Her world ended with a whimper, not a bang. The tear in reality knitted itself back together again, stranding her on the other side, in a different world than the one into which Lenna had been born. That was fine. She had never really liked her birth world, anyway.

One can learn an awful lot about ones self from how they respond to something as simple as the destruction of their reality. For her victims, it was always revealing. To see their eyes widen at the realization of the ruin of their life, and its rapidly approaching end... they always responded in truly telling ways. Fear, anger, resignation. All the stages of grief, or none of them. It always taught her something about them. Better yet, they learned a little something about themselves.

The path to enlightenment is not without its bumps and curves. Generally, Lenna never felt bad about killing her targets after learning their true natures. Most were truly evil men. And those that had responded nobly? Well... the old fallback always worked, in that scenario. Someone would not have hired her to kill them if they hadn’t done something wrong. Maybe that something was simply being too good. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in someone’s way. To them, she always apologized. But money was money, and a job was a job.

In the aftermath of the destruction of her own life, Lenna didn’t learn all that much. There were some lost contacts, and a few exes she’d never have to see again. Lenna didn’t have family, and she didn’t have loved ones. Hell, she hardly even had friends. To the healing of the rip and the end of that other world, the real world, her original world, and her home, she felt cold... numb. For her, that little death didn’t teach her anything she had not already known. She was a stone-cold killer, and there wasn’t really anything she held in reverence. Nothing was sacred, nothing deserved her respect. In life, she could simply sail through without making true connections. Brief moments of connection were great, like her mission with Sinclaire or a one-night stand, but they couldn’t touch her. They didn’t change her. At least, that was what Lenna had thought. It was only when she faced her own death that Lenna learned about herself. About what she truly valued... and about weaknesses she had never considered that she would have. Like most important events in her life, the whole thing kicked off when somebody tried to kill her.

—

Always with the missions. An organization like SUPER never ran out of targets. Their lists of names were extensive, information varying from vague to intensive. People to kill, people to question (and don’t mix up the two unless you want the white hot fire of bureaucratic justice to rain down on your head). There were always people. And since moving over to the new world, Lenna had been working hard.

You know, you would be surprised at how many dangerous mutants a government organization can discover and want to vanish after only a little bit of time. And investigating the ones who were questionable? Difficult, but infiltration and faking things had never been her weak points. It was just the questioning leadership that had.

Lenna had been raised by a straight-up dictator, all things considered. Cortez had been the ruler of his own little slice of the world, controlling crime. Drugs, power, pleasure. Even life and death. That sort of leadership makes one question leaders. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. She’d happily left the thinking to her superiors, until the nagging monster known as conscience had reared its ugly head. Honestly, that wasn’t true. At the time, she’d just been tricking herself.

Conscience had been something with zero to do with Lennas questioning orders and leaving Cortez. Independence had been the real culprit. But anger and conscience had come along for the ride.

Freedom to make her own calls, about who she worked for and when. One hell of a drug. She had been granted permission to work for who she’d wanted, and because of that, she’d worked for the wrong person. Killed the wrong person. And then she’d killed the wrong person who’d been dispatched to dispatch her. Lenna had also learned a dangerous fact. Her boss had arranged the death of her parents. She’d learned that by exercising her own freedom, and killed the person who’d actually done the job. But her freedom had told her she was free to want more. Vengeance is a kind of freedom. All that freedom had left its mark.

Now, when Lenna got an order of questionable validity, she didn’t always question it. But she was free to, when she saw fit. Free to exercise a little judgment. And she was something of a monster, whose judgement was not perfect. She was a monster with a code. Sometimes, she used that freedom to live up to this code, and people she deemed redeemable or undeserving of super violence skated on a technicality. People like Aura, another monster with a code... who had escaped. Whoopsie. Her bad. But such choices came few and far between, so Super had yet to really notice her big failing. Lenna had not noticed it, either.

She valued independent thought and she valued free will. That didn’t always jive well with supers prime directive... yet sometimes, it did. For instance, they’d had no problem with her integration into the general public. Her apartment was paid for with her own money, all her things, her money, and she lived there. They hadn’t objected yet. So long as she didn’t leave the country, she supposed they’d continue to not object. Hadn’t Nolan said as much?

She was free... except when she had a mission. Missions, missions. Always with the missions. This mission was one where someone tried to take her life. And not for the reason one would think.

—

When someone says they nearly died on a mission, you tend to think it had something to do with the mission. A screw up? Something fatal. A close call? Someone disagreed with your course? They rarely assume the attempt on ones life came before the mission had ever started... by an unrelated party to the whole thing.

The attack happened suddenly, a surprise. Now, after setting it up for all this time, one would think it was a good attack. Something honed and clean, at a target and planned long in advance. Again, you’d be wrong. It was an attack of opportunity, and one that had been entirely unplanned. How does one plan for running into a dead woman?

He was grungy. He was sneering. He saw her walking on the street minding her own business, and said “holy s#*t!” Then, he pulled a gun out and shot at her.

The guttural utterance had hardly been a warning. For her purposes, however, it was warning enough. In her mind, Lenna imagined an orange glow surrounding the gun. Her eyes had flicked up as he’d went to aim the gun at her head— and she’d nudged the gun off course by the barest of margins. It went wide. Then, Lenna surged towards the grimy bastard.

She disarmed him in a blur of motion, knocked him down, and sighted the gun on the man. Then, she paused for a second, because this was not covert. SUPER liked being under the RADAR almost as much as they liked acronyms. He used the moments hesitation to make like lightning and bolt.

Lenna cursed. Police would be on the scene soon. He was fleeing the scene. She had a gun with uncertain origins, and it wasn’t clear what he would do after he escaped the scene. Hence, she shoves the gun away and rushed to follow him. Better to catch him and figure out why he’d shot at her than to let him escape and double back with backup.