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[b]Name:[/b] Helena Bertinelli
[b]Age:[/b] Mid-20s
[b]Alias:[/b] Don Bertinelli, the Huntress
[b]Skills/Abilities:[/b]

Helena Bertinelli is an Olympic level athlete, tall and athletically built. Her training regiment remains extreme, and the equal of anything the NFL or Navy SEALs can offer.

She is one of the premiere marksmen in the world. 

With an extensive and often times merciless martial arts training record, Helena has forged herself into an incredible martial artist. 

On the surface a Technohobbyist, behind the scenes a technician, mechanic, and engineer that has been trained from the start to create her own tools and equipment, to depend on no one. Still room to improve as a hacker, and has no experience with hyper-advanced technology. 

After a long campaign to successfully embed herself within the American Mafia, on top of her Sicilian upbringing, Helena holds all the resources and power of a Mafia Don without many realizing it. Thus far the Huntress has primarily used this as an intelligence resource.

[b]Weaknesses:[/b]

[i]The Tight Rope[/i] - Helena lives a life not even Bruce Wayne would live. While she is the vigilante Huntress at night, there is no break in intensity or danger with her day time persona: as Don Bertinelli, danger is always around her. One misstep, and everything falls apart. And if the Mafia ever found out Don Bertinelli was truly the Huntress...

[i]Helena...Wayne?[/i] - According to Jim Gordon, the member of the Batfamily most similar to Batman in terms of personality is the Huntress. And that's not a good thing. Obsessed with her mission to the point of dehumanizing herself, it can be nearly impossible to get close to the Huntress, or Helena. 

[b]History:[/b]

Helena Bertinelli was born a princess in a Mafia Empire she blissfully knew nothing of. She knew her parents loved her, and her family loved to get together at her father's house. They would descend their home in Gotham Heights to see musicals in the city, or go to the zoo, or the circus, or the museums to see the dinosaur bones. 

It was a happy childhood, until the day cruel men in black masks kidnapped her right after school ended at Saint Sebestation's in the Heights.

What exactly happened to Helena is hard to work out. Police reports suggest various mental and physical traumas, but Don Bertinelli pulled whatever strings necessary to ensure no one would examine his baby girl and put that filth on a report any of his enemies could pay some clerk to get ahold of. Her father told her to put it behind her, that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", and encouraged her not to speak of it again.

Not even a year later, a van full of masked gunmen burst into the Bertinelli estate in Gotham Heights, and murdered every living member of the Gotham City Bertinelli family. All except the little girl too numb to be scared; without fear little Helena could think, slipping under the corpse of a still bleeding out uncle, allowing her to escape the gunmen and live.

Immediately after Helena was returned to the Sicilian Bertinelli clan, the "mother clan." There was talk of marrying Helena off to a distant cousin, or a rapid riser in the Sicilian scene. It was then one of the greatest assassins of the early 20th century, Giovanni Bertinelli, took Helena with him one early morning to hunt fowl.

Giovanni would later admit perhaps he was pushing himself to find something when he took the girl hunting that morning. His own parents had been murdered in a war within the Cosa Nostra. He knew that drive for vengeance. Just as much as he knew a natural born killer when he saw one; and in Helena, he saw it in spades. 

Helena Bertinelli had no childhood after that day. Her training began immediately and unrestricted. She holds a degree in Corporate Communications from the Sorbonne, and both a masters and PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics. She achieved this by the age of 22 while receiving training in secret from Giovanni and Lady Shiva.

Where her father was a quick minded and ruthless businessman and Don, Helena had become a true master in the art and science of international business. Applying such radical approaches to business as the Theory of Constraints, Lean theory, and Six Sigma, Helena bought failing and crumbling business after failing and crumbling business only to turn downsize, raise product quality, and worker efficiency...and in turn cost efficiency of the bottom line. Sometimes called a 'corporate terrorist', the result was nearly inevitable, what businesses would assist her the most in her ultimate goals were kept while all others were sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder.
 
When Helena Bertinelli returned to Gotham City it was on the cover of Business Week and being covered by Bloomberg and CNN. Using the ultimate power broker of money, Helena used to the fact that she could make more of it than anyone else available to usher her return to not only the Gotham Mafia, but to the American Mafia as a whole. 

Now the majority owner but never direct manager of multi corporations, Helena has turned her focus squarely on Gotham City's Mafia...and her quest to ruin it from the inside-out. Taking on the mission given to her by God the day she played dead under the corpse of an uncle, Helena has decided a theatrical method of hitting the Mafia from the outside while secretly exposing and bleeding them from the inside by taking on the mantle of a former feared and dangerous enemy of the Gotham City Mafia: The Huntress.

Her revenge would leave a bloody trail across Gotham City, until the Batman finally caught up to her. Even he wasn't able to keep her from killing her final target, though the fallout between Batman and the new vigilante was intense, and would lead to Helena leaving the city. She'd return in secret to visit family graves, and pay respects. Instead she found herself caught into the Cataclysm--an earthquake that left Gotham City in ruin and cut off from the rest of the world. For reasons unknown to her, all of the Batfamily was out of the city when it happened; leaving the Bat mantle to her, and her alone. 

When Bruce finally returned, he found her with a self made Bat suit, spray painting Bat signals, and chasing the Joker. He would return to Gotham as Batman during it's hour of greatest need, but in part out of respect for her efforts, and in part because he had no better options, Batman brought Huntress into the Cave and formally made her part of the Batfamily. 

After Cataclysm, Helena would leave once again, taking the Huntress on an international crusade agaist organized crime, with a focus on human trafficking. Though she would accept an invitation to the Justice League, the Huntress wouldn't stay with the team long. Her latest return to Gotham City is not secret.
 
Despite her ties to the Batfamily, Helena is neither villain nor hero, merely a very dangerous and resourceful young woman on a fanatical quest to kill the Gotham Mafia for once and for all. A quest that can only end in her own death or the death of the Gotham City Mafia as it is known, or had ever been known. A fact she has willingly accepted.