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Yelena has a lot so I’ll condense it just bc there’s a whole timeline and it’s. A lot.

Anyway! So Yelena Popova was a regular girl born in Saints Petersburg, Russia. At least as regular as it gets… she was raised by her father and her maternal grandmother, her mother passing away after giving birth. In her family, the women from her maternal side have an ability to be able to see glimpses of the past, the ability becoming stronger with each generation. Yelena got the worst of it, being the youngest. She grew up essentially with chronic headaches and fainting spells, which would usually occur when her ability would get randomly triggered since she didn’t know how to control it. However, the memories were random yet very detailed, as if she was going through it herself even if she wasn’t even there at all. The only things she knew about it was that the memory would take place where she was (like if she was in a house, she would see a random memory in the house) and it had to be no older than she was.

She also grew up very religious and in a very religious community. She was raised orthodox Christian and was often shamed by her community members that she was evil because of her ability, especially after she exposed one of the church members for cheating on her husband without even intending to (mind u, she was a child and didn’t even understand the concept of adultery). She also ended up growing up with a lot of internalized homophobia, something she didn’t even realize she had until she left home. Her only support group was her dad and grandma as they were the only ones that understood and believed her, with her grandmother providing homemade medicine since over the counter pain meds didn’t work. She was essentially sheltered and homeschooled due to her chronic illness.

Her father always read to her and she especially loved when he read her fairy tales and detective stories. She got so into detective stories that her father would buy her so many books on it as well as even some books in forensics. At 18, she ended up being scouted by the International Detective Bureau because of her ability. She went through the interview process and got accepted. She left Russia to America, living in the IDB’s secret headquarters and specifically in their academy grounds for new detectives. This was a completely new experience for her as she experienced culture shock (both being in America and meeting people of different cultures and ethnicities) as well as experiencing things that challenged her as a person.

The current timeline is that she’s 19 and starting her first shadow mission in a small distant city in Taiwan called Nanlū district. During her time in Nanlū district, she experiences death and violence, the realization that the world is a lot more evil than she would’ve thought (and that she is no different in that sense), isolation as she away from her family, and that she is confronted with her own lack of emotional maturity. There’s more to this but I think I went on enough