The Night Before Reckoning : Part 1 of 2

A little background on someone that's only been mentioned in passing thus far...

Rien Thomas Ofphilly possessed the sort of last name that came from the Great Disaster that had shoved all of the people from the Great Cities together. His grandparents had foregone their proper surname in favor of one that told the world proudly where they were from. There were many like this and thus, common last name rarely told of genetic correlation these days. Particularly since those from what once was Philadelphia and was now a rather vacant land void of all but the most stubborn corpses were those who most proudly latched onto where they were from, rather than their own heritage. Besides, after the Great Disaster, that was how you introduced yourself, even if you had a proper last name. "I'm Greg Dean OfSanFrancisco." That sort of thing. Though if Rien recalled correctly, Mr.Dean had moved on from San Francisco long, long before San Francisco stopped existing. It was just the only famous name he ever came up with on first shot, really.

But, regardless of common last name or famous people from the past, Rien was spending Reckoning alone again. Given that all the Ofphillys he knew had their own families, he had been hard pressed to find anyone worth spending the holiday with anyway. The young man sighed, feeling, for all the noise of the City, terribly alone. When the acid rains had left this time, they had already taken the roof he had claimed, and the snow that floated down to turn into slush on the hot asphalt managed to chill the warm-blooded descendant of Pennsylvania winters. Wandering the near-empty streets as time sped onward towards the anniversary of the arrival of the Others.

Once, the day had been celebrated for bringing a savior to a people who had needed one desperately. But though the Christians still insisted on remembering it, with their Christmas trees and cards and the like, most of the progeny of the Great Disaster remembered much more clearly the day that the Goddess...and others like her, revealed their true forms. There had been those that had worshiped her and her lackluster army of familiars since the dawn of time...but now, she walked the Earth like one of them, and yet not.

Shaen intrigued Rien like nothing in the world. He couldn't really make any sense of her and what she meant. The majority disregarded her claims to ownership of the world, most religious-minded individuals thinking that, at most, her existence was only to try their faith. The young man shivering on the snow-covered streets hadn't made up his mind yet. His folks had been convinced that she was not a demon, but a Goddess, and it was the ignorance of the others that had brought so much doom to the people of the City, and had brought the Misshapen into prominence.

But he wasn't certain that either was entirely correct, or even why, necessarily, the two excluded one another absolutely as falsehoods.

Later, he would think back on the naive thoughts that had filled his head with amusement of someone who knew precisely what Shaen was. Of course, the only reason he had any idea of what she was was that the ambiguity of the thoughts floating through his head that night seemed to call the self-proclaimed ruler of the City.