Heroes/Fox

Lore
Mother Nature must have planned Fox as a boy. The fidgety, personality-packed troublemaker always kept her parents on their toes. She used to ditch her arts and crafts lessons, so popular among all the other young ladies. Her mom and dad eventually resigned themselves to the fact that they would never see their youngest offspring in a wedding dress. You’d have to be crazy to propose to her, right?

By her race’s standards, Fox was no great beauty, either: her ears too tiny, her body way too hairless. The girl knew this, so she made it a point to get on everyone’s nerves with her stubborn and shocking behavior. At first, women laughed at her antics, but soon enough the respect and support that Fox earned from their male counterparts made them stop chuckling. Little boys, young lads, mature men, and old geezers alike, they all followed Fox’s shenanigans with ceaseless interest. Why? Because nobody could handle weapons quite like the mischievous girl. She hand-crafted at least three dozen different gunpowder-using weapons and self-propelled cannons. Unfortunately, since Fox’s homeland hadn’t seen war for more than seven hundred years, the only use people found for her inventions was to distribute pest-killing poison in their gardens, trigger avalanches, and scare off mountain trolls. What’s more, Fox’s weapons were never as popular as her sister Annie’s devices. Annie outdid Fox in everything. Except for weapons, of course. Armament was outside of her sphere of interest: she considered weapon-making a pastime solely for men, and also quite pointless in a time with no war. At the time, that is...

One night the whole city was startled awake by a dreadful thundering and the smell of something burning. The streets shook with a rhythmic pounding, as though an unbelievably huge giant had come through town, crushing everything in his path. As it so happened, that was exactly it.

Panic broke out, everyone screaming and running, mothers rushing to save their babies. Fox, though, simply stood at her window, warming up her tiny hands.

It didn’t even occur to her that, deeply asleep in her special new earplugs, Annie was snoozing peacefully in the next room.

Something exploded out on the street, and several trees crashed down noisily. Men were dragging their belongings away from the debacle, and some even began to fight over each other’s possessions. Trying not to wake her sister and quietly whistling a popular tune to herself, Fox carefully started down the stairs to the workshop. There was a deafening roar, and a house three blocks away from Fox crumbled under the weight of the never-before-seen monster. Dust filled the air of the whole neighborhood, making the steps of the killer beast even more ominous.

Annie, still asleep, stretched, smacked her lips, and turned over in her bed. The earplugs stayed right where they were supposed to, protecting the girl’s delicate hearing from all sounds.

Fox put on her gloves, grabbed a heavy bucket, and filled it with strange black powder. The house across was burning: the monster had broken the gas pipes her sister Annie crafted with such love and care. “What a dunce,” thought Fox, pulling down the sheet covering a strange, giant structure hidden in a dark corner.

Then the fearless girl opened the door of her workshop, the monster’s hot breath burned her cheek. It took her a minute to load the Stormbreaker, her newest superheavy weapon, with black powder and take aim. And then she fired. The monster let out a horrible howl, clutched at its humongous stomach, crashing right into a wall of their lovely house, and dropped dead.

The dust kicked up after the fall made Annie sneeze in her sleep. That sneeze finally woke her up. Annie glanced around, her eyes still half-closed, and took in the picture before her: the destroyed town, the defeated monster, the cheering townsfolk. Then, she sneezed once more, and fell right back asleep.

The news of what Fox and her miracle weapon had accomplished traveled far beyond the town, reaching the ears of Emperor Ingvar himself. He invited the brave engineer to the capital and appointed her to a squad of valiant Guardians. Here, finally, was somewhere Fox could really let herself go!

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