Miss Missy
Crocodile Machine

Prolaboro

((A/N 'Before the Suffering'. It's a short prologue, just a tiny bit to get a spark of attention. It helps to read this with a country accent, but it's fine if you don't.))

Miss Missy was my name, honest to goodness. In the before. I was told it was because my mother used to cry out every time I kicked in her belly, "Watch out for my ribs, little miss missy!" And it just tickled her pink to think of actually naming a baby that, and so she did it. Grampa Harrowingsays it wasn't anything like that, but instead that Daddy just couldn't think of a name and wrote whatever came to mind on the birth certificate.

And I find it's that way with just about every coin - there's always two sides. Usually more, since few incidents only involve two people. So far as I was concerned, my side of things was the only one that mattered. In the before. But now I'm in the after and I find I don't have much of a side in things.

There does tend to be an overwhelming absence of the right to an opinion when you're taken away, tied up and never more than a few feet from the bullet that could be the last thing to go through your mind.

Oh, but you're not ready for that part yet. You're not ready for all that can of worms. The storybooks always start out on a normal day under normal conditions and work their way up to the problem. Now, I'm not meaning to make what's happened, or what's going to happen, seem like a fairytale. I don't predict no happily-ever-after, so consider yourself warned. And now that I've put in my two cents - that's four sides - I can get to the start of things.

And it almost started back in June of ninety-nine.