#DO THEY NOT REALIZE NONE OF THE CREW HAS THE HACKING ABILITY SO THEY MUST HAVE A HACKER TO DO THE WORK FOR THEM??!@

[residentxangel]

THIS!! literally THIS!!

VILE faculty : now that we know about Chase Devineaux, we know Carmen Sandiego does not work alone!

Zack and Ivy : Um.

VILE faculty : we had no way of knowing she had accomplices. We had never seen anyone.

Zack and Ivy : WOW. OKAY.

[hadesburns]

kana takeda, high priestess

7.

she stands on the cliffs with the winds at her back, the air tugging and pulling at her clothes like a begging lover, the uncharacteristically frayed robe and nightgown whipping at her body tightly, loud and wailing, the roar filling her ears despite the silence that infects her. the storm above her is some comfort at least, knowing that the sometimes the sky cries as well, knowing that sometimes the weight of water becomes too much even for mother nature, until eventually the dam cracks and rain must fall, tears must fall.

kana has been weeping for weeks straight now, the sorrow sinking in marrow-deep until it is all she knows, until it’s all she’s sure she’ll ever know; her hands empty, her life empty, the grey of the world whirling and surrounding her, infecting her. it hadn’t taken long after the absence of their son for her husband to lock himself into his study and only come out on an ambulance stretcher, pills filling his gut, freezer-burn covering his eyes, his fingers, the stench of death wafting off him like a curse. she closes watery eyes and listens to the ringing of her eardrums, listens to the pounding of her heart howling against her rib cage, listens to the tides beat themselves against the shoreline, rising up to meet the challenge of the moon, hidden behind thunder. rising up to meet the challenge of her own personal gravity, her own personal hell, hidden behind exhaustion.

when she exhales and falls from the rocks, her shoeless, coatless form cascading downwards into the drink like a curse, the cold winds kissing her limbs, wishing her farewell, she prays to the triune goddess, prays for death, prays for the crashing sounds of the sea to swallow her down, down, down, and the crashing sounds of mirrors breaking to crush her, deep, deep, deep, prays for just one more chance to see her son again.

and receives none of it.

1.

the mirror glistens cold in the midnight air and finally, finally, this she knows for certain: she is all storm and howling, she is all thunder and power, nothing delicate framed in the cut of her young cheekbones, in the dark of her eyes, in the way her reflection glares back into her like an abyss she no longer fears. her hair a maelstrom havoc from nightmares spent in drenches of sweat and stress, her nightgown torn askew, her soul torn asunder, a stain of red in her wake in the way all women burn scarlet at this particular age, and she decides white is no longer her color, no longer the bliss and innocence she will hide behind, no longer the shade of ribbons her nanny is allowed to tie into her long, black locks.

barely eleven years old, the witchling steps across the shards of the mirror her newly-awakened powers have shattered across her bedroom floor, and in the pieces strewn about, she glimpses her future, she watches her past, she opens the doors to ruin and inevitability, penning the course of her life without truly meaning to. divination shines through her chest and she likens it to a birth, begins screaming, begins breaking, the stars high above her shuddering in reverberating echoes and instinctively she knows: this is the last night of her childhood. from now on, she will adopt the vague apathy of her mother, the grey distance of her father, the frozen poison of her grandmother, and come next morning, she’ll learn why.

she’s sure it’ll have something to do with seven years bad luck.

2.

strong magic floods through her veins, a direct lineage to the ancient sorcerers of old, back when the world was half shadow, half spirit, back when human and dragon could be fused into one, and kana believes she is a dragon, believes she is half shadow, believes this is the only explanation as to why she burns deep within herself, why she enjoys selfish magic so much more than anything ivory. she grows in her abilities as she grows in age, surrounding herself with blackened tales, banned guides, abolished spells, memorizing what she can, lavishing in what she wants, her family’s wealth and prestige affording her access to whatever her heart may desire. she’s the singular daughter of one of japan’s forefront fashion and design brands, her parents inheriting a luxurious empire from her grandmother upon the old hag’s death, kana raised amidst these stages and diamonds, limousines and velvet carpets, her appearance and technical prowess in the business granting her plenty of attention herself.

3.

she’d assumed, wrongly of course, that somehow her accomplishments in both the fine arts of music and poetry, as well as the physical exertions of martial arts and combat training, would prove her independence enough as a woman capable of ruling alone, capable of reaching through the clouds and swallowing the stars themselves, capable of breaking the earth’s crust in the gravity of her heels, but not to her mother. nothing is ever enough for her mother. at eighteen years old, kana is given in an arranged marriage to a man eleven years her senior, the heir to an even bigger technological conglomerate, a man forever scented in cigar smoke and ink, a man with tired eyes and small burn scars on his knuckles.

she asks him one night across the stretch of silk sheets, the dimmed glow hovering around their bodies, where he’d gotten the scars, and he tells her that he used to own a pair of tiny dragons who’d scorch him all the time when he fed them. just like her. she snorts and looks away, but it’s the first moment she doesn’t outright despise him.

5.

she glows with promise in the heart of her coven, a star in her own right, a sun on the horizon of life, her mother-priestess and the high hand naming her the maiden archetype, granting her the possibility of tutelage, of eventually becoming a priestess herself. she impresses them with her hold over her own abilities, her potency, her knowledge, her skill, the way she masters the basic practices, the way she convinces the world that she is a hurricane made flesh, a dragon brought home in the center of her chest. she harnesses her craft through anger and clenched teeth, through red lipstick and curled knuckles, through the half-shadow she drags by its ankles, the curses she breathes and the fire she bleeds, and she can almost feel everything she’s ever wanted in her grasp, all the power a sharded young girl could ever need, could ever have been wrong about in the pieces of shattered reflections across her bedroom floor. she’d never had any reason to be so worried– it would all be fine.

mirror mirror on the wall….

6.

it is exactly the equinox of the spell, the midway point when she realizes she has been tricked, she has been fooled, she has made the gravest error of her life– or more specifically, she has failed in her trick of the others, the pin-needles all shifting suddenly towards her, the sharpened sting of betrayal and white-hot understanding flooding through her, icing her blood in a way entirely foreign to her. she’s been young before, been inexperienced before, been wandering and stretching and hungry before, but fear? fear is a monster heavy on her lungs in this moment, claws and jaws digging in and robbing her of breath, of sight, of atmosphere. fear is her reaction to being out of control, and in these two very separate thousand-year-moments, two beats that will forever define her and deform her from now on, she has never been more out of control.

the first moment is given to when they take the only thing she’s ever loved before away from her; the young toddler’s face seeping down into the immutability of stone, forever silenced and choked away from her, life shifting to earth; his tiny, reaching hands, his wide, teary eyes, everything melting down too quickly into permanent solidification, just before she can touch him.

the second is given to when she disappears into the maelstrom of hatred and boiling, tumultuous fury, when she lets her restraint finally, finally become swallowed up by the flames of her internal wraith; the darkness howling up from the unfathomable ocean of her soul, the likes of which had never been seen by her coven before. and would never be seen by them again, not after she’s grinded their bones into the earth they love so damn much.

betrayal tastes bitter, but not as bitter as the dirt and dust she crushes all the bones in their bodies into– all twelve of them writhing and gasping in simultaneous horror.

4.

when she bears a child, a boy, her firstborn, she comes to the belief that he is the truest form of the sun incarnate, the belief that he is all light and all laughter, tiny hands and toes and eyelashes even longer than hers, and he’s the first boy she’s ever loved quite so much in her entire life. she was raised from one nanny to the next, but she’ll be damned if she lets anyone else so much as touch him for any extended period of time, insisting on raising him herself, insisting on hoarding all his first giggles and first steps and first words, dazzling him with the magic she becomes more and more involved with.

he is every golden memory, every reason to fall in love with life itself, every belief in the cosmos she’d never truly had before. he’s perfect and she occasionally has a difficult time believing that he could have come from her.

8.

when the men are finally able to revive her, rouse her from her drenched, unconscious state, she sputters awake like the lifting of a curse from her skin, coughing and hacking up mouthfuls of salt water, wheezing air into her lungs as though they’ve never felt so free before, as though she’s never felt so released before, her arms and fingers reaching and grasping onto anything sturdy enough to hold her. she is as wet as a fish, having been mistaken for a mermaid by a fishing crew and hauled up on deck in an effort to save her life, dressed in almost nothing, floating adrift in the middle of the sea currents that separate two countries from each other. she blinks at the faces of the men surrounding her limp, shivering frame, the sky as grey as she remembers it, and before one of them can manage to fetch her a towel or a blanket, she asks what’s happened.

“we found you in the water. you stopped breathing, we thought you were dead.” the man, presumably the captain, bellows in korean– which is all kana needs to know about where she is and where she’s heading.

“are we near a port?” she asks in perfect korean, having been trained in up to five different languages, beaten into her skillset until perfection.

“busan.”

busan. that’s it then. the veil of the world is drawn back for her in that instant, clarity finally descending upon her like a beam of light, a calling she cannot and must not ignore or refuse. the goddesses have seen fit to spare her life for a purpose and she knows what she must do, what she owes not just simply to them but also to the world at large– blood for blood. she has a debt now, a payment she must make in life for what she’s taken from it, for the havoc she’s wreaked, for the evil she’s lathered across her palms, spread over her flesh like ointment. the goddesses won’t allow her peace until she’s fulfilled her role, until she’s given back in the amount that she’s taken. balance.

busan.