Drip. Drip. Drip.
Darkness.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Silence, broken only by the slow fall of condensation from old pipes long forgotten by the world above. Then...
"Please, no! Please please pleasepleasepleasegodnopleasehelpmeeeeeeeEEEEE-!"
A scream, chopped off by a shuddering gasp. The voice is a woman's. She is alone. She is young.
She is terrified.
The knowledge that the frailties of her flesh are long gone temporarily subsumed by the hideous memory of their loss, the young woman sits upright, clawing her way from the tortures of yesterday to the desolation of waking. As she levers herself up, the last echoes of her tortured sobbing dying away amidst the ancient, corroded lagging, ratty sheets fall away from an otherwise-nude body. The form so exposed is both radiant and repulsive, idealized and inhuman, a thing found only in the dreams and nightmares that come in the small hours and whisper to the darkest parts of the metahuman psyche, just before waking...
The girl is at first lovely. Her skin is perfect, very fair without being pallid, smooth and soft and warm and bearing neither hair nor blemish. Her legs are long and lithe, a dancer's legs, toned without being muscular and rising into a compact curve. Her arms are slender and pleasingly rounded, and her modest chest appears larger than it otherwise might because of the narrow, waiflike structure of her body, with her flat stomach, waspish waist and only a gentle flare to her hips. Her face is cute, even fey, dominated by a pair of huge blue-green eyes above a rosebud mouth and below a small, pert nose. Her cheekbones are high but not prominent, and her chin comes to a delicate point that emphasizes the long sweep of her swanlike neck, which in turn gives way to a delicately notched collarbone. Her voice is lovely, even gasping and sobbing, a high, crystal-clear, perfectly pitched thing of breath and forbidden promises. Her dark-golden, almost honey-colored hair falls in a gentle wave down her perfect back, marked only by a palm-sized cerulean LED tattoo of a music staff going around a skull. The staff bears notes, . Where they grip the lumpy mattress, her hands are long and fine-boned, pianist's hands, and her small feet are highly arched. Both finger- and toenails are varnished a delicate pink with tiny, intricate white flowers painted onto the last three fingers of her left hand.
But the longer one stares, the more one sees what is simply not quite metahuman about her. Her eyes are just a shade too large, her delicate face a shade too symmetrical and perfect to be real. The proportions are just slightly off as well. The fingers gripping the mattress have sprouted seven-centimeter claws that have sunk all the way to the steel frame beneath and the delicate feet have sprouted long, wickedly sharp spikes. Her waist is just the slightest bit too small, her chest the barest fraction too large, her hair just a shade too lustrous. Her neck is slightly too long, her skin too perfect, her lips too red. She is exquisite, but somehow wrong. Artificial.
It is this inhumanity that gives her her name.
Dolly. The living toy. A thing created from woman but not of woman, robbed of her humanity to make room for someone else's twisted vision and that vision whored out for sex, and violence, and all manner of twisted depravities. Humanity's dark side has many uses for a beautiful, pliable monster, who was built to be everyone's plaything.
Only now Dolly plays a different game.
Dolly blinks slowly as consciousness reasserts itself. Her cyberears tell her that there is nothing else in the room- nest, really- that wasn't usually there, the dripping from the pipes echoing back only from objects that her perfect recall remembers. Her honey hair begins to glow faintly, a weak illumination that is nonetheless enough to allow her low-light vision to function, painting everything in the gunmetal tones of a starlight scope. She checks her internal commlink for the time, seeing how long she was out, and the answer comes as no shock to her, even though her elapsed time of unconsciousness was some fifty-three hours.
As always, the hours before her long sleep are missing from her mind, stolen by Laés or magic or drugs, a stipulation of her work in The Houses of Pain, that sinister underworld-below-an-underworld. Sometimes, full-sensory simsense recordings appear, made from her mind and body. She never watches them. She doesn't want to know. Other times, there will be people maimed, or missing, or murdered, and those times the denizens of Earl's court would give her a wider berth as she moved amongst them, doing the bidding of The Houses, or the Courts of the Holy, or the Earl, or The Old One.
Dolly, her composure regained, retracts her metal and swings her slender legs over the side of the rude bed, then yelps as the balls of her feet touch the cold, damp stone. The chill is actually painful, and it takes her a moment to realize that in that missing span of space, her sensory inputs had been overclocked to provide a more intense sensetrack. She takes a moment to reconfigure them back to normal human levels; she could dull or mute them entirely, but she likes to be able to feel still, even if it is through the modern miracles of computers and artificial nerves rather than simple, warm skin.
She stands, then almost immediately stumbles, tripping as her limbs refuse to obey her as they normally would. Dolly throws out a hand to catch herself, but its moving too, too damned slow, and all she manages is to knock an empty glass phial from the packing crate that serves as her nightstand. Her perceptions slow down, the accelerator burning in her mind and the remains of her body boosting her already-heightened reflexes to speed unmatched by anything purely flesh, and she realizes that the same souls who had tinkered with her perceptions had re-engaged the performance interlocks on her limbs. It is the work of a thought to take them off line, bringing them back to their full capacity, and she turns the stumble into a graceful landing on both feet and one hand, her other arm snapping out to snatch the phial out of the air without having to look.
Dolly breathes a sigh and shakes her head, looking around at the nest. It is a sad approximation of an apartment, to be sure. The room isn't even a proper apartment, just a dead-end annex in one of the old lower tunnels with enough room for a bed, a small desk, a small closet, and her packing crate. Her bed is a metal frame with thin metal strips laid across it in an approximation of slats, and an old, somewhat discolored futon mattress atop the tarnished metal. While she is proof against some of the lesser mundanities of environment, she still feels things like heat and cold and it is still possible for her to freeze to death. A friend of hers long since gone had knitted her a blanket against just this danger, and the bright blue-and-yellow check of the large, thick crocheted blanket is the only spot of real life and cheer in the entire nest. Beside the bed is an old packing crate on which sits a pair of holsters containing Ultimax machine pistols and the now replaced-phial.
THere is also an envelope.
Dolly picks it up and sighs again when she sees it stamped with the pentagram of The Houses of Pain rather than the feathered wings of the Courts of The Holy. She checks for- and sees, in ultraviolet- the slitted, serpentine eye inside the pentagram that bespeak The Old One's personal influence as well, and she flicks the envelope open with a twitch of her fingers, her long blades extended only fractionally and withdraws the single sheet of holopaper.
Dolly scans the message inside quickly, her pretty face turning down into a frown as she reads. She sets the paper back on the table, then very carefully picks up a lighter and sets it on fire. Its contents thus protected, Dolly turns to her makeshift armoire, choosing what outfit to wear that will cover Heaven, Hell, and all points in between.
