Helena Walker

Helena is a 21st century or present-day biologist and palaeontologist from Australia and a resident on The Island Ark. She was excited to study the wildlife, most notably dinosaurs, that call the Island ARK her home. Unfortunately, her discoveries make her realise and more aware that something is off about the Island and its inhabitants. Helena is also the protagonist of the upcoming ARK: The Animated Series.

Alias


 * Helena Walker
 * Miss Walker
 * The One Who Waits

Background
She was born in Darwin in possibly 1989, enjoying the sunsets and wet season storms. Between that time and 2008, she volunteered at Kakadu if she could. An accident occurred in 2008 because she ended up on the Island and it was the last year she knew. In a non canon note, she was terrified of being on the Island but the company of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures soothed her. She decides to spend her time on the Island writing dossiers of the many creatures after a prolonged observation of each species.

Personality
Helena was a carefree woman who enjoyed being outdoors because of her passion for biology and palaeontology. Many of her friends, like Rockwell, Mei Yin and Santiago, note of this attitude even when they are in serious danger. Even being threatened with death by Nerva, the New Legion Tribe Leader, Helena is somehow always happy and knows how to stay true to herself by helping them on how to work with the obelisks and leading them to the Tek cave. A profound trait that Santiago notes, is her creativity and use of swearing. Any person she meets, she has a great respect for them, even if they surpass her, or cross moral boundaries. In any circumstance, no matter how bad, she always wants to help people in any way she can. Throughout the ARKs, she takes an empathetic approach to her problems.

Being Australian, many survivors note of her vulgar attitude when she shows disrespect or having her accent but in the end, she kindly looks after her fellow survivors and friends. Diana notes of this when despite being new to the futuristic/Tek tribe, she risked her life to help them. During the fight against the Corrupted Master Controller, HLN-A tells the player that Helena always stood by her friends no matter the situation.

In Scorched Earth, Helena realises that her playing nice isn't going to make it far in survival, so she does what she can to help pull her own weight and being able to take care of herself. In Aberration and Extinction, she had a huge character development when studying the prism Mei Yin found and witnessing Rockwell's true monster form. Because of the potential risks it could do to her due to her reactivity with it and the fact that there is danger in every corner in Extinction, she chooses to use the prism to save her friends, not to solve the mysteries of the ARKs.

According to an addendum by Santiago, he said two things in a conversation with Helena that made her furious: asking to put another "dodo on the barbie" and confusing Australia with New Zealand.

Ever since Helena ascended, she has become a wiser and most notably, a calmer person. For being a Homo Deus, Helena learned what she really wanted to know and she has become even wiser. Given where she is, Helena doesn't know what it is like to truly be a Homo Deus during all the time she spent alone and not talking with other Homo Deus. Instead of going in without thinking, she always has been taking a methodical approach but she still doesn't hesitate in helping other survivors even with the tiniest form of help. She even regrets not knowing what peace truly feels like when she used to be human.

Relationships with Other Survivors

 * Rockwell
 * Rockwell has been Helena's best friend for science and tea. Both know and are aware of the stupidity of the tribes on the Island.  They always kept in touch and are friendly to each other.  They also help each other up with advice on their respective fields of science.  When Rockwell lends an Argentavis Helena names Athena, she feels guilty for not giving him a gift.
 * On Scorched Earth, their relationship has gotten strained because of the time gap they haven't seen each other.  This leads Helena being oblivious of what she did to hurt Rockwell's feelings by going to an obelisk without her notifying him and what Rockwell has done for the New Legion.
 * On Aberration, Helena always has to help Rockwell from bumping into dangerous things. Once Helena saw who Rockwell truly was, being a mass of tentacles infused with element, she was disgusted and wanted to kill/save her closest friend.  She writes a letter to put the Rockwell she knew to rest.  Any reminder of Rockwell made Helena break down because she didn't want to repeat his fate.
 * On Extinction, Helena accepted the fact that Rockwell chose his path of endless madness, torment and torture.
 * In Genesis: Part 1, Edmund Rockwell through the Corrupted Master Controller, mocks at how Helena can no longer save the survivors, considering them to be rubbish. He also mocks that despite her omnipresence that allows her to see everything from an infinite number point of views, she didn't foresee his involvement and always underestimated him whether she was a human or a Homo deus.


 * Mei-Yin
 * Helena met Mei Yin when she wanted to find evidence of the Ark's abnormalities on tamed creatures.  At first, they were tense with each other because of their opposite views of the world around them, with Helena seeing nature while Mei sees constant war.  They always agree with each other because of some things they have in common such as being bad cooks and having a close mount.
 * When Rockwell murdered the Tek Survivors, including Mei Yin's closest friend, Diana, Helena comforted Mei Yin as another friend she feels close too in the aftermath.
 * Ever since the Tek survivors are forced into the Wasteland, Helena notes of Mei Yin's constant fighting on her own.  As a change, she confronts Mei Yin to let them share the load. When Helena told Mei Yin that they have to find out what is at Santiago's signal, Mei Yin warned Helena that she is starting to sound more like Rockwell.  Because of Mei Yin's cold words, Helena reconsidered her priorities many times.


 * Diana Altaras
 * Even in the short amount of time they met, they were friendly towards each other and understood each other.  Diana notes of how she was just a stranger to the Tek survivors, yet she wanted to help them with the obelisk inspection.  After she ascended to Homo Deus, Helena guided Diana to Mei Yin and then to Arat Prime.


 * Santiago
 * Another Tek survivor Helena met on Aberration, Santiago was just the hacker and backbone of the Tek engineering of the Tek Tribe. They just helped each other once in a while.  They even have a level of understanding with one another.  When Helena wanted to stay on the ARKs because she brought the monster Rockwell with her, Santiago understood her motives.
 * On Extinction, he assigned Helena to be a Mek pilot for her maxed sync rate.  In the training sessions, Santiago got irritated with Helena knowing what he says but she can't execute an action physically.  However, Santiago sacrificing himself made Helena wonder why every single survivor, kind or cruel, is giving themselves up so she could live.


 * Nerva
 * Though they rarely interacted, it is implied that Nerva ignores Helena's rude behavior towards him.  However, Helena has a great sense of respect towards him for being an effective tribe leader even though the tribe is declining from constant base raids from lesser tribes.


 * Raia
 * Helena met Raia when the former saved Helena and the village she was living in from a swarm of mantis.  Ever since that rescue, Helena wanted to meet Raia in person.  She only got to see Raia as an old woman who warned her about the ARKs ability to level entire cities. Raia tells Helena about a city in the southeast she doesn't want to talk to go deep into the details.  Her warning "This place doesn't want anyone to control it" has made Helena terrified and aware of the ARK's power.


 * The Player
 * Although she resurrected the player countless times, Helena can only talk to them through the prism, about how she is breaking down inside the system and is holding on to her identity until Earth is a healthy planet.  When the player is going inside the Genesis Simulation, Helena gives them HLN-A, a robotic hologram that has her personality when she was in a physical form.
 * Throughout the ARK journey, it can be implied that Helena has been grooming the player to be her champion against Element.


 * HLN-A
 * A personality copy of herself, Helena built the hologram to act as a guide for the player.

Appearance
Being on wallpapers for every Ark map, Helena is shown to have short brown hair and brown eyes. Several portrayals of her having the regular, and ponytail hairstyle. At one point in Extinction, her hair has grown a little bit that it reached her shoulders. On the Island, Helena wore brown cloth boots, pants and shirt. On Scorched Earth, she had a full attire of desert cloth armour. On Aberration, she resumed to normal clothes and soon had a suit of Tek armor. When she became a Homo Deus, Helena is only a body of blue ethereal light that highlights her body shape and hair.

In ARK: The Animated Series, Helena is portrayed with tanned skin, a trait of her Aboriginal heritage from her mother's side, and the cloth armour set without the hat. Her legendary notebook containing the dossier of other creatures, and her accounts of the Island, and other ARKs is in the right pouch of her belt.

Survival Skills
Helena Walker is by far, the most resilient survivor on the Arks, from being the weakest of the four original survivors to becoming the most influential and powerful as a Homo Deus. Helena writes dossiers about the creatures she encounters as a way to save as many survivors as possible.

On the Island, all she is was the weakest survivor but she survived by writing a dossier of every animal in hopes of saving other survivors' lives. In combat, she would rather avoid conflict because her aim was terrible and she isn't a person who likes to punch others. In Scorched Earth, Helena becomes adept at using guns as a means of protecting herself. Being by herself, she always utilised everything, even a Jerboa for comfort with an added bonus of being a weather radar. On Aberration, Helena's marksmanship has improved as she was able to shoot down several seekers before they decided to leave her and Rockwell alone. She also could help Santiago, a futuristic hacker, with some work on the ARK's control center. On Extinction, Helena is the best out of the four Mek pilot candidates because of her synchronisation rate as well as her calmness and creativity in various situations. For some strange reason, she was able to activate a blank prism found at Santiago's signal which Mei Yin couldn't. The moment she rammed the prism into her wrist, she was able to make the King Titan and the corrupted horde retreat disoriented but at a cost: she couldn't stand up and Mei Yin had to pick her up as Helena slowly fell into a coma, beginning the Homo Deus ascension.

Being a Homo Deus, her power has grown so much over many years but her mind is inevitably crumbling. In her time of being a Homo Deus, she reworked the Mega Mek, Santiago's masterpiece weapon, to require one pilot instead of four. She also made it possible for survivors to experience death by hacking the entire ARK system by tiny bits, although the testing she did was on an innumerable amount of survivors. This allowed them to be resurrected countless times to be better survivors to fight the King Titan. In helping her fellow survivors, she brought back Diana and made HLN-A for Mei Yin Li and the player respectively.

According to the futuristic survivor tribe profiles, Helena is considered a biologist and scientist who taught herself basic level rifle marksmanship and survival. Her best skill is writing down dossiers about the species that live on the ARKs and Earth as it will come in handy to them in their database.

Known Tamed Creatures
The Island


 * Athena (Argentavis)
 * A Parasaur from ARK: The Animated Series
 * A Dimetrodon (as seen in the Dimetrodon Dossier)

Scorched Earth


 * Radar (Jerboa)
 * Morellatops

Extinction


 * Onslaught (Mek)

Tribal Affiliations

 * Australia (Citizen/Palaeontologist/Biologist)
 * Howling Wolves (Guest)
 * Rockwell Manor (Close Friend of Edmund Rockwell)
 * Painted Sharks (Guest)
 * Iron Brotherhood (Guest)
 * New Legion (Informant/Prisoner)
 * Tek Tribe (Informant/Mek Pilot)
 * Homo Deus (Informant/Caretaker)

ARK story
Refer to the explorer notes

Fate of Helena Walker
After she ascended into a Homo deus, Helena understood and saw at how death kept taking people away. To stop death itself, Helena accidently resurrected Diana Altaras. What she actually did was put Diana's mind and soul into a clone body of Diana. She told Diana that she needed to help, lead her to see Santiago's MEK, then she lead her to Mei Yin's location, guiding them to a secret bunker, and expressed curiosity to Mei Yin and Diana about going to Arat Prime. During the travel to the bunker, Diana noted Helena seemed to have forgotten her name. Mei Yin noted that the voice they are hearing feels familiar to her. After the duo faced the King Titan in the Mega Mek, Helena tugged on their minds to head to Arat Prime, which they did. There, Mei Yin and Diana sent Helena into the Genesis Simulation for an unknown reason. In the simulation, she was spotted by Nida Akhtar, a soil scientist on the Colony Ship. To prevent herself from getting boxed in, she created HLN-A and swapped places with it. She left the Genesis Simulation for an unknown reason.

At the same time after resurrecting Diana, she experimented on how to bring back survivors that have died and an unknown amount of time passed until she made consistently made a generation of survivors that can't be killed off permanently, and soon, she made the player. However, her experimentation was on a scale that was so large she noted that she was seeing everything in the experiment in high detail from millions of point of views. This caused her to lose her sense of time and she is now losing her mind and identity of herself due to understanding everything she is seeing. Being the weakest Homo deus, she was gradually crumbling. Another thing she altered was the Mega MEK to be safely operated with only one pilot.

By the time the player slain the King Titan, Helena comes to thank the survivor for helping the Earth begin its healing process through its Reseed Protocol. Helena soon disappears after seeing the fertile Earth once again. She also thanks the player in her notes for putting an end to Rockwell's madness, indicating that she knew that Rockwell would inevitably die in trying to take over the Colony Ship. Overall, HLN-A described Helena's fate as unknown as the most of the Homo deus are beyond the physical reality and Helena's whereabouts are unknown.

Notes/Trivia
Helena as a Homo Deus


 * Helena's ascension to Homo Deus is similar to the Bible story of Jesus' resurrection in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.


 * 1) Both of their resting places or tombs were described to be found in a cave that was soon closed off by a massive object, completely blocking the entrance.
 * 2) Both of their bodies went from physical flesh to a body of light or spirit form.  They left no trace of their physical body in their tomb.
 * 3) Both ascended into a different realm that is far beyond human reach.  HLN-A described that the realm Helena went to as a Homo Deus is far beyond a human's view of reality.


 * The dodo on the barbie is a reference to both how the dodo is ARK's mascot and the Australian slang of throwing a shrimp on the barbie.


 * Helena's name is Greek in origin that means "Light".
 * Her name is fitting as throughout her journey, she unveils a hidden truth about the ARKs wherever she goes.

Gallery
Helena Helena Walker Helena Walker