FIDELIA

ELISSA / CST OR AWST

[break]FATE ZERO, arturia pendragon

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Anna Sullivan





Captain Sullivan; Cap; Fidelia





Enhanced human (supersoldier)





Actually 97, appears around 23-24 or so





June 30th, 1919





Baltimore, MD





Female





Cis lady

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Really, Anna’s just lucky military nurses don’t have to subscribe to quite the same types and rigors of discipline as the doctors do, and the doubly lucky that Fidelia had to worry about that even less. She’d have made a terrible soldier.



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She’s brave, yes, and intelligent enough to make important decisions on the battlefield, and impassioned enough to fight to the death if she has to (and she always, always enters the fight knowing she may yet have to). But she’s also stubborn as a mule, and not particularly good at taking orders, least of all if she doesn’t know who or where they’re coming from. And the instant she things she’s laid eyes on injustice, boom, out come the fiery eyes and the fiery speeches and her fists, should she have to use them. And her shield, too, later.



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And, seasoned veteran though she may be, torn out of time and place though she may be, a killer though she may have been at times, and though she may yet be in the future, she’s never quite managed to lose that idealism that led her to the recruiting office in the first place, that feeling that there really is something beautiful and worth protecting in this country she loves, in its people, and in its grand ideas. And she’s never lost that spark of kindness, either, the caring that led her to become a nurse, and then later that keeps her up at night with the ghosts of those she’s killed for the government, either by her intention or by her failure to save them.



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So, a good person, maybe even a good hero, yes. But a truly terrible soldier. And she’s beginning to think maybe what the Initiative wants isn’t heroes, good or otherwise -- it’s soldiers.







It starts like this: at the height of summer in 1919, in a tiny rowhouse in Baltimore, Maryland, a little girl is born who will one day change the world. It also starts like this: Anna Sullivan is born screaming her head off to anyone who will listen, and she doesn’t stop until she goes into the ice.



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Maybe that’s not quite fair; she grows up an introvert, more interested in sitting and watching and drawing than hanging out with the other girls, mostly. She’s drawn, too, to the boys her age; not because she likes them any better than the girls, or because of any early childish ideas of romance, but because to her it’s clear that they’re full of potential, in ways no one seems to think she’s allowed to be. And when she realizes that, she can’t seem to keep quiet anymore.



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Anna makes it to 18 with her knees permanently scraped, her frame narrower and scrawnier than it should be thanks to a never-ending host of childhood ailments that follow her into her adult life, and more ideas about where she’s going to go and what she’s going to do than reality can suffice to hold. She finds work where she can and tries to save the money to go to art school. But when America goes to war less than four years later, she doesn’t stop to think -- she follows in the footsteps of her late mother, who was a nurse for twenty years, and enlists as a nurse. She’s in training to begin her duties, and set to be assigned to the front lines in Europe, when she’s tapped for an entirely different kind of training.



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She wasn’t Fidelia at first. The supersoldier serum came with an advancement in rank, and at first, while she was in combat training and through her first few missions, she was just Captain Sullivan, or Cap to those who knew her best. But it’s easier to market a brightly-colored alias than a girl from Baltimore, so when her duties started to expand from secret weapon to the occaisional promotional material or propaganda for the folks at home, she went from being Anna Sullivan to being Cap to being Fidelia, guardian of freedom and justice and apple pie and whatever else it was the American people wanted her to guard. Their hope, mostly. Their ideals, their determination.



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But even Fidelia had her limitations. She took one mission too many and ended up crash-landing into the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean, frozen under the ice for seventy long years until an Initiative research crew fulfilled the long-running American ambition of finding her and thawing her out. Thus she joined the Initiative by default -- and because at the time, she was too overwhelmed by everything happening around her to disagree. But the perfect soldier she is not, and as she’s settled more and more into the modern world, she’s bowed to authority less and less.

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The supersoldier serum had myriad advantages and side-effects: the short, scrawny, sickly Anna Sullivan became Fidelia, a 5’10” built-like-a-brick-shithouse warrior who is impervious to most diseases, many poisons, and a wide variety of injectable and inhalable substances, including alcohol and pretty much all illegal drugs, not that she’s gone around and tried them all out, mind you. Along with the fact that combat training and active military missions, and, in the modern day, Initiative training and missions keep her in damn good shape, the serum enhanced her strength, speed, reflexes, and endurance beyond natural human ability. In addition, the serum made her bones harder and her muscles more dense, thus making her overall much more durable than a baseline human.







Anna has about 90% of a 1940s-era combat medical certification, so a very good (if a bit dated) grasp of field medicine, and when she was selected for the super soldier program instead she entered intense combat and weapons training that left her an expert in hand-to-hand combat and a good shot, though by no means a sharp-shooter or sniper.







The serum essentially halted Anna’s aging process; she has aged only very slightly since, and a large part of that is believed to be the physical effect less of time and more of the stress her body was under when she was iced for around 70 years. Essentially, her cells are so durable that they do not experience aging as a normal person’s might -- the phrase “perfect cells” gets tossed around from time to time. No one knows if she’ll maintain her youth forever, or age very slowly, or perhaps suddenly age all at once. One thing is for sure, though: this doesn’t mean she’s immortal. A gunshot, an effective poison, a fire, or any other conceivable physical harm could still kill her. She just won’t likely die of old age.







Anna’s tactical brilliance was built through mission after mission of hard-won experience, not through any particular training she went through. She was always bright, but military employment and, eventually, leadership brought her strategic thinking ability to the forefront and honed it until she could make beautiful tactical calls in a split-second on the battlefield. But, of course, this ability depends on her full understanding of the powers and abilities of whoever she is working with and whoever she’s fighting against.







Fidelia’s icon was always the shield, employed in the staunch defense of American justice, naturally. Anna can throw it, block with it, beat people over the head with it, break or even cut items with it depending on their make, and do any means of other tasks as the situation may require. Hundreds of hours of training and dozens and dozens of combat mission combine to make her accuracy with the shield very nearly perfect.