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Hello! Thanks for checking out my [possibly very wordy] request! I go by Alectro in some online spaces, and I'm 30 years at the time I'm writing this. For that reason, even the content of this request appeals to you, I humbly ask you to approach me only if you're over 25 years of age. I mean no offense and I apologize for the inconvenience! But it's a question of personal comfort. I am little bit autistic and have been writing for the better part of my life in a way that I think it's quite safe to say roleplaying is my special interest. I mention this because it's relevant for my request, as you'll be able to see soon.
But first, on to what I'm looking for exactly—I have a female character I've been carefully and lovingly fleshing out for about a year who has become the apple of my eye, and I've come up with a romantic dynamic for her I'm intensely interested in, but haven't had any luck finding a partner that can match my enthusiasm (and, consequently, dedication) for it.
I'll provide a rundown on the plot before I go on to establish any rules to make sure our expectations align, just so you won't have the trouble of going through some fastidious bitch's whole request only to find out in the very end you're not into the setting actually. I'm respectful of your time!
I'd define the genre of this plot a mix of magical realism and slipstream political horror. If you're familiar with the 5th edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, you know exactly what I'm talking about because this setting was heavily inspired by it. In its turn, the romantic dynamic I mentioned was heavily inspired by what Anya Taylor-Joy's Furiosa and Tom Burke's Praetorian Jack have got going on in the latest installment of George Miller's Mad Max. So if you're into these things, there's a chance you'll be into what I'm requesting.
Without further ado:
YC was there when the Falciferian headquarters went down because he had sought them for help—heard they had plenty of unassigned dames, highly educated and trained women, in there and maybe, just maybe, one of them would take up his cause if she heard him out. He couldn't afford to hire anybody else for this, and these dames would work for you for free if they thought you were worth it—or so he had heard.
YC knew the one he wanted on his side the second he laid eyes on her hard little face, but he didn't have a lot of time to express it because that's when the windows exploded. YC and MC covered for the dispersing dames and fought their way out of the headquarters, fleeing into the surrounding woodlands in order to make it back to the nearest city.
MC was an unassigned dame about to put in a proposal to turn her current duty as headquarters sentry her assignment, but with the headquarters gone and the Falciferians dispersed, she would have to pick something else. As the resourceful MC escorts YC out of the Falciferian woodlands, they fall into a comfortably silent companionship—one that may just as well bloom into YC becoming her Assignment.
Alright, with the concept out of the way and assuming you're interested, all that's left is finding out if we're a match as writing partners! We're likely a lovely fit for each other if:
Heads up! The following sample wasn't written for the setting described above! I wrote this as a backstory piece for a post-apocalyptic side project, but since it illustrates what Drusilla (and my writing style) is like exceptionally well, I thought I could share it here to give you a taste of my difficult, extraordinary girl. I hope you fall in love with her the same way it happened to me!
But first, on to what I'm looking for exactly—I have a female character I've been carefully and lovingly fleshing out for about a year who has become the apple of my eye, and I've come up with a romantic dynamic for her I'm intensely interested in, but haven't had any luck finding a partner that can match my enthusiasm (and, consequently, dedication) for it.
I'll provide a rundown on the plot before I go on to establish any rules to make sure our expectations align, just so you won't have the trouble of going through some fastidious bitch's whole request only to find out in the very end you're not into the setting actually. I'm respectful of your time!
I'd define the genre of this plot a mix of magical realism and slipstream political horror. If you're familiar with the 5th edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, you know exactly what I'm talking about because this setting was heavily inspired by it. In its turn, the romantic dynamic I mentioned was heavily inspired by what Anya Taylor-Joy's Furiosa and Tom Burke's Praetorian Jack have got going on in the latest installment of George Miller's Mad Max. So if you're into these things, there's a chance you'll be into what I'm requesting.
Without further ado:
It's the late 20th century, and the Falciferian Order may well be one of the oldest surviving institutions, second only to the Catholic Church. A peculiar chivalric order... Stunning not only for its longevity but in that no records show it ever dubbing a single knight—there have only ever been dames, Falciferian Dames. They have stalked the shadows since the Middle Ages. For centuries, their decaptation sickles and wolf-pit traps purged Europe of post-humans (called vampires back then). But their purpose shattered when they successfully engineered a political campaign that weaponized the Romantic era's upheaval.
In the post-Napoleonic power vacuum, vampires exploited human sympathy. They infiltrated salons and medical societies, recasting their predation as a tragic blood affliction. Byron and Polidori's literary vampires became tormented aristocrats, outbreaks of rabies and pellagra masked their feedings. By 1848, vampirism had been integrated into human society—a "protected post-human identity". Hunting them became a capital crime.
Determined to protect their culture and tradition, the Falciferians made a ruthless pivot—leveraging the era's sexism as camouflage. Victorian society dismissed women as nurturing, non-threatening caregivers. The Order weaponized this.
Knights would have been seen as mercenaries infiltrating aristocratic homes. But dames posing as governesses? They were invisible. Expected. Forgivable.
They embedded dames as governess-bodyguards in elite households, using access to heirs to secure influence and recruits. Yet this was only one path in a rigid system: every dame had 20 years of service. In her first years, she sampled roles (bodyguard, scholar, diplomat) but by 25, she chose an assignment—a single vocation to which she'd devote her remaining years. Governing became the most coveted assignment, binding dames to powerful families for a decade or more.
For 150 years, this culture sustained them. Post-humans, now entrenched in power, tolerated the Order—until they realized the Falciferians weren't just governesses. They were archivists of post-human biology (not the tampered shit they weaved into scientific journals). Mentors to future presidents. A latent threat.
Tensions festered. No living Falciferian has ever touched a sickle (mostly because now they take to rifles), but post-humans never forgot their medieval bane. The Order's influence with the upper class of human society made them intolerable. When intelligence hinted at an attack, the Grand Master activated Dispersal Protocol. Too late.
Mercs stormed their headquarters, and it burned. Survivors scattered to their Assignments worldwide—a decentralized network of "respectable" women. A geometry tutor in Zurich. A diplomacy instructor in Tokyo. A security consultant in London. All still bound by oaths, protected by the ordinariness of their roles.
Now, decentralized and hunted, the Falciferians endure as ghosts in plain sight. Their war is no longer fought with sickles, but with loyalty: the love of charges they raised, and the secrets only unassigned dames remember.
In the post-Napoleonic power vacuum, vampires exploited human sympathy. They infiltrated salons and medical societies, recasting their predation as a tragic blood affliction. Byron and Polidori's literary vampires became tormented aristocrats, outbreaks of rabies and pellagra masked their feedings. By 1848, vampirism had been integrated into human society—a "protected post-human identity". Hunting them became a capital crime.
Determined to protect their culture and tradition, the Falciferians made a ruthless pivot—leveraging the era's sexism as camouflage. Victorian society dismissed women as nurturing, non-threatening caregivers. The Order weaponized this.
Knights would have been seen as mercenaries infiltrating aristocratic homes. But dames posing as governesses? They were invisible. Expected. Forgivable.
They embedded dames as governess-bodyguards in elite households, using access to heirs to secure influence and recruits. Yet this was only one path in a rigid system: every dame had 20 years of service. In her first years, she sampled roles (bodyguard, scholar, diplomat) but by 25, she chose an assignment—a single vocation to which she'd devote her remaining years. Governing became the most coveted assignment, binding dames to powerful families for a decade or more.
For 150 years, this culture sustained them. Post-humans, now entrenched in power, tolerated the Order—until they realized the Falciferians weren't just governesses. They were archivists of post-human biology (not the tampered shit they weaved into scientific journals). Mentors to future presidents. A latent threat.
Tensions festered. No living Falciferian has ever touched a sickle (mostly because now they take to rifles), but post-humans never forgot their medieval bane. The Order's influence with the upper class of human society made them intolerable. When intelligence hinted at an attack, the Grand Master activated Dispersal Protocol. Too late.
Mercs stormed their headquarters, and it burned. Survivors scattered to their Assignments worldwide—a decentralized network of "respectable" women. A geometry tutor in Zurich. A diplomacy instructor in Tokyo. A security consultant in London. All still bound by oaths, protected by the ordinariness of their roles.
Now, decentralized and hunted, the Falciferians endure as ghosts in plain sight. Their war is no longer fought with sickles, but with loyalty: the love of charges they raised, and the secrets only unassigned dames remember.
YC was there when the Falciferian headquarters went down because he had sought them for help—heard they had plenty of unassigned dames, highly educated and trained women, in there and maybe, just maybe, one of them would take up his cause if she heard him out. He couldn't afford to hire anybody else for this, and these dames would work for you for free if they thought you were worth it—or so he had heard.
YC knew the one he wanted on his side the second he laid eyes on her hard little face, but he didn't have a lot of time to express it because that's when the windows exploded. YC and MC covered for the dispersing dames and fought their way out of the headquarters, fleeing into the surrounding woodlands in order to make it back to the nearest city.
MC was an unassigned dame about to put in a proposal to turn her current duty as headquarters sentry her assignment, but with the headquarters gone and the Falciferians dispersed, she would have to pick something else. As the resourceful MC escorts YC out of the Falciferian woodlands, they fall into a comfortably silent companionship—one that may just as well bloom into YC becoming her Assignment.
Alright, with the concept out of the way and assuming you're interested, all that's left is finding out if we're a match as writing partners! We're likely a lovely fit for each other if:
- You're absolutely excited to try out this concept! Why do I think excitement is a requirement? Well, like I mentioned up there I'm a little bit autistic and roleplaying is most likely my special interest. This means that the amount of love, energy and time I pour into this hobby is not inconsiderable at all. I've had many, many [painful] experiences in which I was clearly the only one invested in the plot and being indulged by the other party and while I appreciate the sentiment, that's not what I'm after. I'm not saying I expect you to neglect your personal life for the sake of a hobby, not at all! Like the title says, I just want desperately to be met halfway in terms of creative involvement. So if my idea doesn't excite you and you only feel like trying your hand at it, I ask you very gently not to approach me and spare both of us from a middling partnership.
- You enjoy (not tolerate) being spammed with inspo, quotes, headcanons and the like. Doing this is my roleplay love language, and I do it a lot to partners because when I'm invested in a plot and have been given something to work with, I think about it all the time! So everything reminds me of the plot, and I just have to send it my partner's way.
- You try your best to engage with everything your partner sends you. This is something I've had a lot of heartache over, I send a couple of messages to partners because I got a little excited with my train of thoughts and they only answer/acknowledge the last message, like they didn't even bother to read what came before. Like once or twice it's fine, sometimes there's nothing to say about the first messages or maybe you missed them, but it's really painful when it happens every time.
- You're into diving deep into your character! As you probably noticed, I'm wildly into psychological complexity/verisimilitude and I'd love it if our development reflected that. I just want somebody who's into engaging intelligently with characters like I am, especially for this dynamic!
- My writing style is acceptable to you. I'm including a sample at the end of the post so you can judge for yourself plus get to know my character. You don't have to love it, but I know my style can be a bit much for some people so I have to make sure my partners are into it. I'd love to get a writing sample from you too if you decide to message me!
- You don't mind plotting with me for a while before we invest any energy into writing. This is because writing requires a lot of me for many reasons, and I'm physically incapable of half-assing it. I give 100% on every single piece I write. Moreover, while I thought this plot over by myself, we still have to think about how to integrate your character into it, and worldbuild together a little too. So I think it isn't unreasonable to ask that we talk things over thoroughly before getting started!
- You're not after a soft, submissive female character. Because that's most definitely not what you're going to get here. I decided to add this point after I noticed quite a few requests included this requirement, so I wanted to make sure our expectations aligned well. Drusilla is a difficult, stunningly intense character and I need partners who wouldn't have her any other way. Because of this fact, this is very much going to be a slow burn, by the way!
- You don't put smut first in your plots. This is not to say I won't write sensual content, I will and I look forward to it when there has been enough development for it! But it's not really my focus. My focus is really the romantic enmeshment I expect (and hope!) will develop between these two and all the delicious narrative complexity that comes with it. I don't even mind if we don't explore the political horror part of the setting, as long as we get to explore very thoroughly how our characters navigate it together. Together is the magic word, I want them to become inseparable and mutually devoted.
- And last but not least, you use actors as faceclaims. I confess I don't feel comfortable with any other kind of faceclaim and I hope I have your understanding in this. Drusilla's faceclaim is Anya Taylor-Joy, and you would make my whole year if you used Tom Burke, but I can be persuaded to accept another faceclaim as long as he's an actor.
Heads up! The following sample wasn't written for the setting described above! I wrote this as a backstory piece for a post-apocalyptic side project, but since it illustrates what Drusilla (and my writing style) is like exceptionally well, I thought I could share it here to give you a taste of my difficult, extraordinary girl. I hope you fall in love with her the same way it happened to me!
Meet the Cherry Hills Village "retreaters" betting their future on expat-founded SubRosa Solutions, read one of the front-page headlines in the Rocky Mountain News on January 20, 1980. That would be the same date Drusilla took the ladies' singles gold home to the United States of America in the World Junior Figure Skating Championship held in Megève, France. The carefully-framed medal posed proudly beside its peers in the family room of the Silverthorne house for six years (Momma and Daddy amused themselves that it would be more "on theme" to display her middle school skating awards there—Domitilla's debating trophies remained in Cherry Hills Village, as they had nothing to do with ice) until Los Zopilotes zeroed in on the deserted property in 1993 and carted the disassembled cabinet and its sentimental contents away, down to the satin nickel hinges.
Drusilla had been thirteen going on fourteen that year, and straight as a pin… The year they finished construction of SubRosa Solutions' underground fallout shelter beneath Keystone christened Columbine Prime, which had been funded by the former's primary clientele since the seventies—upper-class families and yuppies of the Denver–Aurora–Centennial MSA who could afford to suffer from the nuclear anxiety that Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign and the collapse of the détente restoked.
Reagan's administration had been good for business as far as SubRosa Solutions was concerned—but at what cost.
In addition to partial coverage of Columbine Prime's state-of-the-art schematics (SubRosa Solutions had advised Daddy against talking to the Rocky, so they compromised by not disclosing the location), the piece featured an account of the Seymours' latest exploits as a construction business put together with such a thinly-veiled vitriol that it could have easily passed as a Straight Creek Journal publication instead. As predicted, it was received so poorly by the abandoned middle class of Denver that Daddy refused all subsequent invitations to talk to the press, and only discussed his brainchild with like-minded preppers in their social circle, or friendly columnists of the newsletters he subscribed to like Personal Survival Letter and The Survivor.
Now, Drusilla is the last person to begrudge anybody their class-given right to hard-earned resentment. It had been only curious to watch CAMP liberally avail itself of Momma's once-treasured 19th-century Sèvres porcelain dinner service, or Daddy's winter collection of suede penny loafers turn into camp slippers on the mud-caked feet of bruisers. It was well those things should be put to use again. The miserly ghost of expropriation had no power over the girl after upwards of twenty years shadowing sense incarnate in the person of her godmother—seven of those post-Pox, with all the routine privations that entailed. As a matter of fact, Los Zopilotes would have likely taken much longer to find the Seymours' secluded vacation property had she not volunteered its location as a token of goodwill when joining them in 1993.
But render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. All in all, money had had comparatively very little to do with why upper-class families like the Seymours would come out the other side of 1986 while ninety percent of the world wouldn't.
Money had played a part, of course—when Seymour money could be counted on as a player in its own merit, and didn't mean billions in a currency bricked overnight. Money had bought them a head start. It secured them a rather roomy family suite at Columbine Prime, complete with decent creature comforts (Daddy had gone as far as designing a private rink for her, but the energy costs proved prohibitive), and stocked to see a household of five safely through the brunt of any national or global crisis, up to a couple of years of aftermath. This extra care with provisions had been met with certain condescension by some of SubRosa Solutions' so-called down-to-earth clients. There had been then this American-upper-class sense that whatever lay on the horizon couldn't possibly keep them all holed up underground for more than a couple of months at most, so the company's provident buffer was initially called excess before they backtracked and reframed it as providence about halfway through August 1986.
Excess, buffer, providence—it wouldn't have been enough, whatever the name. Daddy could have stocked a safehouse himself for much cheaper (avid reader of Kurt Saxon, Mel Tappan and Karl Hess as he was), and it wouldn't have gotten the Seymours half as far into the timeline of survival as SubRosa Solutions did, for a simple reason:
SubRosa Solutions had Marjolaine Loiseau.
It had been Marjolaine who thought on her feet in 1986 and dispatched escorts to get their clients quarantined at Columbine Prime before June was out, having been tipped off about the outbreak in Berlin by her European contacts. It had been Marjolaine who ensured order in the bunker after the radio operators broke out the news of the Pox's apocalyptic death toll worldwide. It had been Marjolaine who coordinated and trained recon parties to go test the waters of the new social orders coalescing in the Front Range Urban Corridor, after Columbine Prime picked up The Springs' broadcast in May 1987. It had been Marjolaine who fronted the long negotiations with The Springs, eventually agreeing to trade their stockpiled perishables in exchange for citizenship for the souls in SubRosa's (they had dropped Solutions as early as then) custody—clients turned friends under the duress of survival. It had been Marjolaine who worked out a clever way to sneak those friends, one family unit at a time, from under the noses of Los Zopilotes (their new aboveground neighbors, in a curious turn of events), and then escorted them to The Springs' relative safety-in-numbers throughout 1988.
It had been Marjolaine, and not money, who pulled them all through.
Drusilla had been put together wrong in the womb, and she knew it.
The knowledge seldom bothered her, except when it demanded she deserve her page in the family album or somehow compensate for its lack of luster (which never aligned with the objective truth, in Momma and Daddy's reckoning—but she couldn't have her cake and eat it too, could she now). Perhaps this [self-]consciousness was just a corollary of having been born an unfortunately-placed in-between thing in the order of siblings—squished after a star and before the fucking sun—, so that her tentative twinkling felt like an insult to her parents' constellation. Drusilla's birth introduced a supernova into the household, collapsed the Seymours' gravity well, and she can trace her fundamental insecurity over that fact as far back as her earliest memories can go, so long had it been her formative companion.
In all occasions, where they are and what Domitilla or Linus happen to be doing vary widely—from something momentous like her big sister at her student piano recital, awing a packed Broadmoor International Theater in Colorado Springs to something more homely like her toddling baby brother (not yet old enough to warrant the precocious force of his personality) babbling their entertained parents' ears off aboard a Catalina sailboat on Lake Dillon. What rarely varies is Drusilla's point of view in these memories, and what her round-cheeked self is doing—perched on Daddy's arm, anxiously racking her little brain to make sense of her siblings' antics from the vantage point of his height.
They had always understood something vital about life and living it that had gone over her head somewhere along the way.
But most damning of all (and perhaps most decisive of the tenor her life would take later down the road) must have been the disparity she descried in Momma and Daddy's well-loved faces when they regarded each of their children in turn. Looking on their eldest and their youngest, their features lit up enough to rival the combined brilliance of her siblings, the wholesome pride of caregivers rolling off them—and then they gentled with inexorable compassion (too kindly to count as a kindness) whenever Drusilla's little gimlet eyes met theirs halfway every time, watching them right back like no babygirl should.
So it was nothing short of a miracle in her book when the Seymour siblings' fabled godmother came [back] into their lives on a clear morning of 1971, and singled Drusilla out on the spot upon stepping on the driveway of the house in Silverthorne—her keen lynx eyes throwing her chronic sense of alienation into stark relief like the searching beam of a lighthouse in some badly-needed, all-seeing way—, before moving on to humor baby Linus, the godchild she was most at fault with out of the three, whose birth and then christening her asylum in France had made her miss. Marjolaine Loiseau wasn't the name signed in all those cards stapled to the birthday and Christmas presents sent by their absent godmother until then (that was an American name, Drusilla would be able to tell later on, not French—had she gone supernova too, back in Vietnam), but it was the name of the woman larger than life who plucked her off Daddy's arm and set her down on the ice. The tatami could wait until she had learned to reverse-engineer belonging (security, in the dialect of childhood) on her own two skates.
Turned out Drusilla had been made of the same stuff as her godmother all along, and it took the two of them locking in a binary dance around the same barycenter in that morning of 1971 for the Seymours to realize it.
Just as it happened when Drusilla landed a clean 5.8-5.9s/5.4-5.6s triple Lutz (technically near-flawless at some expense of artistry) at her first Southwestern Regional in 1977.
Attending St. Mary's Academy became more endurable because of the ice arenas of South Suburban in Littleton, and the promise of weekends with her godmother in Silverthorne to look forward to. The Seymours' monopoly of the ski resorts in Summit County (plus neighboring Beaver Creek, Vail and Loveland) had made a nonissue of housing Marjolaine and her network of fellow GI Janes trickling back into the country sub rosa between 1972 and 1973. SubRosa Solutions was a company co-founded as the deserters decompressed from years of asylum in France and Sweden in the vacant resort lodges—but SubRosa was a bond, and it dated back to 1967 when they disobeyed orders to go home war criminals instead of heroines, then rode the shadow of the international press sensation caused by the crew of the USS Intrepid jumping ship on the coast of Japan. Sexism may have worked in their favor for a change then—what was it to the Armed Forces the loss of the "petticoat army" (regardless of how valorously they had fought for and carried out duties reserved for men) when they had the repercussions of the Intrepid Four scandal to contend with. But back on home soil, the women were well aware the status of deserters trumped gender—forged identities would only protect them from court-martial so long as they kept a low profile.
Many SubRosa would choose to go by the names in their birth certificates again when the military justice system collapsed together with the government in 1986—but until then utmost discretion was imperative, and not only for their individual sakes. They owed a debt of gratitude to the Seymours for not measuring efforts to repatriate strangers on the strength of Marjolaine's word alone—and the latter's little shadow had become a staple in their midst whenever they convened in Silverthorne to talk shop.
Fifteen years later, when Drusilla joined them as the first of what they would later call second-generation SubRosa, they had nothing for her. No rite of passage since they would come up with the blood oath only in 1989. No way to train their esprit de corps into her any more than she had already internalized it over the course of the years, having been brought up bathed in it. None of them lacked proof of what she could do in a pinch with that AK-74 on her back or those lithe skater's legs under her, live-wires of densely coiled power primed to spring without notice—not when most of them had at some point gone on hunting trips with both godmother and goddaughter, or when they had looked on with mounting interest as she worked assiduously on the leg grappling techniques, in the dojo across the hall.
So in 1987 when the first of Columbine Prime's recon parties set up camp for the night in Keystone on their way east to Denver, Marjolaine sat her goddaughter on the mossy banks of the Snake River and posed a question that set a valuable precedent for the network's recruitment tactics in the coming decade:
"What do you make of SubRosa, ma petite louve?" Marjolaine asked. Not asking what SubRosa was objectively speaking—what SubRosa was to her. The wording had been pointedly sinuous, in a way she knew her goddaughter would equally pointedly ignore.
It said more about the girl than SubRosa—and perhaps that had been the whole point because her godmother just beamed in response.
Her girlhood glided by against the backdrop of SubRosa Solutions gravitating towards a customer base that side-eyed the economic smugness of the Wall Street of the Rockies as the latter's profits soared in the wake of the 1973 OPEC embargo, running counter to the rest of the stagflated country. Coloradans with stakes in the Denver Petroleum Club weren't terribly likely to fund a prepper program like Columbine Prime—not while they were at the top of the 17th Street's ladder and the skies looked azure from up there. But the Seymours had long memories of the mining town cycle passed down the generations since Pike's Peak, and Marjolaine's prudence to boot—in the Centennial State, a boom must mean a bust was on the way.
For the greater part of the seventies, schematics detailing Daddy's vision for Columbine Prime in various levels of refinement lined the walls of the study in the Silverthorne house. The room directly opposite it had been re-outfitted into a private dojo for Drusilla, so Marjolaine wouldn't have to cross the hall in order to instruct her every time her footwork needed adjustments as the adults discussed paperwork, redesigns, cost reductions and construction setbacks. Either set of pine double doors stood wide open like arms whenever she used the dojo (which was religiously, to the tune of her inner metronome), and that didn't make it any less of the hermetically sealed, orderly world that South Suburban was—it smelled potently of sun-dried rice straw, rush grass and rosin like it had never been aired out, and when muscle memory of edge drills kicks in to save her from skidding on the sweat-misted tatami, it's like a little bit of Zamboni exhaust and wet limestone wafts in. The tension leaking from the other side of the hall mounted as the decade wore on and Columbine Prime wasn't finished, but it rebounded against the kinetic force field of [over]training. Any wisps of nuclear anxiety that exploited the hairline cracks and seeped in would be hard-pressed to catch the hybrid powerhouse she had honed herself into as young as eleven—tough to keep up with and tougher to keep down.
If Drusilla's context failed, her body would not.
It was like going supernova again, without any upside—Drusilla's knees buckled impossibly mid-landing during double loop jump practice and she crashed soundly on the ice, unable to break her fall because of the fire licking at the micro-tears in the tendon behind her kneecaps. Her injury had gone largely unregistered (what with her laser-focus on her program for the World Junior Championship the following season), the growing grinding in the back of her knees over the previous months every time she warmed up, most likely aggravated by practicing Vovinam's deep stances on the weekends. It was a small mercy that she was balled-up in far too much pain to dwell on the fury her body's betrayal stoked to fever pitch, or the possibility of being unable to train as hard as necessary moving forward.
Daddy spoke carefully in the house throughout her rehabilitation, but failed to muffle that undercurrent of concern that lent a familiar tremor to his voice—and there she was again, back up on her old perch in his arm.
Ultimately, nobody could cut through to the source of Drusilla's mute terrors quite like her godmother. After hanging up her skates with a flourish as the 1980 World Junior champion, Marjolaine K-taped her tender knees and took her camping in the White River National Forest enough that six years later she could draw a map of the land from memory—annotated with useful information about key sites, and the local fauna and flora.
"Bodies fail. If you want to keep this world at bay, it's time you learned to engineer survival out of it," her godmother lectured her, and it turned out to be a lesson Drusilla has never forgotten.
By 1992, Los Zopilotes' turf had expanded enough that coming and going from Columbine Prime without tripping enforcers on patrol became a challenge SubRosa couldn't afford to take head-on—nor was it their modus operandi. For economy's sake, both residential and convenience compounds had been sealed and decommissioned shortly after the Seymours relocated to The Springs in 1988 (the last family unit to do so). Only their headquarters and the maintenance compound remained operational, serving as chief meeting ground and occasional home base for the few unstationed SubRosa collecting out there—unassigned to any one settlement.
But losing total access to their safety net wasn't an option—not when said safety net doubled as a safe.
It was no real wonder when Drusilla volunteered for the post, saving the first generation the trouble of conferring with one another to come to the conclusion that she was the top pick for it. It only made sense given the girl's familiarity with the terrain and the particularly desirable set of skills at her disposal where a faction of Los Zopilotes' ways was concerned. Her godmother alone sensed the ulterior motives behind her chosen course of action, if they could be even called that. Marjolaine made no comment, but all it took was a single exchange of looks charged with complicity for Drusilla to be sure she had figured out her objective—and approved of it.
Most SubRosa favored a certain roundabout way to get where or what they had been assigned to do—not so Drusilla.
The first generation had long since learned to give the girl leave to go about her assignments as she judged best, having had proof after proof of her unconventional approach consistently yielding the most results. So it was that in a rosy morning of 1993, Drusilla used her experience with getting around in Silverthorne to bypass the lookouts and strode very deliberately into plain view of Los Zopilotes. They predictably greeted her with a forest of cocked barrels and it deterred her only long enough to raise her empty hands all the way above her head—then she pressed on twice as cautiously, mentally logging the possible escape routes from her position in case negotiations went south. Visually IDing the Urizabal siblings a ways ahead brought her to a gliding stop at the heart of the camp, and every single one of her next movements was fastidiously calculated to afford her the chance to say her piece without inviting bullets. Drusilla unshouldered her satchel, carefully retrieved three sets of items and laid them on the dirt in orderly succession:
A bakelite-lined, waxed canvas sleeve meticulously measured and sewn to fit six months' worth of her Springs visitor passes at a time—a concession to the non-citizen relative of the Seymours. I am your ticket into The Springs.
And the pièce de résistance… Antibiotics. A small crateful of them. This is what a redeemed favor looks like. My friends are welcome to it.
All Drusilla asked in return was warning. A chance to pull the Seymours out of The Springs should Los Zopilotes ever bring the fight to their yard (Defiance's SubRosa had all claimed the same—it was impossible to track that particular chain of events from their loosely-allied stations). Then she waited for the counteroffer, eyes pulsing like beacons.
Drusilla had been thirteen going on fourteen that year, and straight as a pin… The year they finished construction of SubRosa Solutions' underground fallout shelter beneath Keystone christened Columbine Prime, which had been funded by the former's primary clientele since the seventies—upper-class families and yuppies of the Denver–Aurora–Centennial MSA who could afford to suffer from the nuclear anxiety that Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign and the collapse of the détente restoked.
Reagan's administration had been good for business as far as SubRosa Solutions was concerned—but at what cost.
By 1984, suites had been sold out and plans set in motion to build Chokecherry Prime when the Pox hit.
In addition to partial coverage of Columbine Prime's state-of-the-art schematics (SubRosa Solutions had advised Daddy against talking to the Rocky, so they compromised by not disclosing the location), the piece featured an account of the Seymours' latest exploits as a construction business put together with such a thinly-veiled vitriol that it could have easily passed as a Straight Creek Journal publication instead. As predicted, it was received so poorly by the abandoned middle class of Denver that Daddy refused all subsequent invitations to talk to the press, and only discussed his brainchild with like-minded preppers in their social circle, or friendly columnists of the newsletters he subscribed to like Personal Survival Letter and The Survivor.
Now, Drusilla is the last person to begrudge anybody their class-given right to hard-earned resentment. It had been only curious to watch CAMP liberally avail itself of Momma's once-treasured 19th-century Sèvres porcelain dinner service, or Daddy's winter collection of suede penny loafers turn into camp slippers on the mud-caked feet of bruisers. It was well those things should be put to use again. The miserly ghost of expropriation had no power over the girl after upwards of twenty years shadowing sense incarnate in the person of her godmother—seven of those post-Pox, with all the routine privations that entailed. As a matter of fact, Los Zopilotes would have likely taken much longer to find the Seymours' secluded vacation property had she not volunteered its location as a token of goodwill when joining them in 1993.
But render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. All in all, money had had comparatively very little to do with why upper-class families like the Seymours would come out the other side of 1986 while ninety percent of the world wouldn't.
Money had played a part, of course—when Seymour money could be counted on as a player in its own merit, and didn't mean billions in a currency bricked overnight. Money had bought them a head start. It secured them a rather roomy family suite at Columbine Prime, complete with decent creature comforts (Daddy had gone as far as designing a private rink for her, but the energy costs proved prohibitive), and stocked to see a household of five safely through the brunt of any national or global crisis, up to a couple of years of aftermath. This extra care with provisions had been met with certain condescension by some of SubRosa Solutions' so-called down-to-earth clients. There had been then this American-upper-class sense that whatever lay on the horizon couldn't possibly keep them all holed up underground for more than a couple of months at most, so the company's provident buffer was initially called excess before they backtracked and reframed it as providence about halfway through August 1986.
Excess, buffer, providence—it wouldn't have been enough, whatever the name. Daddy could have stocked a safehouse himself for much cheaper (avid reader of Kurt Saxon, Mel Tappan and Karl Hess as he was), and it wouldn't have gotten the Seymours half as far into the timeline of survival as SubRosa Solutions did, for a simple reason:
SubRosa Solutions had Marjolaine Loiseau.
It had been Marjolaine who thought on her feet in 1986 and dispatched escorts to get their clients quarantined at Columbine Prime before June was out, having been tipped off about the outbreak in Berlin by her European contacts. It had been Marjolaine who ensured order in the bunker after the radio operators broke out the news of the Pox's apocalyptic death toll worldwide. It had been Marjolaine who coordinated and trained recon parties to go test the waters of the new social orders coalescing in the Front Range Urban Corridor, after Columbine Prime picked up The Springs' broadcast in May 1987. It had been Marjolaine who fronted the long negotiations with The Springs, eventually agreeing to trade their stockpiled perishables in exchange for citizenship for the souls in SubRosa's (they had dropped Solutions as early as then) custody—clients turned friends under the duress of survival. It had been Marjolaine who worked out a clever way to sneak those friends, one family unit at a time, from under the noses of Los Zopilotes (their new aboveground neighbors, in a curious turn of events), and then escorted them to The Springs' relative safety-in-numbers throughout 1988.
It had been Marjolaine, and not money, who pulled them all through.
For Drusilla, that wasn't the first time. Nor would it be the last.
Drusilla had been put together wrong in the womb, and she knew it.
The knowledge seldom bothered her, except when it demanded she deserve her page in the family album or somehow compensate for its lack of luster (which never aligned with the objective truth, in Momma and Daddy's reckoning—but she couldn't have her cake and eat it too, could she now). Perhaps this [self-]consciousness was just a corollary of having been born an unfortunately-placed in-between thing in the order of siblings—squished after a star and before the fucking sun—, so that her tentative twinkling felt like an insult to her parents' constellation. Drusilla's birth introduced a supernova into the household, collapsed the Seymours' gravity well, and she can trace her fundamental insecurity over that fact as far back as her earliest memories can go, so long had it been her formative companion.
In all occasions, where they are and what Domitilla or Linus happen to be doing vary widely—from something momentous like her big sister at her student piano recital, awing a packed Broadmoor International Theater in Colorado Springs to something more homely like her toddling baby brother (not yet old enough to warrant the precocious force of his personality) babbling their entertained parents' ears off aboard a Catalina sailboat on Lake Dillon. What rarely varies is Drusilla's point of view in these memories, and what her round-cheeked self is doing—perched on Daddy's arm, anxiously racking her little brain to make sense of her siblings' antics from the vantage point of his height.
They had always understood something vital about life and living it that had gone over her head somewhere along the way.
And she had always understood something of the gravity of living any life at all that her siblings couldn't even begin to parse.
But most damning of all (and perhaps most decisive of the tenor her life would take later down the road) must have been the disparity she descried in Momma and Daddy's well-loved faces when they regarded each of their children in turn. Looking on their eldest and their youngest, their features lit up enough to rival the combined brilliance of her siblings, the wholesome pride of caregivers rolling off them—and then they gentled with inexorable compassion (too kindly to count as a kindness) whenever Drusilla's little gimlet eyes met theirs halfway every time, watching them right back like no babygirl should.
So it was nothing short of a miracle in her book when the Seymour siblings' fabled godmother came [back] into their lives on a clear morning of 1971, and singled Drusilla out on the spot upon stepping on the driveway of the house in Silverthorne—her keen lynx eyes throwing her chronic sense of alienation into stark relief like the searching beam of a lighthouse in some badly-needed, all-seeing way—, before moving on to humor baby Linus, the godchild she was most at fault with out of the three, whose birth and then christening her asylum in France had made her miss. Marjolaine Loiseau wasn't the name signed in all those cards stapled to the birthday and Christmas presents sent by their absent godmother until then (that was an American name, Drusilla would be able to tell later on, not French—had she gone supernova too, back in Vietnam), but it was the name of the woman larger than life who plucked her off Daddy's arm and set her down on the ice. The tatami could wait until she had learned to reverse-engineer belonging (security, in the dialect of childhood) on her own two skates.
Turned out Drusilla had been made of the same stuff as her godmother all along, and it took the two of them locking in a binary dance around the same barycenter in that morning of 1971 for the Seymours to realize it.
But that must have been the best-case scenario nobody had counted on because Momma and Daddy's worry lines finally melted away when she spun on her axis fast enough to pulse in phase with dear Marjolaine in the bleachers.
Just as it happened when Drusilla landed a clean 5.8-5.9s/5.4-5.6s triple Lutz (technically near-flawless at some expense of artistry) at her first Southwestern Regional in 1977.
Attending St. Mary's Academy became more endurable because of the ice arenas of South Suburban in Littleton, and the promise of weekends with her godmother in Silverthorne to look forward to. The Seymours' monopoly of the ski resorts in Summit County (plus neighboring Beaver Creek, Vail and Loveland) had made a nonissue of housing Marjolaine and her network of fellow GI Janes trickling back into the country sub rosa between 1972 and 1973. SubRosa Solutions was a company co-founded as the deserters decompressed from years of asylum in France and Sweden in the vacant resort lodges—but SubRosa was a bond, and it dated back to 1967 when they disobeyed orders to go home war criminals instead of heroines, then rode the shadow of the international press sensation caused by the crew of the USS Intrepid jumping ship on the coast of Japan. Sexism may have worked in their favor for a change then—what was it to the Armed Forces the loss of the "petticoat army" (regardless of how valorously they had fought for and carried out duties reserved for men) when they had the repercussions of the Intrepid Four scandal to contend with. But back on home soil, the women were well aware the status of deserters trumped gender—forged identities would only protect them from court-martial so long as they kept a low profile.
Many SubRosa would choose to go by the names in their birth certificates again when the military justice system collapsed together with the government in 1986—but until then utmost discretion was imperative, and not only for their individual sakes. They owed a debt of gratitude to the Seymours for not measuring efforts to repatriate strangers on the strength of Marjolaine's word alone—and the latter's little shadow had become a staple in their midst whenever they convened in Silverthorne to talk shop.
Fifteen years later, when Drusilla joined them as the first of what they would later call second-generation SubRosa, they had nothing for her. No rite of passage since they would come up with the blood oath only in 1989. No way to train their esprit de corps into her any more than she had already internalized it over the course of the years, having been brought up bathed in it. None of them lacked proof of what she could do in a pinch with that AK-74 on her back or those lithe skater's legs under her, live-wires of densely coiled power primed to spring without notice—not when most of them had at some point gone on hunting trips with both godmother and goddaughter, or when they had looked on with mounting interest as she worked assiduously on the leg grappling techniques, in the dojo across the hall.
So in 1987 when the first of Columbine Prime's recon parties set up camp for the night in Keystone on their way east to Denver, Marjolaine sat her goddaughter on the mossy banks of the Snake River and posed a question that set a valuable precedent for the network's recruitment tactics in the coming decade:
"What do you make of SubRosa, ma petite louve?" Marjolaine asked. Not asking what SubRosa was objectively speaking—what SubRosa was to her. The wording had been pointedly sinuous, in a way she knew her goddaughter would equally pointedly ignore.
"It's invisible structure," Drusilla answered without batting an eyelash, having had that particular conviction at the tip of her tongue for years.
It said more about the girl than SubRosa—and perhaps that had been the whole point because her godmother just beamed in response.
Her girlhood glided by against the backdrop of SubRosa Solutions gravitating towards a customer base that side-eyed the economic smugness of the Wall Street of the Rockies as the latter's profits soared in the wake of the 1973 OPEC embargo, running counter to the rest of the stagflated country. Coloradans with stakes in the Denver Petroleum Club weren't terribly likely to fund a prepper program like Columbine Prime—not while they were at the top of the 17th Street's ladder and the skies looked azure from up there. But the Seymours had long memories of the mining town cycle passed down the generations since Pike's Peak, and Marjolaine's prudence to boot—in the Centennial State, a boom must mean a bust was on the way.
For the greater part of the seventies, schematics detailing Daddy's vision for Columbine Prime in various levels of refinement lined the walls of the study in the Silverthorne house. The room directly opposite it had been re-outfitted into a private dojo for Drusilla, so Marjolaine wouldn't have to cross the hall in order to instruct her every time her footwork needed adjustments as the adults discussed paperwork, redesigns, cost reductions and construction setbacks. Either set of pine double doors stood wide open like arms whenever she used the dojo (which was religiously, to the tune of her inner metronome), and that didn't make it any less of the hermetically sealed, orderly world that South Suburban was—it smelled potently of sun-dried rice straw, rush grass and rosin like it had never been aired out, and when muscle memory of edge drills kicks in to save her from skidding on the sweat-misted tatami, it's like a little bit of Zamboni exhaust and wet limestone wafts in. The tension leaking from the other side of the hall mounted as the decade wore on and Columbine Prime wasn't finished, but it rebounded against the kinetic force field of [over]training. Any wisps of nuclear anxiety that exploited the hairline cracks and seeped in would be hard-pressed to catch the hybrid powerhouse she had honed herself into as young as eleven—tough to keep up with and tougher to keep down.
If Drusilla's context failed, her body would not.
Until it did on the sobering morning of March 28, 1979, as every television in Cherry Hills Village tuned in to the coverage of the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island.
It was like going supernova again, without any upside—Drusilla's knees buckled impossibly mid-landing during double loop jump practice and she crashed soundly on the ice, unable to break her fall because of the fire licking at the micro-tears in the tendon behind her kneecaps. Her injury had gone largely unregistered (what with her laser-focus on her program for the World Junior Championship the following season), the growing grinding in the back of her knees over the previous months every time she warmed up, most likely aggravated by practicing Vovinam's deep stances on the weekends. It was a small mercy that she was balled-up in far too much pain to dwell on the fury her body's betrayal stoked to fever pitch, or the possibility of being unable to train as hard as necessary moving forward.
Daddy spoke carefully in the house throughout her rehabilitation, but failed to muffle that undercurrent of concern that lent a familiar tremor to his voice—and there she was again, back up on her old perch in his arm.
Ultimately, nobody could cut through to the source of Drusilla's mute terrors quite like her godmother. After hanging up her skates with a flourish as the 1980 World Junior champion, Marjolaine K-taped her tender knees and took her camping in the White River National Forest enough that six years later she could draw a map of the land from memory—annotated with useful information about key sites, and the local fauna and flora.
"Bodies fail. If you want to keep this world at bay, it's time you learned to engineer survival out of it," her godmother lectured her, and it turned out to be a lesson Drusilla has never forgotten.
By 1992, Los Zopilotes' turf had expanded enough that coming and going from Columbine Prime without tripping enforcers on patrol became a challenge SubRosa couldn't afford to take head-on—nor was it their modus operandi. For economy's sake, both residential and convenience compounds had been sealed and decommissioned shortly after the Seymours relocated to The Springs in 1988 (the last family unit to do so). Only their headquarters and the maintenance compound remained operational, serving as chief meeting ground and occasional home base for the few unstationed SubRosa collecting out there—unassigned to any one settlement.
But losing total access to their safety net wasn't an option—not when said safety net doubled as a safe.
It had been a long time coming now, assigning somebody to befriend Los Zopilotes. The time had come to do that, even if partly out of self-interest—Columbine Prime lacked a sentry, and SubRosa a ferryman.
It was no real wonder when Drusilla volunteered for the post, saving the first generation the trouble of conferring with one another to come to the conclusion that she was the top pick for it. It only made sense given the girl's familiarity with the terrain and the particularly desirable set of skills at her disposal where a faction of Los Zopilotes' ways was concerned. Her godmother alone sensed the ulterior motives behind her chosen course of action, if they could be even called that. Marjolaine made no comment, but all it took was a single exchange of looks charged with complicity for Drusilla to be sure she had figured out her objective—and approved of it.
Most SubRosa favored a certain roundabout way to get where or what they had been assigned to do—not so Drusilla.
The first generation had long since learned to give the girl leave to go about her assignments as she judged best, having had proof after proof of her unconventional approach consistently yielding the most results. So it was that in a rosy morning of 1993, Drusilla used her experience with getting around in Silverthorne to bypass the lookouts and strode very deliberately into plain view of Los Zopilotes. They predictably greeted her with a forest of cocked barrels and it deterred her only long enough to raise her empty hands all the way above her head—then she pressed on twice as cautiously, mentally logging the possible escape routes from her position in case negotiations went south. Visually IDing the Urizabal siblings a ways ahead brought her to a gliding stop at the heart of the camp, and every single one of her next movements was fastidiously calculated to afford her the chance to say her piece without inviting bullets. Drusilla unshouldered her satchel, carefully retrieved three sets of items and laid them on the dirt in orderly succession:
A bakelite-lined, waxed canvas sleeve meticulously measured and sewn to fit six months' worth of her Springs visitor passes at a time—a concession to the non-citizen relative of the Seymours. I am your ticket into The Springs.
An odd assortment of pocket-sized tokens formally presented atop the drawstring pouch they were carried in—gold-capped molars of various sizes, a widowed mother-of-pearl cufflink, a Coors Banquet's collectible bottle cap, a 1954 Aspen lift ticket sporting some indecipherable shorthand, a gorgeous rhodochrosite nugget and a mid-century Zippo lighter. This is how many favors I'm owed.
And the pièce de résistance… Antibiotics. A small crateful of them. This is what a redeemed favor looks like. My friends are welcome to it.
All Drusilla asked in return was warning. A chance to pull the Seymours out of The Springs should Los Zopilotes ever bring the fight to their yard (Defiance's SubRosa had all claimed the same—it was impossible to track that particular chain of events from their loosely-allied stations). Then she waited for the counteroffer, eyes pulsing like beacons.