NEW ERA RESISTANCE
JYJ, the mark of final calamity.

While playing in the gardens as a child, Xinling was snatched away from her family, ordered by a gentleman in possession of both title and large fortune in Brizo, Ptolemy-Horatius Brimstone. He has an estranged wife, Bianca, an eccentric inventor of mechanical contraptions. Their first and only child was a stillborn. The woman went raving mad, believing that her husband had taken the child away as a punishment. There was no peace in his home. The constant wailing, the destruction of property, the attempts on his life.

Brimstone devised a plan to appease and silence her. He would bring her a child, a child he had planned to kidnap and hide away. The child was his trumpet card in case the current ruler was overthrown by the resistance. He locked the little girl in a desolated tower overlooking the city. He told his wife the child was her Cynthia, and that in order to keep the girl from the dreaded sickness plaguing the city, she and the servants were not allowed to make direct contact. His wife drunk in his lies and blindly believed it. She bothered him no more as she occupied herself with building contraptions that would feed, groom, clothe, and play with her sweet Cynthia. Years passed in this manner until it was no longer enough to satisfy. She wanted to teach Cynthia how to read, write, and speak.

Before she went completely mad again, Brimstone quickly whipped up a solution. He bought a dark skinned woman from Haiti and claimed the woman had the power to ward off the sickness. Therefore, she was fit to stay by Cynthia's side. He fooled his wife once again. Unfortunately for Brimstone, the woman was not who she seemed to be. She was well learned and taught Cynthia how to read and write. She taught her English and French. She taught her history, science, geography. Cynthia loved her nurse, or as she likes to call the kind woman, "Nou Nou" but the words and the pictures in books were not enough to satiate her hunger for knowledge. She wanted to see the city below. Not just from her window, she wanted to 'see' it, be in it.

The first time she slipped out while her Nou Nou slept was a complete disaster... but she learned from it. Wandering the cobblestone alleys was much easier dressed as a boy. It was an easy task, disguising herself... thanks to her boy-ish physique. Dark, wire-y hair and thin as a rail. And as time passed, she acquired quite a few tricks of the trade from the other dirty boys. She could act like them, talk like them, throw curses up and down the streets like them. They saw her as one of their own... their little brother "Zen." One night as she scurried along the dimly lit canal like a plague rat, she saw a woman who had a striking resemblance to her Nou Nou. Against her better judgment, she followed the woman. The woman held a piece of paper in her hand... perhaps a letter. She stopped in front of a red door and knocked. It opened. The next thing Cynthia knew, she was staring at her Nou Nou's head rolling into the canal below. A tall, blonde-haired man with sharp almond-shaped eyes hovered over her nurse's decapitated body. The man... he had a strange mark, the letters: JYJ, tattooed on his forearm. She burned the symbol into her memory.

Cynthia returned home not knowing what to think. Did she want to break things? Did she want to cry? No. She wanted revenge. For months, she planned. Disassembling Bianca's contraptions, Cynthia built her own. Things that would aid her in her quest for revenge. Then, the day came when a flyer floated up to her window. The New Era Resistance. Her eyes were glued to the prints. She knew that mark very well. JYJ. The man had the same mark. That man who killed Nou Nou... he must belong to the resistance.

^{RELATED: Now You See Me, 'Steam Days'}

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