THE CARD FACTORY » 𝑘𝑎𝑧 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑘𝑘𝑒𝑟 ✓

𝐢. 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐥

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐎𝐍𝐄 » '𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔟𝔞𝔯𝔯𝔢𝔩'

𝐁𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐈𝐄 𝐁𝐘𝐑𝐍𝐄𝐒 was possibly the strangest girl in all of Ketterdam, and that was saying something. The port city was filled to the brim with psychopaths, criminals, murderers, and literal monsters. You name it, Kerch's Capital had it. 

Yet somehow, the seventeen year-old girl stood out amongst some of Ketterdam's greats: famed for her turn to supposed villainy and general formidability in the eyes of almost anyone you asked within the city. Bonnie Byrnes wasn't known as Bonnie Byrnes, no. She had left that name far behind her on the slavers ship that had carried her from her homeland of The Wandering Isle to, well, here. Hell.

Hell knew this girl as the Joker. Or the Jester. Whichever alias suited their fancy best, that was her name. And a well-earned one at that. Even now - the circus shows long since diminished - she kept that title flying high, blazing above her head.

Yes, Bonnie had received her name from the circus. A show of curiosities that had travelled Kerch for years before the 'performers' fought back. Bonnie had played the clown. The fool who made jokes, ran around, flipped upside down, and played with fire. She didn't do it to make a living - she had more self-respect than that. She did it to survive.

Grisha couldn't live here if there whereabouts were known. They were far too valuable and beguiling to be allowed to roam the streets of Ketterdam with freewill. No, they at least had to have a leash cramped around their necks so they couldn't stray too far. Couldn't fight back if you wished to use them however you like, and that was the very fate Bonnie had once suffered.

She was Inferni. Untrained and unforgiving in her art. It was the reason she had ran from her town in the Maroch Glen to every other spot on the Isle. Bonnie had been on the run from hunters who wanted her blood for medicine, to claim the bounty her own father had placed on her head. The very same people who had smiled at her and pulled her cheeks on the streets just a few years before. Years of hiding and running nearly perfected the Joker's ability to act and lie, two of the best traits to have living in the Barrel. And my, had she used them.

The Joker had let her fire go untamed and for so long, it had had a chokehold on her. But the circus had changed her. The people she met, good and bad, had brought her to be the person she was no: strolling down the cobbles of the Barrels' portside alleyways.

She swung down bannisters, slipped around poles, humming to herself as she winded down the seemingly deserted streets. If people didn't know what she was capable of or thought she was an ordinary woman, she would've been stopped by now - jumped by a thief or a thirsty man. But criminals would see the red hair, the broad grin, and think twice about lurching out of the shadows they made their home. 

The Joker's reputation was one of the most fearsome of all of the Card's - as they were called. The Card's were the band of ex-circus performers once exploited for their skill variety. The very same ones that ganged up to overrun the circus master and owners that enslaved them and trapped them in their business for so long. Since then, the five remaining vigilantes had stuck together and rooted their old bazaar into the bricks of the Barrel; a roaring success of a gambling den rising up in it's place.