Lucy's memories

There are certain types of intelligence that can be very isolating. Relating to your peers is difficult, and there is a natural distance bred by that difference. What can make this considerably worse, is an uneven intelligence within the person. A great deal of theoretical intelligence, and scientific intelligence, without the same levels of emotional intelligence, will lead to a very difficult situation when it comes to understanding people, and navigating the already often difficult social dynamics of childhood and adolescence.

Lucy was a girl who had a great deal of scientific intelligence, and was absolutely not born in a place to foster that. She was brought into the world in a trailer park, the product of parents who mainly didn’t want her, and proceeded to have little to do with her after. She grew up in a relatively impoverished, rural and superstitious town, which had been screwed over for decades by murderously greedy corporations who stuck their tentacles inside the spineless and corrupt politicians of the local area, controlling them like meat puppets to screw over the everyday people.

One key element to maintaining the control over these people, was a lack of education. An educated population is more likely to question what is going on around them, and such things would not be expedient to profits, so were discouraged. This, coupled with a great deal of other factors, eventually formed a cultural bias against education, and against those who seemed a good match for it. Why would they spend that time learning? Do they think they’re “better than us”? They must be stuck up, arrogant. This was the social environment Lucy grew up in.

She was naturally intelligent, in particular leaning towards science. It seemed to make sense to her in a way that it didn’t to the people around her, and more than that was enjoyable. She would sneak out to the one, small, relatively dilapidated library in town and consume books like the other kids consumed cereal. Within a few short years, she had read every book in the library twice over, which was helped by her lack of friends.

As a child, this isolation stung in a lonely way, but other than exclusion, went no further. It was in adolescence, as the hormones began to scramble the brains of her peers in a way that is so uniquely teenage, that this exclusion shifted to a kind of vicious taunting. The ringleaders of it were kids who were the exact opposite of Lucy, who had all the friends they could want, and the kind of natural blessings that were rewarded instead of shunned in this part of the country.

Amanda was the daughter of the Mayor, a beautiful blonde who lead the cheerleading squad. James was the star of the school’s football team, a muscular young man whose father had gifted him a mustang for his birthday that he loved showing off. Aaron was a cruel class clown who made up for his own deficiencies and lack of the natural gifts the other popular kids had by aggressively and very publicly humiliating anyone who didn’t quite fit the mold, especially the small, skinny, late blooming Lucy.

Emotional intelligence can be gained through maturity, that mix of positive love and overcoming negative challenges every person is supposed to have growing up. But if you have a disconnect between your emotional intelligence, and your other types, and aren’t given the proper recourse to develop it, it’s very easy to fall into negative thought patterns.

Lucy overthought, and overthought, and overthought, stewing away in her tiny, cramped cot of a bed as she cried herself to sleep each night. Why was everyone so cruel to her? Why did they soak her with water, tear up her school books, smash her stationary. She’s have to ask for pen even to write with in class, and the faculty naturally began to talk about the lazy girl who could never be bothered to bring her own stuff. Naturally, they didn’t care about her either.

Amanda taunted her about being plain, about being flat, about her poverty. James taunted her for being a weirdo, a friendless loser. Aaron took everyone else’s taunts and made them so much more creative, crafting snappy lines out of clumsy insults in a way that made even the most sympathetic peers laugh. When you’re afraid you’ll be picked on next, it’s much, much easier to gang up on the primary subject of the laughs, making her a sacrifice to save your own skin.

Lucy endured this for years, suffering again and again, her life a hell of bullying in a town where not a single soul cared about her. She tried everything, tried telling her parents, the teachers. No one cared. She tried laughing along, an attempt at reclaiming the joke at the expense of her own dignity. No-one would let her away with it, so convenient a girl would never be allowed to be accepted, so much more valuable as a punching bag than a real person. She even once tried fighting Amanda, a **** attempt, only to be beaten up by a gang of Amanda’s friends while the main girl herself just laughed. For all her intelligence, Lucy wasn’t much of a fighter. Yet.

All the suffering, the misery, the loneliness. Lucy overthought it all, stewing as her brain warped. Over so many years, perhaps something broke. Certain reservations and limits certainly did. And, well, Lucy was intelligent. Terribly so. She soaked up information like a sponge, putting the pieces together. The school was so underfunded, no-one noticed a few chemicals going missing from the labs, some tools vanishing for a night from woodworking class. No-one cared about the finer details, the way no-one had cared about such a bright and innocent girl like Lucy being tormented until a part of her broke forever.

Amanda choked to **** on her own sick at a party, her nervous system fried. It would be blamed on ****, Fentanyl or some other wonder **** **** mixed in with the coke little miss perfect had a predilection for. James’s smashed corpse would be virtually unrecognizable, wrapped around a tree speeding down a country lane late at night. The brakes of his precious mustang had failed at a critical moment it seemed, the young hotshot losing his life, just another tragic victim of inappropriate driving. Aaron’s **** was ruled a suicide, shot in the head with his father’s gun. How could it be anything else, the angle and distance all being perfect? His note was in his handwriting too, or a facsimile too flawless to be viewed as anything other than the real thing. They say class clowns are often struggling with mental health behind the scenes: Even with no signs, it was a story sadly so common in modern society.

After their deaths, the bullying stopped. Stripped of its ringleaders, the enthusiasm that once fired up everyone else dissipated, easily slumping down into the grey, formless grieving that would characterize the rest of the other student’s school lives. Losing not one, but three stars of the school, was enough to permanently damage the year. For Lucy however, a new dawn had risen. She didn’t regret killing Amanda, James, and Aaron. Quite the opposite, in fact. They had rendered themselves less than human in her eyes through their actions, and she felt no remorse in what she’d done. She even went to their funerals, managing to work out some fake tears in her cute black outfit, looking ever the part of the mourning classmate.

The world seemed so colorful now, so beautiful, so exciting. She was empowered, thrilled. She'd felt more alive than ever before when she enacted her little plans, and now removed from all the negative emotions persistent bullying can breed, she was free to fly. Her grades, always good, skyrocketed. She applied herself in new ways, suddenly exploding on the track and in sports as she applied herself there too, memories of being beaten up by Amanda’s cronies spurring her to grind her muscles and reflexes until such things would never happen again. Her body too, experienced deep changes, as puberty caught up and changed the girl into a beautiful and deceptively adorable young woman.

At the end of her time in school, she left on a full ride scholarship to MIT. She never returned home. At college, her social life bloomed just as the rest of her life had so shortly before. She found herself so attracted to bright colors now, wanted never again to fade into the background. She fell in love with the cutesy aesthetics of akihabara fashion, dreamy, anime and K-Pop infused styles coming from Tokyo and Seoul. In a way, she was reclaiming her childhood, the fun freedom she had never been able to enjoy while she was young.

Maybe it was this, her bright, affected style, and her pretty looks, that would lead to the next big shift in her life. One of her professors called her to his lab late one evening to talk about her coursework, an unusual summons due to how late it was, but not one Lucy really worried about. The professor, it seemed, was a man who’d made it to middle age with some repressed desires he wanted to live out, and, indeed, literally couldn’t resist indulging in; now he’d been turned into a skinwalker.

He wanted to wear Lucy’s skin, live her life, enjoy the breezy existence of a college girl who was the definition of the word “kawaii”. He picked the wrong girl. Lucy didn’t know just what he was, but attacking her had removed any kind of moral concerns she would have had, along with his revealed non-human status.

“It’s all so fascinating!” she would think, as she tortured him and took him apart piece by piece. “He really has an amazing healing ability”, she observed, as she carved little pieces of him off, experimenting with all sorts of **** and chemicals, watching with deep interest how they affected him. Naturally, like the good scientist she was, she took detailed notes as she plied his human skin from his muscles, seeing how already, underneath, they had begun to subtly warp and change from the sacred human ideal into that of a monster.

By the time agents from Mortiferis de Infornem got there, they found a very happy human girl, and a suitably mind-broken skinwalker, on the verge of ****. Lucy would be a welcome addition to their ranks. It was a perfect marriage, Mortiferis got an enthusiastic, intelligent, creative and very dangerous new recruit, and Lucy discovered the vocation her whole, unfortunate life had subtly prepared her to be perfect for.

There was another bonus to this all for her; Though she didn’t regret killing those three when she was in school, Lucy had taken three lives. After killing her first skinwalker and having her horizons suitably expanded by that, it was safe to say Lucy was agnostic. Perhaps an afterlife did exist? And if so, perhaps some good karma would be accrued from saving humanity, and that might offset her little **** streak.

Regardless, she was trained, sent on missions, rotated through different teams, until eventually becoming a permanent fixture in a team under the command of a hunter called “Kobrina.” Kobrina was actually younger than Lucy; yet had known of Skinwalkers and other supernatural creatures for far longer. She was powerful, almost excessively so, with a commanding presence and even more commanding physicality. Once she set her eyes on a skinwalker, it would never escape. Once Lucy even saw Kobrina decapitate a skinwalker wearing an adorable 18 year old schoolgirl without hesitation. She wasn’t religious, but still found herself thanking God Kobrina had been right about who the skinwalker was wearing.

It was under Kobrina though, that a certain tension arose between them. There were different schools of thought among monster hunters about how monsters should best be handled. All were committed to saving humanity, but it was more how to do it. Kobrina belonged to a school of thought that could be described as an extremist by some, and genocidal by others. She believed that these creatures were all evil, and had forfeit their souls.

It didn’t matter the circumstances for the humans who had been turned, or the simple fact of their birth for the creatures that started off supernatural; all were to be eradicated under Kobrina’s will, and will of those like her. And after seeing how some of these creatures carried on, it was very easy to be persuaded towards the necessity of Kobrina’s viewpoint.

Lucy, however, belonged to a very different school of thought. One that saw creatures like Skinwalkers as, while abhorrent, also as worthy of study and thought. Things like their healing abilities had eminent medical value, while other things, such as the apparent freezing of time for a person turned into a skinsuit and unworn, meant that it could effectively transport a human through time to the future, skipping years or even decades while losing not a second from their health and lifespan, their lives only resuming once they were restored or worn.

There were a great deal of mysteries still to be uncovered with regards to skinwalkers, and rather than exclusively being a scourge to be eradicated, they offered near endless possibilities as a resource for the advancement of humanity. These were the ideas Lucy carried, and so it was understandable she would find herself frustrated under the authority of Kobrina; a woman who slaughtered every skinwalker she came across with brutal efficiency and little thought to any collateral damage.

The nascent factions, if they could be called that, followed by Kobrina and Lucy were diametrically opposed then. One faction that favored wholesale destruction, the purging of a plague on humanity, and the safest and most loyal option to the survival of the species. The other, could be viewed as a positive **** that sought to exploit the possibilities while eliminating any bad apples; ultimately still hunting skinwalkers, but in certain cases making exceptions to acquire something more valuable than anything: information.

I gasped as I came to on the couch.

That had been intense, what the hell…

So far, I’d worn five people, so I thought I was used to feeling another’s memories. But then again, no-one I’d worn had ever had memories that ****. Even Grace’s memories of being bullied by that bitch Jessica we both lived with, paled in comparison to the brutal and miserable years experienced by Lucy. Feeling all of those emotions from her POV, the **** of three classmates and tens of skinwalkers, and other creatures besides that…

I shuddered a little as I tried to acclimatize to it. This was one time I was genuinely grateful for my skinwalker side, it’s flexibility in these matters giving me strength and normalizing these intense emotions as best it could.

It really is perfectly evolved… that skinwalker side could wear the most twisted humans alive and still puppet their personalities and souls as nothing more than a tool.

It was the part of me that was still human that was struggling. It was a lot to take in. I just tried to breath deeply, as I took my head in my hands. I let myself have a few minutes, that stretched to ten, and then thirty. I just lay there, trying to decompress and get over what I’d seen. After that time, I felt like things were starting to make sense in a way I could use.

I still was still being pursued by hunters. After seeing what Kobrina had done in Lucy’s memories, I knew she would always be a danger that I could never ignore. She was not capable of compromise, and would never stop until one of us was dead.

She’s kind of the perfect hunter…

I laughed a little, but in a way that seemed to combine my awe and fear with the complicated feelings Lucy felt towards Kobrina.

Perfect… but oh so limited.

That was definitely a thought more from the Lucy personality I was wearing...

I have a few options… I’ve escaped with my life, temporarily. I’m wearing Lucy’s skin, so now I will actually stand some kind of chance in a fight with her speed and skills. Candida too, is extremely dangerous. She wouldn’t have lasted for nearly 200 years otherwise… so if I joined forces with her, and kept wearing Lucy, we might be able to take down Kobrina. Lucy’s memories told me the guy was named Mahana, and would be something of a wildcard, being new to the team, however he lacked the experience and a lot of the brutality of Kobrina. Together with Candida, could we defeat both of them…?

There was another option too. In her memories I’d seen the faction Lucy belonged to, I knew that she was different from Kobrina. She was open minded, science driven, and hated being denied the chance to gather data and study the way she wanted. She was restricted under Kobrina…

Would it be possible… to strike a deal with her? Is that idea too crazy…?