LA DOTTORESSA

Parvin
The Doctor
Little Viper
Lady Mehrabi

_{virelle fun facts here !}

_{see the segments here !}

Nearly six centuries ago, there lived in the frozen north a fae named Navina Tchernyavska, one of the old beings that lingered quietly at the edges of the world, neither wholly spirit nor mortal. Among isolated villages buried beneath Snezhnaya’s endless snowstorms, her name traveled in whispers. Some called her a sorceress. Others a curse. To desperate peasants she was the strange woman in the woods who traded remedies, charms, and impossible miracles for favors better left unspecified. Livestock survived impossible winters beneath her gaze. Children vanished fevers after drinking her concoctions. Men who crossed her too boldly were later found frozen in forests with blackened veins curling beneath their skin like roots beneath ice.Whether she was benevolent or monstrous depended entirely on who was telling the story.Navina herself cared little for either reputation. Mortals fascinated her too deeply for morality to concern her much. Brief lives bred peculiar creatures, fragile, emotional, irrational, yet endlessly inventive. For decades she wandered among them beneath false names and shifting appearances, studying their habits with the same fascination another might reserve for rare insects beneath glass. Old tales spoke quietly of the serpent spirits (Vuzhalki) that lingered beneath Snezhnaya’s lakes and forests, beings whose bite carried death too fast to study.Then came the aftermath of the Cataclysm, and with it, the rise of a new Cryo Archon and her Fatui.Navina’s curiosity turned toward them almost immediately. An empire built not on devotion but ambition, fear, and calculated cruelty interested her far more than gods ever had. For years she lingered at the edges of their growing influence, drifting through distant encampments, overhearing frightened conversations from exhausted soldiers and lower-ranking attendants alike, quietly collecting rumors the way others collected jewels.One story surfaced more often than the rest.A young Fatui researcher whose mind bordered on unnatural. A man cast out by his own people, yet already leaving mutilated laboratories and brilliant atrocities in his wake.The Doctor.Intrigued, Navina eventually drew closer, appearing and disappearing through Fatui facilities beneath false names and shifting disguises, never quite belonging there, yet never fully leaving either. She expected brilliance. She did not expect someone capable of unsettling even her.By then, he had already begun obsessing over the division of the self, though the idea still existed only as unstable theory and incomplete speculation. His research bordered on impossible, which only made it more interesting to her. Unlike most mortals, he did not recoil from the unknown. He dissected it.Nor did he recoil from her for long.Navina was discovered quickly, of course. Few could conceal themselves from a mind like his forever. Yet rather than disposing of the intruder, the Doctor allowed her to remain. She understood too much too quickly, and he found her presence useful, if insufferable.Thus began a partnership that outsiders often misunderstood.They were not lovers. There was no tenderness between them, no softness, no romance hidden beneath the surface. What existed instead was something far stranger: mutual fixation between two inhuman minds incapable of leaving the other alone. They argued viciously, disappeared into joint experiments for months at a time, destroyed laboratories during philosophical disputes, and returned afterward as though nothing had happened. Many who witnessed them together assumed intimacy simply because ordinary hatred could not sustain such prolonged proximity.The truth was less comforting.Together, they pushed one another toward depths neither would likely have reached alone. In those earlier years, before Inazuma and long before the Segments fully stabilized, some of the Doctor’s more secretive pursuits briefly drifted through Navina’s hands as well: failed attempts at preservation, unnatural extensions of vitality, and certain alchemical projects whose records remained quietly scattered throughout older Fatui archives, half-forgotten beneath centuries of newer atrocities.Eventually, the Doctor departed for Inazuma pursuing research that neither Navina nor most within the Fatui fully understood at the time. When he later returned with the puppet who would become the Sixth Harbinger, his work changed rapidly. Years disappeared into increasingly obsessive experimentation surrounding consciousness, artificial identity, and the impossible architecture of the self.Navina understood enough to recognize that his ambitions were evolving faster than before. Yet while his focus increasingly shifted toward perfected replication and segmented existence, hers gradually drifted elsewhere.Creation.Not imitation. Not puppetry. Life itself.The process was grotesque even by their standards. Flesh cultivated in artificial environments. Blood refined through alchemical methods. Ruin mechanisms fused with organic tissue. Strange venoms and paralytic compounds passed between them as casually as shared notes. And at the center of it all lay something uniquely Navina’s: one of the serpentine eggs produced by her fae lineage, a thing never meant to survive outside the body of its creator. Where another being might have discarded it as malformed or infertile, she instead offered it to the experiment.The Doctor found the proposition fascinating.Years passed before the prototype stabilized. By then, his own research had already begun branching further through the creation of his Segments, aided in no small part by everything he had learned in the years following Inazuma. The project that would eventually become Virelle was no longer at the center of his ambitions.By all rational standards, she should have been abandoned as an obsolete precursor to greater successes.Navina refused.For the creature born in that laboratory was no failed prototype.She was Virelle.Raised among dissecting tables and bloodstained instruments, Virelle never knew a childhood beyond laboratory walls. To her, sharpened scalpels and anatomical diagrams were as ordinary as storybooks might have been to another child. From the moment she could walk, she followed both her creators tirelessly through their halls of experimentation, peering over operating tables with bright-eyed fascination.She did not fear pain.That, perhaps, was the cruelest thing they taught her.When needles pierced skin, she observed the reaction with curiosity rather than distress. When procedures left pale scars across her body, she traced them afterward like marks of progress. By ten years old, layers of surgical scars already covered her frame, evidence of countless modifications, corrections, and improvements. To any outsider, such treatment would have appeared monstrous.To Virelle, it was education.Navina taught her anatomy, biological manipulation, toxins, and the strange old arts mortals mistook for witchcraft. The Doctor taught machinery, ruin technology, enhancement, and the philosophy that humanity existed only to be surpassed. As the years passed and the Segments multiplied, they too became woven into the strange shape of her upbringing: some colder than others, some oddly indulgent in their own detached ways, all of them familiar enough that Virelle eventually stopped distinguishing where one influence ended and another began. Between them, they raised something elegant, intelligent, and deeply unnatural.A monster with perfect manners and blood beneath her nails.For a time, their unstable equilibrium endured.Then it shattered.By Virelle’s seventeenth year, the partnership between her creators had begun to rot from within. Their disputes, once intellectual, became increasingly venomous. Old resentments festered. Ideological differences sharpened into open hostility. Laboratories became battlegrounds for arguments neither was willing to concede.Until one night, something escaped containment.Virelle arrived only in time to witness the aftermath.Navina lay collapsed amidst spreading crimson, mortally wounded by one of the Doctor’s unstable experimental subjects during the chaos. Whether the creature acted independently, whether negligence caused the breach, or whether something far more deliberate occurred remains unclear. None present that night ever agreed upon the details.What is known is this:Virelle screamed.For the first time in years, she wept openly, throwing herself beside her mother’s body while the Doctor stood amid the carnage in dreadful silence. She demanded he help her save her. Begged him to reverse it. To fix it.And perhaps out of curiosity, guilt, or simple scientific interest, he agreed.Together they worked through the night.Virelle stitched ruined flesh with shaking hands. Replaced blood. Forced breath into failing lungs. Repaired what should not have been repairable while the Doctor watched, assisted, corrected. Dawn arrived regardless.And Navina remained dead.Virelle did not leave that laboratory broken. She left it changed.That night, standing over her mother’s corpse with bloodied hands and trembling breath, she obtained her Vision, not from grief, but from revelation.For if life could be created, then death, too, must be solvable.From that day onward, resurrection ceased to be fantasy in her mind. It became hypothesis, and thus began the obsession that would define the rest of her life.By thirty, Virelle had already accomplished what most researchers within the Fatui would never approach in multiple lifetimes: she created Segments of her own. Smaller in scale than the Doctor’s originals, more unstable in certain regards and disturbingly advanced in others, they cemented her reputation as a prodigy even among those who feared her. Some whispered that she inherited the Doctor’s brilliance. Others claimed she had surpassed parts of it entirely.Neither comparison pleased her much.Decades later, the original Zandik finally died. Age had reached him long before anything else could. By then, Virelle had already spent most of her life beside the man who raised her into something neither fully human nor wholly artificial.Afterward, something in her demeanor shifted almost imperceptibly. Not enough for most to comment upon directly, yet enough that certain assistants learned to tread more carefully around her laboratories, while conversations with some of the Segments occasionally carried an unfamiliar sharpness beneath the surface whenever the original was mentioned at all. Even so, whatever bitterness surfaced never lingered very long. They, too, had belonged to him. In their own strange way, they had helped raise her as much as he had.And yet even death refused to remain simple where the Doctor was concerned.When the events surrounding Nod-Krai unfolded and the remnants of his existence faced erasure within Irminsul itself, Virelle operated carefully from the shadows. Publicly, she maintained perfect loyalty to the Tsaritsa, feigning ignorance with the same elegance Navina once used while lurking through Fatui corridors centuries prior. Privately, however, threads of the Doctor’s final plans moved through her hands more often than anyone realized.In the end, he burned away regardless.Truly gone this time.And in the quiet aftermath that followed only months later, Virelle emerged beneath a new title.La Dottoressa.To the rest of the Fatui, her ascension appeared seamless: the natural inheritance of a brilliant successor molded beneath the Doctor’s guidance for decades. Only Virelle understood the uglier truth hidden beneath it.For every achievement tasted faintly of grief.And every triumph carried the unbearable knowledge that the one person who would have understood her completely was no longer alive to witness it.

_{virelle fun facts here !}

_{see the segments here !}