Laura Joan Virgo (she/her)
Born: April 13, 1967
I have a picture of her in my mind. She is wandering the city of Boston at dusk. She doesn't know how long she has been walking, but it must have been a while, because it’ll be a long ride on the T back home. She finds herself at this place, the same place she always ends up at, no matter how far she walks. Maybe it's because there's a place like this in every city, big or small, across the entire United Republic.
In Boston, it happens to be in a small alcove on the outskirts of the MIT campus. It's a memorial shrine, now bearing the wear of several decades. A shrine to the case that ended her brief and foolish (so foolish) career as a private investigator. A shrine to her friend.
A private investigator generally comes to the scene too late, after all regular avenues of assistance have been exhausted. And the vast majority of PIs are unsuccessful, despite the lofty claims in their advertising (and cultural footprint). But Laura had been different. She didn't consider herself a genius, just basically competent. That everyone else was pathetically incompetent in comparison was of little account to her. She knew how to find people, and how to de-escalate. She was very good at these two things, for a time.
Her practical dream of using her strange, specific ability to help others had shattered around her when she lost her friend. She wasn't able to get close to him in time to convince him that whatever trouble he was in, it was fixable. There was nothing unfixable in Laura’s world, until then.
She moved from stalking strangers from the shadows to following money, practicing a new kind of sleuthing, one with far lower stakes. She didn't give a shit about her bosses, and they didn't give a shit about her. It was a mutually agreeable arrangement.
And yet… and yet, she still found herself wandering at twilight, following the leylines of the city (any city) through some instinct unknown even to herself, until she found the shrine.
She would stand in front of it, with nothing to offer, a quiet fury roiling in her chest because the hollow merchandise adorning this stupid cabinet was not a memorial, hell, it was a cruel mockery of the person who died. A marketable toy for desperate, yearning losers even in his death. She would look upon the dolls and figurines and wilted paper flowers. And then she would turn away.
Most betrayals in Laura’s life were just business. She didn't take it personally. A corporate spy is only one tool in a wretched arsenal of sick devices, after all. But there was another betrayal looming on the darkening horizon of Laura’s life.
Laura lived three decades as though she was rotting alive because of a lie. There would come a day, soon, when the shrines in every city would be quietly dismantled, when the crackpots would gloat, the believers would weep and fall in each other's arms, and Laura… Oh, Laura…