Violence & Roses

3. Present Day-1

Present Day

My name is Mina, just Mina. I’m over two hundred years old, so my days of enduring narcissistic, lying, cheating assholes are over. Did I overreact by destroying an entire township in Jersey? Maybe, but sometimes you have to weigh consequences against comeuppance and scorch some earth. Sue me. I occasionally get a little stormy when someone rubs me the wrong way, but cheat on me, and you’re gonna catch my claws. Fortunately for others, that did not happen often. My heart wasn’t as black as my long straight hair, and my patience wasn’t as pale as my alabaster skin, but I could be hard and unforgiving like my deep hazel eyes when it came to infidelity. Meh, I’m working on it.

Naturally, my recent shenanigans meant they would be coming for me, but it’s okay; the just desserts were worth the calories. Besides, I’m finally ready to face them; it was long past due anyway—but that’s a story for a little later.

In any case, I’m not the least bit ashamed to say I was deeply in love with a miserable phony prick for four years (a blink of an eye for me) or that I had recently agreed to marry said miserable phony prick a few days ago. When people are profoundly disingenuous about who they are, one can’t be blamed for trusting them. I wear my heart on my sleeve; being powerful and ageless allows me to be vulnerable in ways others can not. However, the downside is that you tend to go to extremes when someone f***s you over.

Morristown, New Jersey? Collateral damage. Honestly, it was worth it. There’s little left in the world that commands my full and total rage, and unfaithfulness is one of them. Not to mention, in all my years, I’ve known only one thing sweeter than love, and that’s revenge.

When I received the call from Auri, my bestie of over a hundred years, and heard the frantic tone in her voice, I knew the s**t was going down.

I answered my phone cheerfully, “Hello?”

“Mina?! Hey, it’s Auri!” she blurted out.

“Hey, Auri! What’s up!? You sound… flustered.” I wasn’t used to hearing my normally even-tempered best friend so anxious.

“Flustered?! Oh no, I’m pretty f*****g far from flustered!”

“What is it? Are you okay?!”

“I’m across the street from that little dive bar here in Morristown, Goombas, and I’m staring at Roland… with his tongue crammed down some bimbo’s throat!” She whisper-screamed through the phone.

I became solemn and quiet. “You’re serious?”

“I’m serious, Mina. Here…”

In an instant, my text message alert chimed. I opened it up, and there was a pic of Roland, my fiance, my first true love in over 80 years, with his plump, pink tongue lapping some sluts cocksucker.

“Auri?”

“Yeah!”

“Get out of there right now.” My voice went deadly calm.

“Wha-” Auri scarcely had time to react.

“Get. Out. Of. There. NOW!” I screamed!

“Okay, okay! But Mina, don’t do anything rash -”

I hung up the phone and licked my drying lips. Motherfucker. Looks like honeybear is going to have to rain down some sulfur.

I flung open my front door and strolled out onto the sidewalk in nothing more than a sheer blouse and skirt. All six feet six inches of me (significantly short by Pentavi standards) was vibrating with angry anticipation. I breathed in the fragrant spring air, but it did little to quiet my wrath. Goombas was only about a mile away, and it was a beautiful night, so I decided to walk there. Maybe it would give me a chance to cool down a bit. Maybe not.

As I sauntered down the street with my curvy, muscular hips stepping in time, I began heating up instead of cooling down. My eyes smoldered and my body temperature rose dramatically. I used my well-toned, She-Hulk-sized frame to shoulder rudely through a group of people hanging out and talking on the sidewalk. They began to protest until they saw my burning eyes and felt the heat radiating off my body; then, they quickly backed away and took off like I was radioactive.

I left scorched footprints on the sidewalk with every bare step I took as the clothes I was wearing burned away from my body. The asphalt road next to me began to ripple and run like a black river as my hot, angry fury intensified. Cars driving past hit the asphalt pool and became stuck like dinosaurs in a tar pit, their wheels spinning before finally popping. The exterior paint on their cars bubbled, the heat threatening to cook the people inside alive. Trees all around me suddenly burst into flame, while the buildings glowed red hot. The windows started melting, and the bricks started exploding.

Pretty soon, the landscape behind me was a roaring fire about two thousand feet wide and growing. People were running and screaming from my epicenter as I strolled down the street like a violent act of nature. Buildings caught in my growing orbit began to wilt and run like warm butter. Cars were exploding and propelling embers into the sky that resembled a thousand devils’ eyes as they rained down. This was only a small atom of my power.

As I approached Goombas, I saw Roland and his w***e a few hundred feet down the road, fleeing the flames. He caught sight of me for a moment, and a terrible realization washed over him. They both made a mad dash towards a large church down the road while I slowly followed.

They began to stumble and waver within the field of my intense, inescapable heat. Finally, they fell to their knees and crawled toward the church doors in vain. They were on the verge of passing out, but Roland had the audacity to look pleadingly at me with those lying eyes.

That tore it. I unleashed every ounce of my power and focused it directly on them! Without warning, a fireball the size of an extinction level asteroid suddenly shot straight towards them, leaving a mile wide molten trench in its wake!

The two of them, dumb-struck, gawked in amazement as the white-hot comet instantly incinerated them, along with the church and a three-mile radius of Morristown, New Jersey.

The finale was an explosion the size of a small nuclear warhead that pushed a yellow and orange mushroom cloud towards the sky like a massive tombstone.

I thought of a fitting epitaph, “Here lies Roland. Roland lies, so Roland dies.” I snickered and began to calm down a bit. I looked around and marveled at the refreshing destruction. Hell hath no fury indeed. I continued to look around and noticed I was stark n***d. “Damn, I need a Macy’s.”

I could hear all manner of sirens and helicopters converging on the area, so I ducked away swiftly into the swirling smoke and falling ash.

The Story for a Little Later

I live - sorry, lived, in skanky suburban Morristown, New Jersey, for the better part of 20 years. After two hundred and thirty-ish years, you would think I’d be a billionaire living in a cliff side mansion somewhere on the coast of Italy; or perhaps some kind of highfalutin CEO in control of a major corporation, but nope, I’m just Mina—Mina, from the township formerly known as Morristown.

In any case, it has not been in my best interest to have a high profile in the past, no matter the circumstances, but I was looking to make a change. Come out! My…indiscretion from the other night was going to draw some consequences, but I anticipated that. In fact, I took my ex-fiancé’s infidelity as a sign that it was finally time for me to face my eccentric family ancestry and their clans. I had recently grown curiously restless with the thought of confronting them. I was unbelievably tired of hiding, and I felt pretty certain my power had reached its apex, so I was spoiling for a fight something awful. I couldn’t explain the feeling inside my gut, telling me I could finally take them on, but it was irresistible. Roland got what he deserved for sure, but it was also a test run of my power, and I was convinced I was ready, ready for retribution.

I was Yasmani Ro, which meant I was the hated, mongrel b***h daughter of outlaw lovers from two ancient warring clans known as the Pentavi, an all female shape-shifting clan, and the Sinteverete, an all male warlock clan.

Being the only despised Yasmani Ro in the last hundreds of thousands of years meant both clans had been tenaciously looking to capture or exterminate me—as they had my parents—since the day I was born.

A little backstory: Thousands of years before the first organism crawled out of the primordial soup, the Pentavi and Sinteverete lived peacefully together as one; they were the Zol. The Earth realm was theirs until fire rained down from the heavens, bringing new life with it. The destruction from their arrival and the evolution of this new life threatened the Zol and forced them into a vast, mystical realm, which they called Val Tebrae, accessible only through the conjuring of portals.

The Pentavi and Sinteverete lived together in Val Tebrae, angry and jealous of life in the Earth realm, which they perceived as having been taken from them. Their hatred of life on Earth grew and festered, poisoning their minds until mutual hatred was all they had. Naturally, it wasn’t enough to keep them from eventually turning on each other.

The fuse was lit after a very talented young Sinteverete warlock was instructed by the Elders to create a spell for agelessness called The Eonian. The Eonian, when cast by a Pentavi or Sinteverete clan member, allowed them to live forever and choose their age at will, but the spell was not synonymous with immortality. Members of the Pentavi and Sinteverete under the influence of The Eonian could still be killed, but only in battle. This provision appealed to the Pentavi and Sinteverete Elder’s burgeoning l**t for war and power.

The toxic spell further exacerbated a gender divide between the clans and would soon lead to their uncoupling. Once the Pentavi and Sinteverete no longer needed one another to perpetuate the bloodlines, the chasm widened between the males and females.

The Pentavi and Sinteverete stopped training with one another, weakening their abilities and ensuring no one gender could ever wield both clans' powers. Disputes degenerated into bloodletting, petty squabbles became war, and greed became God.

The Pentavi and Sinteverete people could no longer live together under one clan, so they split based on gender, known as the Great Divide, and criminalized having any more Yasmani Ro children. They no longer had to share anything with each other or future generations, so the clan Elders wanted everything for themselves. At the provocation of the Elders, the clans fought with one another for millions of years until a tense treaty was drafted. Both clans created laws in order to maintain the benefits, as well as their segregation. They were now forever in pursuit of domination over one another, the Earth, and all the other realms.

There were miles of rules and regulations behind this weak treaty between the Pentavi and Sinteverete clans, but it was their laws surrounding coupling and procreation that were the most binding. It was f*******n and punishable by the pain of t*****e and death for members of the Pentavi and Sinteverete clans to bear any more Yasmani Ro children.

The Pentavi and Sinteverete clans, along with their Elders, were all under the Eonian, like myself (thanks to my parents), but they possessed vastly different abilities. The Pentavi, for example, have superhuman strength and intelligence, can cast mid-level spells and shape-shift into huge, regal feline creatures resembling jaguars, called yaggowar. The Sinteverete are powerful warlocks who can cast extremely high-level spells, have incredible strength and physical abilities, and are hyper-intelligent. Since my parents trained me in the ways of both the Pentavi and Sinteverete, I possess all their abilities. I never stopped training and doggedly honed every one of my skills. This gave me an incredible advantage over either side.