CLAIMED . JONES, YANA

Female

Hetero

Twenty One

05-05-1992

Russian-American

Russian and English

Anya

0.50

Claimed

Fire

None

9/10/13 by Jess

Wild Katie


Ana Johan

YOU ALREADY PUT ME IN A SPOT IN THE FIRE NATION!

Karina Lyle from Tiger and Bunny

Yana’s parents are Los Angeles Lawyers – you can just imagine the price tag on their house. While her parents are incredibly well off, Yana herself would be considered middle class. Her parents give her money into her side bank account, but she works as a dessert chef. She’s working her way up the ranks to be a world class chef so she can make the big bucks herself, but for right now she lives in a nice apartment in a middle class area that is right on the line for downtown – and a trolley ride away from work.

DETERMINED.Yana has always had health issues ever since she was a kid, and with the support of her brother and her adoptive parents, she's transferred determination to everything that she does. Once she has a goal set up in mind, it's very hard to push her away from it.

STUBBORN. But there's a line between determined and stubborn. Once Yana's made up her mind, you can't change it until you repetitively barrage her with logic and emotion. Once she's decided something, whether good or bad, there's really no way to stop her. If the appeals to her mind don't work, you may just have to tie her down to the chair until it "passes".

BUBBLY. The girl is like a fountain, always bubbling up with happiness. Yana's the type of person who will always try her hardest to be cheerful, because the world is so horribly negative that it needs all the help it can get. She tries to see the best in life, even if the world's falling down around her ears.

NAIVE. Naivety really stems from the sexual side, rather than whether that shady man in the alley way is a good or bad man.

LOYAL. If you've earned this woman's trust, you've earned it all. She'll go to the wall for you, do everything in her power to make you happy, and is the type of person who will defend you even if you're wrong. If you break that trust, Yana will forgive you... but she won't forget it. If you're family or a friend, she'll do absolutely anything to protect you.

SHORT ATTENTION SPAN. Yana has the attention span of a goldfish with shiny treasure boxes in a brand new fish tank - almost nonexistent. Unless the topic is serious, she'll flit from one thing to another, make a full circle, and start all over again because she can.

KIND & COMPASSIONATE. Yana, as mentioned above, is the type of person who's warm bubbly and tries to make other people happy. She's a nurturer and she tries her hardest to be a kind person, an understanding person. She's the person you go to with your secrets and you know she'll listen and do her best to understand.

CURIOUS. Yana has an unhealthy amount of curiosity for things. She gets her nose into things she shouldn't, like why the packing guy and the baker next door are making out in the security closet when they should be working - or why is the sky blue? How tall can she bake a cake? She's not a snooper, per say, but she's all eyes and all ears, all the time.

PEOPLE PLEASER. This girl is a people pleaser. If it makes someone else happy and doesn't cause harm to other people. She'll try her hardest... even if it makes her absolutely miserable.

DEPRESSION. All of that happy has to have an outlet, right? Every so often Yana deals with bouts of depression. She has medicine to help boost her up, but sometimes that isn't enough. When she's sad, she's downright sad and upset. She won't talk, she'll almost go through the motions like a robot until she can have a private moment to cry all of it out. Once she has, she's usually better, but sometimes she takes things too personal. She may come off as a ditz, but she's well aware of what some people think of her. Ditz, stupid blond, bimbo, slut, too stupid to do real work so she cooks - she never really got over all of the bullying she had in her high school. She internalizes her problems, and getting her to talk about them is rather difficult.




Update as of Late April in Game Time: Because of a rather traumatic experience with the supernatural in the Natural History Museum, Yana's personality has toned down considerably. She is more careful, somewhat more quiet, and quicker to judge her surroundings and the people in it. The naivety is still there, but she tries her best to be constantly aware. It's better to know than be taken by surprise.

Her fear of dinosaurs has escalated to the point that Jurassic Park is a nightmare.

Update as of May 2nd in Game Time:
After escaping from a burning mansion that had several supernatural birds on fire attacking it, Yana is rather frazzled with life. The naive and bubbly nature is diminishing quickly, being replaced with a softer and more careful approach to things. Anything out of the ordinary is considered suspicious.

Yana Jones to say the least, was a surprise baby. Not only was she a surprise to her mother who thought she could no longer have children, but she was also a surprise gift to the family that adopted her much later. Originally born as Yana Aleksandra Valeev, Yana was born to a tiny family in the Russian village of Rybushki. Her mother, Zinaida, had one child before her whom was named Ivan and would become one of the most important persons in her life.

Yana was born with congenital heart failure, a birth defect where her pulmonary valve had two small holes in the tissue, making it hard for her blood to carry oxygen. As a result, she was sick for most of her childhood. What she remembers is some vague memories of her parents and her grandmother, but the one face that remained was her older brother, Ivan. At the age of her two their parents were killed in the village along with other villagers. She was too young to understand that they had been gunned down in the streets, and to this day still does not know this fact - or why they were gunned down in the first place. Ivan took care of his younger sister, traveling with her to their grandmother's in Moscow. At the age of three, she had very vague memories of her grandmother - a spiteful old woman. She completely relied on Ivan, whom she followed like a baby chick as often as she could.

Ivan was her entire world, even though the older she got, the sicker she became. With the broken pulmonary valve in her heart, and no real doctor treatment as a child, it was a miracle that she survived her toddler years. Ivan kept her inside and warm, resting and fed so her body didn't over strain itself. Even when she did get sick he was right there at her side, no matter what. After their grandmother died, their life became rocky. Ivan went to work at eleven to make sure there was food for the both of them while she stayed with neighbors in Moscow, doing her absolute best to stay well despite the fact that she constantly felt ill. While Ivan was away, she would make him presents. Paper animals or drawings, a candle carved with his name in it, a colored shirt - anything to make him smile. The memory of her parents was a distant one, but Ivan? Ivan was her world, and the child stuck to his side like glue. Everything she could learn, she tried to absorb from Ivan, like a little sponge.

A few years passed and at six and a half, Yana's easy life with just her and Ivan was shaken by one harsh winter and a stranger being dragged in through the door. Erik Kozlov, an American spy who looked worse for wear. While he slept Yana watched the man warily, not liking the fact that Ivan had brought someone so large and scary home. When he woke up though, he left a large sum of money and a phone number, telling Ivan to call if he needed anything. As fate would have it, that number came into use. Later that night, Yana fell into a fever and collapsed while trying to go to bed and Ivan rushed her to the hospital when she started to have a breathing attack due to lack of oxygen. The doctors tried to examine her, but her body was wheezing so badly that the machines and tests didn't catch the two small holes in her heart. A cold had also been thrown into the mix and the girl lay sick in bed, crying for Ivan whenever she was conscious.

The doctors told Ivan to take her to America to be treated if he could, because their tests came back inconclusive. Ivan took up Erik's phone number and his offer, and they were arranged to go to America. The whole time Yana held onto Ivan as best she could, sleeping in his lap on the plane until they landed. At the air port waited Erik and a couple - two hopeful people who wanted Yana as their own. In exchange for the medical attention she needed, Ivan would have to let her go, and he would have to go with Erik. Ivan made the most difficult choice he ever had to make in his entire life; he let Yana go.

Yana was immediately taken to the hospital for treatment and for weeks she cried for Ivan, going so far as to trying to sneak out of her hospital room to go find him, hoping he'd be around the corner, waiting for her. The new parents of the Russian speaking girl tried their best to explain in broken Russian that they were her parents now, that they'd adopted her, and she needed surgery to get better. Yana refused it at first, but they insisted and used a key trick that her old neighbor had used many times - behave, because Ivan would want you to behave. Ivan would want you to be happy and healthy. After that, Yana didn't cause as much of a fuss, even though she still cried for him at night. The doctors gave Yana chest x-rays and MRIs and they found the two holes that had torn further open and immediately performed surgery. They reconstructed the pulmonary valve with arterioplasty and closed the two holes while opening the pathways to her lungs to be larger.

After that, her recovery went almost directly uphill. She felt better for the first time in her life, she had healthy color to her skin, and she could breath without wheezing. Yana stayed in the hospital for recovery for a week or so before she was sent home, to her newly adopted parents. At first Yana took to them shyly and slowly. Ivan had always been the outgoing barrier between her world and the outside world, and her social skills had been somewhat stunted from being cooped up in her house her entire life. But her new parents were patient, and she started to learn English. From there she began to lead a life that most kids in her old village only dreamed about. Yana was given the proper medical care she deserved and sent to school, learning English along with more of her Russian. She was given every opportunity, and eventually her crying for Ivan began to wane (much to her parents relief). Her grade school years flew by and Yana was raised to be a polite and friendly little girl. Once she got over her initial shyness, her astounding curiosity began to take over. Every person was made her friend, whether they came willing or not. She was bubbly, and for the first time since she left Ivan, she laughed again.

Ivan was never forgotten, but was a soft memory that she kept in her mind. The thought of him hurt, so she tried her hardest to be the best person she could be, because that's what Ivan would have wanted - what he told her she should do. That thought kept her going as she adjusted to her new American life and her new American parents. Middle school came and went, and Yana grew up the only child of well off lawyers in the state of California. Her parents carefully kept her sheltered, sending her to small elite private schools. Her mother in particular never wanted her to face the harsh realities of the world out there and she took great pains to make sure that Yana wouldn't have to suffer through any hardship. All of her schools were all girl schools, and she battled her own sea of insecurities while she was there. Being the naive and bubbly one, she got called all sorts of names and went through stages of being bullied at school. She transferred once or twice when it got too rough, because Yana was a push over during her younger teen years. It took her awhile before she learned how to stand up for herself and make a small niche of friends at her school.

Yana graduated from high school with a couple of scholarships to her name at Saint Mary's Academy for Young Women. With no real career path set in mind, Yana used her summer after graduation to get a few of her gen eds out of the way at a local community college before she started at UCLA. Her parents paid for a dorm her first two years at UCLA before she decided that she was going to go to culinary school. Her dream was to become a gourmet dessert chef and travel around the world, creating one famous dessert after another for a dignitary here or a prime minister there. Her parents, who had hoped she would follow in a more respectable path, sent her to a culinary school with the thought that after a few weeks of the grueling work, she'd quietly come home and ask to go back to their college of choice.

Much to their surprise, Yana took to the courses like a duck to water and jumped in head first. She loved every single moment of the grueling work from scrubbing beaters of icing to whipping Bombe filling. At twenty she found a career path that she loved and immediately started after it.

After her first semester at California Culinary School, Yana's parents bought her an apartment and leased it out for a year. She found a small internship at a bakery connected to the Hilton Hotel chain and works there four to five days of the week. When she's not baking or working at her job, she picks up extra hours as a dog sitter for the rich and influential. (You wouldn't believe how much Coco and Roxie need their doggie massages or their tails brushed.) Yana's already set her sights on her next goal; the coveted internship at the Brown Derby, a classical restaurant that caters to the whims of the rich and only opens an internship position once every two years.