Helena Walker

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

Alias

Helena Walker
Miss Walker
The One Who Waits

Background[]

She was born in Darwin in possibly the 1980s, enjoying the sunsets and wet season storms. Between that time and 2008, she volunteered at Kakadu if she could. From her extensive knowledge of biology, she must have also graduated from college with a degree related to biology. An accident occurred in 2008 because she ended up on the Island; it was the last year she had known. On a non-canon note, she was terrified of being on the Island, but the company of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures soothed her. After a prolonged observation of each species, she decides to spend her time on the island writing dossiers about the many creatures.

Personality[]

"I turned her away at first, not trusting her intentions. How could I? What mad fool would bother with scholarly pursuits in a place like this? Yet she persisted, and in time I was convinced of her honesty.

I don't know if I made the right decision. Helena is constantly asking strange questions. Why does she need to know so much about my beasts' feces and mating behavior? What a bizarre person."

~Mei Yin's first impression of Helena Walker

Helena was a carefree woman who enjoyed being outdoors because of her passion for biology and paleontology. Many of her friends, like Rockwell, Mei Yin, and Santiago, note this attitude even when they are in 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 work with the obelisks and leading them to the Tek cave. A profound trait that Santiago notes is her creativity and use of swearing. Everyone she meets greatly respects 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 her vulgar attitude when she shows disrespect or has her accent, but in the end, she kindly looks after her fellow survivors and friends. Diana notes 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 realizes that her playing nice doesn't make it far in survival, so she does what she can to help pull her own weight and care for 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 pose to her due to her reactivity to it and the fact that there is danger in every corner of Extinction, she chooses to use the prism to save her friends, not 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. 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 takes a systematic approach, but she still doesn't hesitate to help 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 keep 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 named Athena, she feels guilty for not giving him a gift. She unintentionally hurts Rockwell's feelings when she doesn't notify him of heading to an obelisk with Mei Yin.
- On Scorched Earth, their relationship is strained because of the time gap they haven't seen each other. This leads Helena to be oblivious to 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 and notes that Rockwell is obsessed with Element. Once Helena saw who Rockwell truly was, being a mass of tentacles infused with elements, 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 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 of points of view, 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 to in the aftermath.
- Ever since the Tek survivors are forced into the Wasteland, Helena notes Mei Yin's constant fighting on her own. As a change, she confronts Mei Yin to let them share the load. When Helena tells Mei Yin that they must find out what is at Santiago's signal, Mei Yin warns Helena that she is starting to sound more like Rockwell. Because of Mei Yin's cold words, Helena often reconsidered her priorities.

Diana Altaras
- Even in the short amount of time they met, they were friendly towards each other and understood each other. Diana notes that 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 said, but she couldn'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 due to constant base raids from lesser tribes.

Raia
- Helena met Raia when the former saved Helena and the village she lived in from a mantis swarm. Ever since that rescue, Helena wanted to meet Raia in person. She only saw Raia as an old woman who warned her about the Ark's 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 terrified Helena and made her 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 breaking down inside the system and 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 is 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 had grown slightly, reaching her shoulders. On the Island, Helena wore brown cloth boots, pants, and a shirt. On Scorched Earth, she was fully attired in desert cloth armor. On Aberration, she resumed normal clothes and soon had a suit of Tek armor. When she became a Homo Deus, Helena was only a body of blue ethereal light that highlighted 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 armor 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[]


"The more I see these glitches, the more they remind me of the Arks. Not that I was really on an Ark, of course, but Helena was. She survived the Arks, escaped to Earth, ascended into a being of pure energy, created me… It's a lot for a hologram to live up to, if I’m being honest." ~ HLN-A's Genesis: Part 1 Tidbit Glitch Discovery mentioning Helena Walker.

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, she is the weakest survivor, but she survives by writing a dossier of every animal to save other survivors' lives. In combat, she would rather avoid conflict because her aim is terrible, and she doesn't like to punch others. In Scorched Earth, Helena becomes adept at using guns to protect herself. Being by herself, she always utilized everything, even a Jerboa, for comfort, with the added bonus of being a weather radar. On Aberration, Helena's marksmanship had improved as she shot 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 of the four Mek pilot candidates because of her synchronization rate and her calmness and creativity in various situations. For some strange reason, she activated 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 in tiny bits. However, 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 Diana back and made HLN-A for Mei Yin Li and the player.

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 they will be useful to them in their database.

Known Tamed Creatures[]

The Island

Athena (Argentavis)
Scary (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 how death kept taking people away. To stop death itself, Helena accidentally 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, slither to Mei Yin's location, guide 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 ting 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, sida Akhtar, a soil scientist on the Colony Ship., spotted her. 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 had died, and an unknown amount of time passed until she consistently made a generation of survivors that couldn't be killed off permanently, and soon, she made the player. However, her experimentation was on a scale that was so large that she noted that she saw everything in the experiment in great detail from millions of points of view. This caused her to lose her sense of time, and she is now losing her mind and identity due to understanding everything she is seeing. Being the weakest Homo Deus, she was gradually crumbling. Another thing she altered was the Mega MEK, which was to be safely operated with only one pilot.

When 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 most of the Homo dDeusare 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.

Both of their resting places or tombs were described as being found in a cave that was soon closed off by a massive object, completely blocking the entrance.
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.
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 barbecue refers to both the dodo, ARK's mascot, and the Australian slang for throwing shrimp on the barbecue.
Helena's name is Greek in origin that means "Light".
- Her name fits as she unveils a hidden truth about the ARKs wherever she goes throughout her journey.
Helena's age by the time of Aberration and Extinction was 28, as noted by Diana.

ARK: The Animated Series[]

Element 1[]

Helena awakens, submerged in water by the Island, and reaches it after being chased by a Megalodon. Upon reaching the shore, Helena noticed a crest embedded into her left forearm and was then surprised by the appearance of a Dodo. The Dodo was then attacked by an island resident who wanted to eat the Dodo, but Helena protected it. After a brief argument with the man, Helena follows him to where he claims it is a safer location and learns that his name is Bob, a soldier who partook in the battle of Normandy. This perplexes Helena as the war had ended decades ago, but for Bob, it was merely two weeks for him. Bob would then lead Helena to a giant pond where several Dinosaurs bathed.

A flashback would then show Helena when she was going to give a presentation in front of a large audience. Despite her anxiety, her wife Victoria, who was also in the audience, gave Helena the confidence to complete her presentation whenever she felt distraught. After the presentation, Helena would receive a bouquet of flowers from Victoria and inform her that they would be going to China. The two would hug and kiss over this news.

In the present, Bob and Helena navigate through the forest until they reach a small clearing where they find a wounded Parasaur. Despite Bob's disapproval, Helena removed the arrow lodged into its side, and Helena named it Scary, who then flees the area. After Helena compliments Bob for helping her remove the arrow from Scary and informs Bob of her old-world profession, Bob dies from an arrow shot into the back of his head.

From there, Helena flees from an archer riding on a Raptor. She then finds herself in a village being raided by soldiers, most of whom ride Raptors, and their leader rides on a Triceratops. There, she'd encounter a raptor and use a reflective shield to scare away the Raptor, but the leader would spot this and find it interesting. An archer then tried to kill Helena, but the leader stopped them and was instead knocked unconscious.

Another flashback depicts Helena learning that Victoria was going to be sent to a dangerous mountain area where her life could be at risk. However, Victoria assures Helena that she'll be fine and that when she's gone, Helena can spend her time finishing up the projects she put on hold. The two would then have a pleasant bonding moment together and go to bed together.

In the present again, Helena regains consciousness and awakens in the raid leader's tent. His name is Edmund Rockwell, and he details his former background to her. He also tells Helena where they are and what he calls the island, the ARK. As Edmund leads Helena to the area where the Raptors are kept, he informs her about the leader of the camp they're at as Gaius Marcellus Nerva.

At the Raptor pit, the two debate the morality of science, and in the end, Helena rejects Edmund's advances toward her, causing him to smack her. She then headbutts him and then flees the scene, only to be stopped by Nerva and imprisoned with the other prisoners. Where all of the prisoners were held, Helena briefly befriends a young man she met at the village that was raided. The man was named Jaimie from Anno Domini in 1746. Their chat would be short-lived as Edmund had Jaimie fed to a Rex as a way to break Helena's spirit.

That night, Helena would have a nightmare of the day when she learned that Victoria had died. When she awoke from her nightmare, a Finnish lady gave her some berries because she had heard her stomach rumbling earlier. Scary briefly visits Helena to console her, and then Edmund has two soldiers guide her to Nerva's tent. The two talk about a myriad of subjects, but the main ones are about an artifact in his possession and Helena's knowledge about dinosaurs. Their conversation would take a dark turn when Nerva proposes that Helena join his cause, stating that by taming the Dinosaurs, they could conquer the island. However, Helena poisons his drink, causing Nerva to become temporarily paralyzed. Escaping with his artifact and diary, Helena creates a scene by placing various pieces of meat around the camp and releasing the Raptors.

Helena would then release the prisoners as the emancipated Raptors attacked the Soldiers. Nerva, who managed to squelch the poison that paralyzed him, exited his tent and went after Helena, who escaped riding on Scary. Before Helena was able to exit the camp, Nerva successfully lodged a spear into her shoulder. As Helena escapes, Nerva vows to get his revenge against Helena.

Helena dislodges the spear from her shoulder at a safe distance and vows to survive.

Gallery[]

Helena's First Day on the Island ARK
Helena inspecting feces of Mei Yin's tames, giving Mei-Yin an awkward first impression of her and starting a great friendship between them.
Helena Walker is taken under New Legion custody after the battle of the Blue Obelisk.
Helena ponders her fate as the New Legion enters the Tek cave.
Rockwell's drawing of Helena in her desert attire
Rockwell's depiction of Helena Walker with an Ark assault rifle
Helena in her futuristic clothing
Helena breaks down at the thought of sounding like and turning into the monster her closest friend, Edmund Rockwell, had become.
Helena somehow activates Mei-Yin's artifact in the building where Santiago's signal originated from, turning it into a finer prism.
Mei-Yin helping Helena study the mysterious prism in moderation.
Helena is in the starting stages of her ascension process into becoming a Homo Deus.
Helena completes her ascension into becoming a Homo Deus with Mei-Yin watching her body turning into dust, leaving only an ethereal outline.
Helena lends a hand to the player in letting them see the ARKs descending from the inhabitant's point of view.
Homo Deus Helena