Unease Concerto

Introduction

My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?

FERNANDO PESSOA / The Book of Disquiet

In a gilded cage a bird sings with blood in its mouth. It sings because it knows that once it stops, it's as good as dead.

Similar ideology can be found in all those unfortunate enough to call Gotham their home. If there is one absolute to know it is that learning to fight is the key to survival. The beast dressed in the guise of a city has no use for bright eyed hatchlings that cannot survive its horrors. And so Gotham forges it's offspring in the only way it knows how: through sin, brutality, and misfortune. The song of the city is a savage one, and it would gladly drown those who cannot sing along. Viciously tearing into the meat of the feeble and leave what remains of the corpses discarded in the gutters.

Lourdes Herrera had learned from a young age to match the pain and viciousness of the city with her own.

Gotham is a harsh teacher that had taught her many terrible but useful lessons. The first is that the city does not care in its heart for those that are different. That much was made clear to her in her younger years when her metahuman powers began to develop. When her mother would pull her younger brother away from her and yell at her for things she couldn't control. Her parents wasted no time in leaving her to rot in a city that would rather see her dead.

The second lesson that Gotham taught her arrives a short time later, When her clothes are torn and the hunger sets in, making her wild like a mad dog. The lesson is that even though Gotham tries to kill off those it doesn't think can survive it there are always the outliers. Oddities in the natural order of things. These rare birds somehow always manage to find each other. Such is true when a man extends a kind hand to young Lourdes and offered her a home, recognizing himself in the ostracized young girl left to die. To Lourdes this man will always be Oswald Cobblepot, but to the dark and despot souls that haunt Gotham's criminal underbelly he will forever be known as The Penguin.

Oswald wastes no time in turning her into his perfect little soldier. Lourdes trades in weak and wanting hands for palms filled with weapons, and pain for power. This was her life now. From flitting back and forth from Cobblepot Manor to large and fanciful concert halls to perform for Gotham's elite and most corrupted. And when the cover of night fell she plays the role of the Penguin's ever loyal enforcer.

In this line of work running into the infamous vigilante known as Batman was a given. And though quite the fighter he was nothing a powerful metahuman like Lourdes couldn't handle. The real trouble comes in the form of Dick Grayson. The beloved son of Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham and the news takes the city by storm, taking the heat off Lourdes and her nightly activities. Grayson's plenty of good looking and he's got a charismatic disposition, the perfect distraction Lourdes needed to take her mind off of her double life as a masked assailant.

While things appear to be going well for Lourdes in her romantic life things get much more complicated in the vigilante world with the arrival of a new and rather annoying hero donning the colors of black & blue; calling himself Nightwing. The seemingly new vigilante has thrown himself back into the cage known as Gotham, under the scrutinizing and watchful eye of Batman. Despite all the painful memories being in the city dregs up it would seem Nightwing has not forgotten how to sing with blood in his mouth.

As lines are drawn and blurred one chord rings true throughout the madness. War is coming to Gotham. It's coming for everyone. Hero and villain alike. And Lourdes Herrera above all else....