Erina Dmitriyeva

> *"He only wants to do what he thinks is right. He put a hell of a lot on the line just to keep you safe and sound. I hope you know he'll do everything in his power to make sure you stay that way."*
> ~ Dmitriyeva talks to Zinoviya Marilova about Victor Golovkin.
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## Introduction

**Erina Dmitriyeva**, also known as **Joker** (or, in a more derogative sense, **The Glitch**) is a Captain, later Colonel, in the Mecharussian Armed Forces and the chief electronic warfare officer of the Special Purpose Guard Brigade's Alfa Group. As well as being a close friend of Victor Golovkin (her primary role model), she is equally good-natured. However, she lacks Golovkin's recklessness and is more cautious in her approach, making her the perfect moral conscience for the Ace of Spades.

Like all of the other soldiers of the Eighth VDV Regiment (to which the Spetsnaz is attached), Dmitriyeva was offered the chance to become a Novaya Chthonian once the Trotskaya regime had claimed its foothold. Notably, however, she turned down the offer, becoming one of very few people to have done so. Instead, she would remain with Alfa Group; after Golovkin's disappearance in both canons, she would travel with a band of Populists to tell stories of his exploits, keeping the memory of her inspiration and legend of Mechanocratic Ideology alive. Dmitriyeva would carry on doing this until the next major war - in the Main Canon, this would be the Great Reprisal, and World War IV in the Altcanon - and would continue afterward.

## Personality

Personality-wise, Dmitriyeva is generally a kind-hearted woman, possessing of the same determination to do the right thing as her commanding officer. Her optimism and dry sense of humour do little to betray that she is in fact a highly-reserved individual, lacking of a social life and self-confidence. The gung-ho attitude of the rest of the Alfa Group helps to compensate for the latter shortfalls somewhat, and the small circle of friends that she possesses in the squad has proven to be sufficient thus far.

Coincidentally, Dmitriyeva was also the youngest member of the legendary Alfa Group. She was too young to have fought in the Second Russo-European War, being aged just 13 at its outbreak, making her one of just two members of Alfa Group to have missed the war (the other being Aristarkh Kramar, who was a year older). Generally, like her commander Golovkin, she shies from killing anyone who *"doesn't deserve it"* - but this should not be mistaken for a general unwillingness to kill, this being a sad mistake for anyone to make, especially in light of her favoured primary weapon.

Having little in the way of shooting ability, opting to carry about a RO-39 nuclear flamethrower instead of a plasma or ion rifle or even a handgun, Dmitriyeva's combat talent comes from her phenomenal hacking capabilities. While her comrades who are better suited for firearms keep opposing forces busy, she will be there with her laptop to crack into their operational systems and bring them down, or supporting her allies by tapping into enemy communications and/or reinforcing the squad's own cyber-defences against enemy hackers such as the Frenkish Imperial Army's Watchdogs.

In *A Blood Debt*, Dmitriyeva is revealed to be a smoker, and it is also implied that she is a pyrophiliac.

## Notable appearances

* Like the rest of Alfa Group, Dmitriyeva makes her debut in *A Blood Debt*.
* She appears in *Flight of the Polunochnaya*, reprising her deuteragonistic role as Alfa Group's cyberwarfare specialist and moral guide for Golovkin.

## Trivia

* Dmitriyeva borrows heavily from Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye in the *Fullmetal Alchemist* anime/manga series (though, rather unlike the aptly-named Hawkeye, she is a lousy shot): the two characters are both close personal friends of their commanding officers and serve as moral guides.
* Like fellow squaddies Grigor Grankin, Boris Mikhailov and Artyom Danovich, Dmitriyeva was originally conceived by the author of the New Frenco Empire as a joke project for a Frencoverse version of *Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege*.