vignette Ultimate Freedom and Other Tales - May / June Vignette

[Tiffany Korta]

Freedom City has been rebooted! It's time to retell your character's origins with the hindsight of 5, 10 or even more time spent with the character. What changes? What stays the same?

 

Or

 

Imagine what it would be like if the character had been created in the Gold, Silver, Bronze or even... Iron Age. How would things change if they were written during those times. You can either ignore or embrace those aspects of the characters that would be considered problematic then, but just remember to keep things within the site rules.

 

Your reboot stories should be posted no later than the 30th June 2024.

 

(As a reminder, vignettes follow the same general rules as posts in terms of content, player character limits, and so on. You may have only one vignette per player character. Each vignette should be at least one page (~500 words) in length; if posted in your thread counts at the end of the month, it is worth 1pp for the associated character. An especially long vignette, 1000 words or more, may be worth up to 2pp. Multiple players can collaborate on a single vignette - we recommend Google Docs for this, it's very useful - but the vignette should be about one page per participating player.)

[Supercape]

Snakebite

 

In

 

Finding your teeth

 

 

On the fifth day, the fever broke.

 

Those days had been full of sweat and delirium, dreams of jungles and strange night skies full of unfamiliar stars. Several times, the doctors and nurses had been fearful for Cassandra Crow’s life as they struggled to keep her temperature up, or temperature down. The Crow family could afford for the best of care, although their relationships were not always pleasant. It had not gone unnoticed that a few choice members had been hovering around Cassandra’s bed with a glint of glee, hoping that some of the Crow’s byzantine inheritance laws my bless them upon her passing.

 

A month ago, Cassandra Crow had been deep in Amazonian Jungle, exploring the unexplored. She had located a golden snake head, about the size of a fist, with glittering emerald eyes and a malign serpents grin. Worth a fortune, to be sure, but it was glory not dollars that motivated Cassandra Crow. Caressing her prize, she heard a click… and two golden fangs stabbed into her hand.

 

If it was simply a matter of a few scars on the back of her hand, there the story would have ended. But each fang contained a shot of ancient and Eldritch poison.

Her temperature rose, her tongue coarsened and swelled. Her eyes darkened and pierced the dark. The poison was crawling around her arteries, into her muscles and skin, changing her.

 

And quite possibly killing her.

 

To get back to the Amazonian river boat was a feat of endurance that she would have, a day before, considered impossible, beyond human flesh. Lying in the boat, convulsing, shaking, was an agony she would rather forget. And then, descent into a coma, until she awoke five days ago in a Hospital in London.

 

And now, the fever had broke. She could sit on her bed, she could even walk, clutching onto her IV drip strand like a crutch. Sleep – yes, sleep. She could sleep twenty hours a day and still feel tired. But no longer was her temperature spiking. No more mysterious cold fevers. It was, as the doctors said, as if her blood could not decide whether she was hot blooded or cold blooded. All in all, she was a mystery. Her blood tests, only now resolving, were impossible to understand, and should have killed her. The ascribed her ongoing life to Ms. Crow’s remarkable fitness, what with her being an explorer used to climbing, hiking, and swimming through the harshest of Earth’s terrains.

 

Maybe that was true, but Cassandra Crow suspected other forces were at play. The Crow family were as wealthy as you could be, thanks to good fortune. But fortune was a fickle and two sided beast. Curses, Hex’s, supernatural bad luck – these too came with the Crow Raven Hair and Crow hooked nose. The Golden Snake Head had sensed something in her, it had smelled the Crow blood, and it had attacked!

 

“Uuurgh….”

 

It was a groan of livid arteries, of pounding head. Pain that morphine had muffled but not removed. Her mother and sister were at the bedside. Caring, in that Crow way. Obscured, mysterious, even narcissistic caring, but caring all the same. And Cassandra would rather have them there than some of the more obnoxious and machevellian characters in the more distant part of the family.

 

“How long?” she asked.

 

“Too long…” said her mother, he black crow hair tied, harshly, to the back of her head. “We feared the worst, you rapscallion! Although… I would not have my daughters any other way. You get poisoned, your sister falls of mountains. Tsk! Better a day a lion, eh?”

 

“Or a snake…” muttered Cassandra.

 

There followed more days in hospital, more mysterious medicine. And then a trip to the Crow family manor once she was healthy enough. In some ways, the doctors told her, she was suspiciously too healthy.

 

They were not wrong. A couple more weeks, and Cassandra was riding, swimming and running through the grounds of the Manor. She was always athletic, her long limbs used to the strain of hiking and exploring. But now she rode harder, she swam faster, and she ran for longer than ever before. Her strength was beyond her frame – tight, hot muscles able to lift a motorcycle above her head (yes, she tried). And speed, yes – faster than before, able to balance and leap like a cat competing for the cat Olympics in agility. Cassandra could feel her body writhe, stretch and bend like rubber. Like a cat.

 

Like a snake.

 

And then, there were the teeth.

 

They manifested – with an sharp electrical pain – when Cassandra was running through the nearby woods and was startled by an irritable fox. No threat, neither before her transformation or, much less so, after it, but enough to cause that little flux of adrenaline. Her canines elongates – subtle, maybe half an inch or most, but quite the shock nonetheless. And the bitter taste of poison at their tips.

 

What was she?

 

The answer surely lay in books. And the Crow family had plenty of dusty tomes in the library. Books of history, archeology, certainly. And darker, eldritch, arcane tomes of pre-history and mythology. Books documenting – in crazed words – the worlds of Atlantis, Lemuria, the lost world. And even, in some particularly hushed and warped words, of the yellow sign.

 

But even these were not enough. Cassandra turned to the British library, pulling strings to get the most obscure and forbidden texts. She spent her days away from sunshine, in the depths of the library, in a private and dusty reading room, poring over yellow paper. At least, it was usually paper. Sometimes it was hide. Sometimes it was skin.

 

There it was: Lodged between a scrawled (in blood?) ramble on the sixty six dimensions of the silver chair, and an alleged spell to bind the third eyes of the unspeakable one. A note on the golden skull  of Lemuria, its poison deadly to all but those with snake blood. A ritualistic device to prove one was a true snake person.

 

And Cassandra Crow had survived the bite. Survived the poison.

 

It made her blood run as cold as a lizards. Her sweat felt icy, her tongue felt bloated. Something was very wrong with the Crow family line. Something… inhuman. Somehow, they were not mere homo sapien, but something else. Maybe not material, maybe not genetic. But somehow, in aeons past, the Crow family had taken something of the Lemurian people. Perhaps this explained their strange fortunes, their mystic eyes, the family legacy littered with witches, shamans, sorcerers and oracles.

 

Cassandra Crow was a snake? Then so be it. An enigmatic and twisted smile creased the corner of her lips. There was more work to be done.

 

As Snakebite.