Ivy had long suspected the existence of a nexus of evil, the wellspring from which the majority of the world’s manipulative, deceptive, irrational beings originated. She devoted a decade of her life to discovering its whereabouts, a decade that began the night of the homecoming dance in her sophomore year of high school when Warren, her best friend since preschool and fallback date for all social functions, succumbed to a creature spawned from its seething womb.
She never made it to that dance.
She never saw Warren alive again.
That night, she vowed neither she nor anyone around her would know peace until the devil responsible perished by the razor’s edge of her unforgiving blade.
“I have to confiscate your weapons, sugar.”
She leveled a lacerating glare at one of the sentries guarding the portal separating her from at long last realizing her objective. “You’ll take my sword when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
The sentry—the badge affixed to the lapel of her pink blazer identified her as Hi! My name is LiSBETH, the inexplicably lowercase “i” dotted with a tiny pink heart—maintained her relentlessly sunny disposition. “We must consider safety first. You could put somebody’s eye out.”
“I’ve never tortured, maimed, or killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.”
The toothpaste-commercial smile never wavered. “Be that as it may, I’m afraid I must politely insist.”
Ivy grudgingly relinquished her sword, safely sheathed in the scabbard she wore on her back. Drawing her blade from that position had butchered her hair often enough to necessitate the adoption of the off-center braid in which she now confined her long black hair, but it was preferable to wearing the scabbard at her hip, where it banged against her leg during action sequences.
“I’ll need the crossbow, as well.”
She complied with a couldn’t-care-less shrug. She’d seen that one coming.
“And the grenades.”
She resisted the temptation to pull the pins before handing them over. Explosions caused chaos, and while she wasn’t averse to a little chaos, she’d rather save it for an advantageous situation, as opposed to wasting it eliminating an annoyance of no greater importance than a housefly.
Every filthy little housefly deserved a good smack, though.
She unhooked each grenade from her belt, handing them over one at a time. She held the last one over the sentry’s outstretched palm and let it drop—an inch too far to the right. It glanced off the side of her hand and plunged toward the ground inches away from her pointy-toed pink pumps.
“BOOM!”
An ear-piercing shriek stripped the smile from the sentry and transferred it to Ivy.
A second pink-jacketed female scurried over to comfort her hysterical fellow minion and bestow the full censure of her frown upon the cause of upset. “What did you do to her?”
“I made a joke, mistakenly assuming anyone wearing a Pepto-Bismol pink suit would have a great sense of humor. Can I go in now? I’m more than fashionably late.”
Lisbeth produced the mirrored compact with which her kind was always equipped, corrected her smudged mascara, and fastened the smile back on her face. “Have you surrendered all of your implements of death?”
Ivy patted the snug contours of her leather bustier and leather pants—not the most comfortable or practical attire, but one simply did not go around battling evil while wearing a tracksuit. “Do you see anywhere I could be concealing a weapon in these clothes? You have it all.”
“Are you sure?”
She hadn’t hunted them for ten years without learning something of their limitations. “Want to give me a body cavity search to satisfy your curiosity? Snap on some gloves and stick your pudgy little fingers up my—”
“You can go in now!” both sentries exclaimed in unison.
“I’d like a receipt for my property first.”
Itemized list of contraband in hand, she passed between the pink-and-white bunting-draped tables restricting access to the portal. Her boots fell heavily on the pristine walkway, weighted down with several pounds of hidden knives, poisons, lockpicks, the obligatory spring-loaded blades that shot from the toes, and cab fare for those not infrequent occasions when her pursuit of the enemy ended in dumping her car at the bottom of a lake to dispose of evidence.
Her days of chasing had come to an end. She had breached their defenses and entered their midst, where she would destroy them in their own nest or die trying.
The path forked like the tongue of a serpent. A sign posted at the junction directed her toward the right, to a white-columned building designated the O’Hara Auditorium, where the wielders of wicknedness waited to welcome her to the festering malignancy in the belly of humanity known as…
The Heroine Academy.
NEXT: Orientation: Andrea “Andi” Squire
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This is brilliant. We can expect daily updates, yes? Or hourly, even?
There is much to be told, but the teller, despite her enthusiasm for divulging all, is notoriously overburdened, so don’t expect the daily updates to continue for long.
On the other hand, this is a great means of procrastinating about other things I should be working on, so they might pop up more frequently than I anticipate…
And I may make with the mad linkage, yes?
By all means, link away. Link like there is no tomorrow.
Given the insidious evil rotting the core of the world, there may NOT be…
Bwahahahaha!
Thank you, Your Highness, for procrastinating by giving us this tidbit. I love Ivy. And the boots filled with weapons…Ha! Will be following closely for updates and any hint of other manly men with well-placed scars.