Guess what guys? I've been playing a lot of Assassin's Creed lately. A lot. That's the main reason I'm so far behind on Road Trip, and... wait, you guys aren't my usual fandom, you have no idea what I'm talking about. Unless you found this story on my profile after finding one of my other stories... Ugh, I'm getting myself all tripped up.

The following tale is a highly embellished version of an absolutely true event that happened to me while I was killing it in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, which is in my opinion the strongest in the series.

Laura Boccanera moved through crowds like they weren't even there. Her skills with a crossbow were astonishing. She couldn't leap over a tall building with a single bound, but she could sure as hell climb it in less than a minute.

You see, Laura Boccanera was an Assassin. Though she wasn't born into the Creed like her mentor was, she still embodied the will and determination of her colleagues in the Brotherhood.

Currently, she crouched on a post conveniently set into the top of a church, scanning the Roman countryside.

A horse reared and launched its rider six feet into the air. Laura saw it.

An angry woman chased her husband around, brandishing a broom. Laura smiled in recollection as she watched.

Then, a smooth movement in the general downwardly direction drew her attention. She disengaged herself from the quarrelling couple, and looked down at the movement.

A pidgeon dropped out of the air and perched on top of a pidgeon coop. An Assassin pidgeon coop.

That reminded her. Ezio likely had a new assignment for her. With a graceful leap, she landed harmlessly in a conveniently-placed haystack seventy feet below the conveniently-placed post.

Within her first few days of Assassin training, Laura had asked Ezio who was in charge of making sure there were piles of hay below all tall buildings. Ezio shrugged and said that was the way it had always been. Then he jumped off and Laura watched him sail through the air to the soft landing below.

From the ground, she could barely see the coop. It was tucked behind another building. All the pidgeon coops were in hard-to-reach places, ensuring a citizen never accidentally found out that Venice was under attack by Templars.

Laura approached the coop and made a disgusted face. Pidgeon coops smell really bad. Even Assassin coops.

Inside was several pidgeons, each of them with a small roll of paper tied to their legs. Laura glanced through the notes and found one that read L.B. . She gently teased the paper off the bird's leg and unrolled it, expecting either an assassination or guardian contract.

Laura's eyes nearly popped out of her head when she read her mission.

"I have to go to London?" Laura Boccanera stormed into the Assassin's hideout with her assignment in one hand. However, the room she'd just stormed into was empty, except for the architect, who looked up to see who was screaming.

Ezio wasn't in the room. Laura took a step towards the adjacent room, then quickly turned to the architect. "Is Ezio in here?"

The architect nodded and Laura stormed into the next room. Seeing Ezio hunched over the table studying a map, she once again bellowed, "I have to go to London?"

Ezio turned to see her. There was no way he didn't hear me scream that the first time, Laura thought.

"Oh, Laura. Si. Londra." Ezio looked almost releived to be separated from the map.

"But London is... so far away," Laura whined. "It will take me weeks to get there."

"Your duty as an Assassini may take you across the globe. The Templars don't function solely in Italia." Ezio stood up and stepped toward Laura.

Laura exasperatedly read the contract again. "I... I guess you're right."

"Bene." Ezio then turned away slightly. "And at least you get to have sex."

Although Ezio's affair with Caterina Sforza was common knowledge, no one really talked about it. When she'd left for Forli, Ezio had moped inside the headquarters for days, refusing to perform assassinations or assign missions. For the recruits and Templars this was pretty neat, but once Niccolo Machiavelli snapped him out of it, the party was over.

For Laura, this was enough to stop her argument. She looked down at the floor in resignation, then back up. "I'll leave tomorrow morning."

Ezio nodded and sat back down. "Good. Be careful and don't blow your cover. London is too far away to send reinforcements."

Ezio threw Laura a small pouch of money and she left.

Ever since Claudia Auditore took control of the Rosa in Fiore, the place almost always had at least one assassin in the place, whether they were exchanging intelligence with the girls, or... relaxing. Hey, Assassin is a stressful career. They need somewhere to blow off steam... and other things.

Laura sat on the side of Adele Algiere's bed, watching her friend scurry around cleaning.

"And then he gets all flustered and he tells me that a pickpocket must have stolen his money. Even though I definitely saw it the night before. I told him 'no, I just saw it', and he started to run. He took off downstairs and tried to run out the door, but Signorina Auditore stopped him in the lobby, she pulled a knife and threatened him. He can't come back to the Rosa any more." Adele was prepairing her room for the evening rush, where dozens of bored adventurous husbands and politicians needed something to occupy their night.

This made Laura smile. Though she'd never met Signorina Auditore, she heard a lot about her from Adele's stories.

"So Laura, what did you come for?" Adele lifted a jar of perfume from her dresser to dust under it.

Laura looked down at her fingers for a few seconds instead of answering. "I'm leaving for London tomorrow morning."

Adele stopped dusting and turned around. "London? In Inghilterra?"

"Yes." Laura crossed her arms.

Despite being "common whores", the courtesans were allied with the Assassins, and Adele knew all about the nature of Laura's work. "How long will you be?"

"A month or two. It's for my work."

"I assumed as much." Adele gently sat next to her friend. "I will miss you."

"Thank you. I will miss you too."

Adele nodded silently for a moment. "Have you packed?"

Laura laughed. Adele knew she was awful at packing for trips and preferred to bring a few simple items. "No. I was hoping to do that tonight."

After she glanced around her small room, Adele decided it was clean enough and stood up. "Good luck, Laura. Please be careful."

Laura cleared her throat and took out her wallet. "Adele, one more thing..." She turned around.

"Si, Laura?"

"Can I have half an hour?"

The courtesan stared for a fraction of a second, then figured what Laura was asking. "Oh. Of course," she replied, striding over and locking the door.

Laura didn't usually stay very long after, but this time, she had an excuse: she needed to pack for her trip.

She said a final goodbye to Adele before launching herself out the window to get home.

A ten-minute rooftop jog later, Laura opened the window to her own home and dropped inside.

She chose not to bring her plain white assassin robes; she would be there to hump, not to kill. She did make sure to grab her hidden blade and dagger, in case of emergency. Into her luggage she also threw a random assortment of clothes. Like I said, Laura was really bad at packing.

The Assassin knew that in order to get close to her target, she needed to look entirely unlike a Roman commoner. She didn't have many fancy clothes, just one dress she rarely wore. If the need arose she could use some of Ezio's money to buy another one.

Ezio wasn't at the Hideout when Laura stopped by early in the morning to say goodbye, although the architect was, so she told him to tell Ezio that she had left.

Finding someone who could take her out of town so early in the morning was a bear, but she found a trader who was willing to take her as far north as Milan. Laura knew it was as good a start as any.

Since it was 1501, the Concorde wasn't to be invented for almost five hundred years. The journey from Rome to London took several weeks and went in stages. First, she rode with the trader from Roma through Firenze and then to Milan. From there, she bought a horse and rode north to the foothills of the Alps. She sold the horse at a loss, then paid a guide to take her through the Swiss Alps to Basel.

It was at this point that she began to rely on her rudimentary grasp of German, as she was approaching the heart of the Holy Roman Empire and the local nationalistic attitude made it rather dangerous to be an Italian there.

Next she took up on a merchant ship on the Rhine, following the river up to the North Sea. From there it was almost a straight shot to the Thames River and London.

Early life wasn't incredibly kind to Laura. She was the youngest of two sisters and a brother. When her father wasn't drinking or losing his salary to street gamblers, he was often running from the cops for minor offenses like throwing trash at a guard. When Laura was eight her father taught her an introduction to freerunning, her knowledge of which was later augmented after joining the Assassins.

Every few weeks or so her father misstepped and the gaurds captured him. Then the Boccanera family got together and rounded up all of their money, performed odd jobs for minimal pay, and begged on the streets to gather enough money to pay his fine. Then they wouldn't eat for a week.

It seemed her mother was the only responsible one of the family. She worked as hard as she could to keep her family above the bills and other miscellaneous losses her father managed to incur.

When the Borgias took power, the Boccaneras were surprised to find out that yes, their situation could in fact get worse. Several times a week the family was harrassed by Borgia men, demanding fines or taxes or some infringement they usually made up on the spot.

This was really the only part of her life where Laura could remember her father taking care of the family. He reasoned with the guards, distracted them long enough for the family to sneak out, and in one very close call he killed two men that had pushed past him to manhandle his oldest daughter and dumped their bodies is the Tiber.

Laura remembered this clearly because at the time her mother and brothers were out, and her father asked her and her sister to help carry the bodies once it got dark. Looking down at the dead, impotent eyes of the man that had just tried to rape her sister, fifteen year-old Laura remembered thinking that things were going to keep getting worse unless someone did something about the Borgia.

Whereas the guards before Borgia control were simply doing their job and trying to capture a lowly criminal, Borgia guards were disgusting perverted psychopaths who on several occasions tried to kill her father. Laura was shocked to discover that she wasn't shocked at all to get a letter from her mother explaining that her father had been found dead in an alley, his skull smashed in with something resembling a mace and left dead to be discovered by a neighbor.

Laura herself had nearly met her father at the hands of the Borgia guards. While coming home one night over six months ago, she had been accosted and wrongly accused of stealing money from a Captain. Armed with nothing but a small dagger, she defended herself to the point where she was able to grab a hold of one of the men and put the knife on his throat. When she threatened to kill him if they did not release her, they simply laughed and told her they would simply run both of them through and leave them ppinned together.

Laura frequently wondered what institution the Borgia found their guards at.

As the leader drew back to attack, he jerked and fell dead. Then a man in blue robes dropped from the sky, stabbing the faces of the two men standing next to him.

The man turned to face Laura. "Kill him or left him live. It is your choice."

At this point the man she was holding had pissed in his trousers and struggled against her. His eyes flailed between the bodies of his fellow guardsmen and their killer. "P-please, let me go," he stammered. Laura almost expected him to puke in fear.

Laura looked up at her protector, then jerked the guard's head back and tightened her grip on the u, looking directly into his eyes. "Only if you promise to leave Roma. Forever. And never return." Both the guard and the man in front of her nodded.

"Of course. Please, let me go. I promise."

In an act of mercy, Laura released her grip on the guard and let him stagger a few feet away. In an act of treachery, the guard quickly reached down, grabbed an abandoned sword and tried to attack the man in blue by surprise.

In an act of skill, the man in blue robes deflected the attack, pierced the bottom of the guard's chin with a blade hidden on his wrist, and kicked him in the testicles.

The man in blue robes approached her. "The liberation of Roma has begun," he said, and those words resonated with Laura until her dying breath.

"Fräulein, we have arrived in London," a deckhand called to Laura as she sat in the hold of a cargo vessel docked on the Thames River.

Wham, Bam, thank you mam. This one's for Lady Luly.