Medeya Voronina

"What happened to us? What happened to our future? What kind of world am I leaving to my twin girls?"

―Medeya Voronina wondering about the fate of her Brotherhood, 1991.

Medeya Sergeyevna Voronina (died 20 March 2014) was a member and later Mentor of the Russian Assassins who worked as a scientist in an Assassin cell based in the old Assassin naukograd (lit. "science city") of Protvino outside Moscow. She was the mother of the twins Galina and Avdotya Voronina.

Biography

Life in Protvino

"We had hoped to return to our roots, but now our own Mentor is dead. Suddenly, we are aimless, without vision. Without a strong leader, we are losing influence with our government, and funding is drying up."

―Voronina, on the Brotherhood after Stalin's assassination, 1953.

Living in one of the Assassin science cities, facilities provided by the Russian Academy of Sciences for research, Medeya Voronina saw the Russian Brotherhood struggle to regain its footing after World War II and Joseph Stalin's regime. Without their Mentor, they were left aimless and started to lose influence in the government, as well as funding for their projects. In July 1953, Medeya found her mother's old journal and decided to write in it from then on.

William giving Medeya the Animus plans

In 1977, while stealing animals from the Moscow zoo to use for testing, she witnessed a man being chased by Templar footsoldiers and decided to intervene. After having killed the men, she was surprised to find their quarry was an Assassin, an American called William. As thanks, William gave her blueprints of the Animus, which he had stolen from Abstergo Industries, and asked her to construct the device before the Templars could. He then had her promise to keep him informed about their progress.

As William made to leave, she asked him how she would be able to contact him. William told her they would use their present location, the footbridge between the zoo's old and new properties, as a meeting place, instructing her to come during full moon if she ever needed him. Still confused, Medeya asked him how he would know whether or not she had been there. William revealed there was another Assassin cell within the city, surprising the Russian Assassin, who had been unaware of this. As he was to meet said cell shortly, William then departed.

Medeya was unable to understand what exactly she had been asked to build, and was hampered by a lack of resources in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. Even after more than a decade, she and her allies understood very little about the Animus, with the few subjects that had used it emerging as madmen. As a result, most of her fellow Assassins failed to see the use of the project, desiring to either weaponize it or abandon it altogether. Not wanting to create even more victims, she chose to be the machine's sole test subject, causing her sanity to be slowly frayed away by the Bleeding Effect.

Descent into madness

"One by one, she forces the last of us into her machine in her desperate quest to save us and our cause."

―Avdotya Voronina, 2013.

In late December 2012, a sudden power surge occurred while Medeya was in the Animus, causing her to experience what she thought was a vision of Eve. Believing it to be a sign, she doubled her efforts and began forcing the remaining members of her cell into the machine. Her desperation pushed her to continue, disregarding the fact that one by one, she was driving her comrades insane. By late June 2013, her two daughters were the only sane individuals within the compound, with the maddened Assassins having been sealed away in another part of the facility.

On 28 June, the deranged Assassins began amassing near Medeya's lab, seemingly waiting for something. Simultaneously, the Russian government announced its plans to dissolve the Russian Academy of Sciences and replace it with a "public-governmental" agency with the same name after taking control of its remaining properties and merging it with the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences under the newly-made Federal Agency for Scientific Organizations' authority. Driven to despair, Medeya forced her daughters into the Animus, clinging to the hope that it might save their cause. Out of the two, only Galina emerged relatively unscathed from the machine and would subsequently learn the skills of her ancestors through the Bleeding Effect.

Due to her brittle state of mind, Medeya was eventually possessed by Juno, who had been lurking inside the facility's computer network ever since her release from the Grand Temple. Galina later escaped the compound and enlisted the help of Gavin Banks, Emmanuel Barraza, and Emmett Leary from the Assassin ship Altaïr II, asking them to assassinate her mother. On 20 March, they entered the laboratory in Protvino, where Galina almost single-handedly killed all the remaining Russian Assassins, including her twin Avdotya.

The Assassins then broke into Medeya's lab, finding her strapped to the Animus and babbling about a lost husband and the Grey, while images of Juno appeared on monitors on a nearby wall. Medeya was subsequently put out of her misery when Galina plunged her Hidden Blade into her mother's brain. At the same time, Juno screamed and disappeared from the monitors.

Trivia

• Medeya is the Russian form of the Greek and Georgian name Medea, meaning "intelligent" or "cunning."
• There are certain parallels between Medeya and the Greek mythological figure, Medea. In the Greek myths, Medea was abandoned by her husband, Jason, causing her to kill their children in retaliation. However, one of the children, Thessalus, managed to escape, while his twin, Alcimedes, died, mirroring the fates of Medeya's daughters.
• If Sergei is Medeya's father, her latest possible date of birth would have been 1926, which would have made her at least 56 or 57 when her daughters were born in 1983.