A/N: Well... a warning now, because someone dies in this chapter later. I tried to keep it as T rated as possible, but it still is somewhat graphic.

Well… this was a very unexpected twist in her plans. Things went rather well: About a week after she thought of coming back to the Labule, she was in a bar, drinking away the night to calm her nerves before she'd make her escape to proper Abh territory.

She was a regular at this particular tavern, A Bloody Mess, so named for the frequent bar fights that often resulted in someone bleeding on the floor. She visited so often that the bartender would just start mixing her favorite drink as soon as he saw her walk in, and everyone knew her for her seemingly heavyweight tendencies, never suspecting her to be an Abh, somehow. Perhaps her disguises were just that good, which she very much was glad for.

"Hey, how's it going, Aaramov?" she grinned, seeing the bartender. She liked him enough, but never enough for a romantic relationship to develop.

"Ah, Ki, there you are," he greeted, mixing her drink. He was a stoic older man of few words, with a gaunt face and some grey hairs speckling his brown hair at his age. He considered Ki a bit of a daughter figure, a child he never had.

The atmosphere was typical: people were drunk and loud, some were fooling around with each other. Someone in a corner caught her eye. That woman's new, the street rat thought to herself, she had never seen such a enigmatic person in the tavern, and she intended to try to get a word or two from her. "Any idea who she is, Aaramov?" Ki hunkered down at her favorite spot.

"Not a clue, first time I've ever seen her," he slid the mug down to her. Aaramov honestly figured she was just doing her thing, just watching the people go by. He let her be, she didn't seem to be causing trouble, and didn't mind as long as she ordered something in exchange for loitering around.

Ki glanced over the scenery, and tensed up, her hair standing on ends. There was a Lander man with jet-black hair slicked back, with the most spindly little mustache ever, and she recognized that ugly mug of his anywhere. He wasn't her first boyfriend, but this man was no better than George, being wildly possessive and thinking of women as a man's property. He was a real crappy boyfriend, to say the least. He hated Ki being the spitfire she was and often tried to beat her into submission and tried to manipulate her into staying with him. "So Anton's here, eh?" she squinted, ready to beat him down if the need arose. In the street rat's experience, one either stayed down in fear or rose up and fought back. She eventually chose to fight back in all of her awful relationships, she wasn't the quiet submissive abuse victim so many people usually thought of.

Anton was drunk off his rocks, hiccuping and red in the face. Ki took a sip of her whiskey and rum mix, keeping an eye on him, then it happened. He tried to pick a fight with Ki, getting her attention by being loud and obnoxious. "That woman thinks she can get away with being tough like a man!" he called out, slurring his words.

The tattoo artist just grumbled and downed her drink. She might not be drunk, but the anger simmering in her definitely made her seem like it. "Better to be alone and single than be stuck with you again. You ruined me, Anton. Ruined me!" It wasn't a lie, technically. He wasn't the first to do so, though he was the one to finally solidify Ki's trust issues to everyone who was interested in her.

"I was just teaching you how to be a proper woman!" he snarled back, before Aaramov broke up the escalating fight. It helped some… before Anton downed another drink and copped a feel on an equally drunk woman next to him, incurring Ki's wrath.

"Pervert! Sick freak! You freaking touched her!" she pointed at him, her eyes full of rage and coldness and that readiness to fight.

"And what are you gonna do about it?" Anton goaded on in all his drunken stubbornness and pridefulness. All the while, the woman in the corner was watching, unsure whether she should intervene or not.

"You wanna see, buddy? Let's have a showdown!" Ki stomped up to him and held him by the collar of his shirt. "You can fight now, or you can fess up that what you did was messed up!" Now that this really escalated, there was no chance in hell that Aaramov could stop this fight, since now there was an angry woman trying to shoot Anton down as she drew her handgun.

"You're not thinking straight, Ki…" the bartender tried to dissuade her from the duel one last time, as pointless as it was at this point… but he was right.

"He's gonna freaking pay for all the crap he's ever done," she seethed, too riled up to listen and setting the gun to the kill setting, surprising Aaramov. She wasn't usually extreme like this, not in all the years he knew her.

It was probably the Dozeryua genes taking over, or maybe she just snapped, but regardless, she missed… twice, somehow, and now it was Anton's turn to try and gun Ki down. Unfortunately, or maybe thankful, rather, Ki didn't get the memo, and she suddenly tackled Anton down before he ever drew out his handgun, having his throat in a death grip as she looked down at him and bashing his brains out against the ground at the same time. Her mind was fogged up in her bloodlust, the screams of the bystanders just noise in the background. Kill, kill, kill, a little voice in Ki's head told her all throughout the act. The hooligan made quick work of his agonizing death, and she didn't let go until someone smashed a bottle over her head, knocking her out.

She woke up the next morning in someone else's bed, groaning and holding her head. "What happened last night?" She flinched a bit, her head was pounding with a killer headache, and wounds were still fresh.

"Relax, take it easy. Just breathe," and there was a woman sitting by her side, no doubt the one who nursed her back to health, and almost certainly the woman in the corner from last night. "You had one hell of a time last night. Had to drag your bloody carcass back before someone tried to kill you in the chaos."

"Thanks." Ki leaned back a bit, sighing a bit. "What… what happened?" she asked again.

"Well… you strangled that guy while you brained him, that was an ugly sight. Floor's probably still got brain and skull bits, you were a brute, you held on till I smashed you silly," her nurse revealed. Ki was… well, stunned, to say the least. "I had to fight off a few knuckleheads so I could drag you back here, so you're welcome for that. Lucky me that there weren't too many there, so just a quick stun kept them down long enough."

"...I don't remember anything from last night," she admitted. "All I remember was that Anton was being drunk and horrible, and next thing I knew, I'm here. Why can't I remember?"

"Perhaps it's your Dozeryua genetics," the good Samaritan pointed out Ki's cropped ears. "You just do it automatically, almost in a bit of a fugue state, I suppose one could say."

"Are you an Abh?" she asked in Baronh when she heard the woman say that. It was so strange, as Ki mostly spoke Rikpal, but the Abh language came flooding back to her, naturally and flawlessly, like she was coming home.

"How'd you figure?"

"Only other Abh know of the reputation of the Dozeryua. That and you just have that vibe," she shrugged. "I guess we just know if someone's an Abh or not. 'Sides, we're known to be impossibly pretty," she grinned. "How'd you manage to get stuck here? Most Landers here hate us."

"...It's a long story," she revealed.

"My ancestors picked this crappy place to stay, so that's my story," Ki shrugged. "So now I'm stuck here like them, too." then she had to switch to topic, she had to know more of what happened. "So… what's the scoop? Give me the exact play by play."

"You tried to shoot a man for feeling up a lady you fancied, then you choked him to death," the medic pretty much summed up. "You shot twice and missed both times, then you just tackled him down. I smashed the bottle over your head and tasered everyone to incapacitate them so we could get away."

Ki leaned back, letting it process in her head. She killed a man. "Wow…" she sighed. "Can't say I'm surprised… but it's the first time that's happened," she admitted, feeling even worse than she normally did after a kill. Uuugh, gonna have to tell Debenau that Mommy killed a man, she thought.

"But if it helps, you saved my life, in a way. That man's father Konrad owned me, and Anton was the heir of the crime syndicate here, after all. I sold my freedom in exchange for safety, because I knew the Landers here would kill me if they found out an Abh found her way here. Konrad kept his word, keeping me safe from prying eyes, shockingly… but he and Anton treated me as a subhuman."

So the rumors of the crime boss having an Abh lady in his hands were true. "Was it worth it to trade your freedom away?"

"If I knew what would happen, I'd have killed myself." The silence was deafening.

"How'd you manage to get out if they were keeping you hostage?" she finally managed to ask her savior after a few minutes.

"Extremely careful sneaking around. Lots of planning, too. I had to make sure to sneak out when they were gone, and be back before either of them were back. Had to make it look like nothing was out of the ordinary, too," she explained. Of course, she had a feeling her charge would want to know another thing… "Now, to not look like an Abh, I had to hide my hair extremely well, like so," she gestured to her hair, tightly wound up in a bun and wrapped up in a rag. "Had to improvise with hiding my frosh, so I just used some bandage wrap that matched my skin tone," she took off the rag, and her long, mint-green hair cascaded down when she undid the bun.

"Lemme guess, you just told people you just had a flesh wound?" the hooligan nodded in admiration. "Clever, I just tell everyone who met me that these," she gestured to her ears, "were a body mod that I got from some even shadier service," she gave a thumbs up. Ki stretched and flinched again, no doubt from the headache. "Goddammit," she mumbled. It wasn't too bad, at least, so she didn't need any painkillers.

"Easy, now," the good Samaritan gently pushed Ki back down. "I had to carefully pick out the glass bits from your head, you're still bleeding a bit. Besides… I never asked for your name."

"...Ki," she replied. She needed no other introduction. "You?"

"I am Lof Aronn Rekef Dairuzu Lyuf Ruseja," the medic finally revealed, full title and everything.

Whoa… this was a real proper Abh, Ki realized. She was talking to a baroness, pretty much. "Any relation to Admiral Rekef, then?" Ki chuckled, having a vague idea of who's who in the Labule. If this woman was related to the duke in any way, the story of how she ended up here had to be good.

"...He's my granduncle," Ruseja shrugged, as if it was just common knowledge.

"If that's true, why are you here?"

"I said it was a long story. The short story is that I was a medic on the Galroth, there was a small skirmish not far from here years ago. Dunno if my crew made it out or not, I was lucky to make it through on an escape pod, and ever since then, this hellhole's been my home."

Years… wow, and I've never seen her in my entire life, Ki thought to herself, surprised at the reveal. She had to wonder if there were any other surprises she didn't know about on this planet; she certainly didn't see all this crummy world had to offer, after all.

"Now… the mafia here's gonna find you and kill you, they know what you did. I do know of a few escape routes…" she started to explain.

"Escape routes?" Ki perked up a bit. "Listen closely, Baroness Dairuzu," she beckoned her closer, "I have a plan to escape from here, with a few of my buddies, You want in?" She had a feeling Ruseja would be a great help with the plan, and she felt that it was high time for the noble to go back to her family.

"...Tell me more," the baroness mused, definitely interested. The more allies in on this plan, the better.

Next Chapter:

"Gordie, wanna scout out with me?" Ki offered. Gordon handed his duffle bag off to Ruseja and tagged along with Ki. "I just have a bad feeling about this, is it… wrong of me to feel that way?" she held a steady hand on her handgun, looking around.

"I don't think so, we're all a wee bit on edge… well, maybe 'wee bit' is a wee bit o' an understatement," Gordon tried to lighten the mood, as ready as Ki was to shoot at any opposition.