Eshtaol
Crimson On Her Side
"I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms...I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the crime in the street. All I know is that first...
you've got to get mad."
NAME: Saoirse Flynn
SPECIES: Humanoid
GENDER: Female
AGE: Early twenties
HEIGHT: Average
BUILD: Athletic
SKIN: Dusky
HAIR: Brown
EYES: Brown
FORCE SENSITIVE: Yes
FORCE ALIGNMENT: Dark
ALIGNMENT: True Neutral
AFFILIATION: N/A
RANK: Apprentice
STRENGTHS:
- (+) No matter how unsettled she is, she'll grit her teeth and carry on.
- (+) When she needs to, Saoirse can be highly creative, improvising a plan - or a lie - in no time at all.
- (~) Saoirse is cynical and highly closed off, and doesn't believe in second chances.
- (-) Saoirse would deny having demons before ever facing them.
- (-) She'll never once mention being tired or sleeping badly, but you'll rarely see Saoirse without bags under her eyes.
- (-) Questionable is one thing, wrong is another. She's fiercely against taking lives, for any reason, ever.
Saoirse Flynn was born and raised in the streets - unexceptional, alone from a young age, and bitterly self-reliant. Like anyone else in her shoes, she grew up with a strong dislike of the governments and state heads whose power left her so powerless; unlike many in her shoes, however, she rejected the permanence of her plight. A future of having nothing wasn't good enough for anyone, but she didn't need to change how it was for everyone. She just needed to change how it was for her.
With a goal in her sights came the need to move, and it was through trying to get out of the lower city--the very lowest levels, she'd think to reproachfully--that those goals became warped irreversibly.
She did what anyone young enough not to know better did.
She fell in love.
His name was Aran Khorde and he stood out for sharing her resentment towards the powerful people of their world (and then of the powerful people everywhere, of anyone they could blame for their circumstances). It didn't take long to realise how differently they saw their struggles, but it was too late all the same. Because where Saoirse simply wanted an out, Aran wanted these figures gone.
It started with bringing a blade to a rally. With fighting supporters of whatever he deemed the wrong cause. In that time, the excitement of justice pushed down the fear that maybe this, too, was wrong. But the violence grew worse, spread further, until the fear was impossible to ignore. An alleyway, challenged by policemen who took a look at the pair and branded them lowlives. They had instigated the conflict - but it was Aran who struck first. He and Saoirse both fought. And though he swore they died by accident, it was still he and Saoirse who won.
An accident, he swore. She made him promise it wouldn't happen again.
It happened again, and this time on purpose.
Saoirse had grown up accepting a less than strict adherence to lawfulness as normal and even more useful, but as far as she cared this had become unquestionably the wrong thing. But she had never feared more for others than for herself - if she couldn't change what was happening, all she saw left was to find her way out. It had never been her fault, not really. She could escape and none of it would have been her fault.
But once there was open intent behind his actions, those actions only threatened to escalate. He had plans. He had weapons. And in an instant she stopped being certain she could pretend nothing ever happened - and she stopped being certain she could escape.
She found her escape, but in it she became the killer.
And it became her fault.
But with enough days passed, enough drinks, enough distance between everything that ever happened, Saoirse managed to bury the blame. She would do what jobs she could until she found the future she'd been looking for.
Maybe when she did, the past would go away.
