Anya Novak

Anya Victoria Novak is an AcDragonian born woman from the capital, Lieberman City. She is ethnically Dragonian as her parents are pure Dragonians who left the Dragonian after the civil war. She enjoys learning history, especially that of Dragonia. When Anya joined Squad Mates, she did it originally for boredom however she soon noticed a disturbing trend amongst some of the youth; notably the Dragonian youth who play the sport. While Dragonia is in the middle of a longstanding social change since the Civil War there are still youth that seem to hold a superiority complex over the other groups of people in the system; most notably Lushaneans. This is what prompted Anya to scout Josephine. Anya has black hair that she keeps tied in a half-down half-up braid style with red highlights. She stands at 5' 8" tall and weighs just shy of 114 lbs.

Many people seem to ask why Anya isn't with a seeded Dragonian team which is a good question since they usually have better gear, leadership and earnings potential however Anya has personal reasons for this. Anya's parents actually defected from Dragonia after the Civil War due to their reprehensible actions so by proxy Anya grew up with an intensely rebellious spirit especially against Dragonia. She doesn't hate the people or the planet but the idea of "Dragonian Supremacy" physically disgusts her. After she started noticing a trend among the Dragonian players that they're somehow inherently superior she made it her personal mission to do everything she could to best them.

This is a two-fold tactic: One is a personal dislike of the attitude in general and another reason is that she wants to humble them in battle by playing on their weaknesses to cause them to either lose matches entirely or sustain embarrassing losses. She likes using AcDragonian tactics from the Civil War that won them fights against the Grand Army and despite it being 40 years and through a number of reforms it seems they still haven't learned much from it. The defeats she did put Dragonian teams through did eventually catch the eye of actual Grand Army brass as they are now interested in how this team seems to regularly be able to win against even teams that have established military lineage behind them.

Anya formed the team Bonded Fates and purposely comprises it of different individuals from different backgrounds. She does this to show the Squad Mates audience and the Aegian system at large that even though they're all different, when unified together they can accomplish anything.

Anya is a good friend and incredibly loyal. She bonds with Josephine pretty tightly and is very protective of her, often taking the first swing in an altercation on her behalf. She has come close, several times, to coming to blows with Dragonian men after wounding their pride on the Field.

Anya doesn't have any ins or connections with any of the other Dragonian teams and as such doesn't have avenues to procure expensive gear.

## Personality

Anya is a very friendly individual. She gets along with virtually everyone and even those who don't seem to like her eventually come around. She has eidetic, or photographic, memory and can remember even the smallest details of something by simply seeing it in passing. This allows her to strike up conversation about virtually anything regarding a person which allows her to build friendships incredibly quickly if she desires. She's generally pretty easy and laid back and even when on the field she takes a general "wait and see" approach to how a battle unfolds. When it's time for business however, she gets down.

Despite this, under Anya's outgoing and friendly persona, she harbors a surprising amount of regret and darkness. She keeps it under incredible control however some people seem to get a little too close to some of those secrets and Anya has actually become almost violently antagonistic when people do. She tries not to do that because she knows full well that when she gets defensive about it that it causes people to want to dig further.

## Personal Life

Not much is known about Anya's personal life outside of Squad Mates. Some observant people and those who know anything about psychology remark that it appears that Anya is trying really hard to put up a front to distract people from something she doesn't want them to find out. This is evident if one spends enough time with Anya as she'll sometimes get into trouble and pranks that typically someone half her age would.

Anya spends almost all of her time at the team base or doing something related to Squad Mates. From the outside looking in it almost seems as if the game is her life. This isn't true however. Anya's life is filled with much pain and darkness. When she was a child both of her parents will killed in a terrorist attack when the Extremists bombed a restaurant where they all were. Anya suffered injuries, but those healed. Rather than being turned out on the street, she signed up for young soldier programs which put children in military schools with the goal of turning out the next generation of soldiers. Upon graduating the school and passing basic Anya was assigned to a unit and served two tours of duty in the AcDragonian military. Unfortunately, during a mission gone wrong, when Anya wired up some explosives to detonate an extremist chemical factory, she missed the fact that the extremists had rerouted the chemical plant into a number of infrastructures, including a nearby fusion power planet and outside of recommendations from her own team as well as some of the command element, she ensured everyone that they were good to go and that all was setup by the book. She set the explosives and the plant detonated as expected. Unfortunately a number od secondary explosions under ground detonated a massive hidden store of high explosives and fuel which then cascaded into detonating a fuel depo a mile or so down the road which in turn was also rigged into another system that tied into the backup power systems of the fusion plant and when that detonated it caused enough of a shockwave to knock the power out at the fusion plant itself. Even though the plant should've rerouted it's own power automatically to power itself essentially indefinitely, it didn't which then caused the fusion reactor to explode with the force of a medium yield atomic weapon. Her actions caused the deaths of over ten thousand civilians and destroyed an area of about 700 square kilometers. No one could've predicted this, they knew. The AcDragonian congress knew and so did everyone involved. Technically all that Anya really could've been pinned for was not taking the recommendations of her command and team as other teams responsible for making sure everything was in order failed in their jobs too, someone had to burn for it.

Anya was going to be hanged as a scapegoat but to her, it was the price she was willing to pay. That shouldn't have happened and her button press caused it. However as she was sitting in her prison cell awaiting her execution two men whisked her away to a dark room where they read her entire military portfolio to her before introductions were even had. Turns out, unbeknownst to her that she had distinguishing herself in a number of specialty roles and was even up for several awards prior to the screw up. These men were part of a shadow entity that is known by only a select few named Sector 43. This was a black ops group that was assigned to the 45th IPEF. They wanted someone of her skills, but that person had to be expendable. What better person that someone on death row? Anya took the offer in order to try to earn her way back into what she considered the good graces of society. What followed were years of some of the most grueling tasks on behalf of AcDragonian that people couldn't know about. She personally killed, by her count, 180 non-combatants in cold blood after gaining their trust. She murdered 37 heads of state in Dragonia, Aegis, Corsair and Alexandria. She was instrumental in antagonizing two sides of a conflict and started a war between the two factions on a planet outside of the Aegian star system that eventually devolved into a catastrophic nuclear war that rendered all but select portions of the planet uninhabitable in order to scour the planet for resources. These are among many dark things Anya did for her country. When her time was up, she was dropped off back at her family home as if nothing had happened. The property was taken care of by someone who she wasn't sure was however they were nowhere to be found when she arrived.

Anya carried an unresolvable guilt with her from the first minute she arrived home. Among many things, the most haunting was the war she started. The blood of billions was on her hands. She went to the Veterans Affairs office and tried to get help but as far as anyone was concerned she didn't exist. There was no Anya Novak anywhere in any citizen records that joined the military that fit her description. While there were no less than 137 Anya Novak's currently serving, *she* never served. No awards, no record, no command chain, no accident, nothing. Unfortunately due to the nature of Sector 43, she had no direct command nor did she have a person to turn to. Right as Anya was preparing to down a fatal amount of sleeping pills, she received a knock at her door and when she want to go see who it was a box was on her doorstep. In the box was a credit chip and instructions to arrive at a specific location at a specific time. It had a symbol of Sector 43 on it. As is procedure with any S43 documents, she activated the small device in the box that came with the instructions and credits like on dozens of missions before and the box incinerated in a flash of white phosphorous.

She arrived at the location and it was a Sector 43 run facility that was hidden from all public records in a mountain. After passing through much security she arrived in a room with an Arc Dictator system. It was the only Arc Dictator now known to exist that wasn't in government control. She knew what she needed to do. She paid the credits, strapped into the machine, chose all the traits she wanted and let the machine do it's work. The machine first copied her entire brains contents and then flashed her brain with an electric pulse, erasing every habit, memory and impulse from her brain essentially turning her into a blank slate. The drooling mess of what was once Anya then than had the memories that were copied reconfigured based on what she put in the machine prior and then had them imprinted into her brain. What came out of the chair next was Anya.

What took the technicians of the facility by surprise was that Anya didn't wipe her actions. She purposefully kept those intact so she can never forget what she had done. What she did however was basically write her own acceptance over the memories and also fabricated in her brain that she had gotten over it. So while she never forgets and often reminisces on her time with S43, she isn't crippled by it. Essentially, she overwrote any suicidal tendencies related to them. Likewise though, she did also alter her own personality to make her far more happy and outgoing so that she can get on with her life.

Most people would completely written this part out of their lives and implanted any number of pre-fabricated memories in their brains, but Anya chose to remain her. One thing that Anya did do that was actually a big no-no was that she encoded memories into her brain that would allow her, once she returned home and performed a series of inconspicuous but common tasks would then unlock a set of memories about her time in Sector 43. All of the tasks this Arc Dictator did hard coded any mention or memory of S43 to be erased from memory after 1 day. Not in Anya's case. She will never forget this.

Anya joined Squad Mates to get on with her life as that's what she was good at. During her time playing she met her wife Virginia Halcomb who was an SMC official. The two were married and had a good relationship up until Virginia started asking too many questions about her past and started digging. Virginia was incredibly good at finding info but could find literally nothing about Anya. She was essentially a ghost with a very basic curated "citizen profile" provided by S43. Anya also knew that an SMC official being married to a player could be bad options so using this and how they both are involved with Squad Mates, she got a divorce from Virginia under the guise that she didn't wanna ruin her life. Virginia stated she didn't give a damn about the SMC and would quit and just be a player but it was too late. While normally it takes a lot more than that to get an official divorce, Anya knew people that screwed the system and made it official. The thing about that was that Virginia knew all of this and that made her even more curious. Just who the hell was Anya? She remained close to Anya as a friend and eventual second in command of her Squad Mates team in order to, in her own way, dig into Anya's past.

Virginia thinks it was to protect her, which made no sense and prompted further digging. In truth? Anya didn't want Virginia to find out about her horrific past which would make her hate Anya and see her as a monster, which honestly she deserved. More importantly though, she didn't want Virginia finding out about Sector 43 which if she digs too deep and hits that line, they would kill her, Anya and everyone close to them as a precaution for keeping their existence a secret.

## Trivia

1. Anya has eidetic memory. She can remember even the smallest of details from almost anything she sees.
2. Anya takes great pleasure in humiliating Dragonian teams by turning their own weaknesses against them
3. The Dragonian military pays close attention to Anya
4. Anya used to be apart of a registered Dragonian team but quit after they began to lord their status over other teams. Due to the messy way with which she left, it took months to get her roster entry cleared with the SMC meaning she couldn't participate in Squad Mates.
5. The team Anya quit couldn't recover from her leaving and had to disband.
6. Anya purposefully scouted Josephine because she was Lushanean.
7. Anya has been in 5 fights with Dragonian men after she humiliated them on the field. She won three of those.
8. Anya makes a point to talk to Rania at least once a day for 15 minutes.
9. Anya injured her ankle earlier in life. It's never quite healed properly
10. Anya has a temper. While normally calm and collected, when she does get mad she does rash things.
11. Anya can improvise in almost any situation
12. Every week Anya has to clear out her message boxes due to the amount of people trying to scout her for teams
13. Anya can't go to the province of the Black Sea Territories. When asked, she simply says that "that's between me and the Islanders."
14. Anya has a mini-surveillance drone that she brings into matches with her.
15. Anya almost lost an eye during a Squad Mates match when a round somehow bypassed every bit of protection she had.
16. Anya is divorced. She never tells anyone why or who she was married to.
17. Anya has a particular dislike for the Sand Crabs. There seems to be a history there.
18. Anya slept with Rania once. They were both drunk and Anya woke up first. Realizing what happened, she quietly left the room. Rania still doesn't know it happened.
19. Every time someone asks about her past, Anya changes the subject. If the person persists, she looks them straight in the eye, silently warning them to drop it
20. Anya has been arrested twice for shenanigans she pulled after Squad Mates matches.