Alexeyevna Yakovlena

Headmistress Alexeyevna Yakovlena

Headmistress Alexeyevna Yakovlena is a resolute woman. She runs the Odynova Children's Workhome orphanage as she has done so for the past 40 years, and she intends to run it for the next 40 as well.
She had been raised in the Odynova Home herself, the child of a night watchman and the clinic nurse, back when it had been an Eastern Orthodox charity for foundlings. She still revers God as she had been taught. Her sole regret in life was as a teen, that she had not been accepted into the Romanov Abbey as a nun. But she believes she serves as God called her to do: to run Odynova Home with an unforgiving hand, and to raise up her charges to be productive and pious souls, a credit to the workhome's reputation and to their future employers as well.
Yakovlena has four unshakeable beliefs:

1. the necessity of absolute obedience.
2. all people are born into sin, and are base sinners by their very nature
3. there is redemptive power in hard work and unquestioned service
4. piety and chastity are God's commandments, and absolutely necessary for the salvation of one's soul

Under the headmistress's unwavering direction, the Odynova Children's Workhome had been saved from financial dissolution, and how had a sterling reputation with the elite staffing agencies which provided qualified household help for the haut ton.
Yakovlena takes in orphaned or foundling children, and shapes them mercilessly into hard-working, obedient and compliant servants.
Seeing herself as a determinedly-humble woman, Yakovlena harbors a hidden pride regarding the waiting list of positions the Odynova has for their graduates as indentured staff among the rich and titled of society. Those few wretches who prove themselves failures to Yakovlena's merciless standards—well, she has a waiting list for them as well. Problem children and those who are determined to deny salvation for their souls are shipped off as soon as they are of an age, to toil as laborers on Higgins Moon or the mines of Beggar’s Tin. Every graduate's signed contract into honest lives of hard work is marked as a success for the Odynova Home; each success also contributes credits into the workhome's ledger, allowing Yakovlena to take in yet another wretched waif from the wicked streets of Persephone's numerous slums.
Yakovlena does not tolerate failure. And she does not tolerate disobedience. And above all else—she does not tolerate the willful damage miscreants might do to the hard-won reputation of the Odynova Children's Workhome.

Physical Description

General Physical Condition

She is tall, stern and grimly forbidding, as benefits a a woman of her position.

Ruled Locations

• Odynova Children's Workhome