My name is Nina Velge.
And if I am alive, I shouldn't be free.
I had one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet, and then my employers went head to head in a knock-down, drag-out turf war with the biggest pack of vigilantes the world has ever known. Red shirts don't survive that shit. The folks on the ground are the first to go. The front lines, the mooks, the meat for the grinder. Most of my fellow grunts are long gone now. Some died then. Some got arrested. Some ended up in another organization later, under some chump you might have heard of named Heidegger. Yeah, THAT Heidegger. Orchestrator of the One-Day War, who tried to touch the sun and had his wings melt. More deaths there, more arrests. So many people I used to work with are now either in prison, were in prison, or are dead as a doornail.
And yet, here I am. One of the lucky ones.
Hell, I guess it makes sense. All my life I've been slipping through cracks. What's one more?
I came to Olympia in January of 2019. High school dropout. Couldn't cut it. Hated retail. And I wanted nothing to do with the military. I was young, angry at the world, and wanted to punch something. So I did what a lot of people with no direction and an itch to do some damage were doing in those days. I moved to Olympia with what I could scrape together and joined The Curse. A lot of people make a lot of assumptions about The Curse, and I'm here to tell you that it... was complicated. I'm not gonna mince words or try to defend it, it wasn't a good organization. But not everyone in The Curse was a piece of shit, though. Far from it. Take a sample of a dozen grunts and you'd get a dozen reasons for why they joined up. There were people who thought it was the easy way to riches and success. Others didn't see any other way at all. There were folks who felt they had to join for their own safety, and folks who enlisted specifically because it could be dangerous. Some wanted the thrills of operating outside the law. Some thought Plague and his friends at the top were visionaries. Some drank the Kool-Aid and thought Olympia would legitimately be better with The Curse in charge.
Some just wanted to watch the world burn.
I was kind of in the middle. I wanted to make an impact in a way that the establishment didn't like. I've never been great at toeing the line. Got in trouble at school a lot, especially once I hit my teens. One day I got sick of it and walked out and that was the end of it. So I wound up in The Curse, as a Shrapnel. The recruiter, a bitch with hair that writhed like a snake and skin as pale as a fish's underbelly, asked me which division I thought I'd be most useful in. I looked at 'em. Asked a couple questions.
And, because I was really damn stupid, I picked InGen.
