The daughter of Veld, Felicia’s life was changed forever on the morning that Kalm was destroyed. She was taken with the other survivors to Nibelheim and experimented on by Professor Hojo. He attempted to graft Materia into his patients in order to bestow them with great power. But the Materia he chose for Felicia was only a fragment of the whole and the power could not be fully unlocked. Deemed a failure, he ordered her death along with others that were unsuccessful. However, she was saved by Hideyaki Fuhito, one of Hojo’s assistants. He did not agree that Felicia was a failure and felt that if he could find the other pieces of the Materia embedded in the back of her hand, he could unlock one of the greatest terrors the world had ever seen; Zirconiade.

He took Felicia from Nibelheim, effectively going AWOL, and hid in Cosmo Canyon. Felicia could not remember her name, so when Fuhito began calling her Elfé, she accepted it. Back then, Avalanche was a small group of like-minded scientists and ex-Wutai troops that gathered in Cosmo Canyon to try to come up with solutions to stop Shinra from draining the Planet of Life Stream. But when the leader suddenly passed away, Fuhito took it upon himself to keep the records and foisted Elfé into the position of leader. He was too busy to run the daily operations, but was happy to dictate from the sidelines. He also felt that they needed to step up their game and hit Shinra where it really hurt; right in their main city of Midgar.

The two packed up what records they could and the few people who decided to stay. They made the trek to Midgar, the floating city and began to seek out those who would join their cause. Fuhito had taken the teachings of the Cosmo Canyon group to heart and felt that to be perfectly sure of success, everyone must perish in order to save the Planet. He would need men, lots of men to combat the Soldiers. They would need a place to stage all of this from and with his background, he knew of many secret areas just beneath the city that could house an army. He set up shop in an abandoned Soldier barracks just beneath the upper plate of Sector Six, the scientists had their area, infantry housing, living spaces, an armory was created. Now he just needed dull witted men and woman to fill the ranks. He and Elfé set out to the slums to find such people and he was not disappointed when they came across Shears Albrook and his gang of one hundred men.