Amber was out for her mandatory wait period between surgeries; if it wasn't for that stupid regulation, she'd probably never leave the operating table. Getting surgery was fun - almost better than sex.

Almost.

As it was, she wasn't allowed to lie on an operating table all day because of…needing to wait for her cuts from her last surgery to finish their (accelerated) healing process or something or other, she didn't really care - the point was, she had to do something else with some of her time. So, naturally, she spent as much of that spare time as possible getting laid - after all, as Rotti always preached, sex was the meaning of life. Get Z, get surgery, get fucked, rinse and repeat - that was Amber's life, more or less, day in, day out. She had the money, power, and freedom to live that kind of life - the kind of life everyone wanted.

The perfect life.

At least, that was what she told herself when she felt like something was lacking…

Her father had attached a couple of musclebound morons to her recently - kind of like his own henchgirls, only of the opposite sex. It was annoying, but it had been a compromise between Amber and her father in response to an incident where she had been gang-raped by sixteen guys. It would have been easy to figure out who her assailants had been from the DNA evidence left behind, and Amber had had to beg her father for days not to press charges. As she told him again and again, she wasn't a victim at all - on the contrary, to her, the event had been her own conquest, as it meant that sixteen people had wanted her so badly that they hadn't even had the patience to ask for consent; only four of them had needed her to scream and struggle to get off, eight had been perfectly ordinary, and three had had different fetishes, while one had even been a masochist. Besides, she had enjoyed all of them. But for some reason, Rotti had been livid beyond words with the whole affair, so Amber had been forced to compromise and allow her new bodyguards to follow her wherever she went. Still, they proved not to be nearly as much of a hindrance as she had expected - they only did something when she asked them to or if she needed them to, and they didn't get in her way at all; before long, she started to forget that they were even there.

So it took her a second to understand his meaning when, after she found someone to fuck (which didn't take long at all), he looked behind her and said, "Who are those guys?"

She looked back. "Oh, these two knuckleheads?" she asked. She laughed in her typical nasty way. "Don't mind them," she told the random guy, "they won't bother us - my father just doesn't like me going out on my own."

"Your father?" the guy asked. "Who are you, someone important?"

Amber rolled her eyes and sighed; for some reason, this always happened. "Why does no one ever recognize me?" she asked the guy. "It's not like the surgeries I get change my appearance that much."

"Well, you're not Blind Mag," the oblivious young man said with a casual shrug.

He had no idea what he'd just done. Amber's teasing smile was gone in a flash; he might as well have slapped her.

She took a deep breath. "What was that?" she asked the unfortunate guy with mock patience.

"Well, you said no one recognizes you, but you're not Blind Mag, are you?" he asked.

"Do I look like Blind fucking Mag?" Amber asked dangerously in reply.

"Well, no," the still-clueless man said; "I didn't think you were. But…Well, why would you think you're famous enough for people recognize you if you're not?"

Something inside of Amber snapped. For a minute, she was completely still. Then, an ugly, frightening grin spread across her face, and she turned to her left.

"Hey, muscle boy," she said to the guard she was facing, "would you please do me a favor? Please beat the shit out of this guy for me." Her sickening smile turned into a glower of pure rage. "Now."

Her guard did as he was told, and before the unfortunate man processed what was happening, he was punched in the face so hard he fell to the ground.

"Ow!" the guy yelped, scrambling to get up. "What the fuck?"

"Don't stop," Amber told the guard coldly, her wrathful eyes burning holes into the young man.

She watched unpityingly as her guard delivered blow after blow. After a minute, she gave her guard a small gesture, and he stopped, though he didn't release his victim.

"What the fuck?" the guy demanded of Amber again. "Who are you? You can't really be mad just because you're not as famous as Mag-!"

"Keep going!" Amber snapped at her guard as soon as she heard the word 'Mag'. Then she turned to the guard to her right who was standing by and ordered, "You! Join in! Now!"

Her guards did as they were told, and the young man Amber had intended to fuck only a minute before took a terrible beating right in front of her, until he was bruised and bleeding, his lip and one eye cut and swollen. After about three full minutes, she motioned for her guards to pause again.

"What the fuck is your problem?" the slow-to-learn man shouted, panting. "What do you have against Mag? Who do you think you are?"

Amber's eyes widened, and her fists clenched so tightly they shook. She was too furious to speak for a moment. Then she stepped forward, so that she was standing over the doomed soul.

"Back off," she told her guards. She held out her right hand to one of them. "I'll deal with him myself."

For a minute, the guard she had her hand outstretched to stared at her, as though he didn't understand what she was asking for. She raised her eyebrows at him briefly, and after another moment's hesitation, he pulled a coiled whip out of his belt and handed it to her.

"Thank you," she said mockingly as her guards stood up and reassumed their positions behind her. She turned her wrathful glare on the man on the ground before her.

"Who do I think I am?" she asked in a dangerous whisper. Without giving time for anyone to answer, she raised her hand lashed her whip at the man's face.

WHAP!

"Who do I think I am?" she asked again, raising her voice.

WHAP!

She got down on her knees, grabbed the man by the collar of his shirt, and lifted his bruised and battered face so that he had to look her in the eye.

"I think I'm the daughter of the man who runs this fucking planet, that's who I think I am!" she snarled.

The man's eyes, reduced to slits by the swelling from his blows (and now lashes), tried to widen as, far too late, he realized his mistake.

Amber threw him back to the ground, stood back up, and whipped him again.

WHAP!

"As for what I have against Mag," Amber went on. WHAP! "Why do you -" WHAP! "- fucking love her so much?" WHAP!

The man whimpered something unintelligible and tried to curl up into a ball to escape Amber's wrath.

"Why does everyone -" WHAP! "- think she's so goddamn -" WHAP! "- perfect?" Amber shouted. WHAP! "So the bitch -" WHAP! "- can fucking sing!" WHAP! "Whoop -" WHAP! "- dee -" WHAP! "- fucking -" WHAP! "- doo -" WHAP! "- for her!" WHAP! "It doesn't -" WHAP! "- make her -" WHAP! "- better than me!" WHAP!

The man tried to whimper an apology for his mistake, but it was pointless; Amber's ears were filled with a deafening ring as the hurt resentment and rage that had been building up inside of her since before her seventh birthday finally boiled over - she couldn't have heard him if he'd shouted.

"I am -" WHAP! "- sick and -" WHAP! "- tired of hearing about -" WHAP! "- Blind -" WHAP! "- fucking -" WHAP! "- MAG!" Amber roared. WHAP! "I'm the heiress!" WHAP! "I'm the powerful one!" WHAP! "I'm the one people are supposed to respect!" WHAP! "How DARE you -" WHAP! "- say -" WHAP! "- I'm -" WHAP! "- not -" WHAP! "- as -" WHAP! "- famous -" WHAP! "- as -" WHAP! "- her?"

She was completely delirious now; she forgot where she was and what she was doing - she lost any consciousness of her physical body entirely - as the dam inside of her completely burst open, releasing all the anger and pain she'd been holding back her whole life.

WHAP! "I'm the one Dad's supposed to love!" she shrieked. WHAP! "I'm the one who's supposed to be his daughter!" WHAP! "I'm the one who shares his genes!" WHAP! "And who's she?" WHAP! "Nobody!"WHAP! "She'd be -" WHAP! "- nothing -" WHAP! "- without GeneCo!" WHAP! "Nothing!" WHAP! "She'd be -" WHAP! "- no -" WHAP! "- fucking -" WHAP! "- body!" WHAP! "It's -" WHAP! "- not -" WHAP! "- fair!"

She couldn't feel the angry tears streaming from her eyes, trailing her makeup and eyeliner down her face and washing away tiny bits of the blood she didn't notice splattering everywhere.

WHAP! "Why can't he love -" WHAP! "- me?" she wailed. WHAP! "Why does -" WHAP! "- nobody -" WHAP! "- care -" WHAP! "- about -" WHAP! "- me?" WHAP! "What -" WHAP! "- about -" WHAP! "- ME?"

Suddenly, she was jerked back into consciousness by the feeling of someone grabbing her wrist and stopping her from striking again.

"WHAT?" she screamed at the guard who had stopped her.

He shook his head at her and gestured to the unfortunate object of her wrath. Amber looked down, blinked her vision clear, and saw that her guard had only just stopped her in time.

She had never used a whip in anger before - only ever as a sex aid, and never with its full force. She'd had no idea just how powerful of a weapon it could be. Now, seeing what she'd done with one in a blind fury, she was shocked. The man's shirt had been shredded to pieces, and the skin of his back had been whipped into mincemeat. There was blood everywhere, and faint choking noises told her that the man was barely able to breathe. It was amazing he was still alive - possibly the cloth fragments embedded in the welts in his flesh helped stanch the blood flow to some small extent - but he wouldn't be for much longer if left like this. With a blood transfusion, Zydrate to kill the pain, surgery to pick all the cloth out of his wounds and possibly sew his muscles back together, and a skin graft for his entire back, there was a chance he might still make it, but he needed help fast, and even one more lash would certainly prove fatal.

For a moment, Amber just stood there, panting, trying to register what she was seeing. Then, she turned to the guard who still had ahold of her right wrist.

"You," she said to him breathlessly. "Call it in. Now. Get him help. Stay with him, make sure he lives…" She hesitated, then added in a hiss, "…and once he's conscious, make sure that he knows to tell all his friends that if one more person tells me that there's no one in this city worth knowing about except Blind fucking Mag, they will not be spared."

She stepped back. Her guard released her, and she absentmindedly coiled the whip back up in her hands.

She looked at her other guard. "You," she said, "come with me. I'm going home." She turned her back on the bloody mess she'd made. "I'll fuck you instead," she spat - luckily, she'd finally managed to get her guards to liven up enough to be capable of sex just the other day. She glanced back at the first guard and added, "If there's a next time, remind me about this - it'll be your turn, and I can't fucking tell you two apart." Then she turned away again and started walking home.

Her guards did as they were told.

Of course, Amber knew, deep down, that what she'd just done was wrong - that it was completely unfair of her to have taken out her pain on one slow individual who'd made a stupid mistake. There was no way he could have known that she'd spent her whole life in Mag's shadow, that her father had always compared her down to Mag, that she'd spent her whole life hearing 'Why can't you be more like Mag?' and 'Oh, Mag, how I wish you were my daughter', that the only time her father had treated her like anything but dirt had been when he'd forbidden her to get herself surgically sterilized, or that even then he'd only acted like she was just a vessel meant to propagate his genes, not something important, not a person, not his daughter…

But enough was enough. Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back, but Amber had had enough of everyone's stupid fucking hero-worship of Mag. The bitch would be nobody if it wasn't for Amber's father, and the only reason he'd made anything of her in the first place was because she could sing, like that had any sort of value; but even he acted like Mag was the perfect one and Amber was nobody, nothing, absolutely worthless - even as a small child, Amber's father had always frowned on her, always lavished all his favor on Mag, always treated her like she wasn't even there at best…

No. Amber had had enough. She wasn't going to put up with this bullshit anymore. Obviously, she'd have to keep putting up with it from her father, but no one else was going to be poking that old nerve with a sharp stick and getting away with it ever again. If even one more person made that mistake, then she would lose her status as the only member of her family to not have blood on their hands.

She glanced down at the whip she was holding, and at the redness on it that was making her hands sticky…and horribly, she smiled.

Well, she thought remorselessly, metaphorically speaking.

And the worst part - the part that actually almost scared her - was the fact that she didn't even fucking care.