Crimson Bliss

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

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Crimson Bliss
Player: @Crimson Bliss
Origin:	Magic
Archetype:	Blaster
Security Level:	50
Personal Data
Real Name:	Alicia Lang
Known Aliases:	Ebon Agony, Scarlet Agony, Supreme Seer of the Guardians of the Spectral Abyss, Caretaker of the Temple of the Wilted Lotus, “Rosy”
Species:	Born Human
Age:	27
Height:	5’5”
Weight:	115 lbs.
Eye Color:	Hazel
Hair Color:	Auburn
Biographical Data
Nationality:	Welsh, but an American citizen since the age of eight.
Occupation:	Classified
Place of Birth:	Cardiff, Wales
Base of Operations:	The Temple of the Wilted Lotus
Marital Status:	Single but not looking.
Known Relatives:	None
Known Powers
Energy Blast, Energy Manipulation, Flight, Teleportation, Fitness, Stealth, Electrical Mastery and a menagerie of powers granted by magical and technological items she collects.
Known Abilities
Alicia has mastered some spells and incantations that allow her minor telepathic and clairvoyant abilities. Her connection to the banished titan Hecate also powers her abilities as a mystic and allows her to extend her sight and abilities further.
Equipment
Alicia often carries a .38 special and an assortment of magical items with her. Other than that and essential living items, she doesn’t keep much else on hand.
According to DATA’s registry, the Hero known as Crimson Bliss is deceased. Public records of Alicia Lang, born August 10th, 1981 in Cardiff also show that she died from unknown causes in Dark Astoria. Both records show that no body was recovered but death has been presumed due to evidence found at the scene in Moth Cemetery.

It was August 10th, 1999. I remember because it was my birthday. I had spent the months prior watching non-stop cable news coverage of the Columbine massacre and I had just graduated high school in May. Most people maligned Eric and Dylan for what they did. But I didn’t, and I knew my girlfriend and new roommate Kat didn’t either. We knew the pain of being the school pariah, the small fish in a sea with swarming pubescent sharks. I never felt they were good boys or heroes; that would be insane or crazy. I just knew their pain and loneliness. I still weep for everyone that died on April 20th, including the killers.

My parents moved us to Paragon City when I was eight years old. Back in Cardiff, the neighborhood adults used to fawn over me with claims of beauty and brilliance. I never thought my features were all that attractive but my smile always seemed to turn on the room. I always found it embarrassing when they did it but, as a child, I soaked up my small hometown limelight. I was sad to leave that place and scared to come to America, a foreign land away from my budding social groups. But my parents needed the work.

The only negative thing anyone ever said to me back then was that I needed more sleep. Until the age of sixteen I had bags under my eyes like a runway model whose assistant called in sick before New York’s fashion week. I remember lying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling and being unable to drift off. As I lie wake in bed it felt as though I saw the whole of time and space playing in my head. The move didn’t help this problem at all.

I was not so adored by my peers in Paragon City’s public schools. Mostly the teasing started with my accent. It quickly moved to my clothes. My parents were immigrants and made most of my clothes themselves and they were never very stylish. The fabrics they used were always what was on sale and the designs were often hideous. My clothes were always made for utility over aesthetics and paled in comparison to the department store brands the other children wore.

Once the teasing starts in public schools, you have two options. Get through it until graduation and believe that once you get to the next level of education things will be different or give in to the misery and become the predator.

I remember in sixth grade I attempted to join a clique to get away from the teasing. I begged and pleaded until my parents took me shopping for nice clothes. Once I came into the school and started being recognized, I was in immediately. It was wonderful at first, I felt like a little girl being adored by everyone again. But it wasn’t long before I was discovered. It wasn’t that they didn’t recognize me as the social leper from previous years, but when I refused to tease those less fortunate it revealed me to be an imposter.

It wouldn’t be until my freshman year of high school, when I met Katarina Tepeste that I would start to realize my place. Her pale skin, red hair like mine and deep eyes weren’t a part of the beauty norm in American culture. That being said she had an air like Bette Davis.

The first time I saw her, I was passing her in the hall just before she hit the jock frenzy that I was fleeing from. The boys in the athletic clubs often traveled in packs through the halls belittling, berating and badgering people they came across. I could hear their hoots and hollers coming my direction. I just kept my head down and focused on getting to my next class. I looked up to see the unique woman making her way passed me and she had a smile upon her face that caught my interest immediately. When she made contact with the horny imbeciles chasing me they turned on her, saying that she was a “butter face.” I doubt that phrase needs explanation.

I stopped as guilt flooded over me for letting her fall into their clutches. That being said part of me wonders to this day if she hadn’t turned down that hall just to take the hit for me. Another part of me feels she may have engineered the whole confrontation to form a bond between us. I remember the smelly, sweaty team captain of the basketball team keeping her against the wall as he spoke sticky and ejaculatory nothings to her without shame. Kat never showed concern as she looked him in the eye though his words bordered threats of sexual assault. Only after a few moments, things took an unexpected turn.

The alpha jock slowly began to choke on his words. It wasn’t like he hit a brick wall, but more that his mind struggled more and more to form the words as time went on. He didn’t stop talking until his bravado had vanished leaving his face empty. Then the tears began to fall as if he were in the most severe pain of his life. It wasn’t long after his cheeks were soaked with incredible agony that I heard her Romanian accent for the first time. She gave him one command, “Apologize,” which he did immediately.

Kat and I became instant best friends. She was the one that introduced me to the world of the supernatural. We began dabbling in the dark arts together because we could. She was there when I foolishly fell in love with a football player who quickly moved on to another girl. That is how those popular kids are you know, using up the less influential people before they move on. I never saw it as being dumped, it was more that I had nothing left that he desired.

My breakup with the jock wouldn’t be the only time Kat helped me through a hard time. Kat was the stronger one. She was always there and always willing to stand up to those who treated others poorly. She didn’t mind being a social outcast, she reveled in it. I watched as other kids in school felt so put out from being rejected by people who believed themselves to be so perfect and Kat would pick them up and help them heal. She would promise each and every one of them that these “social betters” would get theirs. We made sure of it.

Our retribution to those who hurt us and people like us was always secret and always severe, cast from books we found in the shops of Brickstown. The jock that used me up and then infected the next girl and the next; he found himself balding with uncontrollable acne and inexplicable blisters. It ended his escapades and his football career. There were so many others that found themselves with similar, inexplicable conditions after they broke our rules.

The cloth we were cut from was known as ostracism. I was never attracted to her sexually, but I loved her like I had loved no one before. It was the week before graduation when we became lovers.

Kat was always the stronger mystic. When I struggled with an incantation, she would always guide me through it. I always followed her lead and I didn’t have any regrets about it at the time. Now I wish I had been stronger and told her no when we did some of the more questionable works.

August 10th, my birthday. Graduation had passed the previous may. Kat and I celebrated in our new apartment. It was a penthouse apartment, with a multitude of rooms. We paid no more than you would for a studio anywhere else. The best part was that there were no people to deal with. We no longer feared judgment from ignorant people. There was to be no teasing, and no need for revenge. We could study our dark arts in peace with the pure intent of learning.

Never mind that we never received any natural light. Never mind we had to travel almost an hour to get to a grocery store. Never mind we had to rummage dumps for every piece of furniture we owned. Never mind that monsters roamed the streets outside at all times. We adored our lives in Dark Astoria for the next three years.

But our own little dystopia was not meant to be.

We had found a book written in ancient Greek in a small bookstore on Talos Island. The binding was stitched by hand. The pages were papyrus. It smelled of soot and death. I was intrigued immediately.

Kat had no interest whatsoever. Unfortunately for me, I had spent the majority of my money on incense and take out. I had mostly spent it on the incense; it was a lot of incense and I was young. After some begging, pleading and less than modest bargaining on my part, Kat purchased the book.

It was three months before she started mentioning how much she regretted buying the ancient text. It was six before she used the word hate in regards to it. I spent the majority of my waking hours translating the ancient Greek to palatable English, and even took the time to rephrase it into poetic prose. Strangely enough, or perhaps due to clumsy translation, the book never mentioned a name but it was almost entirely about invoking the power of an ancient creature. A year after Kat gave it to me, through six months of her attempts to tear me away from it, I finally believed I could start using it.

The same night I finished my lengthy translation, Kat and I would finally make use of the knowledge in the text. A ring of violet candles burning a potpourri of sage and verbena. The incense I burned was called Leo and Sagittarius. Using sidewalk chalk on our hardwood floors, I copied the diagram from the book meticulously. I did all the work in preparation knowing that when Kat came home, she would have no reason to deny me what I had worked for. I also knew that she would easily cave to her curiosity of this new magic.

What I didn’t know was that we were discovered. You see magic energy is alive. It moves and shifts. It reproduces and dies. It reacts to the surrounding life, feeding off of the physical and emotional activities that surround it. It also feeds that life with the predominant energy that it is fed. This is how the mystic explains mob mentality and severe cases of group think. That being said, when two amateur sorcerers attempt to manipulate it they can be tracked.

The ritual was going swimmingly. The candle flames burned at luminescent red and extended at least a foot above the wick. I could feel the power of the words as I recited them. For the first time, I saw the expression I always knew I held for Kat’s abilities on her face. That expression of pure awe while witnessing the pure manipulation of that power. It felt so good to finally come into my own.

That is until I caught on fire.

Just as I finished uttering the last word in the extensive poem I had crafted from the book, my pajama pants caught on fire. We laughed and thought the massive flames had just jumped in a gust of wind. We tried to put it out but then another candle’s flame reached over and took hold of my tank top. It was moments before my whole body was on fire. Kat had cowered away by then, unable to help me as my body was forcibly cleansed of its previous life. I was thankful at first when the door was kicked in.

I thought I was dead. The nearest fire department was all the way on Talos Island, an hour by car. Instead of firemen it was a group of three men wearing white robes over impervium body armor. They reminded me of what Knights of the Order Temple might wear but the symbols they carried were anything but those of a crusader. They destroyed my circle just as I began to truly hear the red flames that surrounded me.

At the time I thought they had stopped the ritual too late. I was certain this thing from infecting me and I had lost my mind. Now I know differently.

The trauma wasn’t over once the flames where gone. My clothes had burned away and the intruders had me pinned before I could protect my modesty. The men shackled Kat and me there on the floor. I remember looking over to her in panic and deepening shock. I remember seeing her face and thinking it was the same expression. When we were in our separate cells, I came to realize it was fury over my desire for the book she felt led us here.

The cells were cold stone with no chairs or beds. A few straw pallets on the floors and a hole in the floor to relieve one’s self were the basic décor of these small rooms. They gave me a burlap sack for clothes until it was my time for what the Guardians of the Spectral Abyss considered a trial. They would bring me stale bread and tap water. Every now and then they would add gravy to the bread which made a strange pudding. I suppose they figured we needed the protein.

It felt like months in that sunless pit until they finally drug me from my cell. When I was caught making love to Kat, my parents had pretty much stopped speaking to me. When we got our own place that was the last time I had spoken to them. I spoke, they uttered not a word. My dad, the quantum physicist, handed me a wad of cash and nodded. Then we got in the moving truck and drove from King’s Row to Dark Astoria.

The whole time I was stuck in there, in that dank cell, I could feel it moving inside of me. I couldn’t feel it literally of course, it wasn’t like I was pregnant, but I could feel things changing. I could feel my body changing and reacting in ways I had never felt before. My thoughts and feelings were different and unpredictable. The guards had to reinforce my dungeon cell several times from my attempts to tear down the door. All that being said, when I did sleep I slept deeper and more soundly than I ever had.

It took six guards to usher me into the judgment chamber. They sent two at first but what ever I had invited into me fought them off with the ferocity of a jungle cat. I was chained to the Guardian seal in the center of the dimly light room. It smelled of natural gas and I quickly identified small vents around me. It was at that moment I knew that if I was found to be a threat, I would be incinerated. I began to cry.

Six versions of Gandalf the Grey came into the room. They were in full regalia and carried staves. They stood at their positions and began to pass judgment over me. They told me I had violated laws that I wasn’t even aware of and how serious the offenses were. I pleaded for their mercy and begged them to understand that I just wanted to know more. They then started demanding to know where I had found the book. I told them where we found it before I was escorted to my cell immediately.

It was almost another week before I was pulled from my cell again. Kat had gone one or two times since then. They always brought her back and locked her back in her cell with heavy frustration. I had to smile when Kat would stick it to those self-important asses the way she did. I watched from the cracks between the old wrought iron doors and the stone masonry. The second time they collected me I went with them willingly.

I was chained back in the center of the room again. This time they went straight into where I found the book. There was nothing new to tell them so I repeated the same information I gave them last time. Their frustration was obvious by their tone and insistence. Whoever sold me that book was being elusive and it bothered these wise wizards. I couldn’t hide my amusement.

“You stated last time that you just wanted to learn the dark arts. That your interest was to know more about how magic works,” the oldest member of the Seer council said. He was my predecessor here.

I responded quickly and quietly, “Yes. That is the only reason I wanted the book.”

The Supreme Seer looked to his fellows then back to me. He gestured off into the darkness and the two guards brought me silk robes. I would soon come to know these robes as initiate robes. They enrolled me into the order training cycle as mystics and we began to learn immediately.

It was months before I knew what became of Kat. I began my mystic training all the while feeling this thing inside of me move and grow. My mentors would assign me very complex rituals and spells every night that I had to master by morning. I watched as other mystics were severely punished for not making the grade. It was a constant threat for me that I might not make the grade. While others struggled, I flourished and I did not meet the punishments once.

Where I once had difficulty learning the arts it seemed I didn’t even need reagents or incantations to perform them. The worse part of it all was that it seemed that as my mystic ability grew, it fed this unnatural power inside of me. I could memorize the spells quickly and every new ability I learned my power increased exponentially. It excited and terrified me. I didn’t believe the seers knew of my condition and I couldn’t find the one person I could always count on. The stress really started to affect me.

After many months I was sent out on my first mission. A creature of Hades had emerged, the mythic Minotaur that roamed beneath Crete. It was attacking Sydney, Australia and the Seer Council decided it was time for me to prove myself against a real threat. They sent me out with a group of Order Knights, lead by a man named Ylpherio and a squad of Order Hunters. When we rendezvoused, I discovered Kat’s fate. She had been initiated into Hunter training and I could sense her increased skill immediately.

Her abilities were demonstrated when we encountered the monster. She was chanting in a whispered tone and causing the beast such great misery. She was no longer just able to affect synapses in the organic brain but she could twist the minds of spirits and banished creatures. I could see the damage she was doing to the beast and I was biding my time to take my turn. Once Kat, the other hunters and the knights had brought the beast to its knees I knew it was my turn. The beast was on its knees. Its body was badly burned and injured. I stepped up onto a car and put my fists together and laid into it with a bolt of mystic energy. The blast knocked it backward and it fell into the abyss. I sent it back to Hades and the mission was a success, covered up as earthquake damage.

After the all clear was signaled I ran to Kat and embraced her. She felt like home. It was like I was holding my breath since we were separated and I could finally get some fresh air. It wasn’t until after our embrace that I looked at her and saw something had changed in her as well. It wasn’t like what was happening to me but it was something severe. I would never say it was less terrible than what I was experiencing.

We were separated again to report back. Once I returned I found out that I had earned my place amongst the Guardians of the Spectral Abyss. I was a full fledged mystic of the Order now and must go out to defend our reality from threats looming in other worlds and our own. I had felt a sense of accomplishment but, at the same time, I wanted to know what was happening to Kat. My new mystic status meant that I could now wander the temples of the Order scattered all over the world.

I found Kat in Venice. She had become a hunter and was let off her leash. She was stronger now and more secure. She was also less compassionate and colder than she was before we were captured. As far as I knew she was Kat and that’s all that mattered to me at the time. I think I had the same delusion most silly girls have which was that I could save her from whatever was troubling her.

From that point on we assisted other teams in eliminating extra-dimensional and extraterrestrial interlopers who planned to manipulate our reality for themselves. The hunters were always fun with their morbid senses of humor and gung ho attitudes. At least most of them were that way; the others didn’t learn survival skills and were drinks or psychotic. Kat and I enjoyed the hunt and the intrigue and, while working as a team, it gave us a chance to work with each other once more.

After a while I started noticing that there was a pattern to our hunts. We seemed to go to places that house other mystic orders. Paragon City, New York City, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca and several cities in Iraq were our focus. The strange thing was I always felt that I was in control of where we hunted until I really started thinking about it. Kat did seem to pass me intelligence then suggest the opposite.

It was about that time I noticed cold air on my bare skin in the middle of the night. I’d awake in our hotel room alone. I started to get concerned and one night I followed her after we were supposed to be asleep.

What I found broke my heart and turned me inside out. We were in Rome and most people didn’t know that the Vatican was still running their inquisition. It was just a covert operation to find and root out infernal mystics around the world. Its inquisitors would return to the holy city to roost. One of them was named Vicente Rossellini and he was supposedly the best.

I watched Kat seduce him at a bar down the street. She brought him back to an apartment, I assume it was his, and then undressed him. I listened outside the window as she then commanded him to lay face down on the bed. I knew she was using her mind control magic. It was only a few moments of silence before I heard the silenced 9mm go off. The muzzle flares lit up my perch and shattered my world.

I hurried back to our room and got undressed. I could hear her coming down the hall as I hopped back into bed. She came through the door and paused. I don’t know why but I imagine it was that she noticed the sheets were not where she left them. She is very nit-picky and observant. After the pause she undressed and crawled into bed behind me. My body knew how good she felt but my mind and heart couldn’t stand to be near her.

Before our next target I convinced her we had to return to Jordan to check in with the Seer council. Though she agreed she kept feeding me intelligence that suggested we should go after some urgent target. In all honesty, I just didn’t know what to do. I knew she was hurting but I didn’t know why and I never expected this. We returned to Amman and during the night I snuck away to the Temple there. I spoke with the Seers and told them what I saw. They didn’t seem surprised. The Order’s leadership told me that I have to bring her to justice in any way I thought was appropriate.

When I returned to our apartment I saw her sitting in bed naked with her gun. I had never seen Kat cry before but she was crying now. She screamed at me, “Don’t you remember what they were like? These people that adhere to organizations and people with power granted to them by irresponsible dolts? Why would you do this? Why would you stop me from making it right? These people have no right to push their beliefs and power upon the rest of us! They have no right and you know this! And we could have had it all, Alicia! You and me! Don’t you know that? We could have put them all in the ground where they belong for what they have done! With the resources of the Guardians of the Spectral Abyss we could have ruled the world!”

I could tell by her fervor that she wasn’t speaking figuratively. She meant every word. In that moment I recognized her face, her pain and her fervor. It was the same that I saw in the faces of Eric and Dylan on their last videos, their visual goodbye letters to tell the world how much it had hurt them. And, for the first time, I saw how much this world had actually hurt her. I realized how much I had just hurt her.

I couldn’t let her kill another mystic in cold blood, no matter how treacherous it was. She raised the gun and at that range she would have killed me. She would have if I hadn’t blasted her out the window. It probably would have killed her if it wasn’t for what she was and the fruit cart parked in her landing space.

I went downstairs and bound her up and wrapped a blanket around her. I took her immediately to the Zig. Afterward I left the Order and went back home to Paragon. I found a cheap studio apartment in King’s Row. I have kept it to this day.