PAGAN BLOODROSE




PROPER

Keisha Carter is one of the new breed of Blood Roses, coming into the organisation through the covert recruitment program being operated out of the Gaijin club. A straight-A student from one of the city's better public schools (her parents, good liberals that they are, insisted on supporting the severely ailing public school system, rather than sending their children to one of the increasingly overcrowded private schools) she went onto John Holland University to study Arts & Humanities, where she was intending to take a year out before graduation in order to work with disadvantaged children. Like every other kid her age, she liked going out partying, and went along a couple of times with her sorority friends to Club Gaijin. 

It was there that she first encountered Jeung Bloodrose. She knew vaguely who he was - although his background was a whole different level in wealth and privilege above her comfortably middle-class upbringing - and she knew that he was supposed to be mixed up in something edgy and dangerous, although no-one actually seemed to know what it was. Keisha was drawn to Jeung almost immediately; there was something about him and his companions that reminded her of one of those wild old English aristocrat-poets that she had been studying in her Romantic Poetry class - "mad, bad and dangerous to know." She started going back more and more to the Gaijin, even though most of her friends were getting bored of the Ronin Style thing. Eventually, she started going on her own, and it was on one of those nights that Jeung sent one of his circle out to invite her into the VIP suite. 

Two weeks later, she was aiming a machinegun pistol at a security guard's head, while three other Blood Roses searched a Port Authority warehouse for a specific consignment of military communications motherboards intended for a Federal facility out in Silverfield. After that, Romantic Poetry classes and gap years out to work with the underprivileged no longer seemed as important as they may once have been. 

Keisha might just have been another one of Jeung's (or even Charlotte's....) many conquests, since there's nothing the Blood Roses inner circle usually enjoys more than corrupting the morals of nice well-bred college girls, but there must have been something about her - a hitherto unsuspected truly wild side, perhaps, that he sensed in her from the very start, since she became a fixture on the Blood Roses scene, taking her place in the Harem alongside Lilith and Strega. Or perhaps, cynically, it was maybe just her family name that assured her a place at the foot of the throne; what she lacks in Sister Lilith's true psychosis or Sister Strega's social cachet, she more than makes up for in novelty value, by virtue of her family name alone. Her parents don't approve of these strange new friends of hers, or the clothes she wears now, or her decision to drop out of college and move into the creepy abandoned Insane Asylum known as Abington Towers. 

Neither does her uncle. Who just happens to be August Carter, Commissioner of the San Paro Police Department.

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