Boyana Luben

Brian O'Reilly's Retainers

Sobriquet: Anna.

Appearance: Boyana stands 5 foot, 9 inches tall when she is barefoot. However she prefers to wear dark professional looking athletic shoes which make the long hours she spends on her feet bearable, and far more practical should she need to chase a suspect or flee a dangerous situation. She wears her dark, lustrous Bulgarian hair a few centimeters past shoulder length, usually loose and despite all her efforts, a bit disheveled. Her gray eyes are as dark and stormy as the peaks of the Balkan Mountains where she was born. Her face is narrow with a fey cast, beautiful but bitter, like the dark elves of Slavic legend. Boyana's build is distinctly athletic which she maintains with a daily routine of exercise learned in the Bulgarian army. She loves to wear pinstriped silk suits sans tie with long-sleeved white business shirts and her customary fedora pulled down low over her eyes. Her only concession to femininity are her painted fingernails which she keeps short and neat. Her voice is naturally husky and made more so by years of smoking, which she has given up for the habit of chewing gum, which she does with a vengeance, especially when stressed. Boyana wears a small arsenal in the form of a 9mm Arcus 98DA pistol slung beneath her left arm, pepper spray and a small taser carried in alternating jacket pockets, a small combat knife strapped to her right calf and a backup Makarov in a mesh holster located in the small of her back. She only wears body armor when expecting trouble.

Behavior: Anna is highly intelligent and well educated in the practical arts of investigation and police procedure. Unfortunately she can be gruff and taciturn with more than a little sarcasm, these natural tendencies are curbed by an intense professionalism and by rare bouts from a well hidden but healthy sense of humor. Anna is naturally alert which is heightened by well earned caution. She never enters a building without identifying all the exits and she usually has an exit strategy for every situation. Likewise, when she enters a public place she carefully looks over every single person and makes note of their locations, general appearance and what they are doing at the moment of her entry. These deeply ingrained habits are made easier by a trick of memory that allows her to recall all that she sees and hears with perfect clarity. While a lifetime of security work in an impoverished former Soviet nation has left her dubious of human nature, she is in general a positive person with a strong survival instinct. Undetected by most people, Anna possesses an adventurous imagination that allows her to transcend the day-to-day tedium of security work. She loves old black and white films, science fiction and like all Bulgarians, a good round of drinks.

History: Boyana was born in 1978. Her father was a local constable and his wife the daughter of a local farmer. Boyana was actually born in the same house as her father in the village of Babintsi, just outside of Teteven in Bulgaria. The village was small, but the family regularly traveled to Teteven to obtain groceries and other necessities. Otherwise, Boyana and her mother stayed in the small village, where they cleaned, cooked and managed a garden behind the old house. The constable, her father, worked in Teteven ensuring the security of the small city. But he was killed during rioting that occurred with the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s. The death of Boyana's father profoundly affected her and her mother, who was devastated with her husband. Without her husband's income, Anna's mother was forced to rely on her meager skills in farming and that process aged her beyond her actual years.

The final years of Anna's primary education passed in a painfully quiet way and when the chance to enter secondary education in Sofia arrived, she jumped at the chance. Her mother once again began to grieve, for in losing Boyana, she was losing the last bit of her beloved husband and the short years of happiness they had shared. While Boyana loved her mother, she simply couldn't stand the quiet country life any longer and with the selfishness of youth she left for university in Sofia. The first year of Anna's studies went well, and she took a summer job in the big city, made friends and partied hard. Academically her second year in university didn't turn out so well, but socially she was blossoming with a number of potential lovers and better jobs opening up as her social skills improved. Unfortunately that was when she fell in with the wrong crowd, in this case the Bulgarian mafiya and their groupies. That year taught her a number of tough life lessons and gifted her with some useful, if illegal skills and a couple scars.

Her academic failure led to enforced financial independence and rather than go home to village life, she cast about for work that would keep her in the capital. For a year she moved from one minor job to the next without finding a career. Her university friends slipped away, moving in different circles, graduating or returning to whatever life they had before university. Anna frequently moved into smaller apartments until she was living in little more than a large closet in a 19th century building owned by a slumlord who housed his tenants ten or twenty to an apartment. Desperate for anything that wasn't pure drudgery or prostitution, she joined the Bulgarian army. She went through the equivalent of boot-camp for women and signed up for training in security work. Within a year she had her own quarters and was trained to handle firearms, dogs and drunken superior officers. Despite her skill and ambition, she hit the glass-ceiling fairly quickly and unwilling to sleep her way forward through the ranks she was relegated to a relatively stagnant position in military security doing female detention work. With only a limited career available in the chauvinist military of Bulgaria, she finished her bid in an unremarkable fashion and reentered private life to pursue police work.

Boyana found the police academy to be both different and familiar, in both positive and negative ways. The academy grouped her with like minded individuals of a similar age, but was run by the 'old guard'. While there was more room for advancement in police work for women than in the army, many of the same stereotypes held sway.

Boyana is a 35 year old, female police officer; she is a seven year veteran of Sofia's growing homicide department. She grew up wanting to be a police officer and spent every extra bit of her time preparing for that eventuality; she is one of Bulgaria’s most highly rated female marksman and competes each year for standing and occasionally prizes. Circa 2016 I use her influence very sparingly, as the senechel in the city keeps direct control of the police. She is now a senior Detective and we speak about every two weeks. She understand that she will need to start using makeup or something similar to show signs of age. We have spoken about what she wants to do in the next decade or so. She plans to continue her career until she can no longer hide and then move to my personal service. When the changes in Bulgaria and her domitor's absence became too much to bear, Boyana emigrated. She now works in London as a private detective with only one real client.

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