The Whitechapel Incident
To understand Samantha Grey, one must look past the crisp costume and the disciplined exterior of the 21st century. Before she was Agent HR-713, and long before she became a defender of Paragon City, she was simply a survivor.
For over two hundred years -- from the witch trials to the Great Cleansing of 1896 -- Samantha existed in the margins of history. She was a runaway, ghost story, and a fugitive from a world that was rapidly trading superstition for industrial ruthlessness.
The Whitechapel Incident is the story of the end of that freedom. Set in 1888, amidst the fog of London and the gears of an aggressive British Empire, we explore the pivotal moments that led Samantha from a rough life as a free spirit into a prisoner of the State. It introduces us to the complex machinery of the Dimension Delta Zeta 17-46 19th century and to Agent Mustang -- the man whose greatest professional success became his deepest personal regret.
This is not a story of victory. It is the story of how the cage was built.
The Ozark Extraction
The heat in Arkansas did not sit; it pressed. It was a physical weight, thick with the drone of cicadas and the resinous scent of pine cooking in the August sun.
Samantha Grey sat on the edge of the limestone bluff, her legs dangling over a drop that would terrify a mortal woman. Samantha was not entirely mortal. She had been born in the Croatoa Colony in 1681, long before these borders were drawn. She hadn't been a "girl" for over two centuries, and at two hundred and seven, she had learned that stillness was the only true luxury left to her.
She shifted her shoulders, grimacing as the rough spun fabric of her dress caught on the leathery membranes of the wings folded tight against her back. She adjusted her skirt to ensure her tail remained coiled and hidden beneath the petticoats -- a constant, nagging discomfort. Her hand rose, habitual and unconscious, to trace the curve of one of the ram's horns curling back from her temples, mostly concealed beneath the heavy, sweat-stained bonnet.
Below, in the valley, the smoke of the German immigrant settlement rose in thin, pale ribbons. Good people. Quiet people. In the winter, when the frost threatened to crack the foundation stones of their cabins, she had moved through the trees like a shadow. She warmed their hearths not with wood, but with a flick of fire -- a thermal manipulation she treated as a chore rather than a gift. They left her bread and cured pork on stumps at the tree-line, offerings to the one they wished was merely a "spirit of the woods", and not a daughter of the fallen Lightbringer.
She closed her eyes and began the recitation in her mind, the Latin syllables forming a cool, iron fence around the burning corruption in her blood. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Her faith. Her shield against the hunger that gnawed at her soul. It helped; somewhat, but without a priest to offer her a true dispensation, it left her mind unquiet.
The woods went silent.
It wasn't the silence of a predator passing. It was the silence of a void. The cicadas ceased. The wind died.
Samantha stood, her boots finding purchase on the rock. She felt it before she saw them -- a pricking sensation on her skin, the taste of copper and ozone. Divination magic. It felt filthy against the clean, hot air of the mountains.
Three men stepped from the tree line. They wore heavy wool coats absurd for the climate, their faces flushed and sweating, but their eyes were glinting, devoid of the exhaustion that should have claimed them after the climb, but full of what could only be magical power. They were not U.S. Marshals. They were something else.
"There lies the Legacy of Hubbard," the leader said. He held a silver compass in his hand, but the needle didn't point North. It pointed at her. "The colonial records were accurate."
Samantha didn't move. She willed herself to teleport, but to her chagrin, it was blocked. Their magic at work, no doubt. Perhaps she could unleash a blast of kinetic force that would shatter the limestone shelf and send them tumbling into the valley, or perhaps that would be blocked, as well. But she saw the leader’s gaze flick past her, down toward the valley floor, toward the ribbons of smoke rising from the German cabins.
"A quaint collection of peasants down there," the man said, wiping sweat from his brow. "Dry timber, these woods. One spark of our kind of fire would be... tragic."
He knew. They knew exactly what she was, and they knew exactly what she protected.
Samantha looked at the compass, then down at the settlement. She had spent two centuries running -- from Croatoa, through the wilds, from the gold camps of Colorado, from herself. But she was tired. And she would not trade the lives of the innocents for temporary safety of her own. She would have to fight for that, on her own, later, as she had before.
She reached up and untied her bonnet, letting it fall to the rock. The inhuman horns caught the sun.
"Leave them be," she said, her voice rough from disuse. She held out her hands, wrists together. "Very well."
The Whitechapel Incident
November 1888. London.
The warehouse in Whitechapel did not smell of industry; it smelled of ozone and rot. Outside, the London fog pressed against the brickwork like a living thing, thick with coal dust. Inside, the air was vibrating.
Samantha hung suspended in the center of a circle etched into the floorboards. Thorny vines bit into her wrists and ankles, twined around the crude iron manacles over her wrists, their pull strong enough to drag a draft horse to its knees, yet they hummed with a resonance that made her teeth ache. Her wings were pinned painfully against the wooden upright to which she was bound, the leathery membranes stretched taut. Her tail, usually hidden, lashed involuntarily against the floor, betraying the agony coursing through her nerve endings.
Before her stood the Speakers of the Thorn. They were not the rough men who had taken her in the Ozarks. These men wore the silk robes of peers, their faces obscured by hoods, their hands clutching relics that looked like shrapnel from a war in heaven.
At the edge of the circle stood Sir James Paris Lee. He looked bored. He checked his pocket watch, the gaslight glinting off the monocle he wore more for affectation than necessity. Behind him, on a heavy oak table, sat a row of leather portfolios -- the sum total of his engineering genius, guarded by three of his private security men armed with Webley automatic pistols, with the rest of his retinue behind them, watching the spectacle with interest varying to astonishment.
"If this works, you'll have proven the power of your so-called Thorn Magic. Proceed," Sir James said, his voice cutting through the low chanting. "My pocket-book is not infinite, and neither is my patience."
The Lead Speaker stepped forward. In his hand, wrapped in velvet, was the True Thorn. It was long, black, and seemed to drink the light around it. It was not merely wood; it was a sliver of hate given form.
"When you join us, Sir James," the Speaker hissed. He raised the Thorn. "You will learn the patience of centuries."
He pressed the point of the Thorn against Samantha’s sternum.
It bypassed the skin entirely, hooking into something deeper -- a cold, jagged intrusion into her soul.
A scream tore from Samantha’s throat, raw and devoid of breath; a sound not of pain, but of absolute violation. She felt the Thorn hooking into the metaphysical fabric of her soul, pulling at the threads of her humanity, trying to unravel the weave of her conscience to leave only the raw, infernal hunger beneath, another soul relishing opportunity to replace hers.
It was a command: Submit. Become. Die.
No.
Samantha gritted her teeth, blood coating her lips. She did not pull against the chains. She pulled inward. She reached for the faith she had built over two centuries of loneliness, the fortress she had constructed stone by stone.
Kyrie eleison, she screamed in the silence of her mind. Lord, have mercy.
The Thorn pulsed. The Speaker frowned, pressing harder. The chanting rose, a dissonant screech.
Christe eleison, Samantha projected, pushing the prayer not at God, but at the Thorn. She rejected the corruption. She denied the monster they wanted to birth. She had felt this before, almost two hundred years ago, when the Illstone had tried, and failed, to kill her soul.
I am Samantha. Even in this corrupted form, I am a child of God.
The reaction was instant and violent. The True Thorn, unable to find purchase in a soul that refused to yield, recoiled. The energy the Speakers had channeled had nowhere to go.
So it went out.
A shockwave of infernal force -- pure, crimson-hot, and deafening -- exploded from Samantha’s chest.
The Lead Speaker disintegrated. There was no blood, only a cloud of red mist and tattered silk. The blast shattered the warehouse windows, sending shards of glass raining down like jagged hail. The gas lamps exploded, plunging the room into a strobing twilight of fire and sparks. The vines that bound her caught fire, and began to shrivel and break.
Sir James was thrown back against his table, shielding his face. He scrambled up, his boredom replaced by a furious pragmatism.
"Fools!" Sir James roared, drawing a pistol. "You’ve lost containment! Kill it! Kill them all before the Metropolitan Police investigate!"
The remaining Speakers, bleeding and disoriented, began to chant a defensive ward, but Sir James’s men opened fire. The staccato cracking of Webleys thunder-clapped over the magical din. Bullets sparked off invisible shields or tore through soft robes. It was chaos -- science attempting to execute magic.
In the shadows of the loading dock, "Thomas", one of the Enfield engineers, stopped crouching.
Agent Mustang straightened his vest. He looked at the scene: The Speakers were losing. Sir James was busy reloading. The "Devil Woman" slumped limp, the vines still burning from the heat of the discharge.
He looked at the table. The leather portfolios were unguarded. The Torsion Track Suspension System. The future of armored warfare, sitting right there next to a spilled inkwell.
It wasn't just luck. It was an opening.
Mustang moved. He didn't run; he flowed through the confusion, a shadow in the smoke. He reached the table, sweeping the heavy portfolio under his arm in one fluid motion. He felt the weight of it -- the leverage he needed to buy his way back into the good graces of his superiors west across the Atlantic.
He looked at the exit. Clear.
Then he looked at the woman.
She was still slumped. The Speakers were rallying for a second strike, this time to kill. Sir James was signaling his men to flank them, completely distracted. She was going to die here, torn apart by bullets or magic, a failed experiment in a burning warehouse. But she was powerful, obviously. Why leave her to die? She would know things.
Mustang cursed. Softly. Distinctly.
He had the plans. He had his ticket out. But he remembered Sir James's file he had read. Human-infernal hybrid. Not a monster. A hybrid. And though she had just blown a High Speaker into vapor with Hellfire, a few honeyed words might work better than vinegared demands.
"Damned foolishness," Mustang muttered.
He pivoted. He drew a heavy, modified heavy-caliber semi-automatic from his shoulder holster -- an American piece that had no business in London -- and put two rounds into the chest of the Speaker advancing on the girl.
He sprinted across the floor, sliding under the swing of a frantic guard’s club, and came up beside her. He produced a set of tension keys from his sleeve, tools of a master locksmith, or a master thief.
"Hold still, darlin'," Mustang whispered into her ear. "I'ma' get you safely out o' here." He let his American accent flow freely for the first time in months. Her eyes lit up.
He didn't unlock the cuffs. There wasn't time. He unlocked the anchor pin holding the chains to the post.
The chains fell loose, still locked to her wrists and ankles. Samantha collapsed, and Mustang caught her. She was heavier than she looked, dense with muscle and bone. Her skin burned to the touch.
"Who..." she rasped, her eyes unfocused, glowing with fading embers.
"Friend o' a friend," Mustang lied. He hauled her up, draping her arm over his shoulder. He aimed his pistol at a cluster of fuel barrels near the Speakers' remaining circle. "Cover your ears."
He fired.
The explosion blew the back wall of the warehouse out into the foggy night.
The Cold Iron and the Voyage
December 1888. The North Atlantic.
The Atlantic Star was a modern steamer, a marvel of the new turbine age, but the brig was timelessly miserable. It was a steel box near the waterline, vibrating constantly with the thrum of the screws, smelling of coal smoke, salt, damp wool, and hints of vomit.
Samantha sat on the narrow bunk, her knees drawn up to her chest. The shackles on her wrists and ankles were chained to the bedframe. They didn't just restrain her movement; they dampened her very essence. Cold forged iron; the hum of power she usually felt beneath her skin -- the Hellfire, the kinetic potential -- was gone, replaced by a nausea that felt like a ceaseless, low-grade fever. Her wings, cramped in the small space, ached with a dull, bruising throb, tail coiled around her thigh in a fruitless effort to keep it warm.
Across the small table bolted to the floor, Agent Mustang sat under the flickering light of an oil lamp. The portfolio stolen from Sir James sat closed on his left. An open notebook sat on his right.
He wasn't looking at her. He was sketching -- a rough diagram of the warehouse explosion, calculating blast radii.
"Thermal output was negligible," Mustang mumbled, scratching with his pen. "But the blast force... cracked a thirty centimeter masonry wall. Effective range?" He looked up, his eyes cold and clinical. "Fifty meters? Or can you throw it further?"
Samantha rested her chin on her knees. The red glint in her eyes was dim, like a dying coal. "I am not a howitzer, Mr. Mustang."
"Call me Tom. You're a potential asset with the demonstrated destructive yield of a field gun," he corrected, tapping the page. "And my job is to catalogue assets. Sir James called you a battery. The Speakers called you a vessel for a succubus. What is that even? A demon? The United States government is going to want to know what they just bought a ticket for."
"Is that what I am?" Samantha asked. "Infernal salvage?"
"maybe. You're evidence, at least," Mustang said. He reached for a bottle of water and a tin of biscuits, sliding them across the table, just out of her reach. He watched her struggle against the chains, the iron clinking, before he sighed and pushed them to the edge of the table closest to her. "Eat. And keep it down. I don't need you dying of starvation before we hit New York."
Samantha took a biscuit. Her claws clicked against the tin. "Why did you take me?"
Mustang leaned back, balancing his chair on two legs. "Sir James is a smart man. But he's a vengeful one. He's already spinning a story in London that you and those fanatics burned his warehouse down. If I left you, the Metropolitan Police would have hanged you. Or worse, the Royal Society would have dissected you. That would be a loss."
"And what will your people do?"
Mustang didn't answer immediately. He looked at her -- really looked at her -- for the first time since the warehouse. He took in the horns, the tail curled defensively around her leg, the leathery wings. But he also saw the bruise on her cheek, the exhaustion in her posture, the very human way she broke the biscuit into small, hesitant pieces.
"They'll study you," Mustang said, his voice losing some of its edge. "But we have laws ..."
Samantha interrupted with a laugh, a dry, bitter sound. "Laws for people. Not for monsters."
She closed her eyes and began to whisper. It was barely audible over the drone of the ship's engine.
Mustang frowned. He leaned forward. "What are you saying? Is that a spell?" His hand drifted toward the heavy pistol on the table.
"It is Vespers," Samantha said, opening her eyes. "The evening prayer."
Mustang froze. "You're praying."
"I am Catholic, Agent Mustang. I was baptized in the Croatoa Colony before the United States existed. I have held my faith for far longer than you, your parents, or your grandparents have been alive."
He laughed, a sharp bark of disbelief. "A Catholic devil. Now I’ve heard everything. Who do you pray to? The one downstairs?"
"I pray to the One who keeps me from becoming what you see," Samantha said. Her voice was steady, possessing a dignity that the chains couldn't strip away. "The Speakers... I know them. Of them. The Circle of Thorns. They wanted to open the door. They wanted the hunger to take the wheel. My faith is my only shield against such."
Mustang stared at her. He looked at the pistol, then at the notebook where he had written Subject: Threat Class A - Infernal Origin.
"You rejected the Thorn," he said slowly, piecing it together. "In the warehouse. You didn't blast them. You... pushed them out."
"I told them I was a child of God," Samantha said softly. "They disagreed. Violently, as you saw. But God prevailed."
Mustang looked down at his notes. He looked at the detailed schematic he had drawn of her physiology -- the wings, the horns -- labeled like parts of a rifle. He felt a sudden, sharp twist in his gut. He had been trained to steal plans, burn codes, and lie to empires. He hadn't been trained for this.
He saw a monster, but she was acting more like a saint than half the men he worked with. Was it an act?
He picked up his pen. He looked at the page filled with tactical data -- Blast radius, thermal capacity, flight potential.
"You're from Croatoa," he said, changing the subject, his voice quieter. "Ran away in 1692? As a child?"
"Yes."
"That's a long time to run."
"It is a very big world," Samantha said. "And it is very full of people who want to use fire, but do not want to get burned."
Mustang closed the notebook. He didn't tear out the pages -- he was too much of a professional for that. Those notes were vital intelligence. But he capped his pen and slid it into his pocket.
"We dock in three days," he said. He stood up and walked to the porthole, staring out at the black water. "The Secret Service... they aren't scientists, Samantha. They're jailors. They will put you in a hole so deep the sun won't find you for another two hundred years."
"I know," Samantha said. She finished the biscuit and wiped the crumbs from her lap. "But you saved me from the Thorns. For that, I am grateful. Whatever comes next... it is God's will. If I am to be imprisoned, or finally die, I will do so with the hope of Heaven's Grace held to my bosom."
Mustang turned back to her. He looked at the keys hanging from his belt. He looked at the heavy iron door of the brig.
"God's will," he muttered, a cynical smirk touching his lips. "Or maybe just a clerical error."
He picked up the portfolio of plans -- the Torsion Suspension, the mission objective, the thing that would win his promotion. He looked at Samantha, huddled in the cold brig, praying in Latin.
"Get some sleep, kid," Tom said. "You'll need it."
Cradle of Cold Iron
January 1889. New York Harbor.
The Atlantic Star docked under a sky the color of a bruised plum. New York City was a jagged silhouette of brick and rising steel, teeming with the noise of a nation that never slept.
Agent Mustang stood on the deck above the brig. He was back in his own clothes -- a rough tweed suit that fit better than the engineer’s disguise. Two men stood behind him in the corridor. They wore identical bowler hats and heavy overcoats, their faces stamped with the bland, bureaucratic indifference of the newly formed Secret Service.
"Asset secure?" the taller agent asked. He held a clipboard like a weapon.
"Secure, sedated, and ready for transport. She'll pass on the way to your autowagon off the docks." Mustang lied.
Samantha was not sedated. She was sitting on the edge of the bunk in the brig, in street clothes -- plain dress, cloak over her wings, and bonnet over her horns, her ears listening to every word, every movement. The ship’s engines had stopped, and the silence was unsettling.
Mustang paced the deck. His footsteps well known to her, as was the thud as he set that large set of plans down.
"Right. Transfer of custody, Check." Mustang said loudly, for the benefit of the agents. "Subject is restrained. Check. Key is..." He patted his pockets, frowning. "Damn. Must have left it down in the purser's office. Hold a moment."
His steps shuffled down the stair. The door to the brig opened, he stepped in next to the little table they spent so much time talking by, and held her gaze for a single, suspended second.
"I found it," he said over his shoulder. "While I'm here I'll get the manifest," Mustang called up to the agents.
He turned and walked out, closing the heavy iron door but not throwing the bolt. As he passed the table, his hand brushed the surface.
One of the keys to the shackles slid silently off his palm and landed on the table side near to her.
He went up the stairs to the deck, flashing a grin at the agents, and handing over a key. "Just countersign my paperwork, and you can haul the prisoner away." Faint sounds of scribbling. "She's official your responsibility, Gentlemen. Good luck, and I need a drink."
He walked away, whistling a tune he’d picked up in a Mississippi river hall.
Inside the brig, Samantha stared at the key. It was small, tarnished silver, catching the dim light of the porthole, out of which she could see crowded streets.
She didn't hesitate. The air collapsed inward with a sharp crack of displaced pressure, leaving the brig empty and the shackles ringing against the floor.
June 1896. Eight Years Later.
The Department of the Treasury. Sector 14 Archives.
The electric lights hummed in the windowless room. The air smelled of dry paper and dust. A clerk, young and eager to impress the new Director, placed a thick file on the mahogany desk.
"Audit's done, Director," the clerk said, sliding the file across the mahogany. "We ran the '88 London extraction reports against the Western census. Took all night, but we found a match."
The Director opened the file. It was stamped PROJECT: CLEANSWEEP.
"And?"
"The report filed by Senior Agent Thomas A. Sawyer, 'Mustang'," the clerk pointed to a yellowed page covered in handwriting that was sharp and rushed. "He noted a specific physiological interaction. The subject, classified HR-713, exhibited a total suppression of bio-etheric output when in direct contact with cold-forged iron. Not just pain, sir. Suppression."
The Director ran a finger down the page. *Subject: Samantha Grey. Origin, 1692. Powers: Kinetic/Thermal. Weakness: Ferrous interruption of infernal magic.*
"Agent Mustang was thorough," the Director noted. "A pity he's still MIA from that Havana operation last year. He had a knack for details."
"Yes, sir. I wouldn't count him out. The man's a legend. Based on his data, we've outfitted the Recovery Teams with cold-forged iron chain nets and manacles."
"And the target?"
"Located," the clerk said. "She's been tracking back and forth across the territories, just as the psychological profile predicted. She thinks she's hiding."
The Director closed the file. He picked up a rubber stamp, inked it heavily, and pressed it onto the cover: AUTHORIZED.
"Send the teams," the Director said. "Bring her in. The containment facility under Fort Leavenworth is ready for another long-term tenant."
The Badlands, Dakota Territory.
Samantha knelt by the stream, washing the dust of the road from her face. The water was cool, a blessing against the summer heat. She checked the horizon, her eyes scanning for the tell-tale shimmer of magic or the glint of a spyglass.
Nothing. Just the wind in the sagebrush and the endless, empty sky.
She reached up, touching the cross that hung around her neck -- a simple thing she had carved herself.
Kyrie eleison, she whispered.
She stood up, shaking the water from her hands. She adjusted the heavy cloak that hid her wings and turned to walk back to her camp.
Then she heard it.
Not a footstep. Not a branch breaking.
The distinct, metallic click of a safety catch disengaging.
She spun around, fire already curling in her palms, her tail lashing out for balance.
But the net was already in the air. It was heavy, woven from dark, dull metal links that smelled of the grave. It hit her with the force of a falling wall.
Samantha screamed as the net enveloped her. The fire in her hands sputtered and died, choked out by the metal that drank her power. She fell to her knees, the world turning gray and silent.
As the boots of the agents crunched toward her in the dirt, she didn't see their faces. She only saw the net. The iron leeched the power from her blood, dragging her down into the mundane. In the fading light of her consciousness, a singular memory surfaced: the dull glint of a silver key on a table, left by the only man who had ever tried to save her.
She closed her eyes.
Kyrie eleison...