Helena Diederich

Helena Diederich is, at the start of Purgatory, an eighteen-year-old freshman attending Centrest College.  She is of Hispanic descent on her mother's side, and her grandmother was second generation American.  Spanish was never enforced when she was growing up despite her mother's infatuation with their heritage, but she knows enough of the language to communicate effectively.

She typically preferred her hair past her shoulders and kept herself well groomed.  Makeup was never an interest of hers, and neither was fashion.  She kept things very simple which allowed her to meld into the crowd.  She is an introvert by nature, preferring closed gatherings with only her friends.

Her childhood best friend was Naddia Holiday.  Up until her death they were inseparable and would investigate the paranormal in secret.  Their first encounter with a ghost took place in the town hall of an old country town, which was also their first encounter with each other.  Their last encounter together was in an abandoned home they came across in the woods where things got particularly violent.  The house was littered with photographs, all with one person's head cut out or stabbed through.  There was graffiti on the walls and broken glass strewn about.  Helena picked up one of the photographs to take a better look and immediately a shrill cry echoed through the old home.  When they tried to run, they found that the windows and the doors were locked, and at one point Naddia was knocked down.  They finally found a broken window to escape from.  The only injury sustained was a bruise around Naddia's arm that appeared in the shape of a hand that held her at a tight grip.

Purgatory did not take a real interest in Helena until after Naddia's death.  The two girls were constantly together, so Naddia's presiding Observer or Guardian would, at times, include Helena in their reports.  Purgatory wanted to see if Helena would continue to see the paranormal without Naddia's presence.  It wasn't long until Helena began to notice the black silhouettes in her peripheral.  It was always ethereal, like a fuzzy black spot in her eye, to which she complained about constantly until she noticed how it moved.  Optometrists would never find anything wrong with her eyes or her vision, so her mother wondered if it was something psychological due to the trauma of her best friend's death.  Nothing could explain the figure, however, and eventually she began to notice it less and less.  Purgatory had never stopped observing her, and it wasn't until her senior year in high school that she was assigned a Guardian.

The Idea Evolves

When the idea of an underworld society secretly protecting the world came about, I then invented Purgatory as the name of its headquarters.  Those part of the society were at first dubbed "Purgators" but I felt it was too campy, so I went with the idea that the armor made them invisible, and thus they became ghosts.  Where the world thought they were experiencing echoes of the past or trapped souls, it was actually the armored warriors of Purgatory.

Originally, the idea was intended for a game that I knew I'd never create.  I was really into Mass Effect and Fallout 3 at the time, and thought the story would definitely suit that medium best.  But I knew it also wasn't innovative enough to catch anyone's interest in creating it to the scale I thought best.  The idea remained with gaming in mind for whatever reason.

I pushed the idea aside to focus on school for a while.  Every now and then an idea would pop into my mind, such as the idea of those within Purgatory being there against their will.  I wanted a better reason than the evil overlords threatening the lives of the people they loved.

Eventually, the woman behind the visor was given a face, and as soon as I completed it I sat back and knew her name was Helena.  She was inspired by a woman I went to school with who not only had a really cool heritage, but expressed herself less feminine than I ever did, and yet still kept a womanly presence.  She usually kept her hair short, and one time she styled it in a really cool faux hawk.

I had just completed a Classics of Science Fiction class, and I remember my professor speaking about an author who only wrote female leads in a not so typical form.  I wish I could remember the author's name, because I found the idea really neat.  I was so used to the mindset that only heroes could captivate an audience, and the idea of a woman being herself and still be interesting enough to read about interested me.  I wanted to create a character like that, and I knew Helena could be that.

Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series greatly influenced the initial concept of Helena.  I love how FemShep was a leader everyone was willing to stand by, and no matter how you played her either.  As tempting as the idea was, I did not want to make Helena a willing leader, or impose leadership onto her.  I wanted to take a stance to show that there can be interesting female leads who aren't leaders.  I wanted to make her more relateable and less of a daydream.

After I graduated, landing a job was difficult.  I did little odd things like making necklaces and selling them on ebay, or taking art commissions in exchange for a little money, but I could never find a work place that would hire me.  I debated on the idea of turning Helena's story into a web comic, even though I know very little of sequential art.  My husband had told me about the success of a lot of web comic artists out there and how their sites gain revenue through adds.  I hit a roadblock as soon as I realized this story was set in a futuristic city, and I was terrible at drawing backgrounds at that time.

Two years passed before I finally sat myself down and began to write it all out.  I wanted it to be only one book, because I felt like sequels are too forced in today's entertainment.  It was a mindset I had adopted after watching some of Christopher Nolan's works.  I loved how the stories he told all came to a lovely close at the end, and that he never really pushed for sequels.  I wanted that in at least this story, but I became too immersed in the lore.  It started to unfold more like LOST as I began to write it all out, and I was concerned that I'd have more questions than answers at the end.

While I feel Purgatory does come to a close and that it wasn't completely open-ended, there were still questions I left that I just wanted to answer.  One book became two, and now the idea has unfolded to three.  There is an idea for an innovative perspective on a game involving the start of the Purgatory program, and I've also debated on writing short stories about the other characters.  I feel like I've gotten carried away.

The Beginning

I was never much of a writer to begin with, even though I enjoyed the activity.  It was another creative outlet when I couldn't put everything I wanted to in a sketchbook.  I am firstly an artist in the visual sense, and the stories bloom from there.  With each piece created comes a background and a life and a whole epic that lives within my mind.  I'm usually content in keeping the stories to my self, and even if I would try to write the stories of my characters, I would never complete it.

For some reason it was different for the story of Helena Diederich.  The story of Purgatory began in the Starbucks section of a Barnes & Nobel in Atlanta, Georgia.  I had just finished my classes for the day at Savannah College of Art and Design, and I believe Halo 3 had come out the September before.  I had brought my sketchbook with the intent of drawing from the thing that inspired me most; concept art books from games.  The two books I took with me to the cafe section were the art books from The Force Unleashed and Halo 3.

In that time, I was more fantasy based with my work.  I drew a lot of dragons and medieval inspired costumes, but I was so in love with science fiction it frustrated me that I could not imagine it so well.

I sketched out a lot of various ideas and concepts that were typically armored themed.  It was the first time in a while I drew someone from a different universe I had not already created in my mind, and it was also the first time I had created someone without knowing what their face looked like.  I ran out of paper space, sadly, and could not complete the armor.  It was heavily influenced by what I had seen in Halo, even from what I had remembered seeing while playing the other two games.

After I drew her, I sad back and began to wonder what her story was.  I was unsure if I should go the Hero of the Galaxy route since my inspiration came from that very story.  I spent a good amount of the rest of my time there sipping my coffee and forming her story and imagining what she would do with all the things I had drawn on her.

I wanted to break out of the typical science fiction mold I was drawn to, which was either Steampunk related or space travel related.  The paranormal was still science fiction, but I wasn't sure how this concept would fit with a world like that.

That night I had a conversation with my roommate about ghosts and possible encounters.  She had far more interesting stories and accounts and even some visual evidence than I did.  The only things close to possible paranormal encounters for me happened in my childhood.

When I was very young, I had a room to myself.  I remember several times waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a black silhouette.  I would tell my mom that he would watch me sleep.  There was one time I woke up after a nightmare and was face to face with the figure as if it were crouched at my bedside, its fingers resting on my mattress.  My mom said it was likely just my cat, and for me at my age I toss it off as my overactive imagination at work.

There was one Halloween night my sister and I were playing a game called Horse.  It was essentially my sister was the horse, and I would be the rider and hold onto her shirt like reigns and we'd gallop through the house.  The first floor of my parents house was all either connected or open, which made for the perfect riding course.  My sister led me through the back rooms, only to stop in my parents' bedroom by the window.  Suddenly, she ran from the room screaming, and I followed after her in confusion.  She claimed she had seen the ghost of a man we'd never met; our great grandfather.  If I remember correctly, she said he talked to her as well.  I saw nothing, and I don't know if my sister will ever claim it was true or not.

My mother also says that numerous people who have been in the house when no one else was there could hear the sound of people talking.  She said there was a male and a female that were both adult sounding, but there was also the voice of a child.  It always came from the room I used to be in, but once my brothers were born it became theirs.  Sometimes my brothers would leave their radio on during the day after they went off to school, which could attest to the voice.  We wondered about the child, though.  Back when I was in first grade a kid in my class had died in a car accident on his way to school at the end of my road.

My father once told me some theory about echos in time when he had mentioned an encounter he had once. It was in the house of a family friend, and he said he could hear the door open and close and footsteps going into the kitchen, but when he looked there was no one there.

In my later years I always had difficulties getting into the paranormal or the fantastical in terms of believing it, but I loved the stories that came with it.  I wanted to present a different take on it all.  A "what if."  I love conspiracy theories as well, even though I do not believe in them.  I wanted to tell a story that would be relateable and also make others believe that maybe it could be something.  And that's where it all began.