Welcome, one and all, to my very first Riddick fanfiction. This story is the first of three, each of which corresponding to a portion of the canon trilogy: Pitch Black, Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, and Chronicles of Riddick. This is, partially, a self-insertion. While the new character resembles me physically and in her attitudes, she is by no means me. I hope that I have been able to work out the 'extra person on the Hunter-Gratzner' cliche without being too cliche. The entire series is written already, but I would still like to know what you think; there is a definite possibility that I may write a few shorts set in this universe. Thanks, and enjoy the ride!
Premonition
A Pitch Black Alternate Universe
Chapter One
When I was ten, my parents sat me down and informed me that I had been adopted when I was only a few days old. Okay, yeah, so it's not even uncommon, let alone special. But for me, it helped explain why I was, to put it simply, different from all my classmates. The difference that almost everyone spotted right away was my habit of wearing sunglasses… everywhere. My only haven was my room, where the lights were set to power up to just twenty-five percent unless I—and no one else—ordered otherwise.
I was always picked first when our class had sports during the recreation period. It wasn't because I was bigger or stronger than the others in my class, because I wasn't. I was chosen because I was the fastest, the most agile, and, oddly, the most accurate when throwing or hitting any sort of ball. I hated it. It was so boring, because I knew whichever team I was on would win, and they would win because of me. How… blah. Of course, it didn't help that I could hear the other girls when they whispered about me behind my back, thinking I was out of earshot. Their most frequent complaint was that I couldn't possibly be a girl, not and be so good at the boys' games.
Normally, being adopted wouldn't explain any of that, but, when my parents had woken to the doorbell and found me bundled up on their doorstep, they also found a cheap message-pad. It contained a letter from my birth mother, with a partial explanation of why she had left me and what they could expect as I grew up. It wasn't the whole story, of course, because it left too many questions unanswered.
Why had my birth father been killed before he could even know of me?
Why had my birth mother been hunted, and by whom?
How did they come by the heightened senses that I inherited?
A part of me, some sort of instinct, warned that researching those questions would lead to bad things, though I didn't know what those bad things might be. Perhaps the same hunters would be brought down upon myself and my adoptive parents.
That's the other weird thing, the only one I've never truly come to terms with; I get hunches and premonitions like normal people get fast food. Usually, it's just little things. I'll go to work by a different route one day, only to find out a few hours later that my usual one was a snarl of traffic due to a bad accident. Sometimes, it'll show up as extreme distrust of a potential client, who later lost their case, often badly.
Actually, I use those instincts the most when I'm working. I'm a legal assistant, working for a high-priced firm that does business—and has offices—all over the 'Verse. My specific area of focus is criminology, using crime scene evidence to construct a template of possible culprits, and also doing the reverse, using psycho-sociological analysis of a suspect to determine whether, from the nature and specifics of the crime itself, they could have done it. I'm damned good at it, too. Three times in as many years, my skills have busted a case wide open, clearing the firm's client and setting the government's eyes on the real perpetrator.
As part of that work, I had access to a great many criminal records. Not only do I keep a list of crooks that may be at large, I keep a similar list of mercs doing business and cashing in paydays. My records on the hunters are just as extensive as the ones on their prey; I know how often a particular merc is successful, how many they've brought in, and, most importantly to my mind, how they treat those bounties. That would probably explain why I hate mercs more than crooks. The crooks get punished for doing bad things to others, for violating the Human Rights Act that was passed ages ago. The mercs, on the other hand, can get away with anything they might do to a captured criminal, and some of them were really brutal.
On top of that, some of those paydays have records that are suspect. That is, I'm not entirely sure they could have done all that's attributed to them. The most frustrating one of all is Mr. Richard B. Riddick, the most notorious murderer in the 'Verse. There is essentially no information there except who he's been convicted of killing, and it drives me insane. How can any analysis be made if his psycho-sociological profile is 'Classified?' And how can his age and birthplace be 'Unknown?' There's a rat somewhere in there, I know, but where, and what has it done, I have often wondered.
Don't get me wrong. My intuition is useful most of the time, and it has yet to fail me. But, sometimes, glimpsing the future can be a real bitch.