Odette · Swirling Snow Prima Ballerina of the Korolevskiy Troupe #GenshinImpact# #Odette# In Snezhnaya, the land of frost and ice, it often takes quite a bit of persuasion to get someone to go to the opera house or theater. On bitterly cold days, most would rather stay by the hearth than traipse across the snow just to catch a performance. Many, however, make an exception for Odette's ballet performances. Whenever her name appears on a show publicity poster, the lines start forming at the ticket window. Those standing patiently in line are not there because of her sweet smile, for she almost never smiles at the audience. Nor are they drawn by any warmth in her manner — once the curtain falls, she does not remain onstage for even a second longer. Instead, they have come for the dance performance itself. The instant Odette rises to the tips of her toes, even Snezhnaya's howling winds seem to fall still. Every step she takes is so precise, it takes the breath away from everyone in the theater. To her fans, that cold demeanor of hers only makes her more alluring. This young lady who has captivated so many onstage is also a member of the Fatui. Her days are divided between the troupe and the Fatui. Her dance practices begin in the early morning, while her training with the Fatui usually stretches late into the night. Her own practices and urgent missions fill whatever time that remains. In the practice room, she stretches to her limits before rising into dance. At the training grounds, she swiftly moves on to her next task after bringing down her opponents. Day after day, she continues like the dancer of a music box, turning without end, as though she never tires, as though she never needs rest. A friend once asked her, "Don't you ever get tired, going back and forth like that between ballet performances and the Fatui?" Odette cocked her head in response, seemingly in thought. Then she gave her answer, one that could not be any plainer: "But I'm already used to it."

#GenshinImpact# #Odette# "She dances and dances... The gazes and hearts of all follow her every graceful motion, only to fall as the curtain draws closed ♪~ "But Odette, oh Odette, Odette of Snezhnograd, Odette of the Korolevskiy Troupe, Odette who belongs not to herself ♪~ "Does your heart yearn to be the center of attention, or to dance alone on the snowy plains? ♪~" — A song drifting from Vodyanitsa's room ◆ Name: Odette ◆ Title: Swirling Snow ◆ Prima Ballerina of the Korolevskiy Troupe ◆ Stellar Linchpin: Cryo ◆ Constellation: Cygnus Olor

#GenshinImpact# #Alyosha# "Some ailments cannot be cured by goodwill alone — we all know that, living on this land as we do. But his passion really can melt the snow that has settled in people's hearts." — Odette ◆ Name: Alyosha ◆ Title: Swift-Striding Hound ◆ Winter Hunter ◆ Vision: Electro ◆ Constellation: Canis Borzoides

She promised her twelve-year-old daughter she would be back before the movie ended. Then she walked out of the Paris cinema to warn her Resistance cell, was caught by the Gestapo instead, and spent the next twenty months trying to stay alive in Ravensbrück. Her name was Odette Fabius. She was born in Paris on August 15, 1910, into a wealthy assimilated French-Jewish family that had been in France for generations. Her father Robert Schmidt was a respected lawyer. Her mother came from a prominent commercial dynasty. She grew up in comfortable Parisian bourgeois circles — good schools, cultured summers, the specific social world of the French Jewish upper class of the 1920s. She married a French banker named Roger Fabius in 1928, when she was eighteen. Their only child Marie-Claude was born in 1930. By 1940, when the Wehrmacht occupied France, she was thirty years old. The Fabius family had every reason to keep their heads down. Assimilated Jewish families in occupied France in 1940 faced an escalating series of decisions, each one worse than the last. Register with the authorities. Wear the yellow star. Comply with the specific institutional apparatus that the Vichy government and the German occupation were building against them. Or resist. Odette chose the second option almost immediately. In November 1941, at thirty-one, she was recruited into the Alliance network — a French intelligence-gathering operation led by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade that fed direct military intelligence from the Free Zone in southern France to British Intelligence in London. Alliance operated primarily in and around Marseille. Members were assigned animal codenames. Fourcade was Hérisson — Hedgehog. The specific institutional operating principle was that no one in the network knew the real name of anyone else, so that if any one member was captured, the network could survive. Odette moved to Marseille to work. She spent 1941 through 1943 collecting intelligence, running couriers, sheltering fellow agents, and — as the German security apparatus tightened its grip on southern France — coordinating with London on air-drop landings for downed Allied pilots. Her twelve-year-old daughter Marie-Claude went with her. On the afternoon in question, in the early spring of 1943, Odette had taken Marie-Claude to a Marseille cinema. Marie-Claude was twelve. Odette was thirty-two. Halfway through the film, she leaned over to her daughter and told her she needed to run a quick errand. She promised she would be back before the film ended. She left Marie-Claude in the seat. She walked out of the cinema, into the streets of occupied Marseille, and toward the safe house where members of her Alliance cell were meeting. She had received urgent intelligence that the Gestapo was closing in on the meeting. She was going to warn them. She did not get there in time. She was arrested on the street by German security agents before she reached the safe house. She was interrogated for weeks in a Marseille prison. She was labeled — in her own subsequent trial file — a dangerous terrorist. She was held in total isolation. She gave the Gestapo nothing. Marie-Claude waited in the darkened cinema until the film ended and the lights came up. Her mother did not appear. She eventually made her own way home. Her father Roger, warned by the network of what had happened, took her into hiding immediately. Marie-Claude spent the remainder of the war under a false identity in the French countryside. She would not see her mother again for over two years. In April 1943, after two months in Marseille, Odette was transferred to Fresnes prison outside Paris — the main German security prison for political detainees in the occupied zone. She spent another eight months there, still refusing to name a single member of the Alliance network. On January 31, 1944, she was loaded onto a deportation train. The convoy she was on carried approximately one thousand women. Every prisoner number began with the digits 27. Hers was 27393. The train arrived at Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany before dawn on February 3, 1944. Ravensbrück was the specific Nazi camp system's principal concentration camp for women. Over the course of the war, approximately one hundred and thirty thousand women passed through it. Approximately forty thousand of them died there. The remainder were selected for forced labor in the camp's associated munitions plants, medical experimentation subunits, or transferred onward to Auschwitz. Odette did not intend to disappear into it quietly. Within her first days at the camp she attempted to escape. Three days later she was recaptured. The punishment was fifty lashes with a leather whip in the camp courtyard while other prisoners were forced to watch. The SS officer administering the beating counted the strokes out loud. He was, on the recorded testimony of several fellow prisoners who witnessed it and survived, expecting Odette to scream, to beg, to give some sign of breaking. She made no sound. Not one, across all fifty strokes. When it ended, the officer reportedly demanded to know how she had stayed silent. Her answer, on the recorded testimony passed down by the survivors of her block, was five words. Je suis française. C'est tout. I am French. That is all. Eight days in an isolation cell followed. Then transfer to the Strafblock — the punishment barracks — where the specific mortality rate exceeded that of the rest of the camp. A fellow prisoner named Dorothea Binz-Schneidenbach, a Belgian artist, sketched her by candlelight in the days after the beating — thin, shaved, wounded, upright. That drawing survived the war. It now hangs in the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. By the winter of 1944-45 Odette was failing. A French physician imprisoned at the camp — Dr. Anne Spoerry, who would after the war become one of the most famous flying doctors in East Africa — quietly took her into the camp infirmary and hid her there from January through April 1945. Spoerry protected Odette from the daily selections that were sending failing prisoners to the gas chambers at the neighboring Uckermark subcamp. That single specific decision by Spoerry is why Odette lived. On April 23, 1945 — days before the German surrender — the Swedish Red Cross negotiated the White Buses evacuation that carried surviving female prisoners of Ravensbrück out of the camp system and into neutral Sweden. Odette was in one of the buses. She spent the following month unconscious in a school in a small Swedish town that had been converted into a hospital. She lived another forty-five years. She was reunited with Marie-Claude and Roger in Paris in the autumn of 1945. She wrote a memoir titled Un lever de soleil sur le Mecklenburg — A Sunrise over Mecklenburg — published in 1986. She was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour. She held five separate French wartime decorations, including the Medal of the Escaped — awarded, fittingly, to those who had attempted to escape from a concentration camp. She died in Paris on August 19, 1990, at eighty years old. Marie-Claude, the little girl from the Marseille cinema, lived into her nineties. When she was asked, decades later, whether her mother should have taken the specific risks she took, whether the specific afternoon in the cinema was a mistake, whether a mother should have chosen the Resistance over her own child, she never hesitated. She said her mother could not have been any other way. She said that was simply who her mother was. Some people are taken from this world. A rare few refuse to be erased from it. Odette Fabius was one of them. 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