[attr="class","TITLE"]PERSONALITY

[attr="class","CONTENT"]Elea is most definitely the light-hearted, easy going sort. Having grown up in some of the most dangerous spots on earth she’s seen some awful things and figures that in comparison, almost everything else in life is a piece of cake in comparison. Few things stress her out and even if something unexpected crops up she tends to deal with it with a grin and a joke, typically in the sort of blunt black humour that have most staring at her with their mouths open. Like her ‘mother’ she’s inquisitive and creative. From her ‘father’ she got the ability to remain cool under pressure and despite years of fighting it the need to save lives. For over twenty years it wasn’t obvious where Elea inherited the rest of her idiosyncrasies from.

Typically Elea’s temper tends to be of the slow burn sort. It takes a lot for her to blow but once she does there’s little anyone can do to diffuse her temper until she’s good and ready to let things go. Family is vitally important to her and for Elea family includes more than just her parents. On the road with her mother and father Elea ‘adopted’ lots of the people she met and pulled them into what she regards as her family circle. In Elea’s mind anyone who messes with her ‘family’ deserves to feel a little of her creative wrath. Screaming, sulking or throwing things are just a little too prosaic for Elea. Why go with the boring stuff when a little effort will make things so much more satisfying?

Nicknamed the Ice Queen at the station Elea is typically anything but. She’s not cold or aloof, she’s not brittle, certainly not frigid. Warm, generous and caring, a serial flirt … the irony of it is not lost on her. Her bull-headedness has taken her through what was a pretty unusual childhood and continues to drive her now. It’s been needed on more than one occasion, especially since the virus hit and there’s no room for evasion now. If there’s something she has to face she will do it head on with the sort of grit and determination you wouldn’t think lay in a delicate figure like hers. If someone tells Elea she can’t do something then they’ll very soon learn that she absolutely can. No isn’t a word she likes to hear.

Much to her parents chagrin Elea has always found it near impossible to keep her mouth shut when she’s around other people. She’s extremely talkative and will just take silence as an opportunity to monologue. Gregarious, she likes to be around others and as much as her parents wished she would’ve had a little more decorum about it she’s been a natural flirt since her teenaged years. Male or female, single or not, it doesn’t matter, it just comes naturally to Elea and she doesn’t mean anything by it. At least, not unless she actually gets a bite back from someone available. No matter how forward Elea is she still not cheat and will not wreck relationships.

As well as being curious Elea is more intellectual than she’s given credit for. She loves to ask questions. Despite the demands of her parents that she remain on the road with them, travelling from far flung country to far flung country, Elea settled down to a life of academia and enjoyed it as long as it lasted. Thousands of books line her apartment, probably a good thing given the current troubles in Lethford and the possible need of barricades if the world really does explode. All of that has come in handy since she started looking for her birth parents in Lethford, the truth won’t come and bite her on her fine ass after all, she’s gotta go out there looking for it.

[attr="class","TITLE"]BIOGRAPHY

[attr="class","CONTENT"] Eleanor Rae Frost was supposedly born in a field hospital in Liberia. From what she was told over the years, her mother, a journalist reporting on the first civil war there while her husband Lucien worked as a surgeon for Doctors Without Borders, had apparently intended to return to her family’s home in South Carolina to give birth but typically Elea decided to make her appearance a month early. In their usual manner her parents decided that there was no point in taking time out to take their daughter back to the US, instead they spent the first five years of Elea’s life constantly moving from one troubled nation to another. By her fifth birthday Elea had more stamps on her passport than candles on her birthday cake – Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire and Tanzania. Every time her father was sent to a new mission hospital Vivienne came along with Elea. Elea got to see much of the world but totally missed out on any formal education, instead she leaned from her parents and the other medical staff who came through the camps.

As Elea got older her parents made occasional trips back to South Carolina but still most of her time was spent in exotic locations. Noticing their daughter’s aptitude for learning Lucien and Vivienne were forced to find other techniques to keep her busy, left to her own devices she typically ended up neck deep in some sort of trouble. When they were on the road Elea was enrolled in local schools, learning alongside the refugee children, or when it wasn’t possible, using satellite uplinks to connect her with a school in Raleigh for long distance learning. Physical possessions were rare on the road, especially when it all had to be packed up into a single bag for travelling but Elea was always keen to learn, to carry knowledge with her in her head. Perhaps her parents would’ve been happier if she’d developed an aptitude for math or geography or even politics but more often than not they’d find her in the middle of the hospital tent, watching with big blue eyes as bodies were pieced back together or cured of their sickness.

For the most part Elea was a biddable child and complained little about the fact that she rarely got to spend more than a couple of months in any one spot. She climbed aboard the cargo planes and helicopters with little complaint and even attended most of the benefits her parents held in the name of raising money for the sick and displaced children of the world. There were lines she refused to cross though and when her parents tried to redraw them for her Elea would dig her heels in fiercely. No matter what her parents required of her she wouldn’t be dissuaded from her own plans without a fight of epic proportions. While she had paid others back for slights or downright dirty behaviour in the past, she never took retribution against her mother or her father no matter how hard they tried to change their minds. Family was family no matter how many times they crammed her into a dress and put her on display like a walking, talking Barbie doll.

An unlucky event on the eve of Elea’s seventeenth birthday would prove life changing for her. Despite Doctors Without Borders being a neutral party an attack occurred one night on a small field hospital in North Sudan. A few minutes before midnight the shooting started, rebels entering the camp in search of the vital food and medicines that had been flown in earlier that day. Bullets ripped through the flimsy cover of the tents, stores torn apart, people cut down where they stood. Elea stumbled from her own tent on her hands and knees to find her father kneeling in front of one of the rebels, his arms spread, trying to protect a boy behind him. The gun barked, bullets sending her father flying backwards before the rebels fled with what they were able to gather. Pale, a scream trapped in her throat Elea scrambled forward and tried to stop the blood until the surgeons arrived to take over to try and save their own. Three doctors were killed by rebel soldiers that night but her father would survive thanks to the quick treatment.

Forced out of the field while he recuperated from his extensive injuries and the ground breaking operations it would take for him to get full function back in his right arm, Lucien took his wife and daughter to London, England. The surgeons at King’s College would piece him back together again like Humpty Dumpty while he learned what he could from them, peppering the surgeons with questions not unlike his daughter. Suddenly Elea found herself in a whole new world. For hours every day her and her mother were turfed out of her father’s room, for tests, for procedures, for bodily care when he was too groggy or unstable to get out of bed to handle it himself. At those times Elea would shun the museums and galleries her mom retreated to and would generally make a pest of herself in the Accident and Emergency department. Numerous calls were made back upstairs to fetch her to start with but eventually the staff let her stay, calling it a little work experience. Elea called it a revelation. Her dad had always wanted her to follow in his footsteps and become a world class surgeon with enough heart to shun the big bucks and head into the impoverished parts of the world with him. Maybe he’d eventually get part of what he wanted. She started studying for a biological sciences degree long distance with King’s College at least. Her little gateway into the wonders of modern medicine.

By twenty-one Elea had a BSc in Biological Sciences under her belt and against her parents’ wishes, struck out on her own to start pre-med at Chicago’s Northwestern hospital. She was studying what her dad had always wanted her to but something about her choice was a vast disappointment to her mother, in a way that Elea could not understand. On at least a dozen occasions her mother tried to push her into another college, somewhere in England perhaps, but Elea refused, getting into Northwestern was a big freaking deal. Vivienne’s final attempt to sway her daughter erupted into an argument that practically shook the walls of the tent they were occupying. Confused and certain that her mother was disappointed in her Elea pushed until the truth was torn free. She had been lied to for two decades, Lucien Givens wasn’t her biological father and Vivienne wasn’t her mother, in fact they had just been the generous people who had adopted her. Elea had instantly suspected that her parents were just other travellers like her parents, journalists or field medics who hadn’t been able to take care of their child but the truth was unbelievably far from that scenario.

When she had been just a few months old her parents had adopted her from some acquaintances. Her birth parents had been a happy little family, her real mum a surgeon, her father a politician who’d spent much of his career rabble-rousing for health reform in Chicago. They had other children, or at least had once had other children. It had been the loss of that incredible husband and their other daughters that had influenced her choice to put their youngest child up for adoption. On one of the Givens’ trips back to the States Lucien had ended up treating the couple’s eldest daughter, a daughter who ultimately couldn’t be saved from the injuries she’d sustained in the accident by the man who would become her dad. The Givens’ had sworn it was just to be temporary at first, that they’d care for Elea until she was back on her feet but after that her mother would cut off all contact. The Givens’ hadn’t yet given thought to starting their own family, not with the way they were constantly on the move but something in the mother’s plight touched something inside of them and as that contact would lost they decided to keep her. Adoption forms sent in the post had come back signed at the very least. Elea was theirs, emotionally and legally. It would take them nearly two decades to explain that to her though.

Shocked, intrigued and more than mightily pissed over the lies that had been told to her, Elea took off for Chicago. Ultimately spending four years in one city was difficult for a girl used to travelling through three continents in a year but the pull of becoming a surgeon like Lucien, like her real mother and the opportunity to seek out the mother who given birth to her there staved off any desperation to head back out on the road. With matters rocky to say the least with her parents Elea decided to steer clear of them for a while and instead look into the circumstances of her birth, the loss of her family before she’d been old enough to know. Her love of research helped of course and it didn’t take much searching to find out the most general details about just who she was. Obituaries, the newspaper stories about her birth father’s accomplishments before his death even the high school year book of her eldest sister. There was just no trace of her mother, not in Chicago.

She was in the middle of a surgical rotation at Northwestern when she finally managed to dig something up. A patient rolling in through the doors as she was called down with a senior resident for a consult, as biddable as a puppy she’d trailed down, looking over his shoulder and had been met with confusion. A murmur of ‘Hetty?’ The ER around her seemed to go quiet. It wasn’t until the woman they tried to treat died in the OR and she trailed out, pale, just as confused, exhausted enough to want to just sink through the floor that things began to fall into place. The man waiting for news of his wife had once worked at the hospital too, just a porter, but after thirty years he’d known the place and its staff inside and out. Including her mother. She’d once been a maverick at the hospital, a trauma surgeon like Lucien. Like the surgeon she wanted to become and she looked just like her. He seemed confused at the idea that nobody at the hospital had mentioned it before. There were still plenty of people here from her mother’s time. As Elea walked through the hospital on shaky legs she felt eyes on her, hushed whispers following her. They’d all known and they hadn’t said a word. Some probably knew where she was but when she returned the next day, just as pale and just as shocky she was meant with a wall of silence.

Elea walked out without a word. She spent the day at the local library with her phone blowing up beside her, vibrating loud enough that she tore the battery out in the end. There was still no trace of Hetty Connelly in the end but there was a thin breadcrumb trail to a Henrietta James at a hospital in a city called Lethford. Maybe she could’ve followed it, transferred to the hospital there to try and track down the mother who seemed to have made it clear she didn’t want her but Elea couldn’t stomach a return to the hospital. She tried, twice, then received a letter from the hospital. She was being let go from the med school program. For a month Elea didn’t leave her apartment. Her mother hadn’t just given her up, she’d helped to tank her career too. It was like a dam torn open inside of her, one that took a solid three months to shore up. As soon as she was steady enough Elea headed for Lethford. She got there a week after her 27th birthday and applied for the paramedic training program immediately. If she wasn’t going to get back into a med school program in Lethford then she’d do the next best thing. Transferring from station to station once she was qualified didn’t exactly go down well but it put her all over the city and that was where she needed to be, even if nothing came of it.

By 30 the trail was cold, her mother probably gone if she ever had been in the city but she’d found a home, a station she’d stuck at for over a year. Elea held on there, chin held up, mouth running, pride fully in place like a shield. Her parents were worried about her, had been ever since her career had imploded overnight, but she spoke to them on Skype diligently, at least until the world tanked itself a couple of years later. A virus suddenly erupting and the world itself felt like it was imploding. If her mother had somehow stuck around the city then maybe now was the time to find her, while quarantine had the entire place locked down and chaos was throwing all sorts of people together. Every hospital run Elea’s been on the look out for her, for a pair of blue eyes matching her own. Fail, fail, fail, but she won’t stop trying now.

[attr="class","ALIAS"]AUTHORED BY ANGE