Nadia Chen
The Frost Smuggler
- Health
- 32
- Stamina
- 8
- Age
- 38looks 44
"The cold doesn't care about your doctrine or your debts. It just takes."
Passive
Your cards with the Ranged Attack keyword have +1 Piercing Attack (deals at least 1 Damage, even if blocked).
Loadout
Who they are
Nadia was fourteen when she was ejected, a teenage apprentice in Elias's logistics office who remembers the domes' sterile gardens as her childhood. Twenty-four winters on the high passes have taken whatever that childhood gave her body: at thirty-eight she looks well past forty, with fine lines scored into her ruddy, wind-burned, golden-undertone skin and observant, cautious dark-brown eyes squinting permanently against snow glare beneath frosted lashes. She stands 170 cm and a lean, wiry 58 kg with a forward-leaning, sure-footed mountain runner's balance. A horizontal scar crosses the bridge of her nose from a frozen cable snap; she bears no tattoos. Her raven-black chin-length bob is swept back beneath a fur-lined watch cap, with scuffed black wraparound snow goggles, their lens edged and their strap striped in mustard-yellow, pushed up on her forehead; the cap is charcoal knit lined with bone-white fleece. She wears the quilted oxblood arctic expedition parka with charcoal canvas yokes and coyote-fur hood trim over the mustard-ochre cable-knit sweater, charcoal insulated winter trousers with mustard-faced knee pads, and black crampon-compatible boots laced in mustard cord, a bandolier of tungsten-core .30-30 rounds across her chest and her gyro-stabilized .30-30 on her back. A sleeve-sprung holdout pistol rides hidden in her left parka sleeve, and the heavy Caldera Longbore waits cached in the rocks below the Crater Rim. In her right parka cuff she keeps a leather roll of paralytic hand darts, finger-length steel needles thrown from arm's reach, and the limb one finds finishes its swing and then stops answering for a while.
She lives on the move between the Morozov Alpine Caldera and the outer shelters, a declared traitor with a Syndicate bounty on her head, still grieving Mara. She fights to keep the winter route open, carrying grain, copper wire, and medicine to the grey-rot shelters and rations to Wei Lin's Vault, and to stay one step ahead of Elias's assassins.
The years before
Year0
The Gardens
"I was fourteen when they put me out. I remember the gardens inside: sterile, white, watered to a schedule. Outside there was mud, and Elias Thorne's logistics office, and I was good with figures. He took me on."
Nadia Chen
Year0
The Last Ration Card
"In the logistics office Jesse Holt taught me to carry a figure without rounding it. On the evacuation ramps he pressed his last ration card into my hand and was gone in the crowd. I did not see him again for nine years."
Nadia Chen
Year9
The Missing Valve
"A copper valve went missing from a container block. Elias shut their water until it came back. Every day I copied his figures: rations withheld, days without. When he entered the dead beside them, I put down the pen and walked out."
Nadia Chen
Year23
The Clean Snow
"Toby Vance fell to his knees in the first clean snow of his life and asked me if the machines had let us back in. He had never seen the sky. I had: I grew up under one. I turned my face into the gale so the boy would not see an old-worlder weep."
Nadia Chen
Year23
The Decoy Caches
"On the Scree Slopes Toby Vance buried rusted scrap under the avalanche tripods so Elias Thorne's hunters would dig in the wrong snow. He lied to the Syndicate as easily as breathing. Then he began to lie to me."
Nadia Chen
Year23
The Longbore Cache
"Elias Thorne's hunters followed me up the passes and came back frostbitten or not at all. For the ones who hunted me longest I climbed to the cleft below the Crater Rim, unwrapped the Longbore and laid everything else I carried on the rocks."
Nadia Chen
Year24
The Ridge Road
"Three days I watched the ridge road through the scope. Jesse Holt stood on it alone, bare-headed, his militia pulled back to the Dynamo Shack. I slung the rifle and walked up the road to him."
Nadia Chen
Year24
The Terms at the Tap
"Elias turned the valve wheel, shut the standpipes of the grey-rot shelters, and had the terms read at every dry tap: the water for the traitor, in person. He chose the one thing I could not watch twice. I came down off the Caldera in four days."
Nadia Chen
Pack 2 · Commander Jesse Holt vs Nadia Chen
All five packs