[Earth] Where the mad things are...

It had been a few months since they'd been taken.   Her daughters.   Her only real ties to the galaxy at large had been stolen from her.   She refused to believe they were dead until she saw the bodies, but with each passing day she gave up just a little more hope.   Maybe people like her didn't deserve to have loved ones, they didn't deserve much of anything.   

She'd had help, and the Goddess knew that Sicaria and Lucia would do their damndest to find her daughters.   She doubted they would give up until long after she did.   But there had been so many dead ends already.   Mirala wasn't able to get much out of that clerk, and Everett and Emile didn't get much out of Alex.   Still, she knew her daughters were out there, and all she had to do was  

Stalk them  

find their kidnappers.   Except they seemed to have vanished into the aether.     

Asharia sat at her console idly typing and browsing the extranet news sites for any sign of similar happenings.   It was like they all had stopped for now.    Still, she couldn’t help but be drawn to other entries.   A series of deaths, all with the same cause in Key West, another set of strange deaths in Port St. Lucie.    It was almost as if  

Hunt them

  she had an unhealthy interest in them.   She turned back to her writing.   Surfing the extranet wouldn’t help her daughters right now, nor would writing, but writing would take her mind off of things.     

Stun them  

Asharia closed her eyes and sighed, adding another page to the already expansive write-up.   She was almost to the decade of the precursor to the Reaper War.   Just a few more years of write-up and she’d have covered everything.  She still wasn’t sure whether she would do anything about this.   This write-up wouldn’t help her find her daughters.   It wouldn’t help her find those who took her.  It wouldn’t  

Bind them   bring her daughters back to her.   Wherever they were, her daughters must have been in danger, and she worried.       

It took her a couple more hours to finish writing, but still she felt restless.   Her fingers twitched and she had to stop herself from going out.   It wouldn’t be healthy.   She had a code to live by.   But the law was failing and she needed to find them or their bodies.  

Stab them  

Failing that… she needed to find her focus.   The longer she was in here, the less focused she was going to be.   It was maddening.  Every day it got worse.  She could no longer use the excuse she was looking for her daughters.   No.   Not to herself.  

Cut them  

Asharia got herself dressed for going out and grabbed her bag.    One way or another, she was going to find her focus.    She stopped by her terminal and executed a command before leaving.  

The terminal’s screen popped up with a dialog box:  “Deleting…  The Confession of Asharia T’Saeri, the Coastline Butcher.”