OOC: Character History (LONG)
Born in Icicle Village, raised in Junon Port, Elena was the only child of an independant weapons machinist and a general practitioner. At a young age, Elena showed a great aptitude for mathematics and spatial logic and her parents took every advantage to give her private tutors to best develop her abilities. Her early childhood in the sea-side town was relatively normal before ShinRa Inc. began to move in newer developments into the city, effectively changing the city's social and economic levels forever. Once ShinRa seized up the weapons market and the health sciences sector, it left a once comfortable family nearly destitute. Elena was only three when her parents marriage fell apart and her father vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. With no other way to make a living in Junon, Elena and her mother packed up and moved to Midgar in hopes of starting a new life in the de-facto capital city. But the streets were not paved with gold and soon the true colors of Midgar became known.
Taking up residence beneath the Upper Plate in a run down, single room apartment, Elena's mother worked two jobs to make ends meet to attempt to send her daughter to the elite Midgar Academy in order to offer her child a better life at any cost; she was rewarded by Elena being placed in a program for gifted students. Around the time Elena was five years old, her mother had remarried an ill-tempered, abusive, alcoholic train conductor. As the situation at home became more and more negative, Elena retreated further and further into herself and her schoolwork. It wasn't until a new student arrived in her homeroom class that the awkward, and often-thought mute Elena began to come out of her shell more. A young boy from the far away country of Wutai by the name of Tseng would quickly become her best friend, and even her first schoolgirl crush. Tseng's father would even take Elena in under his wing to teach her the finer arts of Wutai Martial Arts.
Even though she kept smiling when Tseng was around, the truth was the home situation was growing steadily worse. When bruises began to appear on Elena's face and wrists, she would chipperly dismiss them as her clutzy, moments. At this point did she develop the outward ditzy persona to throw everyone off from the real Elena inside, the one dealing with an abusive step-father and a mother unable to escape a dire situation. Eventually, the powder keg that was building finally exploded.
Returning home from Junior High Prom, Elena walked into a gruesome display as her step-father repeatedly delivering heavy blows to her defenseless mother who was on the ground begging for mercy, apologizing for having overcooked his steak. A sudden rage exploded from the young girl and charged at the man only to be knocked cold by a back handed slap. When Elena came to the next morning, she watched in horror as her stepfather delivered the final blows that took her mother to the Lifestream. In that moment, Elena saw nothing but red. Though the memory itself is somewhat fuzzy to her, the official police report states that the there were no less than seventy-two different stab wounds.
Her mother buried, Elena was sent to live with her maternal aunt, Scarlet Morrison, who at the time was nothing more than the front desk receptionist at ShinRa Inc but was quickly working her way up the corporate ladder via some means or another. Living with her aunt provided less stability than the house of her step-father and soon after graduating from the Academy, Elena vanished for a year into the streets of Midgar, with no one knowing where she was.
When she did resurface, around the age of sixteen, Elena was living under the wing of a Cartel Lord named Jacquise Cardin who had previously employed her mother in one of his establishments. With Jacquise's guidance, Elena was quickly enrolled into Midgar University while working for Jacquise as an accountant. Around that time is when Elena began to seek out illegal means to support herself and to pay her tuition. By the time her eighteenth birthday rolled around, Elena had managed to overtake several other drug lords and firmly established herself as the "White" Queen due to her market domination of the potent narcotic known as "White Magic". Living a double life as a mild mannered university student during the day and a drug dealer during the night, it did not take long for burnout to kick in and Elena turned to her own product: she became a user of White Magic which turned into an addiction she would have for the next five years.
Somewhere between the ages of sixteen and seventeen, Elena was caught up in a maelstrom which resulted in an arrest, a misdemeanor charge, and a loss of product stock. While the man responsible for her capture was unknown to her at that point, Elena vowed revenge and began to work on rebuilding her small empire.
Within two years, having completed the accelerated Masters program at Midgar University, Elena was recruited into ShinRa Inc. as a computer analyst and programmer assigned to work under Reeve Tuesti, whom she would later develop romantic feelings for but dropped when she felt they were not going to be returned. During this time, despite having secured a stable job and a posh apartment on the upper plate, Elena maintained her underworld ties and habits. Overtime at ShinRa, maintaining her reputation as queen of the hill on the White market, Elena had built herself high on the mountain. No one at ShinRa had any inkling of the shy prodigy's addiction or of her double life, save for one person: Scarlet, who was now the head of Weapons Development at ShinRa.
Scarlet used this leverage on Elena to great effect; it ensured that Elena would not utter so much as a word in public about Scarlet usurping weapons innovations that her mother originally created and marketing them as her own. Defeated, Elena kept her nose to the grind stone for the next five years while working besides Reeve. The emptiness she felt from lack of fulfillment in her life increased and so did her drug usage. She eventually gave up the dealing aspect of White Magic and instead turned to something a little more lucrative to boost her monthly income: hacking.
Things began to come to a head when ShinRa, for the second time in their history, contracted the notorious mercenary group "The Turks" on a retainer. The news made its rounds at the water cooler. ShinRa felt the need to protect its growing assets as it began its expansion onto the western continent. While everyone else was busy gossiping, Elena continued her methodical work. It wasn't until everyone went dead silent save for some hush whispers until Elena turned around in her desk and was met with a face she hadn't seen since she ran away from home: Tseng.
Flustered, as well as schoolgirl feelings returning to the surface, Elena was reunited with her childhood friend and was soon made aware of his line of work: He was a member of The Turks, and from what Elena saw of the men who made up the group, she wondered if Tseng had fallen into a worse crowd than she already found herself mired in.
Quickly making up for lost time, Elena and Tseng resumed their friendship as though nothing had happened. She often went out for drinks with Tseng and the wordless man known as "Rude" but kept a cloistered tie on what she had been doing in the past years; it was better if Tseng never found out. However, it would soon come out into the open one way or another.
Around the time that the plans for the Sister Ray were initially given the green light, the workload on Elena's desk increased ten-fold. It wasn't so much overtime as it was more or less living at the office besides Reeve as they both had to pull together a mock control interface for a weapon that had not even been prototyped. This resulted in sleepless nights for Elena, who would sneak off every now and then for a quick fix of White, though by this time her tolerance to the drug had become so great that she required larger and larger doses to achieve the desired effect. Even Reeve was taken aback by the young woman's work ethic, but suspected nothing along the lines of drug abuse.
That was, until the day she didn't come into work. Calls to her apartment and PHS went unanswered. If it weren't for the fact that Tseng lived in the same housing complex, no one would have ever found Elena crumpled on the floor of her living room having finally overdosed.
From that moment, Elena's life took on another monumental change. Tseng's disappointment in her was enough to get her to realize it was time to take charge. Her abuse of White Magic stemmed from trying to please everyone in a futile attempt to feel fulfilled. It wasn't until after Elena was brought into the Turks that she realized where her true potential lied, and who her true friends were as well.
The tumultuous time at ShinRa ended when Midgar was effectively destroyed by Meteor and the Turks vowing to never take on another retainer contract ever again. She has since then come to terms that her feelings for Tseng were merely those of a good friend as opposed to something more; dating your coworkers is just bad practice. As Rude built the new Turks stronghold, Elena fortified it with advanced security systems and since then has laid particularly low on the merc radar outside of becoming Blue List certified and doing low-key hacking jobs on the side.