A/N: I've decided to publish a bunch of the ficlets I've written for various challenges at LJ's leverageland on here - they're short, but I hope you'll enjoy them anyway :) This is #2.
Ever since Sophie had been a little girl she had liked thinking of new identities, other identities. Her own had never been anything spectacular - quite the opposite in fact. Her mother had disappeared before Sophie had turned five and her father had more or less done the same except he had still been putting a roof over her head and paid for her school. Little Sophie (though of course that hadn't been her name yet back then) had always liked school, taking up new information for her own private use.
At first her personas had been all over history; one of them a Geisha, a different one a rebel child of the French Revolution. Sophie would find a use for all the information teachers tried to pump into their students every day (well, almost all of it: she never could make sense of numbers). The personas became her friends, her companions and made up for her lack of real friends, but with time, they became more than that. Sophie found herself able to internalize all the attributes and characteristics she gave her identities which made herself more confident and in turn, charming people into giving her what she wanted seemed to get more and more easy.
Once Sophie had hit puberty, she had abandoned the historic personas (although she always remembered them and every once in a while still thinks of them fondly) and took up new ones. One was reckless and liked to take risks; one was a charming seductress; one was a damsel in distress. The identities evolved and eventually her own disappeared into the background. Picking a persona for every occasion came surprisingly easy to Sophie and reading people was a skill that seemed almost natural to her. She enjoyed the beautiful things in life and she soon knew exactly how to manipulate people (especially men!) to get them for her. Only after she developed a taste for priceless art (after all, paintings and sculptures were part of the world's treasures) she truly took a turn towards a life of crime where she almost instantly gained a reputation of flawless grifting.
The criminal act itself eventually became part of the thrill, but her original motivation would always be getting what her heart desired.
