Life, Death, Then Life Again
Andrea Ellis was born in Millennium City, daughter of Richard Ellis - CEO of Centurion Industries and Chairman of the Ellis Memorial Foundation - and Rachel Ellis. At 17, Andie and her mother were presumed dead when the Ellis’s penthouse home was destroyed during the 2009 Qularr invasion. And in truth, Andie really did die. But her broken corpse was recovered from the wreckage and smuggled down to Vibora Bay. There, a man simply known as the Alchemist revived Andrea’s body, along with the bodies of dozens of others he had stolen, using a compound he dubbed the Lazarus Elixir.
Suffering a traumatic death, only to be resurrected had a harmful impact on her psyche, making it all the more easy for the Alchemist to subject her to mental conditioning to ensure complete compliance from Andie and all of his other subjects. The next several years were spent playing the part of guinea pig for the Alchemist’s experiments, experiments which saw her gain new abilities. She was exposed to different fighting styles so that she could be groomed into being the man’s personal protection and one woman hit squad.
During this time, Initiative Black - a paramilitary organization that serves to investigate and prevent occult crimes and insurgency - became aware of the Alchemist's activities. Investigative efforts were hampered as the man picked up shop and moved locations, managing to stay a step ahead of agents. As time grew though, the Alchemist became overconfident and sloppy. This culminated in a raid on one of his labs, located on a farm a few miles from Sunday Pond in Maine in June of 2014. It was a particularly violent face off that saw a number of the Alchemist’s victims engaging agents in combat, including Andie. The standoff ended with minimal loss of life, but the majority of the victims were never able to return to anything resembling a normal life at all.
In the time it took to wrap up the situation and identify who she was, Andie’s father - the only living relative she had left - was killed, leaving her with no one to go home to.
For the next 2 and a half years, she spent her time trying - and failing - to adjust to civilian life. Andie simply had been through too much to ever find any satisfaction in the chaos that came with that lifestyle. She barely had the patience to go through the process of gaining her GED, and no patience whatsoever to pursue a college degree. While she dabbled occasionally in street level crime fighting in Millennium City, the truth off the matter was that she really needed something that had far more structure and an actual mission.
Andie found that in joining the very organization that had rescued her from the Alchemist. She now works as an agent in Initiative Black's Strategical Initiative Security Division.
