Author's Notes

*shuffles feet, looking sheepish*

Yeah… I kind of sort of made another fake Sue for purposes of mocking them.

But at least, unlike when I unleashed Esuma in The Flames of Paradise, I'm telling you up front this time. That's progress, right? Right? :D

Also, the setting is a bit different. The poor girl in this story should by all right be humanity's saviour and have all the men at her feet, but she has the misfortune of living in a universe too realistic for her kind.

I'm sure you'd figure it out on your own, but just to save you the trouble of noticing the pattern right away, I've used section breaks to break things up when the point of view changes. It's all third person, but it will move from looking at things the way my Sue sees them to reflecting the perceptions of the other characters.

Oh, and another note… this is set in my usual AU, after Apprentices.

Very short prologue, but updates will be pretty quick. I think.

Prologue

Heliksa leaned against the bars of her cell and sighed heavily, staring at the hair she held between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

The grey hair.

She had just spotted it in her mirror that morning, mocking her, and had angrily ripped it out.

She glared at it. Grey! It didn't even have the decency to be snow white or even a gleaming silver! It was just grey, like an ugly little wire that had somehow found its way into the beautiful, deep auburn of her hair.

She cursed and threw the offending follicle at the floor. It floated down in a completely unsatisfying way. She screamed, prompting a snicker from her cellmate, some homely woman whose name she kept forgetting.

"Stop being such a drama queen," the woman said, "it's going to give you grey hair." She laughed at that.

Heliksa pouted at her. "Anybody would be upset over… this!" she said, gesturing at the cell. "It's no wonder my health is failing, in such a dismal environment! Not to mention the company! No offense, of course."

Her cellmate rolled her eyes; thankfully for her own sanity, she had long since decided that nothing her annoying cellmate said had any importance.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this!" Heliksa continued, sitting on the bed and slouching dejectedly.

"Yeah, yeah," the other woman said absently, already resigned to yet another retelling of Heliksa's life story. "I know, I know. You're special."

"That's hardly my fault," Heliksa replied, "but yes, I am. It is soooo frustrating to be wasting away in here when I could be saving civilization instead… and at the same time, am I a horrible person for thinking that if civilization is going to be doing this" she gestured at the cell again, "to me, it deserves to do without me?"

Her cellmate offered no answer.

"I know, it's a hard question," Heliksa continued. "It's because this is all wrong! It started with those two boys; those soldiers." She paused and sighed, a melancholic smile on her face. "Pirate Boy and Mr. Ninja… it's not that I blame them, they were in love with me, so of course they were competing for my attention. They couldn't know they'd end up drawing Cobra's attention to us."