Danika Sedova

Danika Sedova was a former member of the Ukrainian Secret Service before leaving to the United States to pursue a free lance mercenary career. While initially an adversary to the Patron Saint of Crime, Danika later discovered the truth about Maya Grady, with the pair coming to an uneasy truce shortly before Grady's death. After the El Paso incident, Danika operated briefly as the heroine Valkyrie before the armour was destroyed.

## Danika Sedova

### Aliases

Valkyrie, Lady Wintergreen, Sarah Valentine

## Creation

Danika Sedova was created for a writing challenge based on an image of a blonde woman dressed in red. The character I created was initially designed to be an American starlet forced to fight against a Russian doppelgänger trying to steal her identity.

In the end however, the Russian character was far more interesting, and she became the focus of the story, before the story was rewritten to focus completely on her, as well as setting her up as an enemy to the Patron Saint of Crime series I was writing.

## Character History

### **Early Life**

Danika was used by her mother Natalia Sedova to lure Marta Elise into a trap, where she and her partners the Ratel and Elton Hawker attacked the She Drache. In the end Ratel took Danika hostage, leveraging Marta into wearing a suicide belt before the team of bounty hunters left with their prize, with Natalia ordered Danika to make her own way home, as well as telling her eight year old daughter she was a disgrace for crying when she had a knife placed against her throat.

### **Danika Sedova: Bounty Hunter Babe**

Shortly after completing her national service with the Ukrainian Secret Service, Danika left for America, eventually arriving in California. On her first day in Los Angeles, Danika was robbed by a thug and took the law into her own hands, chasing down the thief and rendering him unconscious. In the end both parties were arrested, but ultimately Danika was released without charges, eventually registering with the bounty office and became a bounty hunter. Her stunt with her initial capture however, had not gone unnoticed, and Danika was approached by a reality TV station, who wanted to follow her around for her collars. Danika agreed and she became a well recognised star on local TV.

After three series however, Danika became disenchanted with the lime light and eventually teamed up with Ken Zimmerman to hunt down a dangerous felon known as the Patron Saint of Crime. The pair arrived in El Paso and almost took down their target, only to be thwarted when the two bounty hunters fell out with each other, with Danika leaving Zimmerman to be arrested due to his eagerness to kill innocent civilians if they got into the line of fire. Danika would continue to hunt the Patron Saint of Crime, this time utilising an experimental Valkyrie Trailblazer suit but ultimately she was defeated and was almost killed when her spine was almost severed,

Danika was hospitalised for almost a year, and tentatively returned to bounty hunting just before the El Paso Incident. One of her targets was a high ranking member of the El Aquilla cartel, where she encountered the Patron Saint of Crime again, and reluctantly teamed up to defeat the El Aquilla enforcer the Thrush. During this battle Danika recognised the Patron Saint of Crime as the former stunt actor Maya Grady. Interrogating the criminal huntress, Danika learnt that Grady was an undercover agent, and reluctantly let her go, although she stated that she would stay nearby and would make-sure she paid for her crimes when Boccanegra had been arrested.

### **The Valkyrie of El Paso**

Trapped by the sudden flash-flood that ripped through the town, Danika used the Valkyrie Trailblazer Armour to help maintain order on the streets. Among the criminals she encountered was the 'Gun-Smith' who was auctioning off multiple high power weapons to the highest bidder. Backed by the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Danika won the initial lot, but quickly discovered that the sale of the prototype rail gun was a façade to determine which buyers had the most money, and was invited to a secret auction for a far more valuable prize, a sample of the mutagen known as Eiter, as well as instructions for a synthetic version.

Teaming up with the representative for the FSB, Jace Sallas, Danika stole the sample and escaped into the centre of El Paso before finding a safe place to destroy the sample, but ultimately lost the formula when she and Jase were attacked by the drug dealer known as El Bruja, who later sold the information to the El Tarantula Cartel for an indeterminate amount of money. Danika would later go on to fight other criminals such as William Peters, Zip-Face and Ossuary alongside other heroes such as Maya Grady and Onca before order was restored in El Paso.

### **Destiny**

Danika was later hired by a US Senator to rescue his son, who owed an impressive gambling debt to the local crime lord the Dragon Eel. Infiltrating the casino where the hostage was being held, Danika paid the Dragon Eel off, but the triad leader later double-crossed her, hoping to get more money out of his former hostages father. Through quick thinking and the use of both a stun gun and a sonic incapacitater, Danika was able to escape with her charge, before heading to the airport to follow up on another contact involving the capture of a hired assassin known as Rinkhals.

### **The Depths**

Sometime later Danika would return to her mercenary career, and was hired by an unknown party to destroy a chemical weapons manufacturing facility on-board a yacht owned by the Cinquo Rohas crime syndicate, moored in the Canary Isles. After completing the mission, Danika was meant to return home to San Francisco, but ultimately took a job providing security for a dive team in the Bahamas working for Leviathan Heavy Marine Salvage. While this mission seemed like it would be easy money, this all changed when it was revealed that the wreck the dive-team was investigating was infested with underwater robots that had killed the previous divers who had investigated the wreck.

## Powers

Danika is a base line human being with no special powers or resistances. While she has demonstrated great resistances to pain this is due to a long history of mental conditioning that likely started from childhood. In combat she relies on extensive training and awareness to counter her enemies, as well as a healthy does of luck,

### **Skills**

Danika has proven to be a skilled combatant in both close and ranged combat, usually preferring a mixture of both adapted on the fly. While she has no martial arts training, Sedova has proved to have an advanced knowledge of street fighting, something that aids her against larger more skilled fighters.

In addition to combat skills, Danika is a skilled tracker and is competent with computers, although she generally prefers to delegate such tasks to her assistant back at the nerve centre of her operations.