NAME. Milena Barbosa
AGE & BIRTH DATE. 29 & December 5th, 1995
GENDER & PRONOUNS. Female & She/her
SPECIES. Druid
OCCUPATION. Musician, Drummer for Huntress
FACE CLAIM. Julia Dalavia
( tw alcoholism, death, sad times ) The imperceptible lineage of the lunar court prompted a child to be born amidst a wretched winter storm as combative and ornery winds drowned out the wailing cries of a seemingly ordinary baby girl. Milena was the eldest, a child who saw the love drain from her parents eyes as it was replaced with mere exhaustion and resentment. That did not stop her parents from having several more children, a motley of boys and girls that ran rampant around the house, that managed to make a home out of the cramped and overrun place. Love had blossomed there, but it had not prevailed, waning under the pressure of such rambunctious children, the overdue bills, and the house that seemed to nearly sway whenever the winds in Chicago became too mighty.
Milena’s mother, when she was just shy of seven, made a decision that proved pivotal to the small cluster of Barbosa children and their father; their mother chose herself and her career. This was where the pitfall was produced, where her father began to nurse a bottle of liquor instead of aiding his children through the basic qualms of childhood. Milena snapped to swiftly, changing diapers of her toddler siblings, appreciating how to cook -though Hamburger Helper was a childhood staple- yes, she was not even at an age of double digits, but Milena felt akin to a parent, rather than a sibling. Bills piled up quicker, paychecks became infrequent, and shadier parties haggled her father for debts he could no longer pay. It all prompted Milena, a blank slate in need of guidance but absent of it, to learn a very valuable lesson of self reliance; to live among wolves, you have to act like a wolf. Or, rather, allow the wolf to believe one is of their kind; better a fox than a wolf, and much like the divergence of foxes from the lineage of wolves, Milan adapted. Cunning, swift, she lied and maneuvered her way through life, fringing on the need to protect and aid her younger siblings.
The entirety of her being became dedicated to them, slipping canned goods into various pockets, traveling out of the way to pilfer from certain corner stores; lies and thievery had become a dependable second skin, an adaptation that she relied on when money stretched too thin to handle. A survivalist molded into a nurturing spirit, in spite of the resentments felt for her mother, towards her father; Milena still wiped the drool off his lips, swiped the empty liquor bottle from his hand and helped him to bed. A quotidian routine that spiraled from adolescence to the miniature adult she was forming to be as a teenager. The one constant despite her father’s raging habit was a hidden talent that formed in the resonance of music. Song was in her blood, a distant cadence that spoke to fey and elves, gelid spires and snowy tundras; Milena had no idea the Noble blood which she came from but her musical talents were profound.
Despite the misfortune and poverty which surrounded her, Milena had the anomalous yearning to learn the cello in middle school, musical passion which grew in a maddening flurry as she swiftly shifted to learning the flute. In such rapid succinctness, of bloodied fingers from hours of practice, from labored lungs after her attempt at woodwind instruments, Milena diverted to a completely new realm of music altogether; rock music, punk, whatever one would like to call it. She coveted a prodigal favoring for drums and guitar, instruments which lanced any compressed rage and embitterment from her home life that she so desperately wished to escape from. Her first guitar and amp had been loaned and inevitably purchased before she graduated high school, an investment that was discounted for her from the local music store considering her predicament. The guilt from the investment was clear but Milena often sacrificed plenty of herself for her younger siblings, something she continued to do as they all aged and she felt horribly affixed in the same place. Days passed, years tallied on; Milena never did graduate from high school as her father’s alcoholism worsened and the mouths to feed became older, not as easy to satiate as growling stomachs grew. Milena had dreams and ambitions, much the same as any human born upon this earth, but she settled; a girl forced to be a mother figure, a nurturing presence as she fought to ensure the lives of those who came after her would be better. Seven younger siblings, crammed within a house in the back yards of Chicago; Milena could only pray they’d never have to wipe the drool from her father’s lips, scrub the smell of alcohol from the carpets, nor carry him from couch to bed. If she stayed, they wouldn’t have to; and so, she lingered.
Life was grueling when it came to the patterns of her quotidian life; music became a secondary presence to the meals she had to cook, the homework she aided her siblings with, the crappy hours spent working multiple jobs to ensure they’d not lose the house. It was ordinary, it was routine, but one day Milena was to come home to find the unexpected. The Eye of Horus; someone from their organization sat and lingered in their shoddy Chicagoan kitchen, adorned in a pressed suit, sipping some likely over expensive latte, surrounded by the chipping paint and faded linoleum of Milena’s family home. They spoke of trials, they uttered promises of enhancements that one like her could never dream of. Their gaze upon this world went farther into depths of perception and manipulation than Milena could ever understand; they knew of her blood, spoke of distant nobility that had arisen from a mere donation of her blood to a blood bank.They wanted her; the process was simple, a series of trials to activate the powers within her. She’d be paid for her time, allotted a sum of money to pay for her contribution to the trials, but as Milena looked over towards her father, the human had to decline. There was also the idea that this random was absolutely insane, speaking of elves and eladrins, nobility and song. They were persistent and a horrific compromise was made; if she spoke to her siblings and they were invested in the idea of such a trial, The Eye of Horus could enact such experimentation. What could there be to lose? Either this very man, the organization he spoke of, was a hack of complete insanity; or their lives were to be forever changed.
After Milena’s explanation, none of her siblings were necessarily interested in the cause, but three had been invested for pure avarice of compensation alone. They went off to weekly trials, came home with pinpricks and signs of adverse reactions to look out for until one day the three had vanished. The Eye was an organization which was everywhere and nowhere and it was under such realization, such horror, that her three siblings were lost to her; whether they’d successfully flown the coop or that they’d been taken, she’d never know the truth. Idiocy, greed, all things which propelled their involvement with The Eye, Milena’s guilt only strengthened at their disappearance.
Her time shifted to divulging in whatever she could discover about the Eye of Horus; long nights nursing a pot of coffee, hours dwindling away in the local library attempting to unearth the obscurities of such organization. Retaliation for her sleuthing came swiftly, though they’d cut off contact from Milena, seemingly abducted her siblings completely for their experiments, they could not allow her to dig into things which she could not yet understand. Her world shifted entirely as the slaughter of her own was enacted; her father, her siblings, as they slept within their home they were cut down. A lesson and a warning not to delve into matters that no longer concerned her. A fox smartened up quick, they were ambitious and driven for success, and though she wept and grieved, Milena would not let the Eye succeed on completely overturning her life. Rome was often at the epicenter of the excerpts and articles she discovered and so, through the estate sale of her childhood home, Milena kissed the scars of her adolescence goodbye. The only remnant of such life was a few of her clothes, her first guitar and amp, and the ambitions of her siblings disappearances, her family’s deaths that wrought her presence within the Italian city.
Milena did not find the Eye first, an archdruid had found her; Octavian. Once turned into a pariah and a monstrosity by Rome’s Senate, by the Eye all had turned against him and she found a similar flame within herself. Octavian turned Milena into the Fox; his survivalist acolyte that seemed to have several lives as the Eye swept through their kind. Despite their supposed reform, a fox does not forgive nor forget quite so easily.
+ Ambitious, compassionate, endearing
– Revengeful, nihlistic, impulsive
played by gia. est. she/her.
