As Bruce asked about Emily, Helena had a moment of wondering just how to explain this. "Emily, my daughter. Sort of. It's a very long, very complicated story." Helena wondered where to even begin to explain this. Should she start at the very beginning of everything? Because truthfully, just explaining the Janus Coin wasn't even half of the story.
"In the world I come from, there is a place called the Warehouse. It is a sanctuary or museum, if you will, for artifacts. Though they are not your every day mundane kind of artifact from Antiquity. These artifacts all have extraordinary abilities. Many are destructive, some are helpful, but all of them are kept in the Warehouse once they are found by agents who work within the Warehouse. It is for the betterment of humanity that these things are kept in a safe place." Turning so her back was to the table, she leaned against it and crossed her arms across her chest. "I was an agent once, back in London. Back in a time when I held the highest optimism for the future. I had a daughter, Christina. She was my pride and joy, my everything." Keeping one arm crossed, her other hand lifted and slid inside her blouse, her elegant fingers wrapping around the locket she always wore close to her heart. "One summer, I'd arranged for Christina to stay with my cousin in Paris while I was working in London. She was murdered. I lost myself, my mind. It is a strange sense, to lose one's sanity over a period of years until finally I was a clear and present danger to those around me because I had grown reckless trying to find a way to bring my daughter back. I searched the Warehouse for an artifact to bring her back or to turn back time. Eventually I constructed a time machine and traveled to that day to save her only to fail. Eventually my recklessness caused the death of a fellow agent, and I asked to be Bronzed." She paused a moment, clear and present pain and sorrow within her dark eyes. "Bronzing is much like being cryogenically frozen, only one is encased within bronze. I went into the Bronzer in 1900 and remained there until I was debronzed in 2010. When Bronzed, you are immobile but fully conscious. For one hundred and ten years, my anger and fury and grief festered within me. Needless to say, I tried to use an artifact to bring about another ice age, effectively killing the population of the world. But Myka stopped me, and I was arrested."
She paused a moment to take a deep breath, still clutching the locket tightly in her hand. "The Regents decided to use an artifact on me, the Janus Coin. It stripped my body of my consciousness, imprinting it upon the Coin, and what was left behind became a woman named Emily Lake. Eventually through a series of events, a psychopath got ahold of both the Coin and Emily and put my consciousness back into my body. He needed me to open a lock for him because it had been designed by my teacher at the Warehouse. About a month or so ago, Pestilence, one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, came to town and I had a case of dissociative identity disorder where Emily would take over sometimes. Because this was artifact-related, it didn't simply disappear when Pestilence was killed. The solution was a spell to pull Emily out of my body and give her another body. I don't know how they did it, but they found an eight month old baby girl who has just died, but put Emily within her and brought her back to life. So now Emily has a chance to live as I do. And she has, in effect, become my daughter."
She fell silent, a soft smile on her lips, but the sorrow and pain still hung within her eyes. She had omitted the part where she'd died between opening that lock and arriving here, but that wasn't relevant at the present moment.