Róisín ní Frighil

Name:

Róisín ní Frighil

Age:

113-years-old; 21-years-old when turned.

Gender:

Female.

Physical appearance:

Róisín is a slight girl, standing somewhere around five-six or five-seven, weighing around 150lbs. She keeps her curly black mess of hair unpinned and natural most of the time, regardless of how it tends to get in the way - although, admittedly, she sometimes has momentary lapses back into the hairstyles of the 1930’s. Those lapses tend to be a source of embarrassment for her. The smattering of freckles on her face keeps her looking like someone fresh out of high school, and even her pale brown eyes don’t betray her age: it takes a lot to kill the eternal optimist within her, and safe to say, the eternal optimist still hasn’t died (It’s still hanging on, although she’s not entirely sure how). She has each ear pierced six times, as well as a piercing on her upper left lip. Across her shoulders is a tattoo in a cursive writing of the saying “Tiocfaidh ár Lá”: Our Day Will Come.

Spoiler:

Clothing of choice:

Favouring a pair of beaten army boots, thick wool socks, flannel shirts - which she sometimes switches out for tank tops or blouses - and ratty jeans that have been to Hell and back, Róisín likes to be comfortable, above all, and she doesn’t quite care about how she looks in the process. One of the greatest moments of her not-life was the introduction of jeans being a socially acceptable part of the female wardrobe. Sweatpants, too. She likes those quite a bit. Too much of her life in servitude was spent wearing tight, frumpy dresses on rare occasions and shapeless frocks every damn day, although she is a bit more accepting of some of the newer styles of party dresses. Those ones she likes because, as she told a rather vexed Captain Liam Moore one day when she showed up to a clandestine meeting of the Provos in an unacceptably low-cut black dress, “They make me feel pretty. Now shut up and keep your eyes where they belong, Cap’n.”

Weaponry of choice:

Webley .455 [revolver]*
- holds six rounds
- worn in either a thigh or a shoulder holster, but she usually prefers a thigh holster

Spoiler:

Armalite AR-15 [semi-automatic rifle]*
- holds a thirty-round magazine

Spoiler:

Various knives
* firearms are leftovers from her days with the IRA

Race:

Vampire, Category D.

Abilities:

Her regeneration abilities are not too shabby, but she thinks they could be better, as well as her ability to take bullets (and shrapnel, depending on the place and time). After four hours of direct exposure to sunlight she grows nauseated and shaky, and any longer than six lands her with nasty migraines and occasional vomiting. She’s a decent hand-to-hand combatant, with sharp reflexes that she maintains via a punching bag in her flat that has seen many, many repair jobs - and she will rely on those skills and reflexes if she must, although she would much rather have a grenade, detonator, or gun in her hand. Like other vampires of her rank, she has an improved sense of smell, sharper vision with a range of up to five kilometres away, and sharper hearing. She has accidentally made ghouls of a few dozen people, which were quickly put out of their misery, and she has yet to turn anyone, based primarily on a lack of interest.


Organization:

Unaffiliated, but she’s easily persuaded. Generally by money. Or food.

Personality:

Pleasant is the best word to describe Róisín, followed closely by loyal, prideful, mischievous, and occasionally vindictive, depending on the situation. She is the kind of woman whom, once she finds a cause, she is willing to serve it wholeheartedly, and she will defend that cause tooth and nail - even if in the end it‘s a risk to her not-life. She gets along well with others and is very compassionate, affable - even when opinions clash - and she tends to overlook the flaws of most other people, unless it‘s something that is a danger to her or others around her. Creating things, primarily explosives, is one of her favourite pastimes. As well, she is an eager learner, whether it involves working with her hands or sitting down with piles of books and learning from those; a good portion of her life was spent living in a state of illiteracy that, when several of the men whom she became acquainted with from the Old IRA taught her how to read and write, she latched onto this new skill like a leech. The pride she feels is directed more towards her country and the place she grew up rather than towards herself, although she is keen when it comes to perceiving insults that are directed towards her, and sometimes even imagining insults when there are none. The compliments she gives out, albeit hypocritically of her, tend to be very backhanded in nature and pass more often for degrading comments than praise. Her state of mind is generally very calm; it takes a great deal to set her off, and even when she is ripping mad, it’s kind of hard to tell - her anger is a simmering, quiet kind of anger that is only dangerous once it boils over. Petty vendettas are not below her, either. Once properly vexed, she turns into a cold, calculating individual who uses her intellect for extracting her revenge. If that doesn’t work, she tends to come from the school of solving her problems with guns and by blowing shit up.

Let it be known that Róisín likes to blow things up.


Rank:

She has no real rank, not anymore, although she was branded as a terrorist (of some little infamy, she’ll quip) in 1993 under a former alias because of her affiliation and activities with the Provos. While with the Provos, her rank was Border Clearance officer and then Senior Demolitions Expert.

Biography:

Born in May of 1891, Róisín ní Frighil was raised in a small household in the part of Ireland that is now known as Northern Ireland. She was the eldest of six, and one of two daughters. Her younger sister, the middle child, was sent off to a nunnery by the age of fifteen, whereas Róisín was shipped further south to work with an aunt in an upscale mansion as a maid when she was eleven. The pay was decent, with the majority of it being sent home to her family, and she was allowed to return home every so many months to visit her family for several days at a time, but the longer she worked there and the closer she grew to the other maids and the family of the estate, the less and less she was called to return for visits to her family’s single-story abode.

The last time she visited her family was during the month of her seventeenth birthday and then, after that, she heard nothing from them. They did not write, they did not call for her to visit, either for simple family time or heaven forbid if there had been some kind of family emergency, nor did they ever come calling on her at her new home. It set an ache in her, one that felt of betrayal, and left her quietly simmering; the letters she dictated to the head butler were never returned. Her aunt, however, seemed unsurprised by the development: “My sister,” she said, “your mother, has always been that kind of person, y’know. One of those folks who drops their relationships at the drop of a hat. Bloody awful of her, if you ask me, abandoning you like that. Then again, she did the same to me, too, Lord help me. We didn’t speak for, what, a good fourteen years, I suppose? And even then, if it weren’t for m’own damn insistence, we’d never had started talking again. So don’t you fret, mo chroí. It’s just her shite personality. Although, it’s a Lord-given miracle that it’s not in your blood, too. A complete, Lord-given miracle.”

Her presence in the mansion was simply as another means of money for the family; the girl had been told so at a young age, several months before being employed. With no dowry and being the eldest, her parents saw it fit to send her somewhere to work rather than to try and marry her off to a wealthier man who would probably take no interest in a girl who came from a family with failing finances. Out of spite, Róisín stopped sending her wages to her family, forcing them into contacting her with multiple angry letters, stating that even with her father’s farm work and her brother’s jobs at a mill a few villages over, that it wasn’t enough. The only reply she had for them was a polite ‘no’ - there was no way they were getting her money if they were not going to stay in contact with her; while their family had never been the closest-knit clan in all the county for the reasons detailed to her by her aunt, there was no way in hell they were getting her hard-earned money if they weren’t going to have the decency to check up on her every now and again in the same way she desperately tried to keep in contact with them. In her mother’s last letter, Róisín was, in simple terms, disowned by the woman. No family to return to? Well, okay then. That wasn’t exactly the most tolerable situation, and definitely one she had not anticipated finding herself in, but took it as best as she could (although it involved several late nights, sobbing incoherently into her aunt’s shoulder over the whole mess).

So that was that, and Róisín pushed the thoughts of her family and their sudden absence in her life to the back of her mind and busied herself as a chambermaid for the next three years, until, at the age of twenty, she was promoted to the position of Head Maid of the Ó Bradáin household, following the retirement of her aunt. With this promotion, she found herself presiding over the cooks, other maids, the two stable boys and the governesses, alongside the Head Butler, an elderly man by the name of Séan. It was Séan who aided the exceptionally nervous Róisín in pursuing her duties with dignity and skill, hand firm but gentle in showing her ropes she thought she already knew. But when one’s thrust into a position of importance, she came to learn, the things you know suddenly become foreign, movements that were once fluid become mechanical. Although it took nearly a year, and an almost ruined Christmas celebration, she eventually sunk into a weird kind of routine that had some semblance of normalcy.

The attack on the mansion came in the spring of 1910. There was no way of foreseeing it, as all events of that kind of nature tend to be as sudden as they are violent, but there was certainly no way in anticipating the origin of the attack being from the inside of the estate. The family in its entirety was slaughtered - the Lord and Lady of the house, their three beautiful daughters and two eldest sons, and all the servants, including the Head Butler, Séan. Róisín’s foray into darkness was entirely accidental nature, as she was not quite dead - very near it, just dangling in that moment when it’s hard to tell what one’s body is doing and what direction it is headed in - when the vampire responsible for the attack, the suitor of the eldest daughter, thought she was fit to drink from.

Life after that returned to its quiet, predictable nature, although her tendencies grew to be rather nomadic in nature and she was forced to follow her new master around: a callous, ill-tempered vampire who was prone to lashing out and tended to take to drinking more often than not. It was impossible for her to understand why he kept her; perhaps it was out of some sense of guilt, although she found that hard to believe - he had turned on the members of the household with little warning, for reasons she never did learn, and slaughtered them. Or maybe he kept her on as some kind of reminder to himself to not screw up the same way, not again, otherwise he‘d have two skittish fledglings hovering around him. She felt like a sick little animal having to follow him, at first barely able to choke down the blood she needed to in order to survive, but Róisín was more terrified of the consequences of living on her own with a monster lurking inside her that she did not understand. Several times he told her he’d rather see her dead in a gutter, silver cross through the heart, than have to wake up in the morning and find her sleeping on the cot in the other room of his small home. Not that the feelings were not mutual: she threatened, numerous times, to cut his throat while he slept if she so much as caught wind that he was going to make an attempt on her not-life. On as friendly terms as they could be with one another, either vampire tended to keep to one side of the house, rarely crossing paths, and even when they had to neither one of them would so much as look at the other. And on more than one occasion, he left Róisín to fend for herself for weeks on end as he trapezed from one side of the Isle to the other, at one point abandoning the fledgling for nearly five solid months as he criss-crossed Europe doing whatever the Hell it was. Either way, he returned from those travels with several bags of gold, in various currencies, and he gloated to her about it - “You women-folk can be so gullible at times, you know that, right?” - but he never let the money out of his sight, constantly wearing the bags beneath his cloak and then hiding them somewhere she could never find, no matter how often she turned the place upside-down to do so.

Róisín was a bit peeved with this child-like treatment, and rightfully so. Who wouldn’t be, honestly? When one suddenly goes from an easy, normal routine of waking up in the morning and good-naturedly ordering other girls around before joining in with the cleaning to a routine that consists of waking up as the sun sets and having the life of someone else forced down their throat, one is going to be a bit bitter, a bit on edge. When one goes from that life to the next, and then deals with severe abandonment that implies the risk of yet another death, then, well, things get icky.

Her master was not much older than she: he had been verging on thirty when he himself had been turned, and that had been all of forty years prior. But he was stronger, drank from the living frequently, and in judging her own weakness, perhaps that was why she never made a move to harm him, coupled with the fear of a solitary life. So it stayed that way, her quietly seething over her predicament, wanting to do something but unable to do anything. His patience with her held out until one morning in April 1913 when she was scrubbing her bloodstained clothes in their kitchen sink and, for some reason, that was enough to set him off. Maybe it was the humming, maybe it was seeing her playing the penniless housewife, or maybe it was a combination of both piled on top of some bad drinks. Either way he lunged for her with a roar, aiming directly for her heart with his axe, prepared to hack it clean out of her. Róisín nearly lost her head in the process and instead it was the water basin that took the beating, the cheap tin being split in two and water spilling everywhere. She slipped in the mess and went off on her back, and once he had hauled the axe back out of the basin, Róisín was barely on her feet when he lunged for her again, flailing angrily, screaming curses at her, various ways of describing what he was going to do to her, how much he wished she had never been born, and that he was going to gut her like a cheap fish at the market.

It was all rather frightening, the contributing source to the nightmares that plagued her for months afterwards, and Róisín did not know where the instinct to react the way she did came from. Her first (embarrassing) weapon choice was the washboard, which she managed to slam across his gut several times before he wrenched it out of her hands and threw it at her, busting her shoulder in the process. The majority of their ‘battle’, if you could even call it that - a fray that consisted primarily of obscenities being hurled at one another, as well as chairs and knives. When the axe was brought back into the mess, Róisín felt real terror all over again, and, ducking and dodging blows, watching the cabin go to pieces and ending up, at one point, with the axe buried in her thigh and an utterly bloody mess. Not that her master fared much better than she: she suddenly became acquainted with the cutlery drawer and had several utensils jammed into various parts of his body each time she got close enough, as though to compliment the axe wound he had left her with. It was when he pinned her to the floor, hand on her throat and axe in the air, that she loosened one of the knives from his thigh and jammed it up under his diaphragm. It wasn’t enough to kill him, she knew that much, but it was enough to buy her the time to grab the hunting knife he kept with his boots and used all her strength to jam it down through his sternum and into his heart as he came at her one final time. She may have been terrified of being alone, and petrified of the length she had been driven to in order to defend herself, but she would be damned if she was going to die in a dirty cabin, killed by a man with tin forks sticking out of his damn thighs. No, no, she was not going to die. Not now, not anytime soon.

That night, after a long day of hiding in a cupboard and on-and-off hyperventilating - irrationally terrified that he might find a way to come back despite having a hunting knife buried in his chest, clean through his heart - Róisín abandoned the little Northern cabin and left behind the corpse of the monster that turned her into what she was and headed further south, until she reached Belfast. She made a home there for herself, turning to various forms of employment ranging from a scullery maid to a piss-poor seamstress, until she settled into yet another cleaning job, this time at one of the weaving factories working on, thankfully, the shift designated for cleaning looms during the night, the only time the machines weren’t in use. The pay was meagre, pathetic and all but a fraction of what she made while working with the estate, and it was barely enough to survive on, so she holed up in the work houses, living with the other women. And in living with them came the growing temptation to drain them, to fill a belly that hungered not for food, but for other things, things that made her feel like more of a monster than ever.

But she did not lay a finger on anyone in the shared house. The girls became sisters to her, astonishingly tolerant of her nocturnal preferences and her apparent ‘sunlight’ allergy in which they spoke of in hushed tones, but only when she wasn’t around; they treated her like a family because, well, that’s what factory girls were: one of the biggest, weirdest kinds of families imaginable. Silence continued to prevail in her life, a monotonous affair that comprised primarily of peaceful excursions to and from work, going to the shops in the morning when they first opened, and sometimes walking along the docks to admire the new ships being built. All these little dots connected to form a span of six years with little else happening other than the occasional body turning up here and there - just beggars, no one noteworthy - and then the Irish War of Independence happened. Unlike the Great War, this act of defiance instigated by her country riled her in the best ways possible - if it had been at-all possible, she would have grabbed a gun and joined her fellow Irishmen in the streets, fighting for the independence of her homeland from the British government. The Easter Rising of several years prior and the events that led to it had set her blood, as well as that of many others, boiling; no one, her and several of the factory girls had discussed one night over rather unlady-like drinks, fucked with their country and expected to walk away with their heads held high. Unable to join in the battles, however, she took to attending the Old IRA meetings, becoming a face that was known amongst the guerrilla soldiers and officers until, one day in the November of 1920, when the violence was beginning to escalate, a gun was shoved into her hands and she was told to ditch the skirts and get out on the streets because they needed as many hands as they could get out there.

And so began a long time of working with the IRA, both the Old faction and then the newer, more violent Provisional Irish Republican Army when the IRA split into two distinct factions in 1969. When she stopped fighting in the streets, she worked for a while on the border, helping smuggle in weaponry from the United States and Libya. In her location on the border, the types of weapons that passed through her hands was terrifying. Her and several other men, one of whom was a scrap of an Irishman by the name of Liam Moore, drew up the false documents to ship along with the boxes upon boxes of guns, ammunition, and the tonnes of Semtex, so more weapons could head North, back to Belfast and other outlying areas, where there was less of a chance for them to be found. In the early 70’s, after accidentally finding herself to be quite proficient with making small devices explode, Liam brought her along to a meeting with several officers and both of them were stationed with a small group of soldiers, Liam placed in command over the motley crew of men and Róisín suddenly finding herself with the title ’Demolitions Expert’. Blowing things up, whether it was with Semtex or home-made pipe bombs, was apparently a God-given gift, and she used that gift on numerous occasions, be it in car bombs, demolishing portions of government buildings, or carefully laid mortars, made with a mother’s love and sent off with her best wishes. The majority of the attacks she was involved in were low-profile bombings, save for one incident in late October, early November, of 1993, where she had planted a bomb in a car that had a trunk filled with Semtex, an attack in which she nearly became one of the victims herself and she was branded as a terrorist under the name she went by at the time.

Her stint with the Provos ended in 1997, with the third major ceasefire declaration and the beginnings of actual diplomatic negotiations between the British and the Sinn Fein. With this movement on the table, she moved into a quieter civilian life with an aged Liam, with whom she had been quite frank about her living situation twenty years earlier - “Liam, darling, I hate to say this, but I’m not actually alive. If that makes any sense at all. Actually, no, that doesn’t make much sense, does it? Yeah, no. Didn’t think so. Okay, yeah, long story short. I’m a vampire. Huzzah? ” (His only coherent reply to this declaration was a thoughtful ‘huh, well that explains why you survived that car bomb, then’). They moved from Belfast, neither of them too keen on lingering in a city they had caused bloodshed in, and, perhaps ironically, they settled in a small village in England, several hours away from London, both of them more or less hiding from the titles they had been left with, both of which were that of terrorists. No one knew who they were, nor did anyone ask. It was the most comforting thing either of them had experienced in a long time, and it was something to cling to.

They stayed in that village until early 2002, Róisín taking care of Liam until he passed and then remaining only to take care of his burial arrangements. After that, she put all her belongings, guns included, into storage and she travelled East, under another name and with false papers, to spend several weeks in Istanbul - a place as far away from and as different from Ireland and England as she could get, braving the sun for as long as she could to tour the beautiful, history-steeped city. When she ended her trip almost seven weeks later - i.e when her bank account finally hit zero - she returned to the Isles and moved to cramped, one-room flat in central London, where she now works at a small, quiet pub as a bartender and a waitress. Civilian life, she’s come to learn, is a nice life, and she’s quite certain that this is the way she wants to live now.

RP sample:

[1]

Ireland-Northern Ireland Border, October 17th, 1971. 23h17.


The guardhouse was nothing more than a little shack, tucked practically out of sight and shaded by oaks with thick trunks and sagging branches, and the road that wound its way towards and beyond the checkpoint was just as forgotten, just as run-down, as the shack. The roof sagged and leaked in places, primarily over the makeshift kitchen, the windows were stained with the sea salt that blew across the island, and the once-white paint peeled and flaked to the ground, covering the dirt and yellowing grass with chips that looked almost like a light dusting of snow. Inside fared little better: the hardwood floor was chipped and salt-stained as well, the walls were in desperate need of a new layer of wallpaper, and the sparely furnished sitting room - a single-windowed room that consisted of two stale-smelling sofas, a busted floor-model radio that was possibly a relic of the 40’s, and an oak desk that was covered in piles upon piles of paper - was barely big enough for the three men and one vampiress who had been calling it home for week-long stints for the past two years. The electricity flickered, the gas stove in the backroom tended to fail on them more often than not, leaving the four to sit there for hours at a time with nothing to do but to listen to their growling stomachs; the road was rarely travelled, save for the occasional farmer trucking his wares to the capital or other large towns, or the munitions trucks that would ghost silently through once the right papers were signed.

And this night was one of those nights when there was nothing to do but stare at the ceiling and listen to the wind as it whistled its way through the shingles on the shack’s roof.

Seated at the desk, shoulders hunched and a nearly-forgotten cigarette dangling between pinched-white lips, Róisín had her forehead in one hand and the other drifted idly over the pages of the newspaper she was skimming down through. She had strayed from the dismal contents of the first few pages, the headline of BOMBS IN BELFAST blaring across the front page, the jarring black print taking up half the sheet and, beneath it, an inky image of a building in flames. Róisín grunted, cursed lowly when she read the print beneath it and the list consisting of three suspects who were now being held in custody.

Running her hand through her hair, she removed a folder from the bottom right desk drawer after unlocking it and, opening it, she extracted a sheaf of papers. There were rows upon rows of names, accompanied by images of men and women alike, names of villages, ages. Taking a slow drag on her cigarette and then exhaling slowly, through her nose, the smoke lingering like a wreath around her face, she grabbed a black marker from a cup and began to skim down through the names. She took another drag, the embers at the end of her smoke flaring crimson, and let loose the smoke once more.

“How goes it?”

The hand on her back, warm and familiar, startled her more than the deep voice, and she came up off the chair with a yelp, choking on the smoke caught in her throat. Liam laughed at her, patting her firmly on the back until she stopped coughing, tears streaming from her eyes.

“Sweet mother Mary,” she hissed, slapping his hand away and levelling a dirty look on him. “Be a little quieter next time, would you? I didn’t wake the village ten miles over.”

Liam laughed and rested his hip on the edge of the desk, and Róisín made a face when she heard the other two soldiers, Pádrig and Ryan, cackling as well. Her ears went as scarlet as her face and she buried herself back in browsing through the list of operatives, both enlisted and volunteer, puffing on her cigarette with a good-natured sort of fury.

The hand went to her shoulder, slid back to the middle of her back and she felt Liam’s scruffy chin against her cheek. “Sorry, Grumpy-Buns,” he teased. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, I promise. But, seriously, what are you going at?”

Róisín gestured blindly to the newspaper. “There was some action in Belfast a day or so ago,” she said distractedly as Liam grabbed up the front page, tearing hastily from the front to the internal articles, cursing low in the back of his throat, “and the RUC has names, apparently, and people. We know they like to bullshit, so I want to see how true this is.”

Pádrig and Ryan had come to stand on either side of Liam, peering over his shoulder at the newspaper as Róisín continued to diligently scan through the sheets, onto the eleventh of seventeen pages. No names so far, but that didn’t quell the tightness in her long-silent chest. Nervously, she bit on her knuckle. One person could blow it all, for her, for them, for everyone. That was all it took; the government had begun holding people indefinitely, whether it was with or without reasonable doubt for the accuser’s participation in ‘criminal activity’. And it would seem the men behind her felt the same; Liam had set the paper back down on the desk and was pacing the room, a hand on the back of his neck and chewing on his lips. Ryan had replaced Liam’s presence at the corner of the desk, peering down over his nose and watching anxiously the vampiress as she flicked through the pages. Pádrig watched in silence, but Róisín could hear his heart racing in his chest. If hers had been pumping still, it would have been doing the same thing.

She felt sick. “They have one,” she said quietly. “Not a name I’m familiar with, though. Sheet ‘ere says he’s a volunteer. Does the name Eric Byrne mean anything at all to anyone?”

The room remained silent until the wind picked up once more outside and whistled in and around the eaves, through the shingles, a sharp noise that made that guardhouse sound as though it were going to come tumbling down around their ears.

And then they all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“Thank fuck for the volunteers,” Róisín groaned, feeling the tension running clean out of her until she sat slumped in her chair, hands covering her face. Pádrig placed his bear-like hands on either side of her covered face and kissed the crown of her head, eliciting girlish giggles and she slapped him away, red-cheeked and grinning. Liam and Ryan cackled and Pádrig ruffled the woman’s hair.

“Looks like we might live to see another week of freedom, boys,” Róisín said cheerfully. “The only ’tacht I want in my life is the Gaeltacht, not the Jailtacht.”

Liam raised an imaginary glass and the others followed suit. His smile was warm and it was one that was reserved for her, and her alone. “Sweet, sweet freedom.”

“And I do believe that’s something I’m willing to drink to.”


[2]

Belfast, Northern Ireland. October-November, 1993. 15h46


Acrid smoke filled her lungs and stung her eyes, causing tears to stream from them, down over her cheeks flushed from choking on the burning air. The street beyond her was in a state of panic, and sirens filled the previously quiet afternoon air. It was petrifying, from an outside perspective. From an inside one, however, she simply felt stupid.

Her first instruction had been to plant the bomb. She had done that.

Her second instruction was to detonate the bomb. She had done that, too.

Except, she had forgotten about instruction one-and-a-half: get the hell out of Dodge while she could. As a result of that minor piece of negligence, Róisín lay in the coffee shop she had been standing outside of when she had pulled the trigger, blown through the window she had been standing beside when a chunk of debris had struck her. Now, she lay in a puddle of blood that she was certain was mostly hers, shards of glass sticking out of her thighs and a chunk of the shrapnel lodged through her upper arm. Blood ran freely from the wound and Róisín briefly wondered, as her head swam lazy circles, if that was why her eyes were streaming.

“Holy hell,” she wheezed, grasping a shard of glass that protruded from her breast in her hand and hauling it out, throwing the bloodied piece to the floor and grimacing as it shattered loudly. God, her ears were ringing vespers. “How much Semtex did I put in that fucker?”

Placing her good hand over her bleeding chest and grimacing at the agonizing flare of pain that ripped through her left arm, Róisín dragged herself from the window and pulled herself up until she was stood with her back to the wall, head lolling uselessly for a moment. Then, she placed a hand over the protruding end of the piece of shrapnel - that motion alone was enough to set her head spinning even worse than before - and, shutting her eyes and gritting her teeth, she choked back a howl when she hauled it out, throwing it to the debris-covered tile floor with a clatter.

The sound of a gun being cocked pulled her immediately from the hazy state she was in and she felt nauseous when she found herself staring down the barrel of someone’s rifle. Róisín licked her white lips and then grinned shakily, panting. “Whoa, sweetie, that’s … not very nice. You don’t do that to a lady.”

“Like hell you’re a lady,” spat the man. He readjusted his stance with the gun, reshouldering it several times as he shifted. Nervous. He was nervous; the stench of anxiety rolled off of him in waves.

Róisín smiled weakly. “Surprise,” she said. “Nah, I guess I’m not that much of a lady, am I?”

Before the man could react to her words, she drew her Webley from its thigh holster, shot him in the foot and then threw herself to the floor when he fired his gun at her. Where her head once was, there was now a gaping, splintered hole. The man hurled shrill curses at her and Róisín briefly marvelled at the man’s creativity; even she wouldn’t have been able to come up with half of the names he called her in the span of less than a minute, and she’d been around for … well, too long, at this point. Far too long.

Hands slipped beneath her arm pits and she was hoisted upwards and dragged backwards, through a backdoor in the coffee shop. She was about to struggle, about to bite, when a hand was slapped over her mouth. “The Captain’s gonna fuckin’ gut you yet, Frighil.”

Róisín nearly went limp with relief as she was guided to her feet and urged down a flight of stairs, out through a basement door and over a few fences. The sirens did not fade with the further they distanced themselves from the attack, nor did the fear coiling in her belly abate.

And then she grinned up at her rescuer. “He’s been threatening me with that for years,” she said. “How much you wanna bet he’s gonna find at least another ten chances to say it to me again, huh? I got a few pounds to spare, I'm sure.”

“I don’t think you have nearly enough to place a fair bet, Lady.”

The smile slipped a little from Róisín’s face and she heaved a sigh. “Yeah, yeah you’re probably right. What a bother. I always did like a good bet, y‘know.”