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Re: Katya Alokhin - Katya Alokhin - 08-02-2016
“Within you is a great potential. A potential for good, perhaps. Or bad. I have seen both in my years. I feel it, though. You will become greater than even I. Will you use it for good or evil?”
- the words of Elise Sierra Ciare, spoken to Katya Alokhin
Name: Katya Alokhin
Age: 20
Date of Birth: October 29th, 2025
Personality: Katya defines herself with photography and journalism. A quiet, laid-back woman, with a temper hotter than magma, she is reserved, and in large part anti-social. She avoids most people she meets, preferring to instead be alone with her writings. Katya has also developed a fear for the Power she now controls, and rarely touches it consciously. She only ever does so whenever she has a desperate need for it - much like a thirst - and as such her travel to full power has been significantly slowed.
Appearance: Tall, striking, with an almost imperious look about her, Katya is pretty, if not beautiful, with a slender frame and a pale complexion. She has shoulder-length straight black hair, and has big, glossy grey eyes. She has full lips, a small nose, and narrow hips. More often than not, she prefers to dress in dark clothes, befitting of her personality and temperament.
Powers: Channeler
Ability: Adept
Talents: Ability to see Ta'veren
Potential: 35 (Mesaana Level)
Current Strength: 22
Katya was born in the small town of Prosyane, Ukraine on October 29th 2025. The final child of three, the most unremarkable of three daughters, Katya was often made to bask in the shadow of her elder sisters. The divide between them was immense, and emerged first in their youth, growing even greater into young-adulthood. Katya was never truly great, either. Her grades in school were mediocre at best, and no matter how hard she tried her mind often seemed muddled and confused – specifically in the sciences and maths. Where her elder sisters pulled perfect scores on nation-wide exams, Katya was forced to repeat her sixth year twice for a failed exam – something that earned her the scorn of both mother and sisters.
Katya did have something that made her stand out from the rest, however. Her writing ability was superb, and not once did she fail to achieve anything less than a fantastic score on all of her essays and writings. Even in her youth she took the skill further, her desire to write taking her higher and higher until she had written her first small fantasy novel at age twelve. Of course, it was never published, and never truly recognized save outside of her small group of friends, but that was a feat that Katya held in high esteem.
Nonetheless, her life barreled onward. Nothing of true note happened until she was sixteen years old, already ready to graduate High School and looking to become some sort of journalist or photographer. One night, whilst she was writing, something happened to her. It was a mild sickness, one that didn’t go away for some time, but Katya dismissed it. That same sickness came back ten nights later, and then again and again. Each time it got worse, taking some energies out of her. She looked into some cure for it, and her parents weren’t able to find one. What disturbed her most was that her symptoms were similar to the ones all over the internet – ones of girls dying with no apparent cure. Of women screaming in pain as their life was wrestled away from them.
It frightened her beyond belief.
If she was to become like them… then what? She focused herself more on writing, trying to forget her coming death. She wrote and wrote and wrote, and did so one evening until the sun had come up the following day. She forced herself, not because she wanted to, but because she knew she would die screaming in pain. …Only, she didn’t die screaming in pain. Something had changed that night. She no longer felt the incredible pains that had surrounded so many young women. It had gone and vanished like a spring wind.
From there on out, things changed. Small things at first, growing larger and larger over time. Miracles, some would say, but Katya was not so sure. When she wrote, she remembered things. When she wrote, she was able to do things unlike before. It took her a year to first notice it, and when she reached out afterwards, a woman came to her door. A woman she had recognized.
Her name was Elise, a sturdy middle-aged woman with a shockingly commanding presence for all that her face looked like a doll’s. When she looked at Katya once, she only nodded, and presumed to enter without permission. She began by explaining who Katya was – what powers she had, and reminded the youth that she had once been a teacher of hers in her youth. Katya couldn’t believe it, but she spoke those words so levelly that she didn’t dare sound insane. She spoke of Power, a great barrier between her and it, and men and women who would wish nothing more than to see her dead. In order to defend herself from them, she needed the Power, and in order to access the Power, she needed to work down that great barrier of hers. And to get rid of it, she needed to learn.
She had done it once before, or so she claimed, with another girl. She tried a dozen methods of removing Katya’s barrier every night, ranging from the simplest things to the most degrading of subjects. Elise went as far as to berate Katya for her uselessness, and had sounded so genuine that Katya had begun weeping because of it. Elise only kept driving onward, however, and one night came to Katya so angry that she tied her up with invisible tendrils of Power, dragged her upstairs, and eased her out of a window. She was at least twenty feet up.
“If this does not break your barrier,” Elise had said, “then nothing will.”
Then she dropped Katya.
She screamed as she fell. The threads that had held her vanished, and she tumbled to the ground, flailing about. In that split-second, however, she searched for the Power – no, she didn’t search, she frantically _clawed_ for it, and a split-second before she hit the ground she fell into the Power, and screamed as radiant bliss overcame her. To her surprise, she was dangling just an inch above the ground, held by tendrils she could not see that had caught her ankle. It didn’t matter. In anger, in fury, by the light of the heavens she lashed out with her new-found power, and in the process managed to nearly sear one of Elise’s arms off.
She has feared the Power ever since. It hadn’t been just Elise that made her fear it, but her frantic attempt to control what could not simply be controlled. She had burned Elise horribly, and sat by her side in the hospital for the next month as she slowly healed. She wouldn’t ever forgive her teacher for what she did – but she would never forgive herself, either. Who was the greater evil? She spent many a night thinking on that, trying to shove that glowing bauble in the back of her mind away, but it never did. It stayed, taunting her, making her want to drink in it’s eternal embrace.
After, Katya moved away with Elise. Her teacher promised her a new life, and with the Power, she would need a new one. She had never liked her sisters, so saying goodbye to them was easy, but as for her parents… They had seen her through her life, had been there for her when no one else was. She promised to return. She was only going away for a few years. To the Moscow University, to study photography and journalism. One day, she would return.
She wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to fulfil that promise.
She went anyway, and along the way began learning English, a language completely new to her. The Ascendancy had changed the official language, and no matter how much she disliked it, she went with it anyway. Once they were finally in Moscow and she was enrolled (with the generous amount of money Elise had been willing to spend on her new tutor, thankfully,) she began taking on her new life, reporting on the Ascendancy and occasionally placing her hand in photography as well.
Katya has been in Moscow for two years now.
Edited by Katya Alokhin, Aug 2 2016, 03:24 PM.