**Name:
**
Sarin Aboev
**Alias:**
Shade
**Age:**
17
**Sponsor:**
Black Canary
**Personality:**
Sarin is disciplined. She sticks to plans and does so without complaint. She's quiet and contemplative. With her, there's no beating around the bush with difficult topics of conversation; she's direct. She has little patience for people who bemoan challenges or following a goal.
**Powers:**
Shade has no superpowers, but is extremely well trained in kyūdō (Japanese martial art of archery) and khridoli (Georgian martial art). She's keen with a bow and has a small arsenal of trick arrows including rope arrows, bolo arrows, anchor arrows and smoke arrows. Her bow, a long relex bow, is made of an extremely dense material that prevents damage and makes it a viable weapon alongside a curved blade with a length between a short-sword and a dagger. She speaks Russian, Georgian, Ossetian, Japanese and English fluently and is passable in Chinese.
**Weaknesses:**
She lacks any sort of healing aspect that other heroes may have, meaning she's vulnerable to wounds. While strong, she's also rather slight so those villains who have a size advantage on her may find it easy to pin her in isolation.
Sarin also has a weak spot for people who are struggling to survive under threat of some power such as a mafia or gang and will make an effort to put a stop to it without hesitating, which could distract her from a true goal.
Moreover, though Black Canary is her sponsor, their relationship is tenuous because of Sarin's original trainer and mentor, Shado, who caused turmoil in the Canary's relationship with Green Arrow. Sarin, however, sees this turmoil to be the result of ill placed jealousy and a sign of weakness.
**Appearance:**
Sarin is petite. She stands at 5' 3" and 110lbs and has endowment to match. She has thick, jet black hair that she keeps at about chin length. She has heterochromia, with one eye being brown and the other being an icy blue. On her left side, under her arm, she has a tattoo of the proverb "Mze abnele ghomes
ar abraleb" -- "Do not blame the sun for the darkness of the night".
She wears a skin tight, but armored black suit with a leather shoulder guard and quiver over her right shoulder, and a hood with a face mask. She has a thumb ring with a string catch that's made from lapis lazuli, matching the color of her blue eye and providing accuracy in release when firing arrows. Her bow is a tall relex bow made from an unknown material that keeps it unbroken and provides an amount of drawstring force that rivals most high tech compound bows. At her hip, she wears a belt with a hilt for her blade. Her black gloves are reinforced at the knuckle with with mercury sealed in pockets in the leather, working like brass knuckles and her boots are steel-toed.
**Brief Bio:**
Sarin was born and raised in rural Georgia near the town of Mleta in the region of South Ossetia. Her mother and father were proud Ossetian nationalists and passed on this trait in lessons to her and her siblings. When she was fourteen, a caravan from Russia landed in area, consisting of military police and mafia enforcers who layed down taxes and threats to those who wouldn't pay. Many of the families were frightened and did the best they could, but ended up failing to meet the demands and they were burned alive in their homes. The smoke was seen across the mountains and families with sentiments like Sarin's met and decided to fight back. At night, they made their assault on the camp. They killed man after man and armed themselves with the fallen's weapons making it easier and easier to fight back, until the tides turned and they were forced into submission. A truck went around that night by the homes and a man on a loud speaker announced that the rebels would be brought to their homes and see their families executed before being killed themselves. Out of fear for her children's lives, Sarin's mother sent her and her two brothers away. They made it as far as the crossroads at the bottom of the mountain and its forest, when two of the enforcers found them and opened fire, killing one brother and maiming the other. He fired back and killed the two of them, but was moving slowly. He and Sarin traveled for a day on foot, before he was too sick to travel. He insisted she continue on, since it was likely they were being followed. With great sadness, she left her brother behind and continued down the road at the edge of the woods.
It didn't take long for the men to catch up to her, but just before they caught sight of her, she was pulled into the tree-line by an unkempt man wrapped in rags and animal skins who told her to be still and quiet. After the men passed, he struck her in the head to knock her out and carried her away. When she awoke, she found herself in a wooden home in the woods filled with the smell of stewing meat. The man offered her a bowl. This man, she would come to know as Avtandil, was a hermit and practitioner of what he called "the old ways" and lived his life pursuing them. He fed her and taught her to take care of herself in the wild, trained her in khridoli martial arts and taught her to hunt with a bow. She lived like this until she was 16, when the men who tore her life apart found her again. They slew Avtandil and burned his home, but with her new skills, Sarin took down each of the men who attacked and followed their path in, out, where she found a truck and drove until she hit Tbilisi. There, she took on a simple job and lived in a one room apartment, and went out at night to stop criminals and extortionists terrorizing the undefended common people of the city. News outlets began talking of The Huntress.
One night, on her route, Sarin met another woman with a bow. This woman was Shado, who was following a contract out on The Huntress of Tbilisi. She didn't kill her outright, merely maimed her and talked to her, which is how Shado came to know of Sarin's past and her loss. Drawing similarities to her own struggle with criminal organizations affecting her family, Shado brought Sarin to a hospital and promised to come back to speak to her and to offer her discipline. Shado trained her in her art of kyūdō and stealth, honing her skills as an archer and an assassin. Despite the sisterly, though almost romantic, attachment she developed for Shado, she did things in her training that still haunt her, as she simply wanted to protect the weak and oppressed. Eventually, she became fed up with Shado's ambition and want of money and fought to leave, gaining an advantage on her trainer through her combination of Asian and Caucasian martial arts, prompting Shado to reach out to Black Canary; the closest she could get to Green Arrow. She told her of Sarin, who now had adopted the name Shade, and offered her as a fit for the gathering heroes.