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We might know Elena Fisher especially for her hijinks at Nathan Drake's side, but she was active as an intrepid reporter before meeting her future husband. We can only guess how many adventures she had as the protagonist rather than as a side character. Adventures which saw her tasting glory... and humiliation. Which in a particular occasion tasted like socks that would have desperately needed a trip inside the washing machine. And since you know me and the kind of product I offer, let's take a look at this particular adventure!

She had been a professional for about one year when a colleague of hers, one who wasn't known for having a great relationship with either alcohol or nutcases, told her that during his most recent trip to French Guyana he had heard rumors about an all-female tribe living in the densely-forested lands between the French Oversea Department and the Brazilian state of Amapá. A tribe of real-life Amazons, in other words. He personally had doubts about the existence of such a thing, but he conceded that no indigenous tribes lived in the zone where the presumed sightings had occurred. If somebody actually settled there, they were without a doubt people who didn't wish to be found and there were quite a few of them in the world.

Between her youthful enthusiasm and the outlandishness of the concept of real-life Amazons living in the jungle, Elena's curiosity would have never allowed her to go on with her daily life if she hadn't flown to South America and found the mysterious women-- or whatever they were-- dwelling in those impenetrable forests. Having reached the village of Último Aviso (never was a settlement's name chosen with more wisdom), last bulwark of civilization on the Brazilian side before entering the wilderness, Miss Fisher started her adventure on board of a sturdy Jeep, with provisions for two weeks.

Unfortunately the jungle proved to be an even more insidious place than she had envisaged.

On the morning of the fourth day of her excursion, she found her GPS completely drenched, its circuitry fried by the water. It would have been advisable for her to do an about-turn while she was still reasonably sure she could find her way back to civilization even without electronic tools. Instead she kept going deep into the forest.

On the morning of the fifth day, her Jeep drew its last breath because somebody during the night had poured sugar into its fuel tank, seizing the engine with no chance of recovery, at least in the middle of the jungle. But Elena disregarded that inconvenience too and resolved to keep going on foot.

On the morning of the sixth day, she woke up to find a jaguar feasting on her food supplies. They were apparently enough to satiate his hunger, since it just went away as soon as it finished his meal rather than attacking the petrified American woman. She might have been able to return to civilization without dying of starvation if she turned back then and there. Instead, she kept going forward.

On the morning of the seventh day, her two pairs of boots were nowhere to be found, either in her campsite or nearby. Whichever direction she was going to take, she would have faced the rest of her trip across an extremely hostile terrain barefoot. Since that was true in both directions, she saw no reason not to keep going forward.

One week after leaving Último Aviso, the people she was looking for, out of desperation, or mercy, or a weird mixture of both, had enough of her determination to keep going no matter what and ambushed her. While she was being tied up and gagged with a pair of socks that had disappeared with her boots the day before, she heard her two assailants talking to each other. To her surprise, they were speaking English. To her bigger surprise, one had a Texas accent you could hammer pine nuts with while the other talked exactly like her cousin Suzie from Milwaukee.

Elena's captors took her away tied to a pole like primitive hunters would have done with a deer and it was in that very uncomfortable position that she saw for the first time the very-much-real village of the Amazons, a complex of wooden buildings built on the tangled branches of colossal trees, with suspension bridges and sequences of cavities dug in the tree trunks as the only roads. All of the denizens were women, who seemingly comprised every ethnicity one could find in the world. There was no rhyme nor reason in their selection of attires, each and every one giving a different spin to the idea of "uncivilized", "barbarian" robes. And all of them spoke English, in a wide variety of accents.

The intrepid reporter learnt from her captors that their community was the result of a group of American college students who weren't afraid of dreaming big. About a hundred of such young women had left the US to found their own utopia in the savage depths of the Amazon rainforest, far away from the patriarchal society of their native country and from its corrupted values. Now they all lived as free women in harmony with Mother Nature, once again able to enjoy the simple but genuine pleasures of such a way of life, like the beauty of an uncontaminated landscape-- or the satisfaction after a successful hunting trip-- or the lesbian orgies that were thrown nearly every evening. And since Elena had been so determined to find them despite their attempts to make her desist, she was given the opportunity to spend the rest of her life serving her new mistresses, who liked their simple lives but would never say no to a new toy from time to time. Terrified by the news that she had pretty much become their slave, the young women tried to comfort her saying that she was going to be treated well. Even though the sea was quite far from their position, Bearded Clams and Soles en croute would have always been on her menu, even multiple times each day.

And that was the beginning of Miss Fisher's captivity in the town of the Amazons, which lasted... about six days. Unfortunately for those utopian-minded women, creating a new civilization is HARD, especially in a place as inhospitable as a jungle. Elena's captors were among the few people in the community who were completely free of disease, since about a forth were down with dysentery, another fourth with nasty fungal infections and another fourth with a severe form of nostalgia for physical intimacy with people of the opposite sex. This experiment in civilization-building was already dying by the time she was brought there, but its inhabitants had yet to accept the truth since they didn't want to admit that they had wasted a lot of time and effort to pursue an impossible dream. Luckily for her, a great assembly of all the Amazons was called a few days after she was captured and the leaders of the community called off the "grand experiment". Three out of the five-members governing council after all wouldn't have lasted another week without proper medical treatment.

Elena was found a few days later in Último Aviso. The ex-Amazons had trussed and gagged the poor woman again before shoving her inside a sturdy suitcase one of them still had lying around in her abode. She had then been unceremoniously dropped in the backyard of the house which was closest to the limit of the jungle in the middle of the night and spent more uncomfortable hours before the oldest son of one of the families living there managed to open the mysterious luggage. She then spent the following ten minutes hopping like a madwoman and emitting unintelligible noises-- which were supposed to be her explaining her predicament-- in front of an audience comprising the two couples living in that home, five grandparents and nine children of varying ages. She was freed only because the closest mental asylum was hundreds of miles away. She was still massaging her sore wrists when she noticed that there was something in the suitcase she hadn't noticed while she was locked inside it: a roll of film. To be precise, the one which was inside her camera at the time she had been ambushed by the guardians of the Amazon village. The single photograph it held-- one taken with the automatic shutter release-- had been taken to immortalize Elena's two captors and their "prey". It was the only surviving evidence of the existence of the Amazon civilization and it was completely useless, since nobody would have ever seriously believed that the women at her sides were anything other than mere cosplayers.

Did poor Elena get only a stern reminder of how dangerous the life of a reporter actually is from this experience? Well, yes and no. You see, a few decent meals and some well-deserved rest after being freed from her restraints, Elena realized that the women who had kidnapped her were not in a position to go dark. With so many of them needing treatment for dysentery and fungal infections, there was no way they could have already left north-eastern South America. Their first destination could only be a hospital-- a modern, respectable facility, the kind one could only find a decently-sized city. Once this realization hit her, she quickly went back to hunting Amazons, though this time she would be the one with the upper hand.

But this, as they say, is another story...

This work is a commission for , who was kind enough to use an original concept of mine as a basis for the pic and story. Elena Fisher and the world of Uncharted are copyright of Naughty Dog.

You can find an alternate version of this pic here:

Description

We might know Elena Fisher especially for her hijinks at Nathan Drake's side, but she was active as an intrepid reporter before meeting her future husband. We can only guess how many adventures she had as the protagonist rather than as a side character. Adventures which saw her tasting glory... and humiliation. Which in a particular occasion tasted like socks that would have desperately needed a trip inside the washing machine. And since you know me and the kind of product I offer, let's take a look at this particular adventure!

She had been a professional for about one year when a colleague of hers, one who wasn't known for having a great relationship with either alcohol or nutcases, told her that during his most recent trip to French Guyana he had heard rumors about an all-female tribe living in the densely-forested lands between the French Oversea Department and the Brazilian state of Amapá. A tribe of real-life Amazons, in other words. He personally had doubts about the existence of such a thing, but he conceded that no indigenous tribes lived in the zone where the presumed sightings had occurred. If somebody actually settled there, they were without a doubt people who didn't wish to be found and there were quite a few of them in the world.

Between her youthful enthusiasm and the outlandishness of the concept of real-life Amazons living in the jungle, Elena's curiosity would have never allowed her to go on with her daily life if she hadn't flown to South America and found the mysterious women-- or whatever they were-- dwelling in those impenetrable forests. Having reached the village of Último Aviso (never was a settlement's name chosen with more wisdom), last bulwark of civilization on the Brazilian side before entering the wilderness, Miss Fisher started her adventure on board of a sturdy Jeep, with provisions for two weeks.

Unfortunately the jungle proved to be an even more insidious place than she had envisaged.

On the morning of the fourth day of her excursion, she found her GPS completely drenched, its circuitry fried by the water. It would have been advisable for her to do an about-turn while she was still reasonably sure she could find her way back to civilization even without electronic tools. Instead she kept going deep into the forest.

On the morning of the fifth day, her Jeep drew its last breath because somebody during the night had poured sugar into its fuel tank, seizing the engine with no chance of recovery, at least in the middle of the jungle. But Elena disregarded that inconvenience too and resolved to keep going on foot.

On the morning of the sixth day, she woke up to find a jaguar feasting on her food supplies. They were apparently enough to satiate his hunger, since it just went away as soon as it finished his meal rather than attacking the petrified American woman. She might have been able to return to civilization without dying of starvation if she turned back then and there. Instead, she kept going forward.

On the morning of the seventh day, her two pairs of boots were nowhere to be found, either in her campsite or nearby. Whichever direction she was going to take, she would have faced the rest of her trip across an extremely hostile terrain barefoot. Since that was true in both directions, she saw no reason not to keep going forward.

One week after leaving Último Aviso, the people she was looking for, out of desperation, or mercy, or a weird mixture of both, had enough of her determination to keep going no matter what and ambushed her. While she was being tied up and gagged with a pair of socks that had disappeared with her boots the day before, she heard her two assailants talking to each other. To her surprise, they were speaking English. To her bigger surprise, one had a Texas accent you could hammer pine nuts with while the other talked exactly like her cousin Suzie from Milwaukee.

Elena's captors took her away tied to a pole like primitive hunters would have done with a deer and it was in that very uncomfortable position that she saw for the first time the very-much-real village of the Amazons, a complex of wooden buildings built on the tangled branches of colossal trees, with suspension bridges and sequences of cavities dug in the tree trunks as the only roads. All of the denizens were women, who seemingly comprised every ethnicity one could find in the world. There was no rhyme nor reason in their selection of attires, each and every one giving a different spin to the idea of "uncivilized", "barbarian" robes. And all of them spoke English, in a wide variety of accents.

The intrepid reporter learnt from her captors that their community was the result of a group of American college students who weren't afraid of dreaming big. About a hundred of such young women had left the US to found their own utopia in the savage depths of the Amazon rainforest, far away from the patriarchal society of their native country and from its corrupted values. Now they all lived as free women in harmony with Mother Nature, once again able to enjoy the simple but genuine pleasures of such a way of life, like the beauty of an uncontaminated landscape-- or the satisfaction after a successful hunting trip-- or the lesbian orgies that were thrown nearly every evening. And since Elena had been so determined to find them despite their attempts to make her desist, she was given the opportunity to spend the rest of her life serving her new mistresses, who liked their simple lives but would never say no to a new toy from time to time. Terrified by the news that she had pretty much become their slave, the young women tried to comfort her saying that she was going to be treated well. Even though the sea was quite far from their position, Bearded Clams and Soles en croute would have always been on her menu, even multiple times each day.

And that was the beginning of Miss Fisher's captivity in the town of the Amazons, which lasted... about six days. Unfortunately for those utopian-minded women, creating a new civilization is HARD, especially in a place as inhospitable as a jungle. Elena's captors were among the few people in the community who were completely free of disease, since about a forth were down with dysentery, another fourth with nasty fungal infections and another fourth with a severe form of nostalgia for physical intimacy with people of the opposite sex. This experiment in civilization-building was already dying by the time she was brought there, but its inhabitants had yet to accept the truth since they didn't want to admit that they had wasted a lot of time and effort to pursue an impossible dream. Luckily for her, a great assembly of all the Amazons was called a few days after she was captured and the leaders of the community called off the "grand experiment". Three out of the five-members governing council after all wouldn't have lasted another week without proper medical treatment.

Elena was found a few days later in Último Aviso. The ex-Amazons had trussed and gagged the poor woman again before shoving her inside a sturdy suitcase one of them still had lying around in her abode. She had then been unceremoniously dropped in the backyard of the house which was closest to the limit of the jungle in the middle of the night and spent more uncomfortable hours before the oldest son of one of the families living there managed to open the mysterious luggage. She then spent the following ten minutes hopping like a madwoman and emitting unintelligible noises-- which were supposed to be her explaining her predicament-- in front of an audience comprising the two couples living in that home, five grandparents and nine children of varying ages. She was freed only because the closest mental asylum was hundreds of miles away. She was still massaging her sore wrists when she noticed that there was something in the suitcase she hadn't noticed while she was locked inside it: a roll of film. To be precise, the one which was inside her camera at the time she had been ambushed by the guardians of the Amazon village. The single photograph it held-- one taken with the automatic shutter release-- had been taken to immortalize Elena's two captors and their "prey". It was the only surviving evidence of the existence of the Amazon civilization and it was completely useless, since nobody would have ever seriously believed that the women at her sides were anything other than mere cosplayers.

Did poor Elena get only a stern reminder of how dangerous the life of a reporter actually is from this experience? Well, yes and no. You see, a few decent meals and some well-deserved rest after being freed from her restraints, Elena realized that the women who had kidnapped her were not in a position to go dark. With so many of them needing treatment for dysentery and fungal infections, there was no way they could have already left north-eastern South America. Their first destination could only be a hospital-- a modern, respectable facility, the kind one could only find a decently-sized city. Once this realization hit her, she quickly went back to hunting Amazons, though this time she would be the one with the upper hand.

But this, as they say, is another story...

This work is a commission for , who was kind enough to use an original concept of mine as a basis for the pic and story. Elena Fisher and the world of Uncharted are copyright of Naughty Dog.

You can find an alternate version of this pic here: