| abstract
| - Written somewhen in 2005, this short story highlighted a turning point for Kit, not only IC'ly but OOC'ly. She was originally conceived to be a short-lived NPC, but due to certain events, she ended up becoming one of my staple PC characters instead. She opened her eyes - and then had to turn away, squeezing them shut again. The sun - a sun - streamed into the room unimpeded, washing everything in a brilliant haze that stabbed mercilessly into her mind. A mind that was unusually quiet, blissfully...empty. She flinched in spite of herself at the ghostly murmur, rationalized that she was cold when she buried her head farther into pillow and under blankets; told herself that she was still dreaming, that the last few whispers were nothing more than some tattered memory already faded beyond recognition. After twelve minutes and forty-three seconds, she was actually able to convince herself of that when nothing else was heard. She risked a small peek, waited blearily for the colors to sort themselves out, and then turned her head to find the small bedstand waiting patiently by the left side of the bed. She remembered the bedstand; but she did not remember laying her glasses down upon them, neatly folded. It was enough to make her - she who had relied more often on her own eidetic memory than the data tablet that she habitually carried with her - shiver and wrap her arms about herself. She felt like a ghost; the bits and snippets of a routine inexpertly and incompletely gouged from a program, left to stutter and static when it would hit one of the missing pieces. She waited until her hand had steadied before she risked reaching out for the glasses, picking them up without the rattle she had feared to hear and unfolding them methodically. Slipping them onto her nose, she blinked, adjusting, as they filtered the infrared spectrum from her sight and suddenly things became sharper, more colorful - no longer washed out into a glowing haze where contours and shadows predominated. The floor was cool to her bare feet as she slipped out from under the covers and stood, the boards gritty with dust and unswept dirt. She looked down to peer around her toes, curling them out of the way, and found their outlines already imprinted in the even layer of time's leavings. Looking beyond, she could see tracks of other feet - or, rather, shoes - turning in confused circles between the room's sparse furnishings and eventually exiting through the closed door. The shod trail was larger than her own imprints...the outlines scuffed, as if their wearer had dragged each step ever so slightly, providing barely enough effort to lift them clear of the floor. The Timonae's features had been lined, his body atrophied by age; tendons and muscles harsh and bold without the padding of youth. Yet his gaze had been clear, movements controlled, footsteps silent...and though her head had spun with the error codes and control statements crowding it until she could barely grasp what he told her, her instincts had refused to allow her to relax - Danger! Threat! - until he had departed and the lock engaged. Her footsteps covered his as she walked across the small room to its only window; the railings above it empty of curtains, panes scratched and pitted by the accumulation of wind-flung dust, scraped from the ragged edges of nearby peaks. The light had a reddish tint, warming the edges of the pink and lavendar mists that crowded the view. The statistics unfurled through her mind as nebulously as the mists outside; without source, without context. For a moment, she was almost afraid that the facts would not stop, but continue to crowd her head until they overwhelmed whatever tenuous thoughts she attempted with their steady soldier's march of fact...fact...fact... Even as the panic began, the litany stopped itself, as abruptly as a recording put on pause by the touch of a button - and it was a pause. She could almost feel it, the file hovering near in case she should wish to retrieve it again, a bookmark placed where she had halted it, ready to reveal the rest of the world's secrets at the merest whimsy. It was comforting, even as it was terrifying, for she did not know how she had come upon the information, unlike the knowledge of the bedstand and the footprints. She could not remember reading it; whether it had been on printed paper or in phosphorescent letters on a display. She could not remember whether she had learned it three days before, or three years instead. And yet, it was there, as fresh and solid as if documents lay before her very eyes - all the background information that she could possibly need if she wished to stay upon Antimone for any length of time. She could blend in as easily as any native would if only her physical appearance matched. The words chased themselves through her head, circling and nipping at each other's tails, but with none of the monotonous repetitions that she had learned to fear - the kind that had locked her into a viciously small circle, constantly retreading the same ground, nothing more than a mechanical doll with its spring wound too tight. The programs were little more than psychosomatic murmurs now... ...and she brushed easily past their memory, a hand rising to wave away non-existent cobwebs as she headed toward the bureau and the mirror above it, the only other piece of furniture in the room but for a small desk. There were clothes already draped across its surface, tunic and loose pants in the fashion of the world she now occupied, folded clumsily with creases and wrinkles revealing how they had been stored. She rubbed at the rough fabric, knowing without needing to look that all the bureau's drawers would be empty, and that these would be the only clothes she owned until more were proven to be a necessity. She pulled the sleeping shirt over her head, casting it aside on the bed while she held the new shirt up to sort out its dimensions, to meet her own eyes in the mirror over the bureau...and pause to frown at them. Were they supposed to be brown? Blue...green...she felt the prickle of sweat down her spine as she stared with an indefinable unease at her own reflection. Were her eyes supposed to be brown? Were they not supposed to be blue? Or green...she could see them as green. But those green eyes belonged with lips painted a harlot's red, lashes gleaming black, hair shining gold and scarlet like fire to draw as much attention as possible in all the wrong directions... ...blue eyes with naivete's innocent smile, a dash of freckles across the nose, wispy brown eyebrows perpetually arched in surprise and fascination... ...brooding black, painted nails... ...stormy gray, rare violet... Brown. Who was she supposed to be, with brown eyes? Who am I supposed to be? she demanded of the scattered voices, demanded of her brown eyes and black hair and pale skin, scrubbed and plain to blend with a crowd, to be recognizable as only one of hundreds or thousands of similar phenotypes... Who am I? I do not want to forget - who am I! Tell me a name! You gave me a name along with this face! What is it?! ...and a single word suddenly floated to the surface, like the last bubble of breath released from a drowning man's mouth. Kitty. She stiffened, fingers tightening on the sturdy cloth knotted between them, knuckles whitening in strain. Kitty, she mouthed experimentally. It had a comfortable feel to it, and she could almost hear the voices that would have formed it - - a young man's timber, still light with youth and mischief, but guarded in its pronunciation, calculatedly careless, forming each letter with aristocratic precision - - a woman's husky contralto, trembling with suppressed excitement or amusement, sharp and impatient, as if she could not be bothered with the rest - The rest. There was more. Kitty...Kittianna. Kittianna Trevelyan. She sucked in a slow breath, expanding her lungs to their fullest, holding the air as she stared into her brown eyes. Kittianna Trevelyan; the name did not feel as alien as the others she randomly experimented with, to see how they tasted upon her tongue. It would do. With the name were brought other things - fleeting impressions. A snatch of color or sensation, a peculiar scent or the feel of a fabric. No faces, though she remembered the warmth and pressure of a hand on her shoulder. No names, though she remembered the sound of voices; young and old, woman and man, irate and gentle. Snippets of code again, false starts and premature endings...a hasty erasure that did not complete itself as it should have. She was not supposed to remember this much, she knew, and again, a flash of unnatural fear. This is not supposed to be... No! No, it was different now. She could access whatever she wanted to, with no fear of some distant controller swerving her thought processes aside like some demented train conductor. She worked for someone else, someone with no control over such things. There was only herself in her own head, as it should be. She began the aborted attempt to pull the shirt over her head, movements slow and studied in the turmoil just passed, as if afraid that any violence might trigger another one whether it be physical or emotional, intentional or accidental. But then something else caught her eye and forced her to pause again, arms half-entangled, to blink and peer closer at a faint webwork of pale lines braiding across her shoulders and down her torso. They were nearly indistinguishable from the healthy skin surrounding them, but at this range, she could not miss them. Instinctively, she knew that they ventured nowhere that clothing could not cover. Scars attract attention. Scars can be used to identify you. Do not take scars where you cannot hide them, if you must take them at all. She frowned as she pushed one arm through fully to drag a fingertip across the chill glass, following one particularly long line across her collarbone...how could she have allowed such a thing? The tissue was knit neatly, edges made by a keen blade, shallow enough not to dimple the flesh when it healed, made intentionally... How did she know this? She could almost see the hand that had drawn that pocket-knife so distractingly across her skin, the gold band winking upon his finger, waiting with baited breath to see if he would dare go deeper, and it was another's name that he had whispered in her ear - "Kittianna," she whispered aloud to drown out that other name, shaken, her voice hoarse from lack of use and dread. "I am Kittianna Trevelyan. I will be Kittianna for as long as I wish it." Her breath stopped, her heart skipping. For a moment, she blinked, trying to puzzle out which memory had spoken in her voice...until a movement in the mirror drew her eyes up from the scars. To the reflection of her mouth, curving when she had not bid it to, into a damning smile full of knife edges and unsated desires - "You're awake, I see." Gasping, Kittianna refocused upon the fractured shards of the broken mirror, to the stern, disapproving figure of the Timonae reflected through a dozen fault lines. She quickly shrugged the rest of the shirt guiltily into place, disentangling her fist from the center of the mess, blood dribbling down with a chime of dislodged pieces. "That'll come out of your first paycheck," the Timonae continued dispassionately. "You're lucky the equipment you're selecting out today will be counted as necessary expenses, or it would've been the third paycheck instead." "They are necessary," she reiterated, equally emotionless, the mask easy to assume now that there was an audience to perform for. She examined her knuckles, plucking smeared glass from them. "If you wish me to accomplish anything meaningful on your behalf, I will need every item that I listed." "You're lucky to get a paycheck at all," he reminded acerbically, and she neither protested or resented his words. It was true; she was lucky to be offered a small percentage of the work she was supposed to perform in recompense for the favor paid her. She was lucky to be alive, and in possession - mostly - of her own mind. The trickster had been sent to finish what the dying SIS could not, and instead of destroying her, he had stolen her away for his own purposes. So she would not complain. As long as there were orders to follow, she would not complain. That was a need they had hardcoded into her body, not just softcoded into her mind. "If there are no other problems, finish dressing. We leave as soon as you get downstairs," he informed as he walked back out of the room, leaving the door half-ajar, the reason for the broken mirror uncommented upon; uninterested. She turned back to her fractured image, only one eye visible in the pieces still left within the frame. When she blinked, it seemed to wink at her.
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