From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

The Girl in the Picture

The laminated paper card felt impossibly flimsy in her hand. It was hard to believe, she thought, that it had survived the incident at all, much less come through it completely undamaged. Even so, there it was, the same as it had been before... when everything around her had changed. To look at it was almost to turn back time, to a more innocent day.

The dark-haired girl in the picture smiled back in the face of her stare, cheerfully oblivious to the chaos which had overtaken the world around her. There were times when Kitten almost envied that naivete, when she missed being able to look at the world without seeing the evil that lurked around every corner. Perhaps, as some said, ignorance truly was bliss.

No, she told herself. Ignorance was merely ignorance... and naivete was a dangerous characteristic in Paragon City. Still, there was a certain innocence about the girl in that picture that she wished she could have back.

Her gaze shifted to the writing beneath the picture. "Serina Willmore", it read, identifying that face to any who might gaze upon it. It had been her name before. Legally, it was still hers, and she still used it sometimes... but it felt almost alien to her now. Distant, as though it rightly belonged to another person.

In a way, that was because it did. Unlike her pefectly preserved SERAPH ID badge, Serina herself had not gone through the incident unchanged. When her experiment exploded, hundreds of glass shards had ripped through clothing and skin, and each fragment had been coated with small amounts of altered genetic material. SERAPH had wanted to know what Council super-solider serum would do to hero DNA; by the time they pulled her out of the rubble of the lab, she was a walking case study.

Since then, it didn't seem right to call herself Serina anymore. Serina was the girl in the picture; fair skin, dark hair, that irrepressible cheerful smile. Serina didn't have a cat's ears, or claws, or fangs, or a tail, and she definitely didn't have white fur and bright red tiger stripes from head to toe. Serina might have liked those things; she'd always loved heroes, after all, even the slightly strange ones. It was why she'd been studying metahuman biology. It was why she was working as a lab assistant at SERAPH.

Ultimately, it was how she'd become someone else.

It wasn't just the body... her mind was different, too. She thought more quickly, acted more on instinct, chased down hunches as though they were fleeing prey. It was an apt comparison, as she did that, too. There was no mistaking the predatory instinct; she loved the hunt, and relished the fight. Hero work came naturally to her, as though she were born to it. She ran and jumped and felt the wind ripple through her fur, and she reveled in the sheer exhiliration of it all.

Serina hadn't been like that. Oh, she'd been friendly, bubbly even. She'd loved life with a passion, every bit as much as Kitten did now. She'd never been violent, though, and never much of a thrill-seeker. Serina was a girl that was afraid of roller-coasters, and would never have dreamed of jumping off a twenty-story building, or walking through the alleys of the Row at night.

No, she could hardly call herself Serina at all, no matter how much people told her the name suited her. It just wasn't her anymore.

She walked to the window, casting open the curtains to let the sun's brilliant light spill into her darkened apartment. That was something else she'd gained... an appreciation for certain small pleasures, be it a good stretch, a scratch behind the ears, or even just a warm sunbeam. She always insisted to anyone else that she was more girl than cat. To herself, privately, sometimes she wondered.

From the window, even with it closed, she could hear the sounds of mayhem. Back Yard Football, she'd heard they called it. She'd asked the Rambler about that once, since he'd lived in the Row all his life, and it seemed to be a local tradition; he'd just shaken his head and smiled. Still, it looked like they were having fun, and what was wrong with that? If a few Skulls got mauled along the way, they probably deserved it.

She could hear other sounds, too... downstairs, in the training room, Nanodrive was sparring with someone. Empty Sky, probably, but it was hard to tell. The Row's old buildings were heavily built, and Ember had chosen the strongest one they could find to convert into a base. That she could hear anything happening two floors down at all was an artifact of her enhanced senses. It sounded like they were enjoying themselves, too. It was almost a surprise... when she'd first joined the group, she hadn't thought Angela was capable of fun at all. Maybe she was learning to lighten up a little.

She looked down at the badge again, turning it over and over in her hand. She wasn't sure why she had pulled it out of the drawer. Part of her wasn't sure why she had kept it at all. Maybe it was like that ex-boxer from the Rogue Isles had told her when they'd talked in the D. "You have to remember where you came from," he'd said. There was truth in it. She worried, sometimes, about what she was becoming. Her feral side was enticing, and when it came fully to the surface, the results could be frightening. It had saved her life just the other day, and psosibly some of her teammates' lives as well... but the level of violence she'd found herself capable of was more than a little bit scary.

Somehow, she didn't think Serina would have approved.

Walking over to her dresser, she stuck the badge up in the corner of the mirror. There, she'd have to face herself every day. Her old self, and her new self, too. Maybe she could find a balance there. She couldn't go back to being Serina again... and she didn't really want to. But she owed it to the girl in the picture to be someone that girl could be proud of. To be the hero she had always wanted to be.

She smiled. It was a cause she could live for. And to that end, there was work to be done. She looked across the room at the window again, and that smile grew into a fanged grin. It was a beautiful day... and the city was calling.