Board Thread:Role Plays/@comment-5999656-20170705042341/@comment-5999656-20170711184308

Lustra should have seen it coming, but the reversal of the question back onto her parents caused her smile to be immediately replaced with a cold stoicism. Her semblance activated automatically, concealing the change so it seemed that she maintained her friendliness when in actuality, she was wrestling to keep her tone even.

"I've never met them," she said quickly. She'd had to answer this question countless times, but somehow, every time, it sent up resentful feelings she wanted to keep repressed.

Lustra released her semblance gradually, so her solemn true expression became visible. She'd had to deal with a lot of awkward situations when she'd first discovered her semblance, since she'd relied too heavily on it and people had become unnerved by the disparity between her expression and her tone. She had to show her true feelings, if only a little.

"I was raised by my grandparents. I was a... pretty precocious little kid, so they sent me to a renowned martial arts academy as soon as I was old enough so I could grasp some combat philosophies and learn self-control."

That doesn't answer her question.

Well, here was the decision Lustra had to make. If Cyzarine would never check on her Huntress profile, then she could avoid revealing her background. But since doing that literally took a minute or so of clicking, it was better that she decided how the information was revealed, now rather than when they were alone in the wilderness. It would be extraordinarily troublesome if Cyzarine learned of her origins out there and decided to try and end her because she had tried to keep something as important as this a secret.

"My parents... have been in jail since before I was born. They were arrested for providing a nerve agent to a local mafia, which was used to assassinate a police officer's young daughter. When they - the police, I mean - investigated the incidents involving that nerve agent following her death, they said it was likely that my parents were responsible for the deaths of at least two dozen people."

Lustra gave a sardonic, humorless smile.

"I've never taken a chemistry course in my life. But you can imagine a legacy like that tends to stick. That's why I went out of my way to become a Huntress, to try and overwrite that legacy with one that I actually created. It's a work in progress. I owe a lot of my successes to my team."

"Is my behavior starting to make sense now?" Lustra said coolly. She couldn't repress the bite of sarcasm that crept into her voice. But people, especially heroic Huntsmen and Huntresses, had a tendency of forming incomplete pictures of people from biased knowledge.

Hopefully Cyzarine would be more self-aware than that.