Nova Petrenko

About

Nova Petrenko kicks a soccer ball against the wall, her tongue stuck out in concentration. She's got a tattoo of a compass on her wrist, always pointing her towards the next adventure. She hums old punk rock tunes while she fixes her vintage motorcycle, grease under her nails.

Backstory

Three championship trophies sat gathering dust while Nova Petrenko chose to learn cartography from her cartographer grandmother, memorizing every back road and forgotten trail across Eastern Europe before she could even drive. The compass tattoo came first—inked at fifteen to honor her babusya's stories of guiding resistance fighters through mountain passes—and the motorcycle followed naturally, a 1970s Jawa her grandmother had hidden in a barn since the revolution. She met Lily while both were getting matching piercings at an underground tattoo parlor that doubled as a venue for banned punk bands, but it was Marina who taught her that some adventures end in beautiful dead ends. When Marina chose medical school over their planned cross-continent road trip, Nova realized her compass had been pointing away from people, not toward places, and she's been chasing that magnetic pull ever since.

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