I'm writing this for clockscountingbackwards on tumblr. Not my best writing, but it's a story. It'll be in four parts.
Part I: The Plan
"Who?"
The thug stands in front of me, his pistol aimed straight at my head. He gives me a puzzled look while his buddies on either side of him chuckle.
"I said..." I raise my voice, willing my face to stay emotionless.
No fear, Valerie. No fear.
I've dealt with thugs like these before - living on the streets of Dunwall, you're bound to come into contact with them - but as the unfamiliar name escapes from my lips, I can't help but share a bit of the thug's doubt.
"...We're the Bastard Aristocrats."
Now, all the thugs laugh.
"Never heard of no bastard 'ristocats. You look like a bunch of kids playin' dress-up to me."
Sure, I am dressed as a gentleman, but my ruffled blouse is untucked, my breeches of expensive cloth, wrinkled, my hair coming loose from its bun, and as I grip the saber in my hand, it is clear that I am no gentlewoman.
We are a bastardized image of the aristocracy. We wear their wrinkled and stained shirts, vests, and jackets, their tarnished silver broaches on our collars. Our hair is pinned up, ringlets falling from either side, or parted on the left and slicked with grease as the nobles wore it in the old days. Our breeches and hose, riddled with holes and runs, fit awkwardly as they were tailored for someone else. Some aristocrat, wrinkled and gray or even rotting and dead - or maybe a weeper now, or simply in hiding. Our shoes are suede, ruined and water-stained and caked with mud on the bottom. We are the byproduct of the aristocracy's irresponsibility and cruelty. We are bastards.
My father's name is Lord Morgan Pendleton, or so I was told by my mother before she died.
"When I was a slave," she told me. "He came to me. 'Follow me', he said. So, I did. He led me to a rail car and told me to get inside. I had never been in one before, and I marveled at the red velvet seats and the car's sleek exterior. We drove to his estate. I felt as though I was in a dream, and as he led me inside, I nearly fainted. It was so beautiful. Everything glittered and shined. There were so many colors and fabrics, floors of marble and walls of pearl. It was like nothing I had ever imagined.
"I was led upstairs where a bath had been readied for me, and I washed away the years of dirt that had built up between the wrinkles in my skin and under my nails and feet. I was so dirty that the servants had to help scrub me. They pulled at my hair, which was knotted and dry. It seemed as though they worked on me for hours. Maybe they did, and by the time the sun had gone down, I was... I was beautiful. The servants ran a hot iron along my hair, making it straight. It was amazing, like magic. And they wrapped me in a dress of lavender, putting a silk, cream shawl over my shoulders.
" 'Lord Morgan waits for you downstairs, ma'am,' one of the servants said to me. She called me 'ma'am'. So, I went downstairs, and there he was. Noble as can be - elegant and poised. Distinguished and just... perfect. He stood, and a chair was pulled out just for me. I sat at the table with Lord Morgan Pendleton, and we spoke. He asked me of my dreams and desires, my fears, my demons. And I answered him truthfully - without hesitation. We ate dinner. Though I felt a bit greedy, I ate all of it. It was the best meal I had ever had. Most of the foods I had never even seen before, and Lord Morgan told me what they all were. I drank fine wine and crystal-clear ice water, and after dinner he took me into another room, and we danced to the most beautiful music I had ever heard. It had been years since I had heard music. It was so special. And when our legs grew tired, he picked me up lightly and carried me upstairs.
"I thought I knew what would come next, and the thought of him making love to me was pure bliss, and he lay me down on his bed, taking off his jacket and vest. He beckoned me to sit up and took me lightly by the chin.
" 'Now, my little Pandyssian beauty, we can really get to know each other.' I smiled, and he smiled, and he slid the lavender dress from my shoulders, and the feeling of the silk running against my skin was ecstasy.
" 'Turn around," he whispered, and I did as he said. I could hear him walk away for a second, but he returned. 'Bend over on the bed and brace yourself with your arms,' he told me. I nearly protested, saying that I wanted to see his face, but I kept my mouth shut and did as he asked.
"At first, it didn't register in my mind what had just happened, but the pain caught up with me seconds later, and I tried to stand.
" 'No, no.' Lord Morgan said, shoving me back down to the bed. 'You stay right there.' The second lash was worse, and suddenly I was wide awake.
" 'It hurts!' I said, struggling against his hand pressing down on my back.
" 'That's the idea,' Lord Morgan mocked. 'Now, be a good little Pandyssian slave girl and take it.'
"So, I took it. Like a fool, I let him beat me, the belt leaving red welts against my skin. I screamed, and I cried, and he smiled, telling me that I was perfect. And then he said, 'Now, my Pandyssian bitch, get on your hands and knees so I can fuck you like the filthy dog you are.' "
I remember seeing the tears in my mother's eyes as she recounted the story.
"As soon as he was done, he gave me to his guards, naked and crying. They took me back to the mine and threw me out of the rail car, and as I rolled in the dirt and mud, I felt as though I was nothing but an animal. We are nothing but animals to them."
My mother. My beautiful, young mother, kind and gentle, had been used. It made me sick the first time she told me the story. She refused to tell me for a long time, but when the coughing started, and her hair fell out in clumps, she said that it was finally time for me to learn about my father.
"All I ever wanted was to die a free woman," my mother told me. And she did, having escaped from the mine with a small group of slaves when I was still growing in her womb. I never knew captivity, and for that I am thankful, but the streets of Dunwall are no less forgiving.
I am the first to strike, my blade swiping across the thug's wrist. He is distracted - too busy laughing - and he drops the pistol. I have always been quick. Here, if you're not strong, then you have to be fast. I dart for the pistol, gripping it in my hand, and without a moment's hesitation, I pull the trigger. An explosion of red and smoke comes from the thug's head, and I duck, letting my companions take over. The other two thugs have drawn their pistols, but once again, the blade strikes faster.
To my right, Kitty, slashes the thug's belly before going for his throat, managing to slice through most of the neck. To my left is Mace, whose saber has already made its way into the thug's side. He slashes again, aiming for the gut and then coming around to the liver. Both thugs wriggle on the ground, and we quickly grab the pistols from next to them, our hands scurrying over the thugs' bodies, checking pockets and hats and shoes.
"Hurry up," I hiss. "The others probably heard that gunshot." Once we are sure that we've taken all possible valuables, we turn, sprinting away down the alley.
The Rosethorne Mansion is located in the prestigious Estate District. Why do I mention it? Well, aristocrats are not the only ones to benefit from the plague. As the disease has cleared out nearly half of the Estate District, whole mansions sit completely abandoned. Some are locked tight and others filled with weepers, but it is as if the Rosethorne Mansion were made just for us.
Located in a shady area away from the other houses, we can easily sneak in and out without being seen. It has sewer access in the cellar, allowing us to travel to and from the house underground as well. All the food was left, so we cleared out the moldy and spoiled bits, keeping the cans and jars for ourselves. There are plenty of bedrooms for all twenty-five of us - though some have to share - and we've turned the place into our home. We wear the clothes left behind, which have been dirtied and eaten by rats over the past months. We had to clear a few weepers from the building, but so far it has been clean. As far as we know, there is no plague here.
I enter the building, greeting my other Bastards. Whenever one of us arrives home after having robbed someone, we take inventory. Inventory is never fun, but we must do it.
"Anya, Hector," I say, pointing to the two people closest to me. "Inventory." Mace, Bea, Kitty and I throw our pouches on a nearby table, letting Anya pour their contents onto the surface. The items clang and clink as they hit the polished wood of the old, expensive table, which is now decorated with scratches.
"Three pistols, two bullets, thirty-two coin," lists Anya while Hector writes it into the book. "Looks like... a silver ring." We nod our heads in approval. "Two river krust pearls, one unknown brass key, a piece of jerky - I don't think it's beef, though... "
"You can keep that," I say.
"Thank you, ma'am," Anya chirps. "And one red flavor Mother's Cure bottle cap."
"It's berry flavor, dumbass," says Hector.
"How do you know? You never even had a berry," Anya retorts.
"Shut up, you two, before you sound any more stupider," says Bea. "Ain't no such thing as a berry. They got different kinds of berries, like blueberries and blackberries."
"Redberries?" asks Anya.
"No," Bea says, her face scrunching in contemplation. She snaps her fingers, pointing at Anya. "But there's raspberries. Those are red."
"Then how come the flavor's just 'berry'?" Hector asks, crossing his arms.
I turn away, sighing, and leave them to have their conversation.
"Top three, meeting in my office," I say, and Bea holds up her hand saying that she'll be there in a minute. Kitty and Mace follow me.
Kitty Monroe is the bastard daughter of an unknown lord. She worked at the Golden Cat until she decapitated one of her clients by stabbing him repeatedly with a broken wine bottle. Needless to say, she couldn't work there anymore, and she ran, managing to get away through the V.I.P. entrance while the guards were distracted by the body.
She's one of our best. A ruthless cutthroat with no room for mercy.
"I lost my mercy with my virginity," she likes to say. One might think that she actually enjoys the kill. Maybe she does.
Then there is Mace, no last name. Another Pendleton bastard, though, his father's name was Treavor, he thinks.
"Like there's a difference," he says. "They're all the same." Mace isn't his real name. He won't tell us his real name, saying that it's something he wants to leave behind. All we really know about his past is that he grew up for some time with his mother, who was a servant before becoming pregnant and getting kicked out of Pendleton Manor. She became a servant for another lord. Lord Ashby, if I remember correctly. So, he grew up in the estate, and luckily, Lord Ashby actually took a liking to him. But then something happened between Mace and Ashby. Something to do with Mace's mother. Something that made him run from the manor, from Ashby, from his mother, to never return. He won't tell us what happened, but it was so bad that Mace despises the aristocracy now. He is probably the most vocal of us about his hatred for them, but most of us have never even met an aristocrat. We were only abandoned by them. Even worse, he was raised by one.
Beatrix Armstrong, "Bea" for short, bastard daughter of another unknown aristocrat, was born to a former whore turned thief. She's been robbing people since she was five.
"We'd have this routine, see," she says. "I walk up to someone cryin' n' tell 'em I can't find my momma, and then I lead them into an alley, sayin' I last saw her there. Then my momma jumps 'em. Easy n' quick." She's always talking shit, so it's difficult to tell sometimes whether or not she's telling the truth, but she always means well.
My top three Bastards are my best fighters. Mace is smart, Kitty's fast and tough, Bea is able to make quick decisions. If I am gone, Bea is the next in charge, followed by Mace. Kitty comes next, but Outsider knows we don't want that to happen.
The leader of the Bastard Aristocrats is Valerie Star. Me. I know it's a strange name. My mother picked the last name since she liked to watch the stars when she was a slave at the mine. She says that they kept her going.
There aren't any stars in Dunwall. There's too much smog in the air.
It's hard for the Bastards to get taken seriously, since we're so young. All of us are in our early to mid teens, but we're not kids. Not at all. We're just as ruthless as the next thug. We're a gang, and crime is our business, and we've all killed more than once.
Unfortunately, since we're a new gang, nobody knows this, and we are routinely mocked. And that's only by the lesser gangs. The real gangs, the ones at the top like the Bottle Street Gang and the Hatters, don't even know we exist. We've tried to get their attention, but so far we've failed.
"Maybe we can take on the river," Kitty says. "Get the Dead Eels' attention."
"Are you crazy?" I say. "The Eels don't deal with anyone else. They'll kill us before we can say a word to them. If we're gonna get noticed, I'd say our best bet is Bottle Street. Slackjaw's known to be pretty reasonable."
"Yeah, but you think he'll like the fact that some of us are girls?" Bea asks. "The Bottle Street Gang's full of smelly ogres."
"Well what should we do then?" says Mace. The three look to me.
"At the moment, we're twenty-five strong. We can always expand."
"Yeah, but we have to do something. Petty crime ain't gonna do us no good if we got too many. Plus to get noticed we gotta do somethin' big. Somethin' creative." Bea kicks her chair a few times, leaning on the armrest.
"Well, is there something that people want that we can get?" Mace asks.
"Elixir," I say shrugging. "But Bottle Street's got that bootleg stuff."
"What if we could get real elixir?" says Bea. We all turn to look at her.
"Real elixir?" I say. "And where are we getting that from?" Bea flashes me a smile, sitting up in her chair.
"Well - " I feel one of Bea's stories coming on. "I know this Lower Watch guard, right? We used to pull some stuff together back in the day, when we was 'round fifteen."
"You mean, last year?" I ask.
"Yeah," says Bea, gesturing toward me. "So, I saw him 'bout a month ago, and, you know, went to make sure that he hadn't been brainwashed or nothin' in Coldridge."
"Why was he in prison?" asks Mace.
"It... it was just somethin' small that we did. We made a mistake, though, n' he got caught. Well, I may have gotten him caught. I didn't mean to, though, but when I saw him I thought maybe I could tell him what happened. Well, turns out he's not even mad. I tried tellin' him I was sorry, but he said he would'a done the same thing!" She grins. "So, we get to talkin', right? He's tellin' me about the shortage of elixir in the Watch, but then he says to me, he says, 'There's a full boatload of it near Kaldwin's Bridge, but they won't give it to us because they can't decide how to divide it up between the navy, the army, and the Watch.' So, basically it's just sittin' there in the boat. No one's supposed to know, but he said he heard it from a friend who works as a servant for a general or admiral or whatever. I guess he overheard their conversation."
Mace and I make eye contact, Mace with a dubious look on his face.
"So, whad'ya think?" asks Bea. "Kitty?"
Kitty has been playing with her lighter since the meeting began, but she looks up at us now.
"We should do that," she says, bowing her head to play with her lighter again. I sigh.
"What else do you know, Bea? How many guards does the boat have? How big is it? How much elixir is in it? Which side of the river is it nearest to?"
"Whoa, whoa, hey," Bea says, holding her hand up. Her frizzy, blonde curls bounce in the sunlight. "I can get the info from my friend, but I'll probably have to pay him with somethin' I'd rather not pay him with, so we gotta decide if we're gonna do it or not."
"Which means we have to know whether or not this boat even actually exists," Mace says.
"It does. I promise you. It exists. He wouldn't lie to me." Bea leans forward in her chair. "So?"
I can already tell that Mace has a problem with the idea.
"Won't Slackjaw consider us competition if we do that? We're too small to have Bottle Street as our enemy."
"We can sell it to Slackjaw. Let him sell it to the public." Bea nods. "See? I can come up with good plans." Mace shakes his head and groans. He takes a deep breath.
"This elixir is in a boat, right? Which means it's on the river. Which means... "
We all fall silent.
"Shit," Kitty says, scowling. We stare at each other, bouncing back and forth between each others' gazes. Finally, Kitty speaks up.
"We can take 'em," Kitty says finally, and we stare at her, wide-eyed.
"The Eels?" I say. "You want us to take on the Dead Eels?"
"Shit, Kitty, even Bottle Street don't mess with them," says Bea.
"Bottle Street's full of fuckin' brutes. We're quick, we're quiet, and we're small. We use stealth."
"That's how the Eels do it too," I point out.
"We'll be better than them at it. Plus, they can't be stealthy if we're the ones attackin' them."
Bea gives Mace a worried look.
"Look," Kitty says, leaning forward. "We take their boat, use it to attack the elixir ship, load all of it on the Eel's boat, and we'll be able to just sail right down the Wrenhaven. The Eels got papers so they can look legit."
"But it's the Dead Eels, Kitty," I say.
"Which means that when we fuckin' win, every gang in the city's gonna want to work with us. We'll be famous." She looks around. "Come on, you don't get to the top by doin' petty crime. We gotta do somethin' big. This is big."
"Okay," says Bea, shrugging. "I'm for it."
"Are you serious?" says Mace. "You realize this is Kitty who just thought of this plan. Kitty."
"Why can't I think up a plan?" Kitty snaps. "Sorry, I'm not as useless as you thought I was." Mace sighs.
"I didn't mean it like that. You can just be... reckless at times."
"Listen up, you little sheltered boy." Kittie stands, pointing her finger in Mace's face. "I been through a lotta shit, and I'm still alive. I probably shouldn't be, but I am, and I haven't survived this far by bein' dumb. Just because I'm not real smart like you, doesn't mean that I'm stupid enough to get us all killed. You all are my fuckin' family. I'm not gettin' any of us killed." Kitty stares Mace down before plopping back into her seat. Her silky hair slides out of its bun, half of the strands loosening and landing on her shoulder.
"You're the leader, Val. It's your call," Mace says, with his head bowed to the floor. "But I still say it's a bad idea, and I know you're not planning on getting us killed, but I can't see this plan going well. In fact, I see it going really badly."
I am tense in my chair, looking between my three companions and then reaching up to scratch my head. I think I made my bun too tight, and I feel as though my scalp is being pulled off. I try to loosen it but only end up getting my fingers tangled in my dark curls. Pulling my hand from my hair, I force myself to relax and think.
Kitty's right. We are family, but I'm the one who makes the decisions. I'm the one who decides what's best for the whole family. But what's best for the family? How am I supposed to know? I look up at the circle, my gaze stopping on each one of my other Bastards. These are my Bastards. Mine.
"We'll do it," I say. "But we really have to plan this out. And practice it, too. We can't have anything go wrong. And we need pistols. One for each of us."