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Post by Shilo on Feb 22, 2012 22:50:19 GMT -5
"Oh...I'm sorry." Shilo said, knowing what she was talking about.
"I wish I could help more."
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Post by Meg Giry on Feb 25, 2012 13:50:03 GMT -5
"My younger sister's married to the Kaiser of Austria, and they somehow have a daughter older than me- I don't know what happened-"
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Post by Shilo on Feb 25, 2012 18:25:40 GMT -5
Shilo's eyes widened.
"Dude...yeah. That's weird."
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Post by Meg Giry on Feb 26, 2012 22:09:06 GMT -5
"Johan said he'd ask his father for help-"
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Post by Shilo on Feb 27, 2012 2:41:28 GMT -5
"Do you think he will? His dad, I mean."
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Post by Meg Giry on Mar 9, 2012 3:50:12 GMT -5
"...I don't know," Meg said softly. "Johan says he doesn't even seem to want a son-"
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Post by Shilo on Mar 12, 2012 21:48:37 GMT -5
She frowned. Well, that was just plain awful.
"I'm sorry. I wish I could help more than just say sorry."
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Post by Nina Fortner on Oct 15, 2012 0:40:27 GMT -5
***NEW NIGHT***
A boy stood on a Paris street, wearing a grey cap and blazer, eyes inscrutable, greyscale in the twilight, even with a flare of a streetlamp not far away. He was gazing into a window where two girls conversed, the fairer of whom was, some scrutiny had made it clear, notably pregnant. Their hands were animated in lively speech for a while.
Then a face turned, and squinted and looked shocked, and the boy turned the cap down abruptly and began to walk away at a brisk pace.
Identity is fixed for most people, but the boy was really a girl, and though she didn't have a name, a year ago her name had been Nina Fortner.
A bright girl - some would have said brilliant - studying law at Heidelberg, aikido on the side, on whose highly ordinary fridge a grainy newspaper photo hung side by side with an identical color picture of her shaking hands with an American billionaire and philanthropist, whose parents had died on her 20th birthday. Before she had learned they weren't really her parents.
Mysterious emails from a white knight promising to smother her in roses came to her in the days before her birthday, followed by a face on campus she only briefly glimpsed that made her faint. The big day came with an invitation to meet. But she was only threatened by a messenger, a deluded-seeming man who had been told to keep her where she was. Even terrified the college student managed to overcome her attacker and run home as quickly as she could. But her parents had been murdered, phone lines cut.
A police car arrived for her, and sickened the girl got in. But the dim memory of the phone lines made her more observant. The girl who wanted to be a lawyer caught a glimpse of blood on an officer's coat, and she bolted from the car, leaping into the river before she could be caught.
Now undercover, now anxious to know what she could - now having to face the holes in her memory before the age of ten she'd avoided all her life, the fears she'd cheerily dismissed to the school counselor of her dreams that there was a monster in the dark - she'd kept low as a waitress.
One night she'd planned a careful, though not stealthy, break-in at a cheap little hotel. Though easily overpowered by the burly, brusque inmate, a man in his 60s with a gnarled scar on one cheek, the faintest lift of his eyebrow told her he was impressed.
That was the point.
"What're you doing here, kid," he said as he leaned back, looking down at her with a sigh. "Ain't nothing of value to a punk like you."
"I'm not here looking for anything of physical value," Nina had responded, breathing heavily, voice still a bit constricted, his hand around her throat. Her English had, and kept to this day, a heavy German accent, clipped and precise. "I need you to teach me."
This brought a snigger clearly intended to be derisive, but he could not mask certain elements - unease was foremost among the secondary emotions, followed by what strongly seemed to be admiration, though she didn't assume it, or manipulate it. "Not teaching your punk ass anything."
He released her suddenly; she thought he was recoiling. And here she had to be careful and both stand her ground but not humiliate him or herself, because she sensed backlash from him could only lead to him hurting her, and that, she knew, she would not be able to get out of.
"You're a trained killer. I know who you are. I need you to teach me to shoot. It's not a request."
"Right, right." He looked her over, in a way that wasn't salacious though she suspected his gaze lingered in order to intimidate her. He was, she knew, sizing her up, not leering at her. Almost lazily but with deadly precision he tossed her black knit cap right back at her. An ashy-blond strand of her hair glittered on it. This seemed to unnerve him. "And if I don't, you plan to..."
"Keep right on asking."
She didn't massage her throat, though her voice was hoarse, and she sorely wanted to.
He looked like he was getting sick of her shit, or figuring something out, and his tongue appeared to probe along his lower gums. When he spoke, any trace of humor, even at her expense, was gone. "Who the fuck're you."
She only had a moment to plan in her mind, but in just the moment she had a hand feeling along the wall, and her body gently collapsed against it.
The words were out before she could explain them, and her voice cracked, not entirely because he had choked her. "I think I'm somebody's sister."
Then slowly, unprompted by the man who was by now rolling a cigar between thick, nimble fingers, she shakily came out with the pieces of her story that she knew.
"Let me get this straight," he said quietly, in the silence that followed. "Forget about how you got here."
"Oh, please, it's obvious who you are," she said with a smile she could not suppress, though he looked faintly disgusted, definitely displeased.
"You know who I am, and you want me to teach you. To shoot. And the person you want to shoot is your goddamn twin brother."
The silence stretched on.
And he stretched his legs beneath the rough bathrobe. And refused.
True to her word, Nina was back, though the next time she came she knocked on the front door.
The American mercenary known as "the Comedian" remained in West Germany, undercover, for six months, while Nina's waitressing continued. She had no money with which to pay him, which he snorted about to no end, having her run his errands instead: buy booze, buy food (he stopped short of having her fix meals, she assumed because he hadn't realized this was more domestic than humiliating), buy the cigars whose butts he'd toss at her in practice purely for the jolt of watching her unthinkingly snatch them in midair, never once burning herself. In the meantime she dug up anything, everything she could about her shadow-self. A particularly gruelling bit of errandery for Blake that she argued about performing at all, till he threatened to stop teaching her, seemed centered around pure pettiness, some bit of information about some American rival (Nina kept her meager ties to him secret lest she infuriate Blake; he seemed just small-minded enough for it), turned up a highly-publicised story about the Liebert family, murdered in West Germany, the daughter found in a coma and the twin brother with a bullet wound in his head, rescued by the now-infamous GeneCo, right before the children disappeared together from the hospital. It was something of a scandal, for the short while it was in the news.
A painful missing persons report from Heidelberg revealed what she knew already: two children had been adopted by the Fortners, age ten, a boy and a girl, and the boy had disappeared shortly afterwards.
She never thanked Blake for this, even though he could have known more. She had a feeling it would abruptly end all relations with him, and, indeed, he announced just two weeks later that he was going back to the States and had no interest in the resolution of her case. This was no trouble to her. Nina knew what was most important and now she could track down the police officers Johan Liebert had bought to kill her parents.
The first one was a pathetic drip of a human being, a street Zydrate addict who had done only what he had to. He had been informed that she'd seek him out, and told her a man nicknamed the Baby wanted to see her. This man was the ringleader of a Neo-Nazi organization that saw Johan as a second-coming of Hitler and planned to use her as bait. Going undercover as a prostitute, Nina sought this man out. While held captive by him, unnerved by the degree to which these adult men babyishly worshiped her brother, Nina communicated with a Turkish woman through the pipes who told her she'd overheard a plot to burn down the Frankfurt Turkish Quarter, pleading with Nina to save her baby right before the disturbing sounds of her death sounded through the plumbing.
Prepared for anything Nina broke out, but discovered someone unknown had already murdered everyone in the building. Nina's main cause was the upcoming tragedy, which she tried to her best ability to avert, with dismally small success. Johan, though she had tried desperately to meet with him, was nowhere to be found, though his mark was left: graffiti in the mansion and along a watertower, exulting, "Look at how large the Monster inside me has become!"
Exhausted, Nina tracked the other officer to Southern France, her intention to focus less on administering her own justice on Johan (that trail, for now, at least, had gone cold) and on delivering legal justice, which she'd once believed in, for her parents' sake. This man, Officer Muller, had no interest in helping her until last minute discovering his bodyguard, Roberto, worked for her Johan, and intended to murder her himself, deducing her own plan to kill her brother, and loyal to Johan to a fault.
Muller lost his life in coming to her aid, and Nina had gained very little, perhaps nothing more than the faintest hope in a glimmer of compassion in other human beings, and the knowledge that it, like life, could be smothered in a moment.
There was no trail immediately available to follow, so Nina threw herself into researching all she could about where she and Johan came from before the Lieberts adopted them. Though she had come from an Orphanage 47, after she and Johan had been found nearly dead from exposure on the East German border, Johan had come from Orphanage 511, most famous for burning down in a gruesome fire after which it was apparent that the boys and their adult teachers had all turned on one another and murdered each other. Nina tracked down a Doktor Hartmann for information on the orphanage. She quickly realized the kindly-seeming man had been a crucial part of the organization and gained from him a chilling picture of Johan: the sole survivor of the massacre, a small child sitting in a chair and gazing out at the chaos, perfectly placid.
Hartmann had spent the rest of his life attempting to recapture what he had had with Johan, in numerous children he had abused and murdered when they failed to reach his expectations, and now in Nina, who overpowered him and rescued his adopted son, taking him to the orphanage that had cared for her while a different one had attempted to work on Johan and discovered to its shock that he was already as perfectly near an antiChrist as they would ever be able to craft. Though she was no nearer to finding Johan in the present she now had a firm line to follow him deeper into their past. She did all the research into Kinderheim 511 that she could, uncovering numerous awful stories about children shaped into assassins and spies, an awful nagging whispered phrase in the back of her mind: "Humans can become anything..."
Breaking into the tragic home of a man who had recently committed suicide after the mysterious seeming suicide of his 8-year-old son, who had stepped off a roof to his death, Nina found more information on the orphanage than she could have ever imagined, hints of other figures, other histories predating even Kinderheim 511, and a disturbing eugenics program started during the Third Reich, along with a disturbing children's book written in Czech about a monster and a boy named Johan...
With bits and pieces of information to go on, Nina went to Prague.
She was here now in France, having followed a new lead tracking not Johan, but Roberto, to Paris. As loyal a follower as he was to her brother she could not envision him anywhere for any other reason.
She was a different woman than she had been before Prague. She knew who she was, if only in pieces; she knew who she wasn't. She had finally solved the mystery of who her parents were, at any rate, although the greatest piece of information, really, she should have guessed at long ago. (And surely Johan already knew it. She would be in the States as soon as she could ascertain what Roberto's business in Paris was - praying to god that she was not too late to save Adrian Veidt from Johan's increasingly bizarre need to belong, and deeply entrenched habit for murdering whatever family he had, sole exception Nina herself.) One break-in later - one of the few she'd been defied in; she'd fought with the masked hero called Nite Owl before escaping - and she was off with an encrypted file belonging to none other than Rotti Largo, on bloodwork done and then buried on those two Liebert twins before their tragic disappearance...
Whatever Johan had been up to in Paris was a mystery, beyond the fact that he had seemingly done right by the continued eugenics program. The blond ballet rat was pregnant. It was clear who the father was.
Unfortunately that father was someone Nina, with bound chest and hair beneath a cap, had deliberately made herself resemble, and she had no desire, in spite of her concern for the first, to contact Meg Giry while pretending to be the boy who had so unforgivably betrayed her.
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Post by Meg Giry on Oct 15, 2012 22:25:32 GMT -5
Meg, inside the house, made a startled noise and bolted away from the window like a startled deer, hands pressed over her mouth and eyes wide as saucers.
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