The Bishop (origin story)

Night fell fast on this backwater mining planet, at least faster than Se'ymt'yr was accustomed to. In the dim light of her windowless Borealis apartment, she dressed herself for the evening's assignment. Within her exobiologically altered brain, she induced the final knowledge necessary to don her virus-laden suit without falling to sickness. If only these people knew, she thought, with what they were truly girding themselves under the aegis of alien armor. It was still new technology, visited upon the planet within the past few years, and though it had become a common--indeed, sometimes even necessary--choice for those spoiling for blood, not many bore the psychological fortitude to understand the nauseating mechanics behind its construction. Se'ymt'yr grinned at the thought of using the aliens' own tech against them; as a triple undercover agent, she could definitely appreciate the irony.

Sighing, she buttoned the fly of her pants and leaned over to manoeuvre her heel into its proper place within its boot. It would be several hours before her brain would shift back to its normal state; a slow burn of headache crept behind her skull, but it was nothing she couldn't push past. Some paid for the services of illegal clinics for an instant fix, but Se'ymt'yr's natural distrust of whatever records might be kept was enough to prompt her to wait it out instead. Besides, she had heard rumors that the expensive process was most likely addictive. Her eyes narrowed and flashed darkly beneath brown hair as she thought of--no. She wouldn't allow herself to entertain that memory. Not yet.

Fully strapped into her armor, Se'ymt'yr took a final glance around her prison-like room. It was bare of furnishings except for an ever-circling fan and a small refrigerator placed capriciously against a wall. Her gaze rested upon the refrigerator as the memory seeped forth about its acquisition. It was several months ago, when Se'ymt'yr had still been getting her bearings on Rubi-Ka. The gravity, the notum-rich air, everything had been different. She had sought solace in a seemingly abandoned subway station, but hadn't even had the opportunity to ascertain its least squalid corner before a crazed vagrant, reeking fumes of unwashed human filth and self-fermented toilet wine, had rushed at her, knife drawn, its blade obscured by the blood of its previous victim. Recalling this, she smirked; the old hobo had been either too drunk or too mentally deteriorated to spot her rifle and what fate that had meant for him. In a fit of uncharacteristic pique wrenched forth by a yearning for the stringent eugenics program of her home world, she had drawn her weapon. Although she hadn't had time to aim carefully for a headshot, none of her bullets had been wasted. Afterwards, going through the new corpse's vomit-caked trenchcoat for loose change, she had discovered the fridge that he had strangely been concealing on his person. A trophy is a trophy nonetheless, she had thought, and had lugged it back with her to her new flat to commemorate her first human kill since planetfall.

Se'ymt'yr's crooked smile grew larger as she contemplated just how easy it had been to gain ingress to this world. She had feigned helplessness, dredging herself up out of the water onto the beach as she had observed others doing. She had mimicked their story about a shipcrash to Brandon Thorn, who had unbidden handed her a worn but serviceable rifle, and when he had asked for her name, he believed her without requesting further identification. Of course her real name wasn't Se'ymt'yr; an outcast, an orphan, she was without family, mate, or friend, and had no use for her true identity. She gave laughably false names wherever she traveled, though in certain corners of this universe, one might catch whispers of "The Bishop." Based on the calculating, far-reaching diagonal move from a long-lost game, this epithet had been granted to her after she first double-crossed the government on the planet of her birth.

Se'ymt'yr didn't need a mirror to know how she looked before leaving for the GridStream Productions party: unremarkable. Her armor wouldn't stand out, and she had applied temporary tattoos to her face in a popular design of swirling lines. To her outlander eyes, the tattoos looked to be the work of a hack artist's gauche hand that didn't know when to stop doodling, but the scrawl allowed her to blend in with the crowd. Thankfully the one thing she couldn't alter, her Solitus genetics, helped her all the same on Rubi-Ka, where her biological kind dominated the population. Her line of work typically attracted the mutated, sickly Opifex who believed that shrinking themselves with nanotechnology would lead to more successful subterfuge. "Fools!" she spat aloud. Didn't they see that such antics only made them more con****uous, not less? Se'ymt'yr was no such fool; her keen observation had garnered her the perfect disguise for the evening's party: to assume the role of the Meta-Physicist.

As a class, those fanatics were a noxious bunch; religious but godless, they worshipped only their own hatred of technology and reason, relying instead upon ridiculous weapons brought forth with cheap conjuring tricks and upon the physical manifestations of their own mental frothing. These impotent beings summoned forth from some tainted aether looked like nothing less than some poor creature, bloated and distended, that had supped too vigorously from a radioactive sea. As a disguise, however, it was ideal; long-stunted in battle by their own stubborn adherence to ineffectual techniques, Meta-Physicists instead loitered in droves along the thoroughfares of Rubi-Ka's cities, sometimes passing out blessings of false enlightenment. The results of this laying-on of hands were, as expected, quite ephemeral, but it was easy enough for Se'ymt'yr to harness her own distaste of the whole enterprise to cast her own blobs of annoyance. These drooling minions were far too weak to be of any real use to her, but the party would be crowded enough that no one would notice the discrepancy.

Her distaste arose from the need to attend any event at which music would be playing. Her nanotech-enhanced senses led her to disdain music as a whole, but especially hit songs with their garish rhythms and squealings. She much preferred to spend her free time in the deserted training ground behind her apartment, listening instead to the wet but gentle slushing of the biofreak cadavers and the naive murmurs of the proliferous, top-heavy vermin. Still, the music would provide camouflage; her training kept her from being overwhelmed by stimuli, instead discerning the layers of sound to separate out hushed conversations or footsteps behind her, moving with intent.

Se'ymt'yr only needed one final touch: her bow. It completed her outward Meta-Physicist appearance while still functioning as a deadly weapon in her hands. Some would scoff at her choice, but she knew that skill would trump weaponry, a reason why she was able to charge such a large sum for this assassination contract. It would be a silent, lethal takedown. The dancing masses, their eyes clenched tight with forced mirth, mouths a rictus straining with too-loud laughter, would never see the body fall to the ground amongst them, perhaps would not even pause to check that upon which they stamped an artless flamenco. Se'ymt'yr was ready; she strode out onto wet pavement, into darkness.