information

[tumultuous]

content warning: mentions of sex and sexual abuse, drugs, drinking, etc.


◊ ( QUICK LINKS. )

❧ basic stats.
❧ world info.
❧ relationships.
❧ history.
❧ personality.
❧ abilities.
❧ summary.

◊ ( BASICS. )

name: Corinna Galanos
canon: Original (Tempestuous)
age: 84
d.o.b.: January 17th, 1946
appearance: (◊, ◊, ◊). Corinna's appearance differs greatly depending on her canon point. From reaching adulthood to the beginning of her incarceration with the BIRCH, she was round-faced, with big blue eyes and wild blonde hair. Cosmetic surgery after her faked death resulted in dark eyes, long dark hair, a darker skin tone, and a different facial structure. Halfway into her main storyline she gets a makeover to be less easily recognizable, acquiring a blonde pixie cut and a prominent tattoo of baby's breath snaking up her neck. A constant throughout all of her changes of appearance includes her height of 5'11", weight of approximately 150 lbs, and relatively fit and well-muscled figure.
role in canon: Protagonist

◊ ( WORLD INFO. )

Corinna's world is basically Earth + magical things, like elves, faeries, trolls, nymphs, vampires, deities, werewolves, demons, draconians, anthropomorphics, and many cultural subspecies/races. Basically, if it belongs in a fantasy novel, it belongs somewhere on this Earth. However, most nonhuman races, casually referred to as "Folk," reproduce at a much slower rate and live much longer than humans; the human population always outnumbers the nonhuman population at a ration of about 10:3, and that's not even taking into account individual nonhuman races. There are, however, a lot of "mutts," and it's not unusual for someone to have some nonhuman heritage.

Most of the races are what's on the tin, but there are two in this universe not common to most fantasy realms:
Amphibisprites: Amphibious blue-skinned people said to be the first humanoid present on earth. They live for millions of years and reproduce just about as often, and their pantheon of gods is the oldest and the one for which the most supporting evidence has been found.
Sigma: An alien race that began as an attempt to colonize the Earth, whose mothership never returned. Known for being extremely scientifically gifted and pacifists as a whole. Their strong negative emotions cause them to emit harmful energy similar to radiation, which harms both the enemy and themselves. Because of this, although their bodies are suited to long lifespans, they rarely survive longer than the average human.

Most of the historical events of our Earth were preserved, with a few events now including the key participation of nonhumans: the Holocaust, various civil wars, the civil rights movement; nonhumans, as a minority and a convenient scapegoat, predictably took on the corresponding roles.

Many countries have an organization devoted to relations between Folk and humans. The USA's version is the BIRCH, or Bureau of Interspecies Relations for Cooperative Harmony. While this organization presents an upstanding and positive facade to the outside world, it is actually responsible for many scandals covered up as accidents and, while it might have been an entity with good intentions once upon a time, its intentions now are debatable and heavily influenced by its head, Jason Eagle.

Corinna's main plotline takes place beyond the year 2012 and technology has developed accordingly. By 2030, most of the cars on the road are electric power, AI technology used in phones and entertainment systems are highly prevalent, alternative energy accounts for 40% of the US's fuel, cloning people is possible but not perfected, medicine has developed far enough to cure the common cold and halve cancer's fatality rate (among other things), holographic interfaces for TV/entertainment/radio are standard issue, etc. The political situation of the world has remained largely the same, and though the US has had its squabbles with other countries (predictably Russia, China, the Middle East, etc.), large-scale wars have been avoided.

◊ ( RELATIONSHIPS. )

family tree
↪ ( MARCELLUS GALANOS. ) » Corinna's cousin, best friend, and oldest confidante. She's known him for more than seventy years and in all that time there has never been anyone to occupy more of her heart or thoughts. Married twice, first to the woman that mothered his three children, second to a feisty fire fearie. Despite being only half elf, he fits more into the stereotypes of the race by being generally very intelligent and wise, well-mannered, and collected. He spent several decades as an archaeologist and has more secret connections with the BIRCH and Jason Eagle than he lets on.
↪ ( ABADDON GALANOS. ) » Marcellus' father and Corinna's uncle, married to a weak-willed human called Julienne. Abaddon was generally an awful guy, and there was a reason that Corinna's father had cut off all contact with him. She spent four years in his household standing against his verbal, physical, and sexual assaults alongside her younger cousin Marcellus, after which she promptly escaped with cousin in tow. Corinna never got over the trauma she had suffered at Abaddon's hands and slowly found herself becoming more like him, prompting her to return drunk to his house one day and slit his throat.
↪ ( THE GALANOS CHILDREN. ) » Aella, Joseph, and Mia, children of Marcellus and his wife Johanna, Corinna's nieces and nephew. Aella is a world-renowned botanist and black-market poisoneer with a second husband, six children, and two grandsons. Joseph is a powerful politician with a fiancée that Corinna never liked, two daughters and a son. Mia is a talented hacker, hobbyist conspiracy theorist, and a history teacher at a private school who also has a second husband and one daughter. Corinna loves them all dearly; Aella is the one who understands her the most, Joseph the one she always bickers with, Mia the one who's so much like her it's scary.
↪ ( THE GALANOS GRANDCHILDREN. ) » Aella has six: Elysia (policewoman with husband and infant son Nicolae), Pansy (popular chef with husband and infant son Simon), teenage Alexandria, preteen Leon, fifth-grader Myron and third-grader Collette. Joseph has three: teenage Helene and Yvette, preteen Joseph Jr. Mia has one, preteen Hannah. Corinna, until the events of her main plotline, never had the chance to meet any of the grandchildren except Elysia and Pansy, who were small children the last time she saw them. She was kept updated on all of the kids from afar, though, and grew to love them just as much as her cousin's children, especially when she got to meet them. Leon especially, being the spunky and blunt kid who stowed away for an adventure.
↪ ( ROSCOE PRATT. ) » A fellow agent of Corinna's at the BIRCH, who is a werewolf with an unusual amount of control over his transformations and even more now that he's been genetically enhanced. He originally joined the BIRCH for its perks and stayed for the vigilante missions, upon several of which he worked alongside Corinna. He's brutally honest, believes more in the end than the means, always plays the devil's advocate, and has a bad habit of hurting people while trying to protect them. He's the token love interest, of course, but Corinna has always made herself... less than emotionally available.
↪ ( JASON EAGLE. ) » The aging head of the BIRCH. Always a shady character, but is careful not to reveal his true colors until necessary. He was once a kind man, the only survivor of a massacre brought about by an extremist vampire coven, but the last of his compassion was destroyed when his fiancée was killed in a Folk riot in the eighties. Since then he's made it his personal mission to eradicate Folk.
↪ ( SELENE RELFIGOR. ) » An ancient amphibisprite serving as head secretary for the BIRCH. A longtime friend of Corinna and Roscoe's, with a cynical sense of humor and a noble carriage, who for all she's seen of the world never quite gives up her commitment to doing the right thing, despite the cost. She's instrumental in all of Corinna and Roscoe's hijinks.
↪ ( GENOVEVA ALLENDORFER. ) » A twenty-year-old girl covered in tattoos and piercings who also graduated at the top of her class, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with a thousand ideals. She once worked as an intern for a BIRCH alternative energy research facility, until she discovered B and fell in love with him. She staged the escape of the two of them and arranged for them to become a part of her uncle's traveling circus. She joins Corinna after the elf's speech to the public, helped along from a recommendation letter from an old friend of Corinna's--her father.
↪ ( B [TEST SUBJECT B1298G90]. ) » B was practically raised in the BIRCH alternative energy research facility, and spent his entire life undergoing cruel experiments where he was tormented physically and mentally in order to provoke negative emotions for the scientists to study and try and convert to energy. As such he has become a particularly jaded and angry specimen of Sigma, quiet and often brooding, but with a sense of humor that sneak-attacks at the most unexpected moments. He was liberated by Gen, despite the fact that he probably does not have all that long left to live because of his own irradiation, and it was his idea that theyoung couple leave the circus to assist Corinna in her quest for revolution.

◊ ( HISTORY. )

The Beginning
Corinna was born in 1946, the only child of a pair of elf archaeologists stationed on the remote and miniscule Topaca Island, an American territory just off the coast of Florida. Kastor and Khloe, her parents, had immigrated there from Greece in the thirties to escape brewing hostility against nonhumans. The island was considered part of a town by the name of Sacredo, which was a small community on the nearby mainland.

It's true that in the forties and fifties not many women were archaeologists, and Khloe was little exception; though she did a lot of archaeological work herself, most of the credit went to her husband because very few would accept the research from a woman. Leaving an eight-year-old Corinna with a pair of family friends in the native tribe of the island, Kastor and Khloe went on a long expedition into the Serecite Cave and, unfortunately, never returned. The family friends--a young couple by the names of Carmela and Esteban, with two babies of their own--treated Corinna like a child of theirs. She grew up well and she grew up wild, speaking her parents' Greek and the natives' Spanish and English, tumbling with the somewhat-primitive native children and acquiring her great admiration for the quality of strength. She became like a real sister to the children of her foster family, two young girls named Adalina and Nieve, complete with diaper-changing responsibilities. Unfortunately, after a long bout of commercial fishing near Topaca Island that diminished the population of local sea life, her foster family--fishermen that they were--fell on hard times. Corinna, by then a teenager and old enough to be comfortably separated from her foster parents, mentioned to them an uncle in Boca Raton, with whom her father had had a falling-out. Perhaps he would be willing to accept custody, relieving some of the financial stress of the poor foster family.

So in 1960, Corinna packed her few things and went to live in the city with her uncle and aunt and one younger cousin, a family that had immigrated to the States just before WWII hit. She soon understood why her father had had a falling out with this "Uncle Ab." Abusive physically, sexually, and emotionally, he was a horrible alcoholic who was a bouncer at a bar. His wife, too, "Auntie Jules," was a pitiful creature, a watery-eyed human submissively greeting him with a fearful grimace whenever he stumbled home inebriated at three in the morning, further instilling the need for strength in Corinna's life. Only in her younger cousin, Marcellus, did she find something to hold on to: a little halfbreed boy of seven that was much too old for his years; he, who refused to shed a tear in front of the uncle and protected her at least as much as she protected him.

Reaching Adulthood
Corinna left that house as soon as she could, at age eighteen in '64, taking Marcellus, then ten years old, with her despite the legal repercussions that could've befallen her. The two were homeless for a long while, which helped them stay under the radar of local police; they migrated to the more rural coast, where Corinna could find employ as the fisherwoman her foster family had taught her to be, and Marcellus could do a few chores for neighbors at the local farms during the daylight hours. They saved their cash for a few years, despite the fact that Corinna had inherited all of her parents' savings, sleeping mostly under the stars or in a sturdy camping tent, the way that she had essentially been raised. Technically, they were still homeless, but neither ever felt like it. Though her cousin disliked the living circumstances, he agreed that it was better than living with Abaddon.

When Marcellus was16 and old enough to get a more legitimate job, and their savings had pooled to a considerable amount, Corinna took him back to the city, where they both gained employ at a local diner. It was 1970 and Corinna dragged her cousin to the tail end rallies of the Civil Rights Movement constantly. She then decided that she wanted more out of life and started attending community college. She attempted to follow in the footsteps of her parents, now that it was more socially acceptable for women to hold professional positions, but held no interest in archaeological subjects. In fact, the only thing she could really see herself doing for the rest of her life was spending it outdoors, in the sun and the weather and being with the earth she'd grown up with and so loved.

Corinna dropped out of college in 1973, planning to spend several years (it actually turned out to be around twenty) traveling the world with what was left of her savings and parents' savings, the ability to pick up temp work, and a penchant for ridiculously frugal living. She invited Marcellus to come with her, but he declined, deciding instead to stay in Boca Raton, where he pursued almost the same course that she had tried to: he took out loans and attended community college. But unlike Corinna, Marcellus stuck with his studies, making up for the time he'd lost and more. In time he got scholarships and transferred to a prominent university, where he, ironically enough, pursued the same studies that she had abandoned: archaeology.

Corinna, as mentioned, traveled for close to twenty years, until 1992. During this time, her addictive personality, the culture in the 70's and 80's, and the lack of Marcellus to tame her led her to engage in a lot of sex, drugs, and booze. Mostly booze. It was both amusing and terrifying for Corinna to realize she was becoming an alcoholic like her abominable uncle, and that her fits of violent rage were very similar to his as well. Of course, the terror did nothing to stop her, either.

She saw a great part of the world in that time period; for most of it, she was homeless, using savings she picked up from temp jobs and occasionally working in strip clubs or as a drug dealer to buy her next plane ticket or bus fare or a night in a motel when the weather got too terrible. Also during this time period, Corinna accidentally killed a would-be rapist; she went to trial for it and did some time in prison.

Return to Topaca
It was after this incident that Corinna--vindicated and horrified, and horrified at herself for feeling vindicated--noticed that these slums in these cities weren't where she belonged. She found herself missing the quiet, quaint life of Topaca Island and the villagers the nearby Sacredo that she had also come to know and love. She decided to return, with a clean slate, and swore off the sex and drugs and alcohol that were turning her into her uncle.

But Corinna had had a history of never finishing what she started, and so she would cave on the promise enough to booze when she liked and have a casual encounter or two (but not many because then she'd be the talk of the tiny town). Never a relationship--she was too flighty for that.

When she returned, she was saddened but unsurprised to find that many of her human friends were old or dead, but at the same time excited at the chance to settle and make new ones and giggle at small children surprised at the fact that she knew their grandmothers when they were little tykes. It felt so good to be back in the crisp, warm air, and the first time it rained, she felt like none of the things she had done mattered anymore. Corinna found a plot of land for sale and immediately mortgaged it with almost no down payment, as the people in Sacredo were painfully trusting. She was not afraid of hard work, and she took to farming immediately because of her specifically elven connection with nature. By 1998, it had become a prospering farm, and all of her backbreaking labor had paid off her debts.

At that point Corinna reconnected with her baby cousin, with whom she'd lost contact in the desperate swirl of wandering and vices. She never told him exactly what happened in the twenty years she'd been gone, with only on-and-off contact towards him. He had, in the meantime, become a successful archaeologist and found a lovely young human woman named Johanna, married her, and had three children: Mia, Joseph, and Aella. In 1992, Corinna was forty-six, with Marcellus at thirty-eight and his wife at thirty-two. Aella was nine, Joseph was five, and Mia was an infant. Corinna immediately invited them all out to her expansive farm for a family vacation. Every summer afterwards, Marcellus and Johanna sent the children to Corinna for the summer, until the three started on their own adult lives (though she made them promise to visit). Johanna died from cancer when Corinna was sixty, in 2006, which was a hard blow to the whole family, but especially Marcellus.

By 2010 Corinna was sixty-four (and still looking twenty-five thanks to her elven blood) and Marcellus was fifty-six; Mia, his youngest, was in college; Joseph, his middle, was engaged; and Aella, his oldest, had a daughter, was pregnant again, and was separated from her abusive husband, living with her father. Aella's kids would also be sent to Corinna's farm for the summers. Corinna's foster parents and human aunt were long dead, and to her ire, her Uncle Abaddon still lived. Her baby sisters, Nieve and Adalina, and many of her childhood friends from Topaca Island, were about the same age as Marcellus and expecting grandchildren.

The longer Corinna spent in Sacredo, bored and lonely and watching her extended family and friends grow up around her, the more unhappy she became and the more alcohol she consumed. Even Mia, who was blissfully oblivious to everything, noticed her aunt's being broody and listless. Corinna also became more unpredictable while inebriated. In a 2011 argument with Joseph over the fiancee she didn't approve of, Corinna ended up hitting her nephew hard enough to send him crashing into a wall that gave him a minor concussion.

Downward Spiral
While Joseph was willing to forgive his aunt, Corinna wasn't willing to forgive herself. In a half-inebriated state of self-loathing, she packed up and left the farm without a trace, leaving her employees bewildered the next morning. She fully intended to drink herself into a coma of liver failure and death over the next year or two, even saw it as a perverse challenge considering her elven blood and corresponding longevity. But somehow she found herself back in Boca Raton, at the tenement building that she had lived in with Marcellus, Julienne, and Abaddon all those years ago. It was the middle of the day and the locks were not hard to pick.

The door to the apartment was unlocked like she knew it would be and her uncle was asleep on the sofa. Before she even knew what she was doing, Corinna, in a fit of rage, had slit his throat with a butcher knife from the kitchen. She stumbled out of the apartment covered in blood, and it was only a matter of time before she was stopped by the manager in the building's lobby. The police were called and the second trial in which Corinna was supposed to defend herself for murder commenced. She plead guilty. During sentencing Corinna did her best to be as impossible to sympathize with as she could, which combined with the heavy bias of the Southern justice system was enough to land her with a death sentence.

She was offered a secret bargain: the BIRCH, or the Bureau of Interspecies Relations for Cooperation and Harmony, was conducting genetic research on nonhuman races, and if Corinna would volunteer to be a part of the project (after rehab, of course), her death sentence would be revoked and substituted with a life sentence in a research facility. Corinna was halfway to spitting in the propositioner's face, fairly suicidal at that point, but as she was led back to her cell to "have time to consider the deal," Marcellus and the rest of her extended family begged her to take it. It was eventually Aella's child that convinced her, who said her name for the first time, quickly followed by "I love you."

Corinna accepted the deal and was launched into six months of semi-successful rehab for her alcoholism as the society of the outside world debated the morals of the deal she had been offered. She was visited several times by her family, who she was relieved to see forgive her for the murder of Abaddon. As Marcellus put it coldly, "he deserved to die--even if you shouldn't have killed him." Marcellus' children never knew the extent of what Abaddon had done until Corinna's sentencing and the facts that had come to light with the media focus surrounding it, at which point all of them darkly agreed.

When Corinna finally entered the BIRCH program, still in 2011, she was told to make her goodbyes to her family, as she would be cut off from contact with them for essentially forever. Corinna was infuriated and was about to dissolve the deal, but then Marcellus alone came to her. He told her that her family would rather know she's alive and not be able to see her than attend her funeral.

For the first time since her parents died, Corinna dissolved into tears, in her cousin's arms. Later that day, Marcellus and his children and grandchildren gathered to say goodbye. It was lengthy and tearful and each of them gave Corinna something to remember them by. She was then taken to a top-secret government military base and her suspicions that this was not just a genetic research project were confirmed.

It was more of a genetic experimentation project.

Becoming A Secret Agent
Corinna had by then signed a contract--and it wasn't as if she hadn't figured out beforehand that this wasn't going to be just genetic research. At the facility, after a multitude of tests, an actual procedure was performed. The results were that Corinna's natural elven affinity with nature was amplified to actually encompass controlling it. She was transformed into a human--er, elf--weapon alongside several other members of her race and others (fairies, trolls, nymphs, vampires, lesser deities, etc.). As such, she and these other people became a government-sanctioned special operations squadron.

Predictably, the government faked Corinna's death--suicide in 2013 with the help of a cloning experiment; an event that received widespread media coverage--after which she underwent cosmetic surgery to change her appearance and was issued several aliases and a codename, Poison Ivy. At that point the government also held the lives of Corinna's family in the balance. In order to keep her family safe, Corinna was at the mercy of the government's whims. She went through further training, this type more militaristic and conventional, and eventually reached the point where between those skills and her genetically enhanced ones, she, like the rest of her squadron, was a capable intelligence-gathering, political-assassination machine.

At first her squadron, and she as an individual, was used for small-scale political assassinations and rounding up organized crime. Some of the missions, Corinna was alright with; others, she was not; but it didn't matter because the feds had her family. She spent seventeen years with these types of assignments, with her only friends as the people who'd been rounded up for the project as well. A small consolation were the weekly intelligence reports she received about her family: after seventeen years, Marcellus (beginning to show his age despite elven blood) was retired and remarried; Aella, now a world-famous botanist and black-market poisoneer, was the mother of six (Elysia, Pansy, Leon, Alexandra, Colette, and Myron) with a new husband that was far from abusive; Aella's eldest daughters, Elysia (a policewoman) and Pansy (a chef in high demand), each had a son (Nicolae and Simon, respectively). Joey, a politician, was married to the fiancee Corinna had disliked (who turned out to be not so bad and was a travel agent) and had three kids (Helene, Yvette, and Joseph Jr.) of his own; and Mia was a conspiracy theorist hacker turned teacher, just starting on a second marriage after being widowed from her first, with one daughter named Hanna.

They were happy, and Corinna soon found that that was what mattered, and her own wounds began to heal.

The Rebellion
In 2030, Corinna was called in to the office of her long-time squad commander and BIRCH head, Jason Eagle. There he gave her a mission that was oddly suited to her skills--a job on the island she'd grew up on, overseeing an archaeological excavation into none other than Serecite Cave, the site where Corinna had lost her parents decades before. She was startled by the proposition but accepted, bringing along two friends: Roscoe Pratt, a half-werewolf smooth-talking would-be vigilante, and Selene Rellfigor, a member of the ancient blue-skinned aquatic amphibisprite race whose writings were believed to decorate the walls of Serecite. According to amphibisprite theology, the ancient god of destruction, Xene, also known as the Tempestuous One, had been imprisoned deep in the caves of a long-lost island by his fellow gods for his transgressions.

On arrival at Topaca, Corinna was shocked and upset to discover that the head archaeologist on the dig was none other than Marcellus Galanos, her cousin, who did not recognize her after her cosmetic surgery. Also still residing there were the aged sisters Nieve and Adalina. She adopted the pseudonym Lauren Callahan to keep her true identity from becoming known, as Eagle had warned her that such an event would be detrimental. For a while, all was well on Topaca, until archaeologists began disappearing in the Cave, their passing marked only by screams and spattered blood. Selene and Corinna were affected deeply by energy emanating from the cave, and noted such to Marcellus and Roscoe. The cause of this was later said to be because Selene was an amphibisprite and Corinna had lived just outside the mouth of the cave since she was born, and so the god's presence resonated with them.

Marcellus, Corinna, Roscoe, and Selene went as deep into the caves as they could. Suspecting the work of Xene, Corinna and Selene used their strange mental connection to the god to find their way to the center of the cave where he resided. There, the four of them spoke with the destructive god who'd been imprisoned for good reason, and Xene informed them of his intentions: to break free of his captivity and bring with him the rest of the imprisoned amphibisprite pantheon, and throw the world into the chaos on which he, as the Tempestuous One, fed.

The quartet fled the cave and immediately begged Eagle to cease the excavation. Their request was denied in favor of "a bigger picture," despite the people dying. Infuriated, Corinna took matters into her own hands, and forced those employed by the BIRCH for the excavation to evacuate and return to their homes; including Marcellus. The three agents were apprehended at the airport and returned to headquarters, each punished by the BIRCH for their transgressions; Selene was demoted to a position that would probably crush her soul if given enough time, Roscoe was informed that the BIRCH would be destroying the forests of his home to build a new facility, and Corinna's weekly updates on her family were revoked and she was charged for the transportation of the evacuated parties. Corinna knew that her punishment was not nearly enough for her transgression, though, and awaited the day she would find out the rest of it.

The day came a few weeks later. Her nephew, Joseph, had begun to develop seriously disturbing political views in 2030. In a society already split by hatred, he preached of separation, the inferiority of non-humans, and implied that other races had no place in the U.S. With humans in the vast majority and after a recent spike of tension brought by hate crimes, his platform grew with a rapidity that was deeply unsettling.

The BIRCH had decided that Joseph's career had run its course. As both a way to accomplish its goals and a way to punish Corinna, she was assigned his assassination. However, she made her own inferences: that the BIRCH wanted to inspire a greater hatred of Folk by showing Joseph's assassination as a hate crime, and that it probably had some bright young hopeful just like Joseph ready to take the would-be martyr's place in the renewed tension.

But Joseph was her nephew, and bizarre policies or not, she was not going to kill him.

As it would turn out, Joseph himself was being blackmailed in the same way Corinna was: two of his three children were away at a prestigious boarding school, a thinly-veiled ploy to keep them within the claws of the government. Joseph, after all, was a quarter elf, and loved his family; but his heritage was used against the nonhumans as well, as he publicly disowned every nonhuman drop of blood in his body.

When Corinna confronted Joseph in his office and she begged him to escape, he only recognized her by her voice. He couldn't even ask for her story; he just pulled her close for a hug. When he let go, he pulled a revolver out of his jacket, whispered the names of his eldest daughters, and shot himself in the head.

Then, Corinna realized that he knew it was coming, and that the final price of his blackmail was his own life.

Furious, but not stupid, Corinna returned to the BIRCH as if she'd completed the job herself. When she and Roscoe questioned Eagle about the mission, he gave no real answer, only serving to antagonize them more. And so Corinna decided she was sick of playing by the BIRCH's rules, and with the help of Selene and company of Roscoe, slipped out of the facility in the dead of night.

The two of them traveled to where Joseph's replacement was being inducted and hijacked the widely-publicized ceremonies. Corinna had long enough on the pedestal to give a speech to the masses on the secret plans of BIRCH and the atrocities it had committed. She and Roscoe escaped right after, and her speech was widely regarded as the raving of a lunatic claiming to be the long-dead Corinna Galanos... until investigators happened upon the neat bag of DNA samples that she had purposefully left on the scene to be traced back to her. While this added weight to her statement, it also made her the most wanted woman in the U.S.

Corinna and Roscoe flew under the radar, using their combined survivalist skills and Roscoe's werewolf contacts to spend a few weeks gathering resources--for a revolution. They eventually found themselves staying with a group of kind Sigma, a humanoid race with purple skin tones and heights averaging at seven feet whose emotions gave off energy akin to nuclear power. Here, Roscoe and Corinna were found and approached by to would-be heroes: a sickly-looking Sigma with a BIRCH logo tattooed on his temple, and a heavily inked-and-pierced young girl. Gen, the girl, told the story of herself and the Sigma called B. He had spent most of his life in an energy research facility, where the BIRCH incited strong emotional reactions from him in order to get him to produce radiation that could be converted into energy. Gen had been an intern at the facility and the two of them had escaped to join the circus (long story), but B had enough radiation exposure to be slowly dying.

The two of them wanted to join Roscoe and Corinna in their quest for revolution and taking down the BIRCH, and the two agents refused them outright. But at that exact moment, the secret Sigmese compound was attacked by BIRCH agents that Gen and B had unwittingly led there. Roscoe, Corinna, Gen, B, and two of the four Sigma escaped only by virtue of secret tunnels, the other Sigmese' sacrifice, and abandoning all of their documents and communication paraphernalia to a fire. After escaping to the countryside, Gen gave Corinna a letter from her father, Hans Allendorfer, who was one of Cor's oldest friends; after reading it, she reluctantly decided to let the two youngsters tag along.

Forced by desperation, Corinna led the four of them to the house of her niece, Mia, who had the benefit of being paranoid enough to have a secret bunker under her house where they could stay while Gen procured a vehicle. At Mia's house, Corinna made to catch up on the latest intel from conspiracy theorists and quiet revolutionaries that Mia had a habit of collecting--only to be told that if she wanted real information on Eagle, she should speak with Marcellus. While there Corinna also met her grand-niece for the first time, and the four fugitives underwent drastic makeovers to reduce the chance of them being spotted and caught.

The next stop was the home of Corinna's niece Aella, a renowned botanist and secretly a master poisoneer. Here Corinna spared the time to meet the five grand-nieces and -nephews she'd never seen, as well as the two great-grand-nephews. Aella stocked the little group with ample supplies of paralyzing poison and patented healing ointment, promised to call Mia to set her and her fellow hackers on a trail of attacking the BIRCH, and the four of them went on their way. Little did they know that Aella's son, Leon, only around twelve, stowed away in their SUV as they left.

The next stop was Marcellus' house in the mountains, where Corinna hoped to uncover the deeper secrets that he must have known about the BIRCH and its intentions with freeing Xene. The reunion was odd but happy; Corinna met Marcellus' new wife Tina, and the four visitors settled in the house to receive Marcellus' story. It was not at all what the elf girl expected.

Marcellus told her that while Corinna had been traveling the country as a drifter, he'd taken on a job with the BIRCH to be able to afford to marry and start a family with Johanna, his first wife. The job, incidentally, had been the same one he worked on several weeks before with Corinna as his supervisor: excavating Serecite Cave. His supervisor back then had been Jason Eagle, who, according to Marcellus, was at the time a kind man and the only survivor of a hate crime massacre committed by a misanthropic coven of vampires. Marcellus was able to feed a bullshit story to Eagle to stop the excavation for at least a while, and he was kept in the loop with the major players of the BIRCH for a long several years. But another tragedy had marred Eagle's life to transform him into the hateful creature he was as Corinna's boss: the love of his life had been killed in a Folk riot in the eighties. After that point Marcellus began to be cut off from BIRCH secrets and the organization itself... until Corinna's murder conviction, when he used what remained of his influence to ask Eagle to cut her the deal that saved her life.

Upon learning that her employment with the BIRCH and all the heartache it caused her over the years was Marcellus' doing, Corinna was furious. In her rage she let slip more than she meant to; about how she wished she had been left to rot, about how she had seen that her own family would cope easily enough without her presence, and more. Gen approached Corinna with the intent to calm her down, and the elf was only further enraged by her pity, smacking the young girl across the face. This in turn set the explosive B on her in a fistfight, which provoked Roscoe to transform and come to her aid. By the time the fight had been broken up by Marcellus' fearie wife, B had already emitted a spike of radiation.

Corinna stormed out of the house despite her wounds, intending to continue on the road of bringing down the BIRCH on her own. But upon reaching the stolen minivan, she discovered her nephew, Leon, having stowed away in the trunk. Disregarding her pride, she dragged him back to the house, where he was lectured and wounds were taken care of--until the crew was again assaulted by a small squad of BIRCH agents who had been alerted by the radiation spike. The seven of them managed to fight the BIRCH attackers off, and Leon proved his worth in a tight spot, but Corinna still refused to let him join. Yet it was decided that Marcellus, his wife Tina, and Leon could not stay at the home at the risk of being caught.

The seven of them drove to a nearby contact of Marcellus', a Sigma by the name of Thorps, where they spent the night secluded in the basement. Corinna was overcome with guilt for the fact that her outburst caused B's radiation spike and resulted in the BIRCH agents tracking them to Marcellus' house; she decided that she was better off taking the final steps alone. While the rest of her crew slept, Corinna snuck into Thorps' garage and stole his tiny electric car. She made it to the BIRCH headquarters in NYC hours later, and went in through the secret agents' entrance armed with paralysis-spray and one fatality shot.

She noticed when she went in that the pass code for entry hadn't been changed. This was enough to tip her off; and though she easily got through the guards and Selene let her into Eagle's office with no problem, she was wary. Waiting for her in Eagle's office was Jason himself, as well as a dozen highly trained BIRCH agents with guns trained on her. The two of them taunted each other, ending with Corinna firing her fatality shot in a rage--simultaneous with Eagle's guards firing their weapons.

Corinna awoke later to a BIRCH doctor removing bullets from her body, sans any sort of anesthetic, and screamed till she passed out again. The second time she woke up, it was in a cell, and she inferred that Eagle still wanted her alive. The reason why became clear soon, as Leon was brought to her cell, evidently having followed her. The two of them were then treated to horrific videos of beaten family members and teammates being captured by BIRCH agents and escorted to the headquarters.

At 12:00 sharp, Leon began talking freely despite the camera in the corner. He explained that while following Corinna to the HQ, he had called Mia with a prepaid and unbugged phone he'd bought when his had been taken away for school trouble. Through code he'd communicated to his aunt that Corinna had been captured, and that she needed to have her hackers take down the security and loop the camera feeds starting at noon. Forming a battle plan, Corinna salvaged a few blades of grass from Leon's pants and manipulated them into long grass cords. They busted out of their cell and quickly took out the handful of startled guards in the hallway, then made quick work of freeing the rest of the crew. With Pansy escorting the small children and other evacuees, the thirteen remaining members of the Galanos clan and supporters collected guns from fallen security guards and split up. Mia went to the main terminal and began distributing all of the BIRCH's secrets and scandals to her network of hackers, accompanied by several members of the team. Aella was escorted to the BIRCH labs to cause as much mayhem as possible.

Corinna went back to Eagle's office with the resolution to kill. However, he tempted her with promise of information she would deem critical--something that her own cousin knew but would never tell her. Corinna hesitated just long enough to fall into his trap, getting her information but sustaining another shot to the abdomen, at which point Roscoe came hurtling in and delivered the killing blow to Eagle.

Corinna woke up in a hospital to both good and bad news. The good news being that Eagle was dead. The bad news being that in the struggle, many of her family members and friends had been grievously and permanently wounded. Corinna herself had taken damage to her spinal cord and would have trouble walking for a while.

Surprisingly, the only fatality had been Leon... whose death was, in part, because Roscoe had abandoned everything to come to Corinna's rescue.

This was too much for her; she nearly lost it with guilt. She retained only enough presence of mind in her grief to clutch tightly to Marcellus' sleeve and scream a single question at him.

Why didn't you tell me Abaddon was alive?

◊ ( PERSONALITY. )

If there was one word Corinna could choose to have associated with herself, it would be the word 'strength.'

◊ ( ABILITIES. )

↪ ( PHYSICAL ENHANCEMENTS. )

↪ ( speed. )
↪ ( strength. )
↪ ( stamina. )
↪ ( endurance. )
↪ ( phytokinesis. )


❦ ( PHYTOKINESIS. )

Corinna is an elf, which gives her a natural affinity with plant and animal life. The BIRCH performed successful genetic experiments on her which then gave her the ability to manipulate plant life, in addition to some extra physical enhancements detailed above.

❦ ( rapid growth. ) » She can cause most plants to grow as fast and large as she needs them to be in seconds.
❦ ( rapid decay. ) » She can cause most plants to decay and shrink or die in seconds.
❦ ( flora movement. ) » She can manipulate the movement of plants, to the point of being able to manipulate them as restraints or harnesses.
❦ ( selective growth. ) » She can cause certain types of plants to grow instead of others.

↪ ( OTHER ABILITIES. )

❦ ( survival skills. ) » She spent a lot of time wandering through the countryside and knows how to rough it.
❦ ( fishing & farming. ) » Grew up a fisher family's child, spent twenty years as a ranch owner.
❦ ( stealth and resourcefulness. )
❦ ( marksmanship. ) » Something that twenty years in the BIRCH will ensure.
❦ ( networking. ) » Being this old means you know a lot of people.
❦ ( basic hacking & computer skills. ) » Again, something the BIRCH ensures.

◊ ( SUMMARY. )

Spunky, feisty and violent, fun-loving, insanely loyal, self-sacrificing and maternal eighty-four-year-old elf lady who looks twenty-five. She was born at an archaeological dig, raised on a fisherman's shore and in an abusive uncle's apartment with her cousin and lifelong confidante; she spent decades wandering and sleeping under the stars and years more more farming and spoiling her cousin's kids on an island paradise. She ended up murdering her uncle in a drunken rage and agreed to be a test subject in a government program instead of serving a life sentence--but genetic experiments gave her the power to control plants, and she became something of a secret agent. Her death was faked and she was off the radar for seventeen years, before she went on an adventure to keep a destructive god trapped and overthrow the organization she worked for in its plans to oppress all nonhumans.

credit: protostar