Chun-Yan Wang cultivates her image the way scientists cultivate samples in their petri dishes.
She's learned to embrace the symbols that signify her as other, same as she's learned to hate the prep-school plaid-skirted knee socked girls with their straight white teeth freshly liberated from the metal trammels of dental braces and puberty. They, after all, were the ones told from their cribs that they were BORN FOR THIS, born to dole out JUSTICE with their manicured fists and shout the TRUTH with their trained and militantly optimistic voices.
She hates them, but her hate is not one of passion. It is only a decision that she made one day, after being tired of them always coming after her, trying to crack her codes and unwind her labyrinths, always coming, beating themselves, both metaphorically and physically, against the walls she's built around her encampment. Don't they know a sign of futility when they see one? Chun wonders. When she says that she hates them, it is simply because she has decided to not think about them, anymore, ever. They are out of my hands. She holds no sympathy for the agents who fall into the Traps. It was not as if they had been warned, she thinks to herself. I never invited them here, they're not my responsibility..
Amelia, that was her name. Amelia Jones. Tall, broad-shouldered, messy bobbed hair held back only with a couple of flimsy glittery star-studded clips. She was an Agent, no doubt, but the way she wears the uniform made it look like she'd thrown it on without the crisp consideration of the others.
Rogue. The slightly antiquated word rises in the back of her mind. Chun-Yan has never feared an Agent before; she knows their rules and their protocols better than themselves. But this girl is different. She doesn't seem like the type to follow the rules, at least not to the letter, and that makes her something else. Chun summons a list of other relevant words to come to her aid. Potential. sparkler. Haywire. This is not a girl who will let herself be crossed.
"Hey!" was all she'd said, as if she were greeting an old friend instead of yet another conquered enemy to put to her name.
"You stay out of this," says Chun. "I have enough trouble with you and your friends as it is."
"They're not really my friends," says Amelia. "At least–not yet. I'm still waiting on them."
Ah. So she's come here to prove herself. Everything makes sense now.
"So why are you even here? You know who I am, or else you wouldn't be."
"You've made it past the traps. That's admirable, I guess."
"They were impressive, but rather outdated, in my opinion."
Amelia tilts her head like a cockatiel and gives Chun a funny look. Trying to discern her from ninety degrees to the left. "I've heard lots of interesting things about you," she says.
"Lots of people say lots of things."
"I'm sure they do."
Chun doesn't even keep track of what they say anymore, the statements are too numerous and too ridiculous to pay attention to. Whatever has filed this young heroine's head is doubtless all the lovely rumors written down on lace stationery and passed around the tables, embellished and annotated on by the next gel-pen wielder. Whispers of her doings, her goings, under a billion nicknames formed half out of jest and half out of fear.
The very thought of it wearies her.
"You don't even know me." says Chun to the sparkling girl, who untilts her head suddenly and looks at her straight-on with a face of one about to suggest a truce, a parley, anything but an encounter. Amelia looks away, and the expression is obscured by her bangs.
"No, I don't," she says, shrugging, and waving her hands in a gesture that's not exactly surrendering but not exactly threatening either. "But I think I'd like to. If you'd let me, I mean."
Is this some kind of trick? She's too confident to be real, that's where the crack in the believability goes, but despite herself, Chun wants to believe her, to sit her down and talk and have her say what exactly about the traps that made her think they were outdated when everyone else seemed to be properly intimidated. Amelia wasn't afraid, that was something new for once at least, and maybe that might even rub off on her like the glitter in her hair clips and pins, that fearlessness bordering on brilliance and stupidity.
Chun could use some of that. After all, she makes her living off cultivating fear in others, but never learned to completely extract it from herself.