Goodnight walks with her shoulders hunched against the backlash of her answer to Melisa's question. She knows several members of the team are awakened on some level, and it would be folly to think that none of them had heard her response and immediately connected the dots. She is not blind to the irony of being outed by a spirit, especially one that was only trying to preserve her secret and had inadvertently chosen the only medium in which she was not a manifestly skilled liar. She fears what Isaint will say, or what he'll do once he finds out, but she can't exactly just shout out her sister's secret.
Goodnight glances to her right, at Natasha. The teenager is walking with a bounce and swagger to her step, and it brings a smile to Goodnight's face despite her apprehension. She knows that look, that joy of acceptance. Goodnight and Solo had fostered it, giving her the clothes and the weapons and the magical enhancements of a shadowrunner, and treated her like an adult this whole time. Goodnight is sure that Al or Isaint would say they've made her a target, and dangerously overconfident, but she was already a target. As for overconfidence, well, every teenager has that, and while it might make Natasha prone to larger risks, freezing up in fear would kill her a lot faster. Better to take a stupid risk that might pay off than stand still and become a statistic written in blood.
When Isaint's message shows up, Goodnight scans it at the speed of thought. her contacts are currently gracing Natasha's eyes, but her alice band gives her DNI, so she can read the message anyway. She cocks her head, surprised at the mild tone and levelheadedness of it. She opens a window in her head to reply, but stops. Now isn't the time for another debate, and even though it might be a civilized one, unless she explains a few things to Isaint, it would just be another argument.
For a long moment, Goodnight walks in silence, contemplating. Then, finally, she shrugs. She likes Solo, and Nitro, and the dog-thing, and Melisa. She could be happy running with this crew, if they let her stay. But to do that, she had to build bridges, not burn them.
Goodnight begins composing another, longer message. A transition to complete rationality would be as suspicious as it is unbelievable, so she makes sure to lace her message with the proper amount of vitriolic invective, while still opening herself up to Isaint. Its a risk, sure, but on a level that Goodnight doesn't like admitting exists, she wants to tell her story, even in a brief form and to a person who may hate her for it. No one can exist completely outside normal human contact, and down here her closest friends are a mutant stripper, a free spirit shopkeeper, and a banshee. And her doctor is a ghoul.
<<Hey, bullet points! We're making progress, he can be taught! I want to debate you, but that's proving futile. If you want to continue the argument we're having, we can. It'll pass the time. But first, I want to tell you a story. Rough waters ahead, so bear with me. What I’m telling you is very private, but I’m telling you this because maybe, just maybe, it will enlighten you somewhat and save me some violence down the road. Even a superior, arrogant jackass gets three chances from me. What you do with this one is up to you. >>
Goodnight stops a moment to consider where to begin, then shrugs and just dives right in.
[spoiler=Goodnight's rather depressing and fairly dark story]<<I was born right here in London in 2053, in the Lambeth Containment Zone. By then, the LCZ was already hopeless, heavily contaminated, filled with genefreaks and experiments gone wrong, and magically polluted. I was born to a chiphead father and a junkie mother with a raging cram habit and poor impulse control. You can probably guess what my home life was like.
I got by, even as a kid. We were dirt poor and it wasn’t a happy home, but I survived.
My sister, Victoria, was born in 2058. She was homo sapiens nobilis, a normal elf. I was a dryad, and in the 2050’s, we were rarer than roc’s eggs, and there were all sorts of rumors about being able to bewitch people. As it turns out, those are kind of true, but that’s neither here nor there. She was the golden child, I was the freak, but I didn’t resent her even as a kid. Probably the last nice thing I would do for her until she was Natasha's age.
My old man bought it when I was fourteen. Bad BTL that fried his brain, turned him into a drooling vegetable. I found his meat when I came home from buying soymilk. My mother cursed him for an hour for leaving her stuck with us. Then she sold him- still breathing- to a ghoul den for cram and some petty cash. Then she got high as a kite and beat Vicki and me for the rest of the night. Like I said, life wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t in school by then, and wouldn’t become educated until much later. At the time, this was all I knew.
It would be another year before the night that three men burst into my bedroom and carried me out in zipcuffs and a black bag. Never said a word to me. I know now that they were Red Vory, and that my mother had sold me to them for more drugs and money. She was already in pretty bad health and a burnout addict, and I suspect they offered her a lot of money. It was a chance to get me off her hands, and she took it. Dryads were worth a lot back then. Still are, some places.
Two weeks and interminable abuse later, I was being unloaded from a shipping container into a Tarislar whorehouse run by the White Vory. We’ll skip the next four years, I’m sure you can figure it out. I’m still addicted to Eros- a little- and I’ve been clean off of Bliss for three years. I have nightmares, too, and flashbacks. At some point in there, I awakened, but I was scared of my talent. I was scared they’d hurt me even worse if they knew I had it, so I avoided it. I was genuinely afraid I was going to die in that place, and I still didn’t have the guts to try and get out. Compliance was all I knew.
I got out in 2072. As you may remember, not the best time to be running around Seattle all alone. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to not be alone. I was rescued from that hellhole by the Brat’Mael the Black Sun. They might be murderers, racists, and violent assholes, but to a teenage elf stuck in a Vory whorehouse, they’re the closest things to angels I could ask for. At the time I was too hurt and too blissed out to even stand, and the Black Sun were killing the Russians left and right, exacting retribution for being human and having the stones to imprison and pimp out elf girls in elf territory. A man with gunmetal eyes and a glossy black cyberarm carried me out all by himself. I passed out, but I remember the building burning down.
The man, who told me to call him Corby, took a shine to me. I don’t know why, and I don’t really care. He knew I was awakened before I really understood it myself, and he proceeded to spend the next three years “honing” me. He got me off the pills, mostly. He taught me, passed on experience and knowledge and training I could never have afforded on my own, and I did what I could in return. I was a good joygirl, I knew all the tricks for keeping clients happy so they wouldn’t hurt me, but he didn’t want a pet slut, he wanted something else. I think that I was the personification of that old saw about how, past a certain point, teaching is the only way to learn. So he taught.
And I learned. Magic, languages, martial arts, swordplay, wordplay, guns, chess, magical theory, lore, history…I got an accelerated education that is as good as any you would find in an ivy-league university. He was always teaching, even when we were doing other things, and when Corby wasn’t around, someone else would pick it up, or there would be a stack of tutorsofts next to the bed when I got back to the apartment I shared with Angel.
Corby was as vile and black as they come, though. My magic is dark stuff, rooted in his belief in the Dark Trinity, Badb, Macha, and Morrigan. The spells I know kill or maim, or make it easier for me to do so, or inflict terrible pain. It was what he knew, and by extension it is what I know. He remade me into his image, a darkly elegant weapon that would look pretty in the light but kill you just as dead in the dark.
And I was excellent at it. By the end of my tenure with Corby, I was less a favored pet or a foundling apprentice and more a lieutenant. I fought and bled and killed and fucked for him and his goals. I racked up a body count you couldn’t total up on all your extremities together, and I hurt a lot more. I took a street name- Macha, after the goddess- and for months I let him use me for his own ends.
I loved it.
Then, one day, Corby was gone. Just gone, without a single word of goodbye. Just a case containing a mageblade, a certified credstick with ten kay on it, and a one way ticket to London. Without Corby, I was an outsider again, tainted by my association with the one elf the Laesa tolerated but didn’t patch in, so I took the money and the weapon and I left, coming home. I was proud of myself, I had power and intelligence and beauty and money. I wanted to show off, I wanted to be the white knight on the rearing charger that would carry my sister away from the LCZ and into a better life.
My old home was still smoking when I arrived.
The neighborhood told the story in bits and pieces, greased by money, a few favors, and a couple of well-placed threats. The Vory had hit, taken the girl- my sister- and left the mother to die in the fire. To this day I don’t know why they waited for years to exact vengeance on my family for the attack, or why they leveled it at me at all. Maybe my association with the Brat’mael had made me guilty in their eyes, and they only struck once I no longer had their support, but the Vory soldier I “talked to” did confirm it was a mission of revenge, rather than being motivated purely by profit.
I began searching the next day. I got a shitty little studio in Soho and started looking for Vicki. The nuyen Corby had left for me disappeared in record time as I chased down leads and searched for answers. I must have hit every bar, whorehouse, bunraku parlor, and smuggler in London. I was penniless when I finally got a lead, and my search had slowed as I fought to support myself. Just as in Seattle, I tortured and killed and whored myself out and committed crimes great and small all across the city, searching for information and the means with which to use it when I found it, and while it was hardly pleasant, find it I did, after more than half a year of searching.
When I finally got to where I’d heard Victoria might be, all I found were bodies, torn apart by main force, clustered in a bedroom. My sister was there, chained to an empty bedframe in an apartment in Spitalfields, a plaything for the idle rich. She was pale and cold, and had bite marks on her inner thigh, her hip, and her neck.
I’m sure you’ve guessed before now how this story goes. I’m also sure you would have killed her in my place. But I couldn’t. Call me weak if you must.
I had no money, only my skills at magic, violence, and deception, and now a temporarily dead girl who was going to wake up scared, hurt, and thirsty.
I’m sure if you look around, you can figure out why I went Below. I’d heard stories, read articles. I was fairly certain I could hack it down here. And when your little sister has become a vampire because you weren’t there to protect her, you do anything you can for her. So I came down here, to the lightless places. I took out a huge loan with the Iron Tolltakers, enough to pay for a new life for the two of us. God help me if I default on it, but the risk was worth the reward.
Yes, my sister is a Banshee. She has been for almost a year now. Yes, she drinks blood and burns if exposed to UV-A. Yes, she’s a killing machine, an awakened predator remade on a cellular level to be able to, naked and empty-handed, match you or I on our best day with all of our tricks and enhancements. You know what else she is? She’s a dancer. She wants to go to Wellesley for an M.M from their awakened artist program. She worries about boys and girls, she likes old movies, and she even condescends to play chess with me sometimes.
She’s only ever fed from one person; me, before you ask, every two weeks. Its twisted, I know. Believe me, I know, but she needs blood and I have it to give. The things I do to make sure that I can survive her predations are frequently awful, but that is my cross to bear, not hers, and I'll never tell her what I do for her, and neither will anyone else if they know what's good for them. She has never been anything but a cheerful, pretty, pleasant young woman, trying to have as normal a life as she can. But if she went above and word got around what she was, she’d be dead inside of a week. You’ll have to excuse me if I have a bit of a fucking complex about prejudice and HMHVV.
So there you have it, the whole sad story. I never claimed not to be a monster, Isaint. I am what experience has made me, as is my sister. Nothing more, nothing less. I am a killer, a torturer, a career criminal. I care about spirits and broken girls because I have learned firsthand about their pain. I am not like you. I don’t fight to win. I fight to kill, to draw blood, to feel the rush and thrill of combat. I am so emotional and flighty and girlish because the other version of me, the one hidden behind frivolity and sex and casual talk of relationships and debates on the nature of spirits, is Macha, and she is orders of magnitude more dangerous and repulsive. I want to be good for my sister, and that fact is all that keeps large portions of my former life locked away.
And just to add the necessary boilerplate, if you so much as harm one hair on her head or cause her to be harmed because of her condition, I will move heaven and earth to kill you. Don’t feel special, this applies to everyone. But I feel that with you must explicitly spell out that if she is hurt and I find you are connected to it, there won’t be enough left of you to fill a soykaf cup. Are we reading from the same page, omae?>>[/spoiler]
Her story told, Goodnight continues walking, looking straight ahead. Because of this, she is not taken completely by surprise when the strange masked acrobats come calling, and though her posture changes and she is suddenly hyperalert, she manages to refrain from immediate violence. She examines them, briefly, as the leader speaks, searching their masks and clothes and gear and auras for anything that will jog her memory.
Almost on autopilot, Goodnight's mouth opens and she says in flawless Sperethiel, "We are pleased to meet you, oh Troupe. We are humbled by your presence and your lovely performance, both in music and physicality. We are Goodnight," she gestures at herself, using the plural because she has a feeling that these types will see her spirits and understand before saying, "However, we are not empowered to give away the names of our companions. The music of their persons is for them to play and them alone." One hand rises up of its own accord to rest on Natasha's shoulder, part reassurance, part protection, and ready to fling her to the ground should the need arise.
