Chiaroscuro

## Lonnie Kingston

### Personality

Tea is Lonnie's dearest friend. This is a fact that has nothing to do with her first name and everything to do with her corybantic genes, or *utter lack thereof* according to every test ever. Her ADHD stymies the hell out of the possibility for her to lead a focused life, and the only way to get her to sit down and breathe is ***lots and lots*** of tea. Soda and chocolate work as alternatives, and are more convenient for traveling. She doesn't mind this at all, but the crowd has a breaking point. It's in everyone's best interests to make sure she's not bouncing off the walls for too long. Her inability to remain still, though far from being her only defining trait, is well documented by her peers. You'll be hard pressed to find someone else who favors walking barefoot on broken glass over being motionless.

About that: Lonnie's suicidal. By definition, anyway. Mortality is something that slips her mind like lost socks with their owners. It's never been in her best interests to question why shoving your hands into a blender or charging towards a moving train headfirst isn't *normal*. Watching some of her siblings die helped, but Donovan's had to take her by the hand for the gist of it. Some days she still forgets, and goes 'oops' when she gets stabbed in the chest. Then she has to squirm at the pain and wonder why everyone else is losing their minds. She feels pain alright; she doesn't take it seriously, is all. Suffice to say, she's less mortal than she presents herself to be. That's unavoidable when Ananke and Khronos themselves declare you a detour from everything that should be. *Wot?*

Being inhuman makes her fairly terrible at stealth, not that she had any plans on pursuing that tactic. Lonnie is bright, flashy, and all-consumingly *powerful* about it. She's more one with the aurora borealis than the Christmas tree. Unlike many of her fellow Champions, she was unfairly born with full awareness of her powers and what she was and then some. She's been at ease with her power usage since forever (literal, if you ask her); it's caused Donovan to ban her from going out on her own lest she expose herself unwittingly. While it's positively outrageous for all foes, it gets excessive for her allies. It's no fun at all when she blinks behind the enemy and severs their spine for first blood. This cheery, "Tumblr extra" outlook on life is often sobered by the underlying resolve to be as chill with blood on her clothes as she is with peanut butter and chocolate.

### History

“Ya hear a lot of parents boasting that their kids matured fast. Things like walking when they only a few months old, speaking in full sentences when they two, you know. Advanced. Me? I cheated. I was six months old one week, six years old the next. Ahgez that's why they call it evolution.

“Gunner - my dad, if you kenneven call him that - did’n notice. He gets too many kids and throws too many parties. One of my brothers blew up the pantry this won’tam and he found out maybe five or six years later. His only comment? “So that's why my stash got so low.” Yeah, he nommoch of a dad. Hardly any of us call him that. We call him Gunner, or lowlife motherfucker. I dunno what that means because Sis wone tell me.”

*비춰줘 날 환히 비춰줘
영원히 떠나간대도
변해간대도*
In the beginning, a star died.

As the bleak darkness it left was flooded again with light, few remembered it. Fewer were those who honored it. You ask if stars are rewarded for being wished upon all their life. They are. You ask what they could possibly wish for.

Snorting at a crappy pun. Getting a paper cut. Figuring out if they like you back. Hugging your parents goodbye. Sharing a cup of tea with a beggar. Patting someone's hair as they hurt. Bitter words that you don't mean flying out of your mouth. Trembling wearily as the same old scene plays out in front of you. Refusing to get off their back because you're comfortable.

*Life*.

That one bright star, the brightest of them all, wished for one life to be preserved other than its own.

*넌 내 태양 가릴 수 없어
숨이 턱턱 막혀와 피할 수 없어*
Mourning. That was all Theia knew when the loss of her children struck her. They had left messages through their successors, whose respectfully lowered eyes understood. Apollo and Artemis were gods, not Titans, but delighting in her pain was beneath them. Theia departed with her children's last requests solely in mind. With her, she brought what few tokens they had insisted she must have.

One of them was an egg that pulsed with the last rays of a dying sun.

And something more.

Theia had begged Helios to stop, to reconsider, to think for himself. Her son, her laidback child who cared little for interference, had been immovable on the matter. She hadn't seen him in such a fit for millennia. When he'd called on Chronos and Ananke to convince them to *rewrite what had only begun*, she was inconsolable. It had been the turning point, the dismissal of his final years, and the acceptance of what had to pass. She hated how it had come so easily for him and not for her. What she did regret was how she protested instead of assisted. They could've spent more time laughing together rather than shouting at each other. She should've done more, or tried. He hadn't been her baby anymore, but she'd been too stubborn. If only...

In spite of everything, he'd entrusted the source of their spats to her. She swore to herself that if need be, she'd sacrifice her blood like her son had done. She hid it from the gods' prying, disapproving eyes and bargained for prophetic silence. She talked down the storms, the fires, and all that Time and Chaos predicted. She was prepared to rear the last Titaness that Creation would witness. But her patience and power waned, and the egg's hunger did not. Love stole even more from her as she fled from what refused to let her go. Her last son declared a rejection so irretrievable she could do nothing but comply to his unearthly demands. From him, the egg reaped all it could and stilled. She thought her role done at long last and left. In many ways, it had. And yet, she still hoped Helios would forgive her for the desertion.

*오늘도 너와 나는 발을 맞춰가며 나가
So hot 도도하게 오늘도 난 녹아*
Dale Vane was dead and it wasn't because cheeseburgers are not made in an oven.

They said it was a shame — the good die young. The blame they left to the faulty wiring. He had no recorded living family, though his neighbors swore up and down that he had a son. They weren't able to confirm the claims. Save for a few concerned colleagues, Dale's funeral went unattended. The fire had left the body unrecognizable and cremation had been a say-no-more.

People don't believe in things that go bump in the night, much less in the morning. That's why the dear old lady who was present for the first sparks wouldn't tell anyone about the screams that had started long before. No one from Dale's workplace would dwell on how Dale had called in sick that day. And above all, everyone at the scene dismissed the true origin of fire. It hadn't been the kitchen at all.

It had been the front door.

*오 넌 내 태양
어딜 가도 비춰주네 oh my lady*
She remembers.

Small things, big things. Sometimes trivial, always important.

The glance of a shadow that spun her on her retreat across these strange new lands that Gram had abandoned her in. Sweaty, bleeding guilt at the sight of her uncle's charred corpse. Fierce, undying recognition when she was drawn to her cousin, her nephew and ached to drain him as she did his father. Almost, almost taking the youngest, the daughter, and the gaping hole she was stuffed into, screaming.

Lonnie Kingston was not born. She was hatched. The spirit of mischief himself was baffled at how the energy bomb he'd swallowed came out in the same egg form he'd found it in.