Name: Adéla Veselá

Prison is the end of the line for most criminals. For Adéla Veselá, it was a new start, and she had never considered herself a criminal. She had always wanted to be a musician. Unfortunately when she was fresh out of school, she was tricked by people claiming to want to make her a star. She signed multiple contracts that she didn’t understand in excitement, and after a few weeks in pure joy in a run-down recording studio, she was presented with a bill. In confusion, she brought up the promises made, to which they simply gave the contracts she had signed. She owed them money for the past few days, though they still would help her get her music recorded and become a star. She just needed to do a few small jobs to help cover a small part of the immense costs they were taking to help her in her music career.

Her dream was still alive, and she did her best to ignore the red flags showcasing the true motives of her patrons. She decided to do those simple jobs for them. She wanted so much for that chance to follow her dream. The jobs were simple, usually delivering or receiving packages. They kept the carrot in front of her, giving her occasional afternoons back in that recording studio. Though an album never came to be, her time in the studio was becoming rarer and rarer. The truth she was trying to ignore became more apparent as the days went on. There would be no musical future for her. Around this time, she found out about what the jobs she was doing really were about. Arriving early to pick up a package, she saw a terrifying sight. A helpless young toad was suspended in the middle of the room while multiple mice wearing gloves were scraping his skin with rough metal tools. The residue they scraped off was then melted from the knives into small containers, which were then weighed before being packed in packages identical to the hundreds she had delivered.

This was the illegal hallucinogenic toad venom trade she had always thought to be simply a horror story to scare the young away from drugs. Only it was even more terrifying than those stories, especially with the knowledge that she was a drug mule in that trade. She froze in place. A familiar face scolded her for looking where she shouldn’t before grabbing her package and giving it to her, along with a very gruesome threat about what would happen to her if the things she saw today were shared. She walked mindlessly to her delivery point. She was not a musician. She was a criminal in this barbaric organization. Part of her died that day.

Over the following months, she went about her work as though sleepwalking through a nightmare until the day the police raid came. She confessed to everything she had done and took revenge on her captors, giving up all information she could. The police looked kindly on her and reduced her sentence, and she was out in just a little over a year. This was her chance to turn her life around. She was four months into her new life plan, searching for every opportunity she could to learn and improve herself. A new program by the new speaker of the Collective allowed her to return to college on a rehabilitation scholarship. She traveled to Laruta and began classes with the first batch of these new students chosen by the Collective.

Still, there was a part of her too scared to trust a new patron. She would never trust blindly again, and if she was tricked once more, she was sure she would snap. Prison had taught the skills she wished she didn’t have, but she knew if this Collective betrayed her trust, she would use those skills in revenge however she could.