[application] don't you fucking know what you are?

[lanterncast]

Your name/crazy internet handle/whatever: Liz
Personal journal: ironfall
Email: thistornadoloves@gmail.com
AIM: thatlastlamb
Characters in Taxon (if applicable): Elena Gilbert.

Character name: Judith
Genre (TV/books/etc): Table top roleplaying
Fandom: Werewolf: the Apocalypse

Canon point: Judith comes from comfortably before the actual end of the world; the red star has risen, but no one is quite sure what to make of it, and I'm basically stretching timelines because the official canon is a mess on metaplot structure and the nineties were a dark time whose fashion no one wants to revisit, ever.

Why this Character and Canon point?: Judith is a character I created for another game earlier in the year; that game ended before I could do any of the development I'd planned for her, but the idea of her refused to leave my mind, and so I want to rework her and bring her to Taxon. The thing that I realized when considering this was that a panfandom, isolated game of this kind is ideal for Judith in terms of 'reshaping her into a functioning, healthy person'--in her own universe, Judith would never escape the stigma of her birth or her nature, but in Taxon there's no one around to particularly care about what she is.

The core of Judith for me as a writer, in terms of themes and issues, is essentially how abuse and conflict can shape a person in specific ways that involve negating the self and any protest to the situation in order to endure it without breaking down; she also includes how negative labels applied to someone can be easily internalized and made a part of a person's identity. Judith as a character personifies elements of how not every abused person either overcomes that independently or curls up in helplessness--Judith is a survivor, but that's it. She deals with both fictional stigma and stigma that unfortunately exists in the real world related to her ethnicity (she's light-skinned and can pass for Italian, especially in Boston, but uh, she has lived with ultra white people who were concerned with blood purity her entire life, her 'not-quite' whiteness came up), her gender, and her sexuality and how it was viewed and acted upon by other people.

What my goal is regarding this is for Judith to come to terms with herself and the aspects of herself she's been marginalized for, and enough so that if magically brought back to her own world she'd be prepared to work to improve her own life and the status of every minority group she's a member of. In addition to that, on the level of 'character as individual', if Judith could learn to be happy and not quite so 'arrgh /stoicmurderfest' that would be...awesome, and will happen in conjuction with everything else. IN TERMS OF SOCIALIZING/BUILDING CR: Judith needs friends oh god, I will be throwing her at everyone. Or enemies, if she's annoying enough. Hopefully more friends than enemies, though.

Programmed Possession: The sept of the United Shields is the building on the right, the inside being big enough to comfortably hold dozens of people at any given time and furnished both comfortably and durably. Being a werewolf home, it has a small shrine to the guardian spirit in a room off the kitchen and another sacred place in the backyard, but both of these will be eeriely quiet (...to Judith) since the sept's totem (Silver Hind) didn't make the trip to Taxon. Judith's 'room' is actually a partioned off section of the basement, near the armory full of comically oversized weapons and quite a few guns. Because werewolves. Is why.

Abilities/Weaknesses: Judith is a werewolf! This will take some explaining, and involve the use of a lot of fancy in-game jargon that I will try to minimize as much as possible and define when it comes up. First of all, there are three 'breeds' of werewolves, in Judith's world, which depend on the pairing they were conceived by: homids are human-werewolf babies, lupus are wolf-werewolf, and metis are werewolf-werewolf and strictly forbidden, because a) werewolves are prohibited by their lunar deity from producing offspring together and b) all such offspring are born sterile and deformed, in some way. Judith's specific deformity is the lack of a sense of smell, which also involves a greatly reduced sense of taste, which is kind of crippling for werewolves and makes eating a chore. Another element of this whole werewolf thing she was born with is her auspice, which is both the phase of the moon a werewolf was born under and basically their horoscope/career path: Judith was born under a new moon, making her a Ragabash, who are supposed to be trickster figures and are given spiritual powers related to deception and stealth. FINALLY, her tribe (think of this as a political party/extended family) is the Fianna, Celtic werewolves related to fairies (I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING), who are best known for insane heroism, partying like rockstars, and occasionally getting moody and sullen. Fianna don't...like metis, which I will cover later!

Werewolves also come with innate physical benefits, the most signature of which is arguably their shapeshifting. Judith has five forms, ranging from human, to near-human (think cavewoman with enormous fangs and a growling problem), to the warform Crinos (your classic half-human/half-wolf form, refer to something like Van Helsing for an idea of its build), to dire wolf (...a prehistoric dire wolf on steroids), and finally plain wolf. Werewolves are also gifted with insane regenerating power: bruises and cuts heal almost instantly and broken bones and damaged organs take minutes of rest. Worse damage than this, especially from fire, silver (which they're very sensitive to; it doesn't burn to touch, but it's uncomfortable to hold, and injuries from silver weapons react as of the metal was superheated), or the claws and teeth of other supernatural creatures heal much more slowly, unless the werewolf pours gnosis (a measure of their raw spiritual power) into the healing, and even then it takes a while. Werewolves also need gnosis to fuel the knacks they pick up on from the animistic spirits they interact with. Judith's specific gifts are: the ability to open all mundane locks, resisting poison, evoking intense anger in herself or another person, stealing an item and making its owner forget it'd been theirs in the first place, and the ability to flawlessly mimic someone else's voice. These are all really helpful, but they do require this gnosis thing, and Judith only has a limited power to draw on i.e. she can't run around all day doing this nonstop. She also knows a couple (literally, two) handy rituals, which let her bind clothing to herself so shapeshifting won't leave her...naked and out an outfit, and another which allows her to put herself in a peaceful state which has only semi-religious significance.

Then there is werewolf rage, which is...basically a weakness, outside of limited circumstances involving 'killing absolutely everything'. Judith's type of werewolf is burdened with endless, constant anger, and they have much lower thresholds for annoyance/frustration: even the most patient, monklike werewolf is usually two steps from a rage, and Judith is not the most patient of werewolves. A death rage happens when a werewolf is sufficiently pressured to just lose it, and in that state they do literally try to kill everyone and everything in the area they see as a threat, including innocent bystanders and their own allies. Werewolves are also subject to the whims of the spirit world, which for the sake of not driving everyone insane I think can be handwaved in Taxon, since it operates outside of Judith's universe and that universe's laws.

Judith is really good at urban warfare. She knows how to use guns, favoring handguns and rifles specifically, and she's handy with a knife. In close combat she's somewhat fragile, but that's in the context of her own world where she fights huge people covered in piles of muscle, and also freaky mutants--she can still beat most average people. I...apologize for the combat monster she is, and I have no intention of using any of this or any of the stuff preceding it to make Judith some kind of fighting troll, that's totally against my purposes for the character. Fortunately, Judith isn't prone to starting fights, because fighting = getting hurt = the possibility of dying = too much hassle. For her weaknesses, I refer again to silver, fire, and supernatural attack, but she has a lot of social/intellectual flaws as well: for example, since she never attended school, her grasp of things like 'reading' and 'basic math' are shaky, and she's kind of ridiculously undereducated and naive about the world as it exists outside of her very specific context. Actually, it might be easiest to say that everything except hurting things she's basically not equipped to do--she can't cook, she doesn't really know how to use a computer, she's never lived alone, she can't drive, the longest book she's ever read was a Nancy Drew mystery, and she has an enormous complex about admitting to any of these weaknesses or trying to fix them.

Psychology/Personality: Treating a personality as a cluster of...delicious layers much like an onion Judith's exterior is a stoic, focused, unsmiling soldier; she carries herself with that kind of straight-backed efficiency, which clashes somewhat with her appearance of a young woman who goes heavy on make-up and perfume and dresses fairly typically for her generic age group. She's terse to the point of standoffishness and often acts slightly uncomfortable/hurried when she's talking to someone she doesn't know well. She's very self-conscious and works hard to avoid giving away her flaws, if she can.

Going deeper than that, it's important to understand the purposes of making sense of Judith that she genuinely believes that she is a hideous, sinful freak inherently damned by her nature to be less than a person and undeserving of things like, say, happiness. She entertains doubts about this in the same way a lax Christian would doubt their faith: ultimately, she comes back to this belief because it's what she knows and it's been the foundation for so many of her decisions that she's invested in keeping it; if she abandons it, she has to reconsider...everything. She's generally hyperattuned to her own weaknesses and failings, or what she perceives as weaknesses and failings, and covering and compensating for them is a major preoccupation for her because doing that has been directly correlated with her actual survival her entire life. If she couldn't figure out how to roll with every punch one of them would have taken her out by now, and she's not the long-lived metis in her family line for nothing. She reacts to every situation as a potential threat and sees every person as someone who could potentially hurt her, and even at her best her ability to trust is necessarily limited--however, since most people have never been subtle about hating her, she responds better than she'd like to shows of friendliness and kindness. She wants to be cagier, and deliberately tamps down her first reaction of abject gratitude out of the sense it could be taken advantage of.

That said, Judith is also defined by loyalty which doesn't require her to trust the object of it; she's been faithful to plenty of things which have let her down, and she deals with betrayals and the infliction of harm by considering the greater good or the things that the person/people she's loyal to have done for her in the past and will do again in the future--or the things they haven't done, but might do if she lets them down. Her low expectations make her fairly easy to befriend, but her trust issues make her incredibly hard to get close to. She will react with extreme prejudice towards anyone who threatens something she cares about and feels capable of defending, often past what would probably qualify as a sane response. What she considers 'hers' is a small category, but it's exactly because of that smallness that she protects it so desperately. Losing anything in it would be crushing, and even Judith can only take so much--refer to Seth later on in her history for an example of this in action!

Judith is an angry person in the way that someone who puts their fist through a wall and then calmly says "I'm not mad" is; she really doesn't think she's particularly angry, but that's because she is almost always angry or on the verge of anger on a subconscious level. She's constantly ready to go from 'calm' to 'fighting', but her fits of temper are usually tightly controlled and calculated to inflict maximum damage with minimal cost to herself. She's capable of more demonstrative rages, but they're relatively rare. On the opposite end of the adrenaline spectrum, a lot of her actions are dictated by various fears, which is something she'd refuse to admit BECAUSE A CELTIC WARRIOR KNOWS NO FEAR. (It's like Braveheart, if it were completely different.*)

At the very bottom of this, Judith is exhausted and reeling from recent hideously traumatic events, which have required her to break free of her old circumstances and try to define herself independently. She's depressed, terrified, and separated from the overwhelming other personalities than have previously run her life--Judith is used to taking orders, and in their absence she doesn't know what she's supposed to do with herself. If her survival instinct were any less ingrained she'd probably just let herself be killed, but instead she's actively working to overcome and persist, no matter what it takes.

In conclusion: raised in a fucking basement.

*ref. Jeri

History:
Once upon a time, in the city of Boston, a man named Seamus O'Connell and a woman named Marianne Heyner got involved in a torrid extramarital (for Seamus) love affair, which resulted in an accidental pregnancy that neither of them wanted, although Marianne had more conflicted feelings on the matter than Seamus did. This is more drama than any new life needs to accompany it into the world already, but these are the circumstances of Judith's conception anyway, and they're important because neither Seamus or Marianne were fully human.

In Judith's universe, all werewolves are considered spiritual siblings, in a sense that isn't very metaphorical at all--the supernatural laws they operate under mean that every offspring of two werewolves (instead of a werewolf and a human, or a werewolf and a wolf) is born in the twisted half-human, half-wolf form that werewolves opt to shift into for combat purposes, and additionally burdened with one or more birth defects and cripplingly social stigma. Essentially, they're the product of taboo spiritual incest, and are treated accordingly by the extremely strict warrior culture they're born into. These 'metis' are treated differently depending on the specific werewolf tribe their parents belonged to, and Judith had the misfortune of being born into the one that treats its metis the worst--the Fianna are descended from Celtic roots, and they bear the stereotype of producing the most of these little monsters through mistakes made in passion along with a cultural legacy that insists physical deformities reflect deformities of the soul. Most of their metis offspring are quietly euthanized at birth even in the modern day, and Judith wouldn't have been an exception but for the social position of her father, Seamus (her mother being, at best, nominally Fianna, with her mixed ancestry and uncertain lineage), who was until the mistake that produced her supposed to be a paragon of the tribe. Judith was thus initially kept alive to serve as a constant physical reminder of his sins, and as a warning to other members of the O'Connell family who might be tempted down the wrong path.

The author of that decision was primarily Mary Whalen, a matriarch of the family (kinfolk, to use the werewolf term), who despite not being a werewolf herself commanded most of the social power in the O'Connell family--she was referred to by her maiden name ever since the death of her husband, Killian O'Connell, years before any of these events happened. Mary took it upon herself to see that Judith had an upbringing, but it'd be a mistake that no one would correct more quickly than Mary herself to see this as an act of compassion towards the granddaughter she refused to ever allow to be called that: Judith was not part of the O'Connell or Heyner family lines, and she never would be. At first, Judith was shuttled back and forth between the septs (essentially bases for several packs of werewolves; there is so much terminology in this canon, I am so sorry) of her parents, but when her mother died in a fight when Judith was three she was placed in the O'Connell sept permanently.

This whole time Judith was still stuck in the awkward form she was born in--the Crinos form is good for killing things, and that's about it; even speech is difficult, and Judith didn't actually learn to talk until she was four, thanks in part to that but mostly to neglect. Her physical needs were attended to, but she was treated less as a child and more like an unwanted dog, and with that came abuse varying from simply being ignored to being actively beaten. Infant metis are prone to moodswings and fits of rage, but Judith learned quickly to be quiet and stay out of the way--so learning to talk didn't do her much good. Mary saw to her education in the world of werewolves personally, with emphasis on how Judith was a spawn of their greatest adversity (the Wyrm, an embodiment of/the literal force of entropy gone insane and corrupt) and a freak of nature whose brightest future would be dying in combat, and brought her father downstairs to the basement where she was kept to have her give him updates on her progress herself. ("See, Seamus? This is your daughter.") With a childhood as warped as this and no contradictory outside influences, Judith accepted everything she was told about herself as essentially true, and tried as hard as she could to be better, less of a burden, more like the real children.

All of this being a recipe for complete sociopathy, it's fortunate that some people were willing to be kind to Judith: her whole extended family wasn't entirely behind the plan to shape Judith into a future martyr. One of her kinfolk aunts, Miriam, Seamus' younger sister, took it upon herself to make Judith's little basement comfortable for her, and taught her to read out of cookbooks and the newspaper; her werewolf uncle Patrick once brought her a box of his own daughter's outgrown toys. These and other small acts kept her going, although they were given without much overt affection--either out of real disgust, despite a sense of guilt, or out of fear of Mary's reaction. And then there was Shannon, her older half-brother, the product of her father's legitimate marriage. It was Shannon who finally got around to naming her, which didn't happen until she was five--until then she'd been 'the mistake' or 'you', and those were the polite terms. He was seven years older than she was, and already under tremendous pressure to live up to the expectations that his father had failed to, but in a show of maturity beyond most people in that situation he managed not to entirely blame Judith for it. Judith expected nothing from him but cruelty, at first, and when it failed to show up she attached to him with irrational, idolizing fierceness. They never spent much time together, since Mary wouldn't have allowed him to visit her unsupervised if she knew about it, but when they did it was the highlight of Judith's life up until that point. People can't develop with sanity when deprived of all affection, and so it's not uncalled for to thank Shannon for how Judith turned out relatively capable of functioning.

Shannon was about as happy at the sept as Judith was, and when he turned eighteen he left almost immediately, promising Judith that he wouldn't forget about her; Judith was quietly devastated, but at eight she was always indoctrinated enough to take being left behind as a natural thing--she never blamed him for choosing to get out while the getting was good.

In the theme of 'and then everything got worse, somehow', when Judith was nine Seamus O'Connell decided he was sick of living under his mother's thumb, and uprooted his immediate family to move them as far away as he could manage. He did this without telling anyone, so that Mary wouldn't be able to stop him, and as such Judith didn't find out about it until after the fact. Since Judith wasn't serving as a specific example to anyone, anymore, and pressure began to mount for her to make herself useful--or die, and solve the problem she presented that way. The growing stress finally triggered her first metamorphosis when she was eleven and in another year, after some extremely rough training, she was a fully initiated werewolf warrior at the age of twelve. At this point she was expected to do all the less glamorous detail work around the sept, like keeping watch and scouting out suspected sites of Wyrm contamination. Judith chose, in the face of overwhelming disincentives, to survive, and this survival meant she had to get really, really good in a very, very short amount of time; the learning curve was insane, but she pulled it off. Her small size and relative frailty, along with her deformity, required her to adopt different tactics than most frontline fighters in the sept, an oddity which was attributed to her weakness and cowardice instead of inventiveness--'fairness' is not a theme, here.

Not long after she turned thirteen, the many local Fianna families became involved in fierce feuding that started over a single incident and grew to include constant back and forth retaliation and escalation; Judith wasn't a participant, since sending her to fight other Fianna was considered semi-blasphemous at best, but instead was given the opportunity to follow a pack of other youths kept out of the conflict to handle the always constant war on the Wyrm. The leader of this pack was (and remained) Kieran McEvoy, once a close friend of Shannon, but his position on Judith was somewhat at odds with his absent friend's: Judith was at best a disturbing, too-quiet annoyance, and at worst a potential traitor at any given second. After all, that was what Mary Whalen said. Judith didn't disagree, having heard even stronger versions of the stories that were told, and she kept trying to prove herself as worthy of survival. On the other hand, Kieran still kept his pack brothers from inflicting the worst of the ideas for 'hazing' they came up with on Judith, out of concern that they'd be contaminated by such close contact with her, and he tolerated her presence dutifully. The pack was frequently rough with her, and punished every step out of line with a vigor that even some sept elders were taken aback by, but Judith still developed (finally) a sense of herself as someone who was at least minimally competant in one specific area. When you don't have self-esteem in the first place, you cling to what you can get, basically.

This grim state of affairs continued until Judith was fifteen and a half, and met Seth, another metis from another tribe--the Black Furies are exclusively female except for the male metis they keep, who are considered not quite male or female and thus ritually useful. Seth was a year older than she was and his deformity (a massive portwine birthmark staining the entire right half of his body) was much more visible, but his upbringing (although forever tinged by the nonconsensual circumstances of his conception) had been significantly better than hers, and as such Seth was capable of forming the belief that he and all metis deserved better than they were getting. This idea was so foreign to Judith she at first ignored it, but she still saved his life in a tense situation, and he sought her out later despite her warnings that he should stay out of Fianna territory and bugged her until she agreed to hang out with him one afternoon. Judith was already in the habit of slipping out of the sept whenever she could, although Mary Whalen tried to keep her preoccupied and homebound, and she was interested/kind of desperate to talk to absolutely anyone who didn't seem to resent her existence. The friendship they struck up was turbulent and marked by frequent disagreements and frustration for both of them, as Seth tried to convince Judith they weren't freaks and she argued stubbornly that they were--if they had anyone else to be friends with, they would have given up in disgust with each other, but since they didn't have that option they kept spending time together and learned to fight about less charged topics. Like music.

In the meanwhile, as Judith became more eloquent and...socialized, Mary Whalen seized upon the opportunity that presented her to reshape Judith slightly into an enforcer on her behalf. Mary worked through words and other subtler methods, and using a walking embodiment of sin to occasionally deliver messages in her name seemed fitting--it also gave people a new, slightly more legitimate reason to dislike Judith, in the line of 'shooting the messenger'. Sometimes literally! Additionally, though, Judith was one of the few people (ironically) that Mary could trust to believe and obey her every word, and in her old age that kind of silent, unflinching dedication was reassuring. Her dislike of Judith didn't diminish, especially since she was still the reason her favorite son never called, but she started to rely on her in a way she was unconscious of. Judith, on the other hand, became more and more terrified of her, with the new sense of resenting that terror; after all, Mary was the fragile one, while Judith could tear her and eleven more just like her in half in under a minute.

However, teenaged rebelliousness does not...work, at all, when rebelling almost invariably equals death, and Judith complied in every way to the demands placed on her by her sept in general and Mary in particular. Her late teens were even more violent than early teens had been, as Kieran's pack took on greater challenges to prove their skills, and whatever vulnerability there was left in Judith pretty much died and was buried out of necessity. This put a strain on her only friendship, which had acquired a new kind of tension gradually over the years, and when Seth finally made a move when she was nineteen to carry them over the sexual/romantic threshold they'd been skirting for months she reacted by a) biting his lower lip until it bled and b) lecturing him on how sick and twisted what he wanted was. According to their religion she was technically right, but as can be imagined this didn't make it less devastating or make him less furious, and he stormed off into the night and stopped visiting her completely. Judith was obviously totally fine with this, and never missed him, ever.

The outside political situation changed yet again when Judith was twenty and a large group of kinfolk women and children from all branches of the tribe in the city were on an annual camping trip, one of the few occasions the ongoing feud was put aside. This attack left the Fianna united for the first time in years, furious, and deeply invested in finding out who could have done such a thing, and the investigation began by calling back family members who had been out of the city to assist--this was important to Judith because one of those family members was Shannon, who had been involved in other quests that took him as far from Boston as possible for years. Mary assigned Judith to handle his reorientation in the city, feeling that no chance to reinforce the O'Connell shame was a chance to be missed (especially since Shannon's discontent with his own arranged relationship was known to her), but she might have done otherwise if she knew that Shannon didn't particularly hate Judith on principle. They ended up working their own part of the investigation together, slowly achieving a relationship balanced on both sides by incredible caution and yet still some amount of liking, and it was through their efforts the real culprit behind the attack was discovered behind the tribe who had been framed for it.

This wasn't enough to stop civil war from breaking out, but at least it pointed it in the right direction, and the tribes responsible (the Shadow Lords and the Red Talons, respectively) were vastly outnumbered by the other tribes who had reason to be furious with them. The Fianna called for blood, and were backed primarily by the Glasswalkers (who were the ones who had been framed) and the Black Furies (who took special interest in the victims), with varying levels of support from the other tribes--or at least statements of noninvolvement. Judith and Shannon were of course involved in the preparations, although neither of them were very enthusiastic about it for different reasons; Shannon ended up with Kieran and his pack, while Judith, in the spirit of intertribal cooperation, went to a pack of Black Furies.

Judith isn't sure if Mary Whalen actually knew about Seth, or if it was just one of those cruel coincidences, but spending so much time with him was awkward even on top of everything else. What she did notice was that he'd changed, calmed, and seeing him in action gave her new respect for him. Tentatively, they resumed their friendship, under the guise of striking up a new one since their first attempt had been kept secret from both of their families. Judith was mostly forgotten by her sept, finally had a semi-safe relationship with her brother, and she had Seth, so all in all despite the horrors going on around her it seemed like her life had hit a high point.

Then the fallen tribe of werewolves, the Black Spiral Dancers, harbingers of the Wyrm and severely fucked up even by their world's standards, took advantage of the chaos with such uncanny perfectness of timing it was almost like they'd had a play-by-play breakdown of future events handed to them. The city of Boston, almost overnight, went from 'warzone' to 'total hellhole', and the warring tribes were unwilling to overcome their differences to deal with the greater threat. Instead, they all choose to fight on two fronts, and it was in an assault like this that Seth was taken by the Black Spiral Dancers. This was worse than his outright death, because BSDs taking prisoners intended to torture, brainwash, and ultimately convert them forcibly, and so Judith waited about five seconds before taking off to rescue him.

It looked like luck was on her side when she ran into Kieran outside the BSD squat she tracked Seth back to hours later; his pack was staging a raid at that moment, while he was forced to sit it out and recover from injuries. Judith learned that ther were more prisoners inside, and used the distraction of the fight at the far end of the building to sneak in and locate them. Seth was in bad shape, and most of the other captives were little bit, and certainly incapable of getting out under their own power--when two members of Kieran's pack showed up Judith was relieved, and between the three of them they worked out a way to drag out all four of the people they'd come to rescue. Judith, of course, supported Seth, and they took up the back of the procession. When the BSDs finally caught on to what was happening, they had only a few metres to go before they were out of the building, but that was still too far for the liking of her 'packmates': one of them turned around and shot her, first in the knee and then the shoulder, and left the two metis to buy them time. (That besides being tactically sound, this offered a chance to get rid of a persistent embarrassment to the tribe--well. If it had been anyone else they would have risked saving them all, and probably managed it.)

They reported Judith had died in battle at the sept, and Mary made a point of commenting on how redemptive such a death was, which was...probably not extremely comforting for Shannon. Judith's arrival home about fourteen hours after her death was first reported, very much alive, ruined this touching eulogy.

There is only so much any given person can take before they either collapse or snap, and Judith went for the latter option: Seth had died, in the hive, and she'd fought her way out alone more out of the hope they'd be forced to kill her than the belief she could actually make it. She was traumatized, exhausted, and grieving, and the first thing she did was go for the throats of the men who'd abandoned her. She lost the ensuing fight, but not before wrecking a large chunk of the sept and hospitalizing Mary Whalen--ironically, this kept her alive, because if she'd maimed only her intended targets they would have summarily executed her. Mary, however, would require a little more ceremony before Judith was put down.

Judith escaped early the next morning under mysterious circumstances (i.e. Shannon 'accidentally' unlocking the door she was being held behind and Judith being determined enough to break her own thumbs to get out of her handcuffs), and it's been a month since she started running. She has no ID, no idea how to get or handle money, no social skills adapted to the outside world, and a pack of Fianna on her heels--things are bleak, but she doesn't know what else to do but keep going. It's the only thing she's ever known how to do.

Arrival Post (Third Person):
Judith has made it, impossibly, to Idaho--the Gem State, a brochure told her at the rest stop where she was picked up by the latest in a string of cars that started just outside of Boston. Her current ride is a white middle-aged man named Steven, coming back from a convention (he's a dentist, he tells her, she has nice teeth) a state behind them, and in the hours prior to this gas station as the sky began to darken he's been glancing at her more and more frequently. He's about to ask where she's spending the night, she can tell; he said she reminds him of his niece, Rebecca. She knows what he's hoping he'll get out of this ride, and she knows he's not going to get it from her.

Even if it means crawling out of a narrow bathroom window with the sixty dollars he gave her to pay for gas and 'whatever you want, Rhiann'.

She lands lightly on her feet and knows immediately that the landscape has changed around her, and her first instinct is to consider this treachery. She stands perfectly still for almost exactly one second, registering the temperature, the smooth walls, the fact that she's inside, and the absence of sound, a tall figure of a young woman in blue jeans, sneakers, and a parka, blood on her hand (but no cuts) from breaking the window she just crawled backwards out of--a window that's no longer above her.

"What the fuck," she says, slowly and carefully, in a thick Boston accent, "Is this fucking bullshit?" It seems to be almost a rhetorical question, and she turns around to investigate the rest of the room on her own calmly, examining the bracelet bound to her wrist (she bites it, experimentally, at the line where metal melds seamlessly into skin), the tablet on the raised platform, the ceiling, the floor, and most especially the walls and door. She presses her hands to the door, raps it sharply, and listens carefully to the sound that answers her. Then she takes a step back and sits down cross-legged, with a perfectly blank expression.

"You want me to try to break this door down, or panic--well, fuck you, I'm not playing. I'm going to sit here, on this floor, and you can come and get me. I can wait. If you want something you're going to have to ask me for it, because I'm not doing anything until you do." This speech quietly delivered, she leans over her knees and closes her eyes.

Additional Third Person Sample:
Judith is only capable of simple math: two and two is four, four and four is eight, the second digit of numbers in each ten digit set run from zero to nine and not one to zero, as she constantly forgets (...11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 10, 21, 22...). Fortunately, there are few things she wants to count in the world.

Some people count scars, count kills, count victories, but these people count in a different way than she does.

Judith just counts heartbeats. A heartbeat isn't an accurate measure of time or anything else: her heart is so fast, sometimes, aching in only a literal sense because the heart is just a muscle for the pumping of blood, a fist-sized and fist-tough bundle of dark fibers in the left side of her chest. She's seen too many hearts to recognize them in valentines; she's held them in her hand, like the Morrigan. Hearts hold no mysteries for her. (They say she doesn't have one, but she can feel it beating; they mean something else. She's all right with that.)

It doesn't tell her anything useful, but it keeps her from thinking, and this is how she knows her heart has beat 1121 times since she got into this car with her half-brother and neither of them has said anything since. The Rolling Stones are purring out of the speakers not quite loud enough to drown out what she's more and more sure is an uncomfortable silence - 1122, 1123, 1124, and her hands curl on the plastic bag she has between her knees before she says: "We have to go back."

"What?" He turns down the music and she looks out the window, at the familiar brick buildings rolling by, the signs slowly starting to bear Gaelic underneath the English, even if it's only one word, a splash of green, any flicker of a culture that still lives here and matters to so many. Especially people in this car.

"We have to go back and return these, I can't--" She looks down at the three tiny bottle visible through clear plastic instead of the scenery, and shakes her head. "You can't get these for me, Shannon, we went shopping for you and these are too expensive and--just turn the fucking car around, would you?"

"Fifty dollars of perfume isn't exactly going to break the bank." He doesn't understand, she can tell. Fifty dollars is too much; five would be too much, when the point isn't the money.

"It's too much, fuck--" She twists in her seat, restlessly, knocking her elbow against the car door to be audible. "--it's better if we just do it now, all right, I'm not fucking waiting for you to change your mind or tell somebody and just--turn the fucking car around, already, let's get it over with."

This is more than she's said all day, and she's dead silent and dead still afterwards, her heart hammering hard against her ribcage, like it wants to break something, get out of this trap she's got it in, but heart isn't stronger than bone. Anybody knows that.

"Hey." She examines her hands, curled in plastic, nails ragged at the edges because she's had no time to file them, her black nail polish chipped. "Judith."

The weight of his hand on her knee is impossible, and she turns sideways to steady blue eyes that hold her in place, mute, attentive, like when he taught her to play checkers. That was so long ago it was before heartbeats started counting.

"I'm not letting anyone take those away from you--"

She's on the edge of replying when movement catches her attention out of the corner of her eye, and she's bracing herself before she can finish saying: "Shannon, the road!" He looks away then, cursing in good old-fashioned South Boston style, and slams on the brakes, but Judith's still almost sure they're going to hit the teenaged boy who just walked backwards onto the road before the car comes to a stop.

"What the fuck, man? Watch where you're fucking going!" The boy hits the hood of the car and Shannon bares his teeth in a flash only she catches, she's sure, and rolls down his window.

"You fucking watch yourself, you little shit, don't touch my car--" and in this moment, his voice lilting and 'car' coming out as 'cahr', his temper snapping crisply in each sharp consonant, Judith realizes if he'd stayed they could have had this; maybe nothing else, but this--and then he closes like a book and rolls the window back up as the stunned boy darts back to the sidewalk, and she doesn't want it that much.

"Is that how they drive in Australia?" Judith asks, in the wake of this, still breathless, and it's not funny in any way, it's not even unfunny, but Shannon's regret cracks and he laughs, his head hitting the steering wheel, and then she's laughing, curled over her lap with the seltbelt digging into her shoulder.

"No," he admits, when they're both breathing, and she smacks his shoulder before she can think to stop herself, and somehow all of this is easy, for a handful of heartbeats.

"I can't drive and I'd do better than that."

"You can't--" He straightens up, shaking his head. "--I'll teach you."

Her heart stops.

"Okay."

She starts counting again, smiling, touching the tops of fragile glass bottles she remembered to be careful of; Shannon turns up the music again before they keep driving, unblocking the road, and she listens to "Wild Horses" and thinks the Stones are a pretty good band, all in all.