GAIZKA FIDEL AZAROLA

    on record most of gafa's life is completely fabricated bullshit compliments of the facade and she's read this false account so many times it feels more genuine than the truth. it's the first story she jumps to when people ask where she was born: little apartment in medius with only an older sister and single mother to keep her company. the fabricated bits indicate that the mother died but gafa usually tells it where her "sister" gets hit by a bus or a speeding osr law enforcement vehicle instead.

she likes the idea of having a mom. she didn't actually get one in her none-paper trail life. she got a dog kennel and strange tubes, strange faces, and strange hands.

sometimes she'd get paper and get asked to fold it in certain ways, which she could get usually by the third try. her father used to think it was because she was gifted and manifested early (another specialty item to tack onto the expectations of the strangers who came  with their eager hands and deep voices). he called it enhanced muscle memory. gafa's older sis, her real one named micaela, saw it for what it was: "goddamn fidgeting fingers n shit". 

micaela was the lucky one, she could fidget well with her mind and ran the accounts of gafa's father's business, which extended beyond gafa herself to people gifted and non who the girl could only imagine in the off-hours to entertain herself. micaela didn't care for her little half-sister but sometimes when her full-father slammed her into the door frame or let the back of his hand fly just so, micaela would come over to the kennel and stroke gafa's hair through the bars and spin empty stories where the two of them escaped northern meride and made it as singers in a medius big-shot bar.

gafa didn't want to sing, though, she just wanted to go somewhere open and full of snow.

when she finally could stick a "teen" suffix on her age, gafa had long forgotten the imaginings of micaela-- the older girl had disappeared one day and through her father had raged and torn the house apart, she did not come back. gafa never saw or heard from her again, keeping her in her own dark little heart as a fire burning at the end of a cold cage; as a flurry of snow that could slip in and out of kennel bars with effortless whimsy. and micaela might have remained the younger girl's only hope if not for her father's uselessness with finances. in micaela's absence he acquired numerous debts to a sundry of lenders-- each one more shady than the one before them.

gafa was lucky that the woman who came to collect her father's due was a mother of six with a heart that softened only to the wide-eyes of children. this woman-- gafa used to call her "the bushy bull" because of her long, frizzy hair and larger-than-large build-- left gafa's father splattered all along the hallway he'd tried to scramble through as an escape and then wrenched open gafa's cage with her bare hands. she then picked the girl up and placed her on her massive shoulders and asked if she would like a new home.

the bushy bull hadn't had direct contact with the facade in over a year, but the woman knew they often welcomed unclaimed youngsters into their midst. she said goodbye to gafa as she closed the door to a small student's apartment on the border of medius and aquile. another light that gafa would never see again and often times forget in careless moments, as she did with micaela.

the facade member she ended up with was a young man who was attending classes at one of aquile's medical colleges and who was very kind to her. it wasn't long before her talent with motion and technique were discovered and the facade cleared her of being a gifted through a series of complex, and often painful, tests. her usefulness established, she began training as an infield operative.

gafa never knew what it was about the glide of the light on the barrel of gun, but she was instantly drawn to the idea of wielding something that teetered between grace and explosiveness. and it was with similar volatile force than she excelled once she was finally allowed to stretch out her scrawny, limber arms and legs and MOVE.