Ellie Cohen

Reaper operative (Currently)

**Ellie Cohen**is a former a West Roman Marine, but later left the Marines and joined Task Force Reaper. She is now one of Task Force Reaper's top agents, and also one of its most prominent leaders.

## Biography

### Early life

Not much is known about Ellie's early years. However, what is known about her is that she skipped a grade in high school (thanks to her intelligence), and graduated early. In her pre-teen years, she became an outdoors-type person, and she even took Taekwando and various other martial arts in her teen years.

### Life as a private investigator

After graduating high school, Ellie became a private investigator, offering to assist in various criminal investigations. She began by investigating domestic violence cases, but then her investigations grew to include Internet stalking, cyberbullying, and various different cyber-related crimes. At the age of 17, she switched gears and expressed interest in serving in the military. However, she did not actually make an official decision until she turned 18.

### Kidnapping and escape

About three weeks after graduating high school, Ellie found herself kidnapped and imprisoned in a mysterious facility run by an organization known as Cicaida. As a victim of Cicaida, Ellie was subjected to various experimentations, intended to be used by her captors as a human weapon. However, she was able to escape her captors, then assist in helping other captives escape the Silver Ghost facility, albeit with minor injuries. While at the hospital, Ellie told the police everything about Silver Ghost, allowing the police to track down the facility where she was held captive and arrest everybody who participated in the experimentation of captive humans.

### Early military career

Ellie enlisted in the West Roman Marines Corps at the age of 19. Prior to the events of Life: A Compilation, Cohen was a member of the West Roman Marine Corps' 2nd Battalion in the 5th Marines, having enlisted right out of high school. She had a lot of close friends in the unit. However, during a mission to Nasiriyah, Iraq, tragedy struck when a mission gone wrong led to the deaths of nearly half her squad, including some of her close friends. Shaken and angered by the utter randomness and injustice, Cohen spent the next few months of her time in the military obsessing over vengeance against her friends' murderers. Eventually, it was discovered that her attackers were none other than the Islamic State of New Palestine, the terrorist protostate and later terrorist empire.

Later, Ellie was approached by a man named David Murray who happened to be a commander of a US-led task force and top secret special ops unit known as Task Force Gargoyle. He also became a personal connection for Ellie, as he also happened to personally know the family of one of her close friends. Murray, having also lost a family member in the same mission-gone-wrong as Ellie, offered Cohen a chance to exact her vengeance against the Islamic State of New Palestine, by offering her a position as an operative in Gargoyle.

Seething with rage and still obssessing over the death of her fellow Leathernecks, Ellie left the Marines, but didn't join Gargoyle until 2015.

### Gargoyle

The lifestyle of a Gargoyle operative eventually consumed Cohen. who went under the codename "Swordfish" while in Gargoyle. In the task force, David Murray and his circle of friends became Cohen's mentors, personally training her in the ways of a Gargoyle operative and teaching her to channel her anger and bitterness and hate towards the people who have wronged her.

While in Gargoyle, Cohen\Swordfish ran her unit with an iron fist. She became notorious-and greatly feared-among Islamic State circles for her brazen disregard for orders and her disturbingly high success rates on her missions.

### Hostage Rescue Mission

*For more information, see*Operation Desert Viper *on the TACITUS wiki*

### Task Force Reaper and Hunting the Coyote

*NOTE: This section covers content not covered in the TACITUS series*

Sometime after Operation Desert Viper, Gargoyle was disbanded and Ellie ended up teaming up with Brandon Hitchcock, Vince Crosby, and many other former military personnel to form Task Force Reaper, a private military company and a vigilante organization. Cohen's first mission with the Reapers was the assassination of a notorious terrorist known as Coyote. With the help of Marcus Seal, soon to be the founder of his own vigilante organization, and Kathleen Barrett, the future head of Black Rose, Ellie tracked down and assassinated each of Coyote's associates, culmilating in Coyote himself.

### Vapor in the Wind

In the story Vapor in the Wind, Ellie Cohen joins Laurette Sorel, Vince Crosby, and Derek Westbrook in an investigation into a an attempted murder on a subway train. She eventually finds herself kidnapped by a murder cult known as the Children of Slender, alongside Sorrel, Alexis Gould, Helen Moore, Tamara Sultanovich, Joyce Briggs and Natalya Fashkova. However, Ellie and her fellow captives managed to escape on their own, leading them in a race against the clock to find the girls before they could be recaptured. The girls were found, but were recaptured before TACITUS agent Derek Westbrook and his friends could reach them first. She, however, escaped a second time with the help of Laurette Sorel, and then helped Sorel in obtaining a helicopter and embarking on a hectic helicopter chase through the mountains. With Sorel's help, Ellie was able to able to destroy the helicopter the Children of Slender planned to use to escape from the TACITUS rescue squad. Following this, Ellie and her friends engaged in a brutal hand-to-hand fight against the surviving cult members and rescued the remaining girls.

### Life: A Compilation

Ellie is featured in *Life: A Compilation*, giving her perspective on things concerning life, in addition to personal anecdotes related to her personal backstory, among other things.

## Personal details

### Personality

Ellie tends to be blunt, sarcastic, and sometimes snarky at times. At heart, she considers herself a moral person. However, her kidnapping at the hands of Silver Ghost left her with Post-Traumatic Stress and Survivor's Guilt. Her PTSD has left her with the tendency to behave erratically at times.

She has no interest in genuine relationships.

### Habits and beliefs

> "*I'll put it simple: the church has failed. Centuries of ungodly deeds done in the name of the Holy Father above have left the people of the world looking at us Christ-followers with a mentality of mistrust. No wonder Gandhi said, 'I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. They are nothing like your Christ.'*"
> ― Ellie Cohen reflecting on the failure of the church to reflect Jesus Christ.
>
>

Ellie does not have any musical style preferences. She commonly listens to pop, some forms of rap, Classical music, heavy metal, and thrash metal. She also has a habit of picking at her hair strands whenever she is left to her own devices (the only exception being after a recent haircut). She enjoys sushi, but hates Japanese wasabi or hot mustard, as it makes her nose "burn".

Ellie was raised a Baptist Christian, but has since disassociated herself from any church or denomination. She is still a practicing Christian, but at the same time her bad experiences with the church in the past has led her to look down on the church for most of her life. She is both well aware and well educated when it comes to the various "sins" of the church committed in the name of God (Both from what she read in the history books and in her personal experiences with the church) and it is due to this knowledge/experience that she views the church with a sense of mistrust. In addition, Ellie had spent a great deal of her life living with people who profess to be "Christians", yet never actually talk about following Jesus Christ and only talk about "salvation" and leaving it at that, in the process totally neglecting teachings regarding what it truly means to follow Jesus.

Furthermore, Ellie also has a problem with people who call themselves Christians, but also view following Jesus is a "work" that people do, a perceived contradiction of the Biblical principal that it is only by grace through faith in Jesus Christ that people are saved.

Because of all this, Ellie views Christianity as a whole as a flourishing relationship with Jesus Christ that humanity has reduced to a "dead religion".

### Fighting style

Prior to the Marines, Ellie was trained in mixed martial arts. As a Marine/Gargoyle operative, Ellie's main fighting style became a combination of various different martial arts. She retains this fighting style while in Task Force Reaper. The following is a partial list of various fight moves Ellie has been known to use:

* Back Fist/spinning back fist-Ellie feigns turning away from the opponent, only to unexpectedly whirl back around and punch him (The spinning back fist is a variation of the back fist that uses momentum to produce more power)
* Downward Elbow Strike
* Palm Strike
* Straight Punch
* Sambo Casting Punch
* Eye Strike – Krav Maga
* Axe Kick
* '*El Pensador'***-**This defensive move from Keysi Fighting Method involves using your hand to protect your head during a fight.​​​​​​

## Powers and abilities

### Powers

* **Superhuman Strength**: Ellie's forced experimentation at the hands of Cicaida left her with superhuman strength far beyond that of a normal human. She could crush an alarm clock with her bare hands, dent a window by throwing a shoe at it, rip a whole bathroom sink from a wall, tear a toilet out from floors, and even lift the back of a slow-moving car. In combat, she commonly utilizes this ability to reduce her opponents to mere human ragdolls, throwing them around with little to no effort.
* **Enhanced Speed**: Ellie's forced bodily enhancements allow her to run faster than normal humans. She can outrun cars, trucks, and motorcycles. She can even run across entire city blocks for hours at a time before stopping to catch her breath.
* **Regenerative Healing Factor**: Cicaida's experimentations left her with an augmented metabolism that heals far faster than an ordinary human being. She can heal minor injuries without any scars, and broken arms can heal in a day. It also grants her body temporary immunity from the long-term effects of alcoholism. Due to this, to actually become intoxicated, Ellie has to have a much higher level of alcohol (more than a normal human). The same applies to drugs.

### Abilities

* **Observation skills**: Ellie has near-superhuman sense, meaning she can take in a lot more details than a normal human would. For example, she can tell how a person is feeling simply by looking at them and commenting on it. When people deny it, Ellie would often point out that their facial expressions expose their true feelings.
* **Master Investigator**: Ellie has excellent observation skills, which allow her to become a skilled investigator. She is a master at deductive reasoning, which allows her to help police investigators whenever she is helping them with solving crimes.
* **Combatant**: Ellie utilizes a fighting style that incorporates various martial art forms, including, but not limited to, the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, Capoeira, Glima, Judo, Vale Tudo, Xtreme Martial Arts, and Silat.

## Trivia

* Her hair color changed at multiple times throughout the TACITUS saga: prior to joining the USMC and throughout her USMC/Gargoyle career, Ellie dyed her hair black. She doesn't really mention this much. After leaving Gargoyle,  Ellie dyed her hair a dark shade of brown (it appears black under certain lighting conditions). From Task Force Reaper onwards, her hair is blonde.

## Gallery

Ellie Cohen with her mother in Jerusalem, Israel

## Quotes

*"Now what?"*

- Ellie to Vince Crosby