It's not unlovely to be married. But it is the oddest thing. You are married in the Catholic faith, and then noted in the civil registry, without a great fanfare on either of your parts. Your father gives you away, and it is a delight to leave his side. The economic situation is dire, after the great American crash, and so there is no wild trip of love.
But there is a honeymoon. You laugh and play together, and teasingly begin to note each others' tells. You are free with your voice and your decisions, and Kuno is deeply interested in everything you have to say. You are, in fact, married to a friend who you feel a certain attraction to. It seems that hope was right.
You both work and study in your spare time, hoping to advance in your professions. You both dress up and go to secretive clubs in Berlin on week-ends. You are beginning to be happy. In happiness, however, Helmine Kraft misses a few things.
She misses that Kuno is far more uncertain about life than her. She misses that her partner defers to her in most things, and looks up to her in an unhealthy way. She misses, when she becomes pregnant less than a year into the marriage, the pain and the grief and the insecurity in Kuno Kuttner. She misses that the power in the relationship has de facto fallen to her.
This, despite the legal standard and the income disparity. Helmine has a strength over her partner. News of an incoming child is the death knell of love. Economic anxiety afflicts both deeply, but more so Helmine, forced to leave her job. Toxicity begins to brew. As in all cases, it is the powerful who act and the weak who suffer.
Kuno suffers. Not from physical weakness, or lack of erudition, or lack of available options. But from a trap in her mind, from a circular logic that places Helmine above her and browbeats herself slowly downwards.
The children are born. They are twins, named Ernst and Trudi, and in good health. But they bring stress to the family, a constant stress that is accompanied by the increased burden on the budget, already tight. Both Helmine and Kuno cut down on their meals for the sake of the babies, cut down on clothes, cut down on everything.
Politically, things are not very good either. Germany is becoming a more dangerous place. All around there are threats, the streets are full of fighting and rogue youth, and hate crimes rising. Prussia has been placed under authoritarian rule. Perhaps the whole country will be next?
Maybe this stress explains it. Maybe hurt people hurt people. Whatever the reason, an emotional browbeating shifts to shouting, then shifts to worse. One night, Helmine Kraft strikes Kuno. The shock of it drives the argument from her mind, and she apologises worshipfully. They make love, crying to one another.
Then it happens again. You are Kuno Kuttner, and you are afraid.
For once in your life, you had something good. A lifetime of uncertainty, of ill-treatment by your parents, of brutality at school, of hazing everywhere, of feeling wrong to every inch of yourself.
You thought you had found someone similar, someone damaged like you. But you had found someone who was moving past that damage, and you tried to help her, not realising you were placing yourself under her boot sole. You found someone willing to teach you what you wanted to be most, and gave yourself up without worrying about the consequences. And now you are doomed.
Things do not only get worse. There are better weeks and worse weeks. When the children start teething is a bad time. The children are, indeed, part of the problem. You may not have been sure about them at first, but now you love them. You love Ernst and Trudi more than anyone else you have ever loved, more than your wife, and certainly more than yourself.
You cannot leave them, and you cannot take them with you. You are a couple, and though it may be a terrible one you wish you could escape, the locktrap of your mind allows it no more than it would allow you to throw one of the kids in the sewer.
So the world continues to turn, and the year 1933 comes. With it, comes violence. Violence unleashed by the state upon the streets and upon the people. Adolf Hitler has become Chancellor, and the Reichstag is burning. The fear of discovery, the fear of being attacked, bedevils you both.
But it is not unity that you two achieve. It is that same violence that is being expressed in disgust and hate and fists upon you, and in February it reaches a crescendo. Lying on the ground you, Kuno Kuttner, are shaking from fear. You are a wounded animal, a mammal trapped against the wall.
Your face is bruised from a saucepan thrown at you, and your hands are covering your face as Helmine screams at you. "Look at me, coward!", she is saying. "Look me in the eye when I speak to you!". The children are crying in the doorway, unable to understand.
Sobbing, you turn your eyes up to her face, and are overcome by a relentless hate. A fury bursts in you like never before, a spite at this human beast who treats you like dirt. It bursts out of you, out of your eyes, a fire of blinding light. Helmine doesn't have the time to feel it before she falls to the ground, dead.
You stare, agape. What on earth? You bring your hands to your eyes, which feel warm and wet with tears. Nothing makes sense now. Helmin smells like burning flesh. Her face is a mess of burnt skin and pieces of bone. You sit there for minutes, staring, until you remember the children. And then you are a flurry of action.
WHAT do you do?
[] Try to cover-up the murder in the street violence.
[] Turn yourself in.
[] Hide the body and act like nothing is wrong.
Current Status
Shop assistant, widowed
Known Powers
Laser eyes?
Prologue finished, off to the actual meat of the quest now! As always, ask any questions you wish.
