☽ WIDOWMAKER, 26
"God may forgive you, but I never can." (attributed to Queen Elizabeth I)
Real Name: Eleni Landry
Agency: ʟᴀᴢᴇʀ
FC: Binx Walton
Unicorn Name: Voidmaker
Place of Birth: Ser'hld IX, a mining asteroid under Lava World's jurisdiction, before the gravitational pull from the black hole tore it apart.
Appearance: Tall, severe, with her curls cut short. Elbows like bolts. Legs jittery, like she's half-ready to start running. Burning eyes. Two piercings in her right ear and one through her left eyebrow. Never laughs. Sometimes smiles.
Wardrobe: Black leather jacket, black turtleneck shirt, loose black trousers, oxfords and boots. The occasional black button-up. No heels. No makeup unless she has to. When she goes onto interviews, she tells them to put as much stage makeup onto her face as they would for a man's. She wears gray durasteel piercings, made from the scraps of the first pieces she ever stole for Voidmaker. There's always a watch on her wrist; it doesn't work. It's stopped at 1318 Standard hours, fifteen years ago.
Places most likely to be found: The edges of meeting rooms, the corners of bars and restaurants. The engineering department of her agency, tinkering with Void.
People mostly likely to be with: Flame, who's nice enough and talks enough for two. Her agents--probation officers, more like. Other Lava Worlders, some of whom come up to her with fervent hands and eager words.
Strongest character trait: Her resentment
Public Image: They first tried to brand her a rebel, but she refused to give up that part of herself and her past to the greedy masses. It made her furious in a way that few things did, the thought of selling her anger and her history. They then tried to brand her as the femme fatale, but she refused to don their dresses and their sickly-slick lipstick. They felt wrong on her skin. The agency gave up then. She became the mysterious one, quiet and severe and short-spoken, and strangely enough, the people liked that. The agency built on that, and soon a new biography was built for her: the child of a secret agent, high up in the Estrellan Federation's political echelons, cool and suave and likely trained to kill.
Racing Strengths: She knows her Void like the back of her hand and can handle her with a mastery unseen even by the Snow Queen herself. The pair of them are quick and agile and nimble.
Racing Weaknesses: In the early days, her agent would scream at her after her races--you need to give a shit about the race, Landry! we kept you from Estrellan jail because we thought you had it in you to give a damn, we can't keep you here if you keep racing like that--so she learned to try. Or to see least act like she was trying, because the fact remains that Eleni doesn't give a shit about winning the races. It's just bread and circuses to her, keeping people too happy and entertained to recognize their crumbling cosmos.
Personality: Quiet, taciturn, but eloquent and measured when she finally speaks. Uncomfortable in the spotlight, for all that she commands it well. Holds grudges like it's a competition; falls quickly into righteous fury. She doesn't have a lot of friends, but she will go through hell for the ones she does.
Biography: She remembers the day when the world ended. She was just old enough to understand that earthquake drills were not just a game they played at school. The alarm sounded inside their little house, louder and more insistent than it ever has, and her father pulled her out the door and started running. It's happening, he said, and she grew horribly afraid, because she had never seen him cry before. It's happening, Ellie, you need to run, they have shuttles for the children, you need to get out--
They were separated by the crowd. She followed his directions and ran. The last thing she heard was him shouting her name, before an official in uniform pushed her into a rescue shuttle and the doors close behind her, and they took off.
They were the last ship to make it off the moon.
Her mother was an overseer in the mines. She would have been among the first to die, as the gravitational pull of the void pulled apart the fissures in the moon's surface made by mining shafts and yanked all of the people there into deep space, scattering them into the airless black. The same would have happened to the people on the surface not long afterwards. The gravity swell that had destroyed Ser'hld IX made the shuttle groan and rattle. Eleni had just gotten a watch for her eleventh birthday, and the spacetime distortion from the black hole's swell broke it.
1318, on the second. That was when her world ended.
The children rescued from the destroyed moon were declared wards of Estrella. Eleni attended boarding school in the central Lava province until she couldn't stand it anymore. The Federation had the capacity to travel faster than light, to build floating cities and terraform entire planets, to build horses of light and arenas of fire and ice for the pleasure of their rich benefactors. They had already conquered space and gravity and time--so why did they leave her moon to die? They could please the powerful all they wanted and put up a show of mourning for the dead--but that didn't change the fact that they left her family to die, her city, her people, the people who mined the metal and ore used to build Estrella's gleaming wonders.
The Federation left Ser'hld to die. The moon should have been evacuated three decades ago, before she was even born, but the mines were too lucrative.
She snuck onto a cargo ship when she was 14 and flew back to the backwater provinces where she knew she belonged, where the ground rumbled beneath her feet with every fluctuation from the black hole. She found other mining refugees there, who like her no longer had homes because of Estrella's neglect. They stole and bartered for a living; she learned how to hack security systems and plan raids on government facilities for oxygen dispersers and power cells and other necessities the Federation hoarded for itself. They talked about other things, bigger things--like separating the planet from the Federation and making Estrella pay. She learned she was damn good at fixing systems which were broken and even better at breaking systems when they needed to be broken.
She was 15 when she snuck into a facility and saw engineers developing robotic horses for some--racing game. They needed the metal to fix air purifiers in the area; mining smog corroded the filters like nothing else. That night, she and a couple others went back to scavenge sheet metal from the discarded prototypes, and she saw that there was one horse still running its program, LED eyes blinking in the dark, its body dark as a void.
Eleni took it with her when they left, and it trotted silently behind her like it had been trained.
It made her something of a legend in her new home, a girl with sunken eyes and a horse as dark as night, who stole from the powerful and would help you for a small price. Her horse--Void, she called it, dark as space--came with her team on raids, stepping silently behind her and carrying their loot. She had to steal from more and more well-guarded facilities to keep Void working, and one day, when she was 21, she got caught by a guard with LAZER on his uniform.
He gave her a choice--prison in central Estrella, or to race with Void for them.
She came back to her home--the backwater province where she stole and bartered for all of her growing years--a full year after she vanished, and she raced the course with her heart pounding, and she won. And she heard the roaring of the miners and shippers and cargo guides crash over her like a wave, because one of their own had won against a top-rated Ice Worlder. One of their own had won. The girl with sunken eyes and a night-black horse was back.
She doesn't want to race for Estrella. Lazer can go to hell, for all she cares. But every revolution needs its symbol, and Eleni might have just become her own.
Relationships:
Snow
Sky
Ice
Supernova
Sunbeam
Flower
Flame
Nyx
Playlist:
"Revolution" by The Score
"Vesuvius" by Sufjan Stevens
"The Angry River" by S. I. Itswa
"Running Up That Hill" by Meg Myers (Kate Bush cover)
"Conquest of Spaces" by Woodkid
Pinterest: N/A
Headcanons: N/A
Agency Bio: https://robot-unicorn-attack.tumblr.com/database-widowmaker
