[hider=2nd Character. Go ahead, peek now.]

[CENTER][COLOR=SLATEGRAY][B]C H A R A C T E R   C O N C E P T   P R O P O S A L[/B][/COLOR][color=633371][h1][b]H U N T R E S S[/b][/h1][/color][hr]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/Wqz5slU.jpg[/img][h3][color=gray][sup][sub]H E L E N A  B E R T I N E L L I  [color=633371]✝[/color]   C E O  [color=633371]✝[/color]  L O S  A N G E L E S  [color=633371]✝[/color]   I N D E P E N D E N T[/sub][/sup][/color][/h3][img]IMAGE/BANNER[/img]
[/CENTER][INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3][color=633371]C H A R A C T E R   C O N C E P T[/color][/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr]
[CENTER][sup][color=gray]"I will fill your mountains with the dead. Your hills, your valleys, and your streams will be filled with people slaughtered by the sword."[/color][/sup][/CENTER]
[color=gray][INDENT][INDENT]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 Sebastian’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 uncle. 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 degrees in various engineering specialties and economics, with post-graduate degrees 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. Helena leveraged family wealth inherited from her father, and uncle, and 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 America it was on the cover of Business Week and being covered by Bloomberg and CNBC as a Private Equity darling. 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 the Mafia...and her quest to ruin it from the inside-out. 

Taking on the missiongiven 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 Mafia: The Huntress.

She is neither villain or hero, merely a very dangerous and resourceful young woman on a fanatical quest for blood and revenge. A quest that can only end in her own death or the death of the American Mafia as it is known or had ever been known. A fact she has willingly accepted.[/indent][/indent]
[INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3][color=633371]C H A R A C T E R   M O T I V A T I O N S   &   G O A L S[/color][/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr][INDENT][INDENT][color=gray]Reaching six years into the past to bring out a favorite character concept for me in this ultra-violent, ultra-driven, vision of Helena Bertinelli. I always loved the idea that a vigilante character with a Mafia dynasty background actually actively uses that part of their background as part of their crusade against crime. Whether it's weaponizing her checkbook, leveraging private business firm acquisition, or utilizing the skill and training given to her over time, this character truly cares about revenge more than anything.

I'm going to play with that a little for this go-round with the character. Introducing a partner in crime, having her start to engage more with the communities she's stalking and make her face the choice of justice over revenge, even giving her the (albeit dim) possibility of a life after revenge. She's also not starting in Gotham City, this time, and instead opening her war on the American Mafia in Los Angeles. Probably swing her to Gotham City in time, but whether that's even full time or just to make hits, kind of up in the air right now. We know how crowded Gotham can get in games. [/color][/indent][/indent][/color]
[INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3][color=633371]C H A R A C T E R   N O T E S[/color][/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr][INDENT][INDENT][color=gray]
[hider=Avio International]
Avio International is a private partnership focused solely on private equity. The firm has over 20 years of experience in growth investing, building world-class businesses around the globe. Avio International applies a thesis-driven approach to investing across a variety of sectors and geographies. The firm has developed domain expertise in Consumer, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, Industrial & Business Services, Aerospace, Defense, Real Estate, and Technology.

Avio has grown to employ nearly a thousand people globally, including their brand new location in Gotham City. Though Helena Bertinelli is the Managing Partner, her much older and Wall Street veteran partner, Hans Stoerner, is said to have taken a more direct role recently as Helena has moved to Los Angeles and focused on other ventures.[/hider]

[hider=Vera Estes]
Although some would simply call her a content creator because of the gold YouTube play button award sitting on a shelf in her home office, the channel it was awarded for is mostly a mix of filmmaking and journalism. Combining a lifelong love of photography, with an upbringing in videography, an education in investigative journalism from USC, and a knack for turning traditional news broadcasting on it's head has turned Vera into a digital age star journalist, free from the editorial constraints and corporate interference most traditional reporters deal with. Ask her, and she'll say she just makes videos. Though a vast over-simplification meant to disarm, it would be unlike Vera to pass on an opportunity to poke a little fun at herself. 

Given this resume, and a pretty face, more than a few networks have attempted to lure Vera into their employ but her independence in picking her topics, and more importantly what she says about them, has been too valuable for her to accept any offers. Though they both tried to keep it private as long as possible, one too many pictures have been taken of Vera and Helena Bertinelli together for social media, and traditional media, to not have called out their romance...though neither will officially admit to anything.[/hider]

[hider=Henry Bennett]
There wasn't much left for Henry Bennett after the Army. There was a wife, but that...soured. He doesn't really blame her, and though she may blame him, it's not Henry's place to say just how right or wrong the crazy bitch is. Wait until you're grown-up to find your spouse, kids, is pretty much where Henry would leave the topic. His career in Law Enforcement wasn't awful, and there were certainly some really big highlights, but problem with Henry Bennett, according to Henry Bennett, is that he can't stand bullshit. Got no patience for it, and never did sit well with lying. 

So instead of play-ball for his department supervisors when things went twisted and sideways, Henry told the truth. That evidence was planted and he got burned, well, never really did surprise Henry all that much. He took a few more law enforcement jobs, but history always had a way of catching up with him. He caught a break when an old Army pal started a management company in LA, but it wasn't really work he enjoyed, and he'd rather live out a shitty apartment and eat bad microwaveable food if it meant he could run his own private investigation firm...at least it was honest.

He never got the chance, though, when his last gig for the 'solving rich folk problems' management firm job introduced him to Helena Bertinelli. Long story short, crazy as the woman might be, Henry found something unexpected in Helena: a similar soul. Henry quickly said seeya to his old Army pal's business, and went to work 'security and investigations' for Helena's personal security. Her actual security team hates him, but they rarely see him, and he rarely sees them. So fuck 'em.[/hider]

[hider=Omar Raheem]
A Black, Muslim, community oriented young man with a day job of owning a comic book store. Friends and family tend to think of Omar as a bit of a stick in the mud, but less for his propensity for introversion and social anxiety, and more for his intractable morality. Crime is a problem in his valley neighborhood that's become more than the street gangs that Omar grew up with. This shit is organized, and deadly. It would have killed him, too, if not for the—and he can't believe he's saying this shit—for the cape that saved his life. Yeah, heroes aren't science fiction in the world, but they don't haunt his side of town, or come to think of, LA much at all. 

Then again, this chick ain't no hero. So Omar has cancelled his plans to move back to Gotham City and take care of his aging father for now, his older sister has handled for a while and can handle for a while more, so long as it means Omar can make his neighborhood a better place for his nephew and nieces and his younger sister from LA. Well, he and this crazy cape chick.[/hider]

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[INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3][color=633371]S A M P L E   P O S T[/color][/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr][INDENT][INDENT][color=gray]

"THE BRUISES!"

The girl's gasp was deep-seated and heavy with shock, as Vera tossed the Fire Stick remote to the side and threw sheets off their bodies, crawling over Helena's near naked body and pushing at the side of the larger woman, determined to get a better look in the morning light shining in from the bedroom's wall of glass facing the Pacific. "Um, ow." Helena's brows furrowed in irritation, between the two reactions there was enough to deter the smaller girl from continuing to push and prod, instead Vera just went from her knees to sitting the weight of her body on her ankles and feet, a hand brushing her long brown hair from her face and behind her shoulder as her light brown eyes gave the mother of all worried looks.

"Hel, lover, baby...when you do this MMA training, do you ever hit THEM...or do they just pummel you for a few hours?"

Helena's chuckled response was equal measures low, and pained. The night before came back in flashes of memory: the shithead with the SMG actually, somehow, surprising her. He'd barely gotten a second of trigger pressure before she'd ushered him into night-night land, and her back plate armor had held, but the bruises were impressive—even she had to admit admiring them in the mirror for a few minutes. To no surprise, Vera was far less impressed with the damage her body had taken than she, herself, was. 

"It looks more like paint-ball damage. Are you doing that simulated airsoft gun combat gaming, again?"

[i]Shit.[/i] Helena snorted, and flew off the bed. The upside of Vera's mind was Helena wasn't bored, ever, and they could talk on nearly any subject for hours, upon hours. The downside was lying became a more difficult game than she would have liked. Chads and bimbos were fun sexual distractions and never asked too many questions, whereas Vera...

"Okay, I'm JUST saying, maybe remind them your billion dollar ass is worth not trying to kill in a ring?"

Helena gave a slight hop as she tugged her jeans on, and buttoned them, staring at the girl as her face melted into a small grin. "And yet every time I remind my girlfriend about my wealthy ass, she doesn't seem inclined to give me any leeway."

Vera's return grin was instinct, and far, far more devilish in nature, the deep tones of a groan echoing in the otherwise higher pitched melodic voice of the girl as she leaned her body forward and crawled to the edge of the bed, reaching out with her hands to Helena's waist, and pulling, "God I just want to bite that ass and kiss every inch of your—"

"—food?"

Vera stopped, instantly, and nodded, using Helena's hips to support her weight as she got off the bed. "I'll get dressed, maybe, definitely, take a shower. Won't take but a minute."

"Oh what the fuck ever..." Her eyes rolled as she threw on the dark blue linen loose linen blouse and made her way barefoot out of the room and down the stairs. Henry stood up the moment from the far side of the grey sectional as she entered the sunken floor den of the Malibu beachside property. She was busy with a hair-tie and her hair as her dark eyes stared the private eye down.

"Sorry, but it couldn't wait. Last night has caused a lot of waves."

She was casual, walking across the room as she finished the ponytail and rounding the near side of the sectional, taking a seat as she reached out for slip-on flats, "Every night causes waves, Henry."

"Sure," he allowed, yet the apprehension in his voice didn't seem to calm, "but most nights we don't have Diego Assante fly into town." While the fact brought anxious dread to Henry, Helena couldn't help but smile. "And that fact excites you, I see, holy shit you're insane. Are you [i]suicidal?[/i]"

Impish as it was casual, her eyes reflected the smile on her lips, and her shoulders shrugged, "Henry..."

"I know, I know. Yes. Yes you're fucking suicidality insane."

Vera's voice was sounded from stairs as she fussed at damp hair, this time wearing more than Victoria's Secret, but a purple tank top and black leggings with Nike's in a matching purple to the tank top, her eyes taking in the scene she found, "Good morning, Henry. Are you scolding her for MMA, too?"

Henry's face became a sudden downward slant of brows, and flattened mouth, as stern worry became a mask her threw on, "Oh, yeah. Can you believe how careless she is? How fucked would I be without her paychecks clearing?"

Vera smiled, and sweetly, "You're a bad liar, Henry. Shall we get breakfast, Helena?"[/color][/indent][/indent]
[INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3][color=633371]P O S T   C A T A L O G[/color][/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr][INDENT][INDENT][color=gray][i]WIP.[/i][/color][/indent][/indent]

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