Stats[]
Ida in her Academy uniform.
Age: 27
Birthday: 2nd June 1983
Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Grey
Species: Human
Likes: Lydia, archery, first-person shooters, pinball, skiing, snowball fights, provoking Vash, throwing people out windows if they annoy her.
Dislikes: getting up early, lazy people, werewolves, liars.
History[]
Ida was raised in a loving home with a caring family, her mother, father, grandmother and grandfather all living under one roof with her. Despite despairing over her tomboy-ish ways (she was either up a tree or rolling around in mud during her childhood) they doted on their little girl and only daughter. She took up archery after her grandfather left her his bow in his will. She was 8 years old at the time, and was too small to hold it, but determined to use it one day. She practiced for hours, shooting at trees and then moving targets her dad set up for her. She joined the Prague Archery club at 10 and practiced long after the sessions finished. She wanted to be worthy of the bow her grandfather gave her.
On the way home from practice one November evening, she noticed the front door of her house hanging open. Her grandmother was extremely paranoid about security, so this was very strange indeed. She crept carefully into the house, noting the furniture strewn about everywhere. Her fears were realised when she saw movement at the top of the stairs. She dived into the study, hiding around the corner as someone - a theif! - walked down the stairs. Something thudded on the steps behind him. He was probably dragging a sack of all their stuff. Ida felt anger burn in her chest. She had to do something. She had to protect her home.
Reaching to the side, she picked up her grandfather's bow from it's display holder, as well as three arrows. The thief had moved from the hall, down towards her grandmother's bedroom, which was on the ground floor since she couldn't manage the stairs any more. Through the dark halls she crept, silent as the breeze outside that pushed the clouds over the full moon. Light shone through the windows, and as she looked through the door, she saw the man looming over her grandmother's bed.
And that was no sack he was dragging with him. That was Ida's mother.
Her arrow flew through a red haze, and the man unleashed a howl like some kind of wild creature. Grandmother jolted awake, and screamed at what she saw. The man, with an arrow sticking out of his shoulder, twisted in the moonlight, fur growing where skin was, bones cracking and groaning as they shifted, snarls ripping through increasingly larger, pointer teeth. A car-sized wolf stood in the bedroom, and it was angry. Ida's second arrow missed in her terror, and as the wolf jumped over the bed towards her, she ran for her life. She ran out the back door, into the large garden, but without the twists and turns of the hallways to slow it down, the wolf caught up with her, massive claws raking down her back and knocking her into a tree. The pain was immense, but still she kept her grip on Grandfather's bow. The wolf roared at her, and just as it did, Ida shakily fired her last arrow. It went straight into the wolf's throat, stopping only once it was sticking out the back of it's head. The werewolf collapsed, and Ida fell unconscious.
Ida came to in a private ward in a hospital she didn't recognise. Every movement was agony; even breathing hurt. Eventually it was explained to her that she'd been mauled by a bear, but that was stupid. She knew what she'd seen. A man had transformed into a wolf, right in front of her, and she'd killed it. Unfortunately, the wolf or bear or whatever it was had also killed her mother and father. Her Grandmother, though still alive, was traumatised and had become unresponsive, vegetative. Ida herself stubbornly refused to believe what she was told about the bear, to the point where she was also branded as traumatised and sectioned off. She told herself it was the truth, so many times that she gave herself a verbal tick, "prav", which means "truth" in Czech.
That is, until one day a priest came in, with a wide friendly smile and an outstretched hand. He said he believed her, and that he was very impressed that she'd fought off a werewolf all on her own, even if it hadn't actually died. He offered her a place in the Young Hunters Academy, where she could hone her already considerable skills, and perhaps one day find that same werewolf who killed her parents and serve justice to it. Ida gleefully accepted.
At the Academy she met her best friend, Lydia Biely, and the two immediately hit it off, sitting next to each other in class. By the second year of their studies, the two were room-mates, and completely inseperable. They trained together, ate together, studied together. Even before they had graduated, they were known by the nickname Czechoslovakia, Lydia coming from Slovakia and Ida Czech Republic, thus completing the historical in-joke.
Once they'd left the academy, they refused to be put on seperate teams. Considering that the Hunters generally work in groups anyway, and valued teamwork and co-operation highly, nobody made any move to refute them. They worked mainly from the Slovakian Hunter's base just outside of Bratislava, originally quite an obscure location despite Eastern Europe's notoriously high concentration of supernatural beings. But with teamwork, Lydia and Ida rose out of the masses and soon became notorious for their success rate. In 2003, Ida pledged to rid her home country, the Czech Republic, of werewolves in their entirety within the decade. Many dismissed it as impossible; Czech Republic was practically infested.
But Lydia believed she could do it, which gave Ida the confidence she needed. By 2008, the werewolves were gone. Not a single one attempted to cross the border into the Czech Republic any more, for fear of Ida Dusek's "silver fingers". But it's not enough. She still hasn't found the one that killed her parents. One day, she plans to hunt him down specifically, but she has a debt to the order to repay first, not to mention Lydia's own goals to complete.