Kate Walker

**Katherine "Kate" Walker** (born 1972 in New York) is an American ex-lawyer, the main character of the Syberia game series. In all installments Kate is voiced by Sharon Mann.

In the first part of the series, she is tasked with overseeing the purchase of the Voralberg automaton factory on behalf of her employer. She later abandons her assignment, as well as her life and career back in the United States, to accompany the factory's heir, Hans Voralberg, in his search for the legendary island of Syberia, a sacred site to a fictional indigenous Siberian tribe known as the Youkols which is also said to be home to the world's last surviving mammoths. In the third part, Kate travels with the Youkol tribe to their sacred lands, while the latest installment focuses on Kate discovering secrets from her own past and the consequences of leaving her life in New York.

## Apperance

Kate is a tall and slender young woman with long brown hair bound into a bun.

## Personality

She is quite courteous and kind by nature but very determined and self-confident. If someone doesn't respect her, she brings out her strong personality; at that point she no longer cares what authority she has before her, proving that she always puts goals first. She tends to be very analytical and rational, in fact she almost never loses her calm and control, and it is rare to see this woman panic or be particularly anxious. Kate uses her keen intelligence to always find the quickest and most effective solution, she can also be deceitful and manipulative when she needs it. She also has a fair sense of humor.

## Biography

### **Before games**

Kate was born in 1972 to Sarah and Richard Walker. Her father died when she was a child. Her mother took care of her. As a child, Kate learned to play the piano.

She became engaged to Dan Foster and took a job at the law firm of Marson & Lormont Ass. Her best friend since childhood was Olivia Parker.

### **Syberia**

On April 17, 2002, Kate arrives in Valadilene in the French Alps on behalf of her employer. She is to oversee the sale of the once famous Voralberg Mechanical Toy and Puppet Factory, owned by Voralberg Manufacturing, to the American Universal Toy Company. Upon arriving, Kate learns of the death of factory owner Anna Voralberg. She contacts the Valadilene notary who gives Kate the last letter of the deceased. Anna tells in the letter about her brother, Hans Voralberg. Hans did not die in a car accident in the 1930s, as was made public, but went on a world tour and is currently somewhere in Siberia. Information about the existence of an heir prevents the sale of the factory. Kate's job is to find Hans and get his signature so she can close the case and go home.

Kate investigates the Voralberg factory and home, learning more and more about Hans. He discovers that Hans suffered a serious accident as a child, which left him physically and intellectually ill. From then on, he became obsessed with mammoths and eventually ran away from home to look for their tracks. At the factory, Kate meets Oscar - an automaton machinist and Hans' last invention. Kate decides to go on a journey with Oscar. Anna Voralberg built a wind-up train based on her brother's designs, to use it to meet Hans after selling the factory. Kate takes her place, hoping the train will take her to Voralberg.

The spring of the mechanical train is about to unwind. Kate and Oscar stop in Germany, in the university town of Barrockstadt. Kate must wind the train if she wants to continue her journey, but she faces many formal obstacles along the way. It turns out that Hans stayed in Barrockstadt many years ago. Kate investigates Voralberg's past - learning about the workings of his old inventions and talking to people who once knew him. At the University, she meets Professor Cornelius Pons, a paleontologist and an old friend of Hans. Meanwhile, Kate's New York City bosses push her harder to close the sale immediately.

After winding up the train, Kate moves on. Together with Oscar, she reaches the Russian Komkolzgrad - an abandoned industrial town. The director of the Komkolzgrad factory, Serguei Borodine, attacks Oscar and steals his mechanical hands. Kate learns that the director's dream is to bring Helena Romanski, an old opera diva with whom the director is unhealthily obsessed, to the factory. For this purpose, he converted the factory into a concert hall, and used Oscar's hands to construct an automaton-pianist who was to accompany Helena. Kate comes to an agreement with the director - she will bring the singer to Komkolzgrad, and the director will give back the hands of her train driver, without which Kate cannot continue her journey.

Kate goes to the Soviet space depot in Komkolzgrad, where she meets Boris Charov - a colonel and would-be cosmonaut. He did not become one due to the suspension of the space program by the USSR. Unable to realize his dream, he fell into alcoholism. Kate helps him start the spaceship, and Borys provides her with an airship, in which Kate flies to Aralbad - the Russian spa where Helena Romański is staying.

Kate finds Helena, who retired from the stage many years ago due to voice problems. Kate helps her heal her voice and convinces her to return to the stage. Together with Helena, she returns to Komkolzgrad. Helena appears before the factory director, who imprisons her during her preformance and goes insane. Kate frees Helena and takes Oscar's hands. The Director tries to trap her in the factory, but Kate escapes through the mines. Together with Helena and Oscar, she escapes by train. Meanwhile, Kate finds out that her fiancé Dan cheated on her with her best friend Olivia.

The train reaches Aralbad. Kate's bosses in New York are furious with her for failing to sell the factory. Kate says goodbye to Helena. On the pier at the spa, she unexpectedly meets Hans Voralberg. He signs the sale documents without even reading them. Hans proposes to Kate to join him on his journey to find Syberia. Kate refuses - she has to go back to New York. She says her farewell to Hans. Hans goes to his train, while Kate heads towards the plane that can take her home. At the last moment, Kate changes her mind and runs to the train station. She jumps on a speeding train and leaves with Hans and Oscar towards an unknown adventure.

### **Syberia II**

The plot of the second part of the game is a direct continuation of the events of the predecessor. Kate and Hans take a train through snow-covered Russia. Hans tells Kate about the legendary island of Siberia, where the last mammoths in the world are said to live to this day. Hans desperately wants to see them; it's his life's dream. Kate vows that they will find the island together.

Kate's bosses, concerned about her disappearance, send detective Nick Cantin after her. Hans' train stops in Romansburg, the last town before the Siberian taiga. While Kate is busy getting coal to heat the train, Hans sneaks off the train to an old friend Mr. Cirkos. There he suffers a fever attack and falls into a delirium. Kate wants to find a doctor for him, but the only help she can get is the monks at the monastery. However, they do not want to let her in because of the radical principles of the fanatical patriarch. Kate sneaks into the convent and convinces the patriarch to help. The monk agrees to take care of Hans, but does not give him proper medical attention and firmly believes that Hans is a lost cause.

On September 14, Kate finds a hidden storage of a late monk Alexei Toukianov - another friend of Hans, who spent many years with the Yukol tribe living in remote Siberia and knows about their medicine. Kate treats Hans with Yukol methods. They flee the monastery, pursued by the patriarch, who tries to stop them at all costs.

Back on the train, Hans asks Kate to fix the mechanical horses at Mr. Circos's bar that he built many years ago. While Kate is at the bar, the train is hijacked by Ivan and Igor Burgow, brothers and local thugs who want to travel to Siberia to get rich off mammoth bones. Kate chases the train with a handcar. The brothers (with no knowledge of train driving) accidentally destroy the bridge, which not only separates them from Kate, but also causes the train to get stuck.

Kate manages to get across the chasm, but the brothers escape her on a snowbike, abducting Hans Voralberg in the process. Unexpectedly, Kate meets Boris Charov, known from the first part of the game. His spaceship crashed, but he helps Kate get to the train using a still working ejection seat. Kate disconnects the stuck wagon from the train, and with Oscar she follows in the footsteps of the Burgow brothers. She makes it all the way to the mammoth bone yard where Ivan attacks her. He tries to kill her, but the ice collapses beneath them.

Kate wakes up in the Youkol Village hidden under the ice. She learns that Youkol also saved Hans - he is looked after by a Youkol shaman. However, the shaman warns that Hans has given up and is close to death. In order to save him, Kate participates in a Yukol ritual and joins Hans in a dream, where she convinces him to fight.

It turns out that Oscar's body was intended to serve Hans as a mechanical skeleton to sustain life in a situation like this. Oscar sacrifices himself for his maker. As the train tracks end at Yukola Village (Voralberg never got any farther), Kate and Hans sail out to the ocean in an ark. They sail towards Syberia, but on the way the ark gets stuck on an ice floe. As Kate disembarks, Ivan Burgow makes one last attempt to abduct Hans and claim the mammoth bones. It turns out that Burgow has been hiding in the ship's hold the whole time. Kate sneaks back on board and throws Ivan overboard, where he is torn to pieces by angry penguins.

The Ark moves on until it reaches the fabled Syberia. Kate manages to play the old Youkola tubes and summons the mammoths. Creatures come when called, and Hans fulfills his lifelong dream. The game ends with Kate waving to Hans as he rides off on a mammoth into depths of Syberia.

### **Syberia III**

After abandoning the island of Syberia, a dying Kate Walker is rescued from a makeshift boat by the Youkol tribe. Determined to escape their common enemies, among them a Russian militia unit allied with a corrupt doctor named Olga Efimova as well as the private investigator hired by her former employer, she decides to help the Youkols fulfill their ancestral tradition of leading their snow ostrich mounts on their seasonal migration. Walker and the Youkols depart the town of Valsembor on board a ship named the Krystal, and arrive at an abandoned theme park in Baranour, a town which is devastated by nuclear fallout from a failed nuclear power plant. After finding a disused but intact Voralberg automaton in the park, Walker installs Oscar's mechanical heart into the automaton and revives her friend. Together, they help the Youkols find their lost temple and help navigate them across a bridge to reach a bordering country, where the snow ostrichs' breeding grounds are located. The game ends on a cliffhanger as Oscar is incapacitated by the militia and Walker is captured.

### **Syberia - The World Before**

After the events of the previous title, Kate Walker has been imprisoned as a slave laborer in a salt mine alongside a young Russian woman called Katyusha Spiridonova. Before the day's work, is informed her that Kate's mother, Sarah Walker had passed away. During their digging, a distraught Kate causes a minor collapse in the mine shaft, revealing a parallel cave, containing a train belonging to a Brown Shadow task force. The pair discovers that the train contains vast amounts of stolen art and antiques, amongst which there is a painting of a young woman almost identical to Kate Walker. Before they could escape with the nearby motorbike, they're confronted by their prison guard, who shoots Katyusha dead and is incapacitated by Kate. With her dying breath, Katyusha asks Kate to track down the girl in the painting.

Kate travels to Vaghen and tracks down the antique shop that sold the music case that housed the painting. While there she also installs the heart of Oscar, Hans Voralberg's automaton engineer, into a Voralberg-designed mechanical armadillo and revives her companion. The trail leads Kate to a remote mountain refuge on the outskirts of Vaghen, occupied by an elderly invalid, Leni Renner. Renner recounts her past with Dana, who had come to the refuge in the summer of 1937 to work as a waitress. The refuge at the time was hosting an expedition in pursuit of a proto-human specimen called the Gorun. The group is guided by a young alpinist named Leon Kovatsin, with whom Leni is deeply smitten. After an altercation with, Herr Hoss, the Brown Shadow officer supervising the expedition, Dana and Leon strike up a romance.

The expedition departs for Baltayar, where the Gorun is theorised to live. As the winter sets in, tensions in the expedition rise due to the lack of success and Leon finds out that some of the members of the group plan on making him the scapegoat for their failure. However, one member of the group, Sauer, finally finds the Gorun. As he runs off to fetch the rest of the group, Leon approaches the creature and strikes up an amicable relationship by tending to his wounds and feeding him his ration of hardtack biscuits. On the other hand, the expedition is far harsher than Leon in their treatment. The creature's wails attract his mother's attention and the group's leader tries to shoot her dead, Leon tackles and accidentally kills him. With the Goruns gone and their leader dead, the group ties up Leon for trial. However, Sauer confides to Leon that he doesn't agree with his colleagues and sets him free and agrees to send his last letter to Dana.

Dana collapses at the news of Leon. It is revealed that she's pregnant with his child. Her parents, fearing public embarrassment, allow her to be taken to a remote sanatorium by their friends, the Zimmer family. Soon after her departure, the Roze household, as well as the rest of their district, is marauded by the Brown Shadow led by Hoss and Dana's parents are murdered in the pogrom. Following this discovery, Kate who had been tracking Dana's whereabouts is encountered by her hitherto elusive neighbour, "Colonel Blake" who turns out to be Frau Junta, a friend of Dana and a British-Austrian double agent who spied on the Brown Shadow on behalf of the British Secret Service during the war. She reveals that Dana's daughter Anna was stillborn and was buried in Baden Island in western Vaghen. Following the loss of her child, Junta takes Dana to Britain, where she becomes an operative of the SOE. An assignment reveals that Leon was in fact alive and is operating a resistance network in Vaghen. Dana agrees to be air-dropped into Vaughen and coordinate a dangerous mission.

Kate confronts Leni Renner after three bodies, lost since the war, are retrieved by forensic pathologists. It is revealed that Leon survived the harsh Baltayar winter thanks to the Gorun tribe who took him in. As the war began, Leon returned to Vaghen to fight, and was accompanied by "Ludwig Hardtack", the young Gorun whom he helped before the war. Joined by Leni Renner, they operate out of the winter refuge against the Brown Shadow. Leni had been biding her time for Leon to forget about Dana, whom he believes to have been murdered in the Vaghen pogrom, but Dana turning up alive and rekindling her romance with Leon enrages her. She rats out the network to her father Gustav, a collaborator. The refuge comes under attack and Leon sets out to exfiltrate the civilians as Leni, Dana and Ludwig make a stand to cover them. Leni gets critically injured and as their numbers dwindle, Ludwig goes berserk to slaughter the rest of the attackers. However, the prolonged fighting trigger an avalanche, burying Leon and his charge, the Exners.

Following the war, Dana emigrates to the United States and becomes a renowned pianist. In the 1980s, she's shocked by the confession of a nun from her time at the sanatorium that the Zimmers, to whom she was entrusted during her labour and later coma, took her baby as their own and lied to her about the stillbirth. She tracks down her now-adult daughter, who is revealed to be Sarah Walker, Kate's mother. Deciding against revealing herself, Dana nevertheless briefly encounters a young Kate and accompanies her as they play the Hymn of Vaghen on her piano. Overcome with the reminiscence and vindicated in her belief that she and Dana Roze were related, Kate finally decides to return to New York with Oscar and mend fences with her loved ones. However, a nearby train bound for Baltayar triggers an epiphany that Dana may have gone there live amongst the Gorun as she had planned to do with Leon. Running after the outbound train, she's helped aboard by Ludwig, who is also going home after Leni's passing.

## Facts and additional information

* In Syberia - The World Before: At the end of the game we find out that Kate's mother, Sarah, was adopted by the Zimmers, who once knew Sarah's biological family, Rozes.
* In Syberia - The World Before: The Brown Shadows is inspired by Nazi's and Vagerans are the equivalent of the Jews.
* In Syberia - The World before: A young Kate Walker plays the "Hymn of Vaghen" in her bedroom on the piano, where she meets her real grandmother Dana Rose. Her grandmother's fate is unknown.
* Kate received a music box shaped as a swan (symbol of the Town of Vaghen) . The "Hymn of Vaghen" is played by the music box when Kate clicks the button.
* In Syberia - The World Before: When Kate dreams about her family house, we can see her father in the picture and learn that he died when Kate was young. In fact, next to this photo (on the fireplace) we can see the picture of Kate's grandparents, the Zimmer's.
* Graphics of Kate Walker improves in each game and we are able to see more of her face.
* Presumably, Kate has no living relatives. Her biological grandmother may be alive.
* Kate's mother passed away in 2003, but Kate found out about it in the winter of 2004, when she was received a letter and a music box from Olivia in the salt mine back at Iron Taiga.
* Kate's former best friend Olivia married her ex-fiance Dan.

## Gallery

SyberiaSyberia II (after the clothes change)Syberia III
1. ↑ The locations of the cities are not 100% accurate. They were made based on the game info and some good assumptions. For example, we know that Valadilene is in the French Alps, but we don't know the exact location, which is why, it was marked in the middle of that mountain range. It should be added that in Syberia: The World Before we see a map of Europe that is significantly different from the actual one. This implies that the world depicted in Syberia is significantly different from the real one (different divisions of countries and new geographic regions). Therefore, it is impossible to retrace Kate Walker's exact route.