Misadventurous

Cassandra Baron is the star character of my NaNoWriMo novel, tentatively titled CASSANDRA.  In this second novel of a series Cassandra Baron, becomes infatuated with a human named David Kilpatrick.

David happens to be the right hand man for Dominic Locke, the interim leader of the ancient race of predecessors to werewolves, known as the Rath. She becomes embroiled in the internal conflicts of the Rath and soon find herself facing off  with Dominic’s daughter, who is destined to be another new Power in the world.

Origin & Circumstances

Cassandra’s mother was the progeny of an amphibious civilization, long gone. Her father is the human musician, Jonathan Baron who discovered that his mother was a sea-dwelling, aboriginal remnant of that ancient race. Her genetic makeup was determined by the avatars of an ancient race of sentient ships known as the Vorsha. She was designed to be their perfect creation. She’s a weapon, a whirlwind. A god.

Cassandra is one of a kind and completely new to the human world. Her current abilities include shape-shifting (rarely used), rapid self-healing, teleportation and limited telepathy. Her rapid and unstable evolution makes her powers unstable, as she often has difficulty gauging the effect of some actions. On occasion, she finds that she can affect objects on a sub-atomic level, causing them to ignite. She’s stubborn and volatile and will kill for the ones that the she loves. She’s a straight shooter. She doesn’t always utilize tact, even though her father reminds her constantly to behave as humans do. She has a tendency to switch randomly from verbal speech to thought-speak and back when in the company of beings with telepathic ability. She teleports without warning and mid-conversation.

She is experiencing too much too quickly due to her rapid aging process and overconfidence in her genetic memory. She tends to act on a notion without thinking it through. Because of her siren lineage, she has a hypnotic effect on humans when she looks into their eyes. It’s almost something she can’t control. Their minds become open to her and they become susceptible to her control. She gets careless with her power and people get hurt sometimes.

Cassandra is a product of alien science left to evolve and incubate over many millenia. Her first act of violence was to deal a devastating blow to her creators. She constantly fears the day when they’ll recover enough to seek her out. Impulsive and stubborn, she laughs as easily as she cries and barely restrains herself from acting on both.

Her innate kindness is often undermined by her impatient and capricious nature. Her rage is often beyond her control.

Excerpt

Her panicked screech was cut short by the bone-jarring thump her body made crashing into the ground.  The dark figure lay there for a few moments, dazed from the pain radiating through her bones and the shock of even falling in the first place.  There was a thick moan, the jerky flutter of eyelids.  Her eyes widened, azure irises reaching for the sky.  She gasped, scrambling sideways.

Something small and dark fell to to ground with enough force to become partially lodged in the earth, bare inches from her face.  She uttered a shaky breath, struggling into a sitting position.  Every minute movement hurt like hell.  A metallic wetness blossomed in her mouth.  She grimaced, wiping at it with the back of her hand, brow furrowing when her fingers came away sticky with blood.  Cassandra Baron had just learned three valuable lessons.

The first lesson was that in many cases, an object of a certain mass colliding with a bigger object of even greater mass – say a frozen tundra, will often result in significant damage sustained by the smaller, more human shaped object.  The second lesson – and this was the real kicker; even a being with the ability to defy the constraints of space and time, was still firmly bound by the laws of something as pedestrian as gravity…

Written by Tonya Moore

Speculative Fiction Writer, exploring fiction's many forms. Visit my homepage to browse and add listings to the Web Fiction Directory.

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