She is dead and remembers nothing before it.
She is a Hunter working in the city of Grimoire to destroy the monsters of the Miasma.
She is an outcast, and she wants to go back to the land of the living.
To do this, she must undergo the Test of Rem...
Up in the sky over Grimoire is a giant black cloud, swelling, surging and growing day by day. It is comprised of fumes, smog and fog, and it radiates with a malevolent intensity that can be felt by the all that lives beneath its gaze.
It is the Miasma. It is Grimoire's illness and has existed as long as the patient has existed. As the denizens of the city live their lives, the Miasma worms its way into their hearts, corrupting and warping the susceptible and the weak-willed to create terrible monstrosities. Like the Demon, the Geist, the Prince and much worse.
Hence the need for the Hunter.
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Home was a second-floor apartment room with no framed photos on the walls, no flowers in porcelain vases, and none of the ordered chaoticness that that was normally found in places of the heart. Amber would describe it as minimalist, whereas someone else would describe it as sterile. Blank. Vacant.
She made coffee for two in the small kitchen as Max worked the TV remote in vain to find something on the channels apart from static and white noise. Salem was curled up out on the balcony. It faced the neon sign of an arcade on the other side of the street. Sometimes Amber would wake up in the middle of the night and go over there to play in the dark with the machines. She found there to be something whimsical in the atmosphere of the place with all the bright, flashing lights and happy, 8-bit sounds.
Plus it beat the long silence every time.
Amber wouldn't call Max a friend, per se. Friendship was hard between Hunters, even between those who hung out together in their little cliques with their own hard-earned territory. The fact of the matter was that they were not only colleagues, but they were also competitors, all contending for the white dust that came from defeating the creatures of the Miasma, which was necessary to fuel their Trinkets.
So any Hunter that got to eat, meant there was a Hunter out there who had to starve. Of course, with that in mind, it probably sounded better to remain as Cattle. Which was why many if not all Hunters were originally thrill-seekers, foolish, world-weary or a combination of the three. The dark work only attracted the desperate. All that being said, the most a Hunter would be willing to receive openly from another Hunter was amiable cooperation and perhaps even a grudging respect.
Which was why Amber has always distrusted Max's attempts at friendship. And yet, she still let her visit. If anything, she was still someone she could talk to, or perhaps the other Hunter's persistence had made progress.
"So what's the story?" Max asked as Amber handed over her mug. Barefoot, the two sat together on the mattress and watched the TV as Max continued to fiddle with the remote and wisps of steam wafted out from their coffee and trailed up into the air.
Occasionally, in the times when Amber would decide to leave the TV on, something would break through the static on the screen. Things like sitcom laughter, hip-hop music, weatherman reporting and the like. Salem had explained to Amber that it was the result of signals from beyond Grimoire managing, every once in a while, to pierce the veil that separated the real world from limbo. The cat had suggested at one point that Amber get a radio, as the signals for radios operated a lower frequency than that of those for a TV, and thus, would be more often received. "That is if you want to listen to more than just the white noise when you sleep," Salem had added.
