Welcome to Tabernacle! A city that is full of history, spectacular architecture (both old and new), a string of businesses that leave tourists and natives always discovering something new, and breathtaking sights. To its natives and even its tourists, Tabernacle is a normal city never suspecting that something sinister lives in its shadows. For the past 80 years, the Templar Order has operated in Tabernacle with the sole intention of taking it over for themselves.

Armed with technology and science that can only be described as ‘futuristic’, the Templar Order has been abducting and experimenting on its citizens and tourists to use as guinea pigs in developing genetic enhancements and advanced weaponry for their soldiers to use amongst the citizens they deem as ‘lowly’.  One such guinea pig was a woman named Valerie Andrews.

Valerie Andrews found herself orphaned at age 10 after a fatal car accident killed both of her parents. She was sent to St. Bernard’s Orphanage which was run by a man named Father Max. Though she quickly made friends and got settled into a routine, Valerie couldn’t shake the fact that something was wrong with her new living situation. Three years after her arrival, Valerie’s best friend Kenneth mysteriously disappeared which led her to realize that other children had been going missing as well. She took her concern to Father Max who merely dismissed them and assured her everything was alright. In reality, Father Max was the last person she should have trusted.

Father Max’s real name was Maximillian Chambers, the leader of the Templar Order, a religious order that was bent on taking control of the city. Known as the Grandmaster, Maximillian was using the church as a front to abduct children and attempt to indoctrinate them into the order and using those that would decline to join as test subjects for scientific experiments. Fearing that Valerie would bring attention to the orphanage, he had her abducted and brought to the lab that was underneath the church.

The Grandmaster had her injected with the Templar formula, a genetic enhancement drug that the order gives to all its soldiers which enhances the subject person’s reflexes, senses, speed, and even strength. For the next five years, Valerie was drugged, kept prisoner, and experimented on by the order. The Templar’s final experiment on her led them to believe they had killed her, forcing them to send her body to a nearby mortuary to be incinerated. As one of the Templar members was about to incinerate her, Valerie woke up and fought him off, killing him in the process. To cover her tracks, she quickly burned the man and fled out into the street. Valerie wandered around until she came across a crime in the process. She fought off a group of muggers, saving 26-year-old lawyer, Casey White. After chasing off the muggers, Valerie shortly thereafter collapsed due to the fatigue caused by her captivity.

Casey immediately called an ambulance for Valerie and even ended up accompanying her to the hospital. Valerie eventually woke up, but to more problems. Due to the nature of the call, the police were summoned to her hospital room to get a statement for the mugging, but Valerie had no form of identification. She told the officer she had run away from St. Bernard’s orphanage as a teenager and was kidnapped off the street shortly after by a man who had held her prisoner for the past five years.

Though when the officer had asked where she escaped from and who her attacker was, Valerie knew she had to exaggerate a bit. She gave a detailed description of her alleged kidnapper by morphing the faces of Templar scientists in her head. Realistic that the police would buy it, but no one they would ever actually find. As for the place, Valerie merely explained that she had panicked and doesn’t remember where she had escaped from. After a short investigation into St. Bernard’s, the police quickly determined it had no relevance to the case and continued to look for the man that Valerie had identified. However, The Grandmaster still shut down St. Bernard’s in precaution, sending the children to other orphanages throughout the city.

Realizing that Valerie had nowhere to go and no family to lean on, Casey invited Valerie to stay with her for a time and offered to help get her on her feet as thanks for her good deed. She was originally hesitant, but eventually, Valerie agreed. She would go on to receive her GED, obtain her birth certificate and social security card, gain life insurance and funds from the sale of her family home which her parents left, and even go to a community college for a short period.

In the five years since her escape, Valerie profoundly studied the Templar Order and honed her new abilities. She got a job as a museum tour guide where she befriended a regular guest, a man named Klaus. During her investigation into the Templars, she discovered that Klaus had been a former Templar scientist who was presumed dead. Valerie would eventually confront Klaus about what she found and he would go on to tell her his history with the Templars and that he put that part of his life in the past. After telling Klaus her history with the order and her plans to take them down, he reluctantly agrees to help her in any way he could. They both agreed that any form of mutation was out of the question, opting instead for advanced technology. After a few break-ins to low-security Templar safehouses, Klaus was able to craft a set of cutting-edge escrima sticks for Valerie as well as a protective helmet taking the chance to channel their worst fear and construct it into a symbol that they and all other criminals would fear.  However, Valerie still wants to keep her freedom and life safe while she battles the order’s advanced technology, mutated soldier as well as their discarded experiments. By day, Valerie works humbly at a museum, but at night? At night she becomes…Devilina.