Veda Dragomirov (mirror)

Growing up, Veda didn't understand her parents. They were always so jumpy, so paranoid. Don't stay out late, don't talk back to authority, don't break the rules, you take what you're given without question and be grateful for it. By the time she was old enough to remember anything, Earth was actually fairly well off at the center of the newly recovered Terran Empire. It was well on its way to recovering its lost glory — schools, public works, a replicator in every home that wanted it. Veda didn't know hardship at all.

Her first taste of power was intoxicating. The school yard, a boy was chasing her because he had a crush, but he slipped and fell, skinning his knee. They were well away from the other children, she was bigger than him, and something in the back of her mind told her to cover his mouth and rub the gravely dirt he lie in into the bleeding wound. He tried to howl in pain, tried to struggle away from her, even bit her hand, but in the end he was left in silent tears. He swore he wouldn't tell a soul, and for the next month she got the cookies out of his lunch.

She moved to easier targets for a while — animals caught from the woods around her house mostly, occasionally the neighbors' cats and dogs too. For a month after they dissected a frog in school, she repeated the experiment on anything she could get her hands on until her father caught her and yelled at her long into the night about how she was terrifying him. He was the only one she'd ever listen to, and the experiments on animals stopped.

Her interest in science spiked in school after this, and both her parents were happy. There was a lot of demand for those in the sciences, it was one of the areas the Alliance had been the most restrictive on Terran education so there was a lot of catching up to do. Anything Veda needed to pursue this area of study was found for her, even if it meant her father putting in extra hours at work, or her mother taking on odd jobs. When they got older, both her siblings were put to work to support her as well.

In high school, she found the Future Daughters Club. Sponsored by Principal Oxana Bogdanov, it was the most exclusive and competitive club in the school. Perfect grades, utterly cut throat, and the top performers in all the extra circulars — these girls were the best the school had to offer. Veda was their queen. When Tatiana Nikolaev, the Russian delegate to the Terran government and highly decorated member of The Daughters of Sato, came to speak at her graduation, Veda hung on her every word.

She received a full scholarship to medical school, and further from her father's watchful eye, she started to again pursue those experiments she'd stopped at his demand. This time her attention fell to the men who attempted to court her — fellow classmates, random chumps in bars, she wasn't picky. At first she hid it behind a pretense of being a BDSM aficionado with a medical fetish, but as rumors started to spread through the scene that she didn't respect safe words and pushed hard boundaries that well quickly ran dry and she gave up pretending. She'd lure men at bars to an a motel room she'd prep beforehand — soundproofing and plastic sheeting made cleanup easier, and she had cleanup down to an art. She'd lure her subject on a Friday night, and by Sunday it was as if he'd never existed.

She graduated with top honors, and fell into Nikolaev's sights at this point — she recommended Veda to a job in the medical research division of the Terran government. It didn't take long for Veda to climb the ranks, soon specializing in the research and development division. On the surface, it claimed to be basic medical research—preventative care, physical therapy, new medicines—but those in the know were aware its real goal was providing the Terran government and the Daughters of Sato with better tools to interrogate and dispose of their enemies.

Veda achieved the top post of Secretary of Medicine about two years ago, when the previous secretary suddenly fell ill and wasted away all in the matter of about 24 hours of a very painful and very rare virus. Whispers moved through the halls of the research division's primary facility about how Veda had recently visited the Vulcan Science Colony Nisus, the only place within Terran territories that was known to have a live specimen of the virus on hand, but as her appointment came within hours of the previous secretary's death, no one dared speak of it very loud.

In addition to her medical knowledge and sadistic streak, she's fluent in Russian, Orion, and Vulcan in addition to the primary Terran language. She has a reputation for being much more hands on with research than her predecessors were, and though she's been the target of many assassination attempts, she has survived every one of them. Not an insignificant number of those who've attempted her assassination have met their end as her test subjects.