Amy was able to flourish in the orphanage, developing a gregarious nature. She would become known for taking newly arrived orphans under her wing, ensuring that they knew how everything worked and where the most important rooms, and tools were. Such helpful mindedness would often bring her into conflict with several of the older kids who, on prior occasions before Amy's arrival, had become used to taking advantage of new arrivals. While the altercations were rarely to become physical, Amy would stand up time and time again for those bullied. It was because of these actions that Amy would begin to suffer transgressions, her food portions would often be much smaller, she became routinely the last person to take a shower and was forced to use ice cold water. None of these steps taken to demoralise her would be successful; she would continue to provide help and support for the new arrivals and the youngest within the orphanage. Moreover, the well-funded nature of the orphanage would allow Amy to take up a hobby she would maintain for the rest of her life: drawing. Drawing was one of the few activities Amy could undertake without any substantial risk of interruption or bodily harm. It would become a passionate hobby of hers, and she would often draw extensively to help her reduce stress and relax, especially during the height of the indignities performed on her.
Training
- "She’s loyal that girl. Very loyal. Compassionate, too. Very few Spartans like her; she's special, sir."
- ―Mendez to Kurt-051
Trial by Fire exercises
Personality and Traits
- "Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart."
- ―To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. Amy's friendship with Joshua was all consuming, but after his death she came to resent the overbearing pressure he placed upon her. As time moved along, that resentment turned to genuine anger and disgust at his role in her life.
Throughout most of the first decade of Amy's life, she was a gregarious, caring individual who made friends quickly and easily. Indeed, the circumstances that Camp Currahee provided were remarkably similar to that of the orphanage she had spent several years in. Naturally, as one of the older candidates, Amy found herself providing comfort and support to some of the younger trainees. It was this gregariousness that allowed her to stand out from the rest of the trainees during her first few years on Onyx. Almost immediately, Deep Winter recognised this precocious trait and brought her to the attention of Kurt and Mendez. Despite this praise from their AI, they were hesitant at first, seeing this trait as something that could be easily exploited by ill-intention trainees. However after a conversation with Amy these fears were quelled. Amy's personality remained chipper for most of her time on Onyx, despite falling out of favour with Kurt due to her repeated failures to live up to his lofty expectations. This loss of respect from a trusted mentor, provided her with a steely resilience that would come to benefit her in later life when she would be face with similar hardships.
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| As Amy made way for Hera, she became more morose and sullen; joy became increasingly difficult to come by as she isolated herself from her peers. |
During the first two decades of Amy's life, she would face two cataclysmic events that would leave long-lasting marks on her personality. Operation: Contagio Purgatio, the first such event, brought about the deaths of three of her teammates, leaving her and Josh as the survivors of Xiphos. After being burdened with the knowledge that Josh's life effectively rested on her shoulders, Amy took it upon herself to build her fellow teammate up, often to her own detriment. Josh, who himself was not emotionally intelligent enough to realise Amy was doing this, began to rely heavily on this praise from Amy and would often require her to put her woes aside for his benefit. While the two were firm friends, Amy, developing a form of Stockholm Syndrome, herself began to ignore the severe emotional stress this friendship was putting on her. Her gregariousness began to fade and she adopted several of Josh's introverted, quiet personality traits. For the five years that the pair worked together, Amy became a completely different person to the one that had been brought to Onyx so full of life. Despite this, during her time as a trainer for Team Boson, Amy was friendly and extremely forthcoming with the trainees, providing the much needed balm to the caustic training style of Josh. Indeed, Amy would often console the other trainees, in particular Merlin-D032, and attempt to build them back up when Josh laid them low. It was these interactions with Spartans needing direction that would allow the old Amy to occasionally resurface.
It was not until after the second disastrous event of her life, Josh's death, that she truly began to realise the damage he had done to her psyche. While initially devastated by the loss of her last surviving Gamma friend, as the distance from his passing grew longer, Amy came to resent their relationship and eventually grew to feel intense loathing and disgust towards Josh. Furthermore, the procedures performed on her after returning to the Infinity were also to have a lasting impact on Amy. Unable to truly process the brutalising operations that were performed on her without her consent, Amy was forced to reject her own identity as she no longer felt it truly represented how she felt in her own body. She chose Hera, her field operative moniker, to represent herself both professionally and personally moving forward. To Hera, the impersonal nature of the name allowed her to attempt to divorce herself from the emotional and physical trauma that was attached to her birth name. Hera herself, was ill-tempered, morose and extremely sullen. Unable to find joy in anything around her, Hera increasingly isolated herself from her peers and her friends, lashing out at those who wished to comfort her. When assigned to find the Librarian, Hera took this opportunity to distance herself from her old life: she would spend days at a time just floating in the black of space trying to collect her thoughts and gather the energy required to be around others.
Service History
For Amy's service record before the Created Crisis, see Joshua-G024's article.
ONI Service
Disaster aboard the UNSC Athens
- "Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive."
- ― ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Shattered Self
- "I am not your friend, Andra, and I never have been. There's nothing left for us out there but a hollowed sense of duty. Now get out of my sight."
- ― The trauma of the Created Uprising, coupled with the death of her longtime partner and the invasive surgeries performed on her by ONI, caused the young Spartan to crack and renounce her old identity.
After escaping from the UNSC Athens, Amy found herself wounded to the point of immovability. Furthermore, an error caused by the damage to her MJOLNIR armour kept her radio communications receiving the dying gasps of Joshua-G024; for close to two hours she endured his sufferings as he slowly succumbed to oxygen deprivation. During this period, Amy reflected on herself and the past as for the first time in her life, she was truly alone. The betrayal of Avalokitesvara and then the later death of her longtime companion, began to truly weigh on Amy's consciousness. After several days of drifting, Amy herself began to suffer from oxygen deprivation and had several lucid hallucinations of defining moments of her past. Amy viewed these hallucinations with a distant observer who identified themselves as Hera, Amy's codename. Indeed, during these conversations with the spectral Hera, Amy spoke of herself in an excoriating manner. The extreme nature of the self-destructive examination of her self, began to have a significant effect on Amy's selfhood and her self worth. She, and Hera, agreed that she had--rightly or wrongly--on multiple occasions, been one of the contributing factors to many of the disasters that had befallen herself and her Xiphos teammates. This intense self-loathing along with the transitory nature of her hallucinations, began to cause Amy's sense of self to wither away as she became incapable of distinguishing between reality and her fugue state.
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| Amy's entire lower body had suffered severe trauma and required extensive surgery. ONI used this as an excuse to test out experimental equipment. |
It took four days before Amy's emergency beacon was discovered by the UNSC Beckett. Once her lifepod had been recovered, her rescuers found a babbling, barely coherent spartan on the brink of death. The Beckett was a prowler that lacked the capabilities to remove Amy from her hulking armour shell nor provide much in the way of medical attention. Instead, the ship's doctor had to stabilise Amy with several doses of extremely potent sedatives that did little in the way to calm the mind of the wounded Spartan. It took a further two days before Amy could rejoin the UNSC Infinity, which was now the hub of the surviving UNSC war effort against the Created. Upon arrival, Amy was immediately taken for surgery to repair the extensive damage. Once the surgery began in earnest, it became clear the extent to which she had been wounded; her L1 through L5 vertebrae having been completely shattered.
As such, radical and invasive procedures had to be employed. The Office of Naval Intelligence sensed an opportunity to implant Amy with several pieces of experimental technology, and quickly sought out Derek Frendsen's approval for such an undertaking; which they promptly got. Amy's spine was completely removed and replaced by a new, cybernetic one that increased her reaction times; her back muscles were chemically enhanced granting her increased strength and her Neural Interface was upgraded which provided her with a small quantum computer that allowed her to perform complex calculations significantly faster. Despite having Frendsen's approval, Amy was never consulted about these changes and would come to resent them almost immediately.
The cybernetics Amy was forced to receive had a profoundly negative impact upon the young Spartan. During her medically induced coma, Amy's hallucinations took a sinister turn; vivid depictions of herself being flayed and restitched together replayed regularly. When Amy finally awoke, she felt a great disquiet with her body. As she was unaware of what had happened to her, the first symptoms of body dysphoria appeared. Amy began to feel disconnected from her body; she became fixated on the strange sensations that came from her new spine and strengthened back muscles. As Amy awoke a few hours before her scheduled coming to, she spent the few solitary hours clawing at her back, tearing out sutures and creating new wounds, her mind filled with a desire to undo the barbaric things that had been done to her. When the doctors arrived at the appointed time, they were horrified by what they discovered and immediately re-sedated Amy and closed her wounds. It was when she awoke for the second time that she was finally given an explanation of the changes that had befallen her, causing Amy to immediately recoil in horror. Amy's personality became promptly warped and in order to cope with the brutal lose of bodily autonomy, Amy retreated inside her own head for several days, her personhood twisted and turning and reshaping. Unable to fully reconcile with her injuries, Amy began to see herself not as a person, but as a tool. As such, she started to refer to herself as Hera - her impersonal field moniker. It was during these first few painful days as her new self, that one of her former pupils, Andra-D054, came to visit dealing with her own feelings of pain and loss. Unable, and perhaps unwilling, to empathise with Andra, Hera lashed out verbally and dismissed her saying that they had never been friends and that they never would be. It was an exchange that Hera would soon come to regret but one that would never be rectified. A few days later, Hera was given a rushed psychological exam which she passed. For better or worse, Hera had become resigned to her fate as a tool in the UNSC's arsenal, a fate she knew she would only be released from upon her death.
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| Andra, Hera's former pupil, was desperate to bring her friend out of the stupor that had overtaken her. |
Six days following her psychological evalutation, Andra approached Hera again and asked her to spar with her. Andra, unaware of the severe mental trauma Hera had suffered, believed that a sparring match would help to bring her out of her stupor. Hera rebuffed the suggestion as futile and was once again dismissive of Andra. Still concerned, Andra went to Frendsen and put forward to him the idea of a sparring match between the pair. Frendsen was intrigued by the prospect and saw it as a good exercise to gauge Hera's physical readiness to be back in the field accepted the proposal. On the same day as Andra's request, Hera herself approached Frendsen and begged him to send her into the field, stating that she could no longer cope being on the Infinity and so many reminders of her past. Frendsen, sympathetic as he was, stated that he would only acquiesce to her request should she spar with Andra in full MJOLNIR. Infuriated but aware that she did not have a choice, Hera agreed. The next day, the pair arrived in a private training room inside the Spartan Operations Centre. Frendsen laid down several ground rules; it was to be full contact but neither were to attempt to deliberately harm the other. During the beginning of the fight, Hera struggled to adapt to the new enhancements and was easily overpowered on several occasions by Andra. However, after a few minutes, Hera grew accustomed to them. She moved at a much higher speed than Andra, whose punches now failed to land where intended. The quantum computer in Hera's head also allowed to her to plan out her own attacks while anticipating Andra's at a speed far beyond Andra's capabilities. The fight quickly ended after it became clear to Frendsen that Hera was simply too fast and too strong for Andra and was a waste of time. Frendsen was extremely impressed by his operators new capabilities and granted her request for redeployment.
ONI's Sword
See Halo: Power Plays for more.
- "I don't care where you send me, just get be as far away from all this as you can. I am no longer a Spartan, Frendsen."
- ―Amy expresses her wish for solitude in her work.
Searching for the Librarian
See Halo: Heaven and Earth for more.
- "Hera, if you're successful this could change the course of the entire war. Our way of life hinges on it."
- ―Hera was tasked to hunt down the elusive Librarian in hopes of turning the war in the UNSC's favour.