Stella Bonnaro lived a good life. Not the best life she could have imagined for herself, but a good one nonetheless. She helped those who were in pain, those who suffered, those who told themselves they could not be saved. Some say her devotion to helping people was because of the death of her brother, Roco Bonnaro. He was a minor criminal who hit it big with the theft of a plant known colloquially as the Grey Ash. The properties of which have been used in countless lifesaving drugs, most notably Venus Sickness. Venus Sickness causes those suffering from it to go blind and decreases their life expectancy. It is caused by a spores in the atmosphere of Venus that are said to look like snow. Stella Bonnaro had it since she was a baby. Those who knew her back then, before her sickness was cured and her brother’s death, that she was a kindhearted, if lonely woman. More often than not, she would isolate herself in an abandoned wreck of a ship she called home. Allegedly, she was to have had some minor ESP when she was blind (which is to say she was quite good at reading people, even when blind, to a supernatural degree). Some have speculated that it was because of this ESP ability that she isolated herself from the world. She didn’t want to see all the horrible people within it. Of course, that’s hogwash, as her work later in life had her in the midst of some truly terrible people and organizations, including the infamous Lucifer gang. From the ashes of a gang war that went horribly, horribly wrong, arose a new gang. One that was, to be quite blunt, rather mean spirited and cruel. They were known to have had schemed to go above and beyond the acceptable boundaries of typical criminal empires. They assassinated political enemies on a more than frequent basis, torched countless cities to the ground, and had a body count that would have made any government acquiesce to their demands. Some people who died have noted that they were more akin to a terrorist organization than a mob. And yet, Stella Bonnaro found herself in the middle of their operation. Speculation abounds as to how she got in with them. Some wonder if people who knew Roco tried to pressure her to join them while others believe her ESP drove her to them with an almost clairvoyant clarity. A few conspiracy theorists believe her to have been kidnapped and radicalized by their agenda to bring about a feminist “utopia” and other such things Lucifer was very much not into. The most common theory in this respect is that she simply fell in line with a bad crowd after having numerous bad experiences. Regardless of origin, Stella was not, for lack of a better term, corrupted by her time with Lucifer. Photographs of her at the time she was in their organization highlight a degree of discomfort and misery. But her work within the organization helped countless on the precipice of their ideology escape unharmed. Some even escaped from deeper within the circle, such as noted criminal lawyer Johnson Philips. Stella spent three years in their circles before people who were invested in Lucifer’s aims (a vague sense of white nationalism that believed people born outside of Mars should be exterminated to bring about the master race, among other rather dimwitted things) noticed what she was doing. By that time, she was tipped off of their awareness. She was barely able to escape with a girl she had just coaxed out of the organization who only joined in the first place because her abusive ex-boyfriend practically forced her to. Her name was Joanna Jones. Jojo, for short. When out from the other side, Stella and Jojo opened up a bar on Mars they called the Lovely Angel on account of a dream Jojo had as a child of an angel swooping down from the heavens and pushing the storm clouds away. It was quietly closed a few months later when Lucifer caught up with them. They were on the run from Lucifer for several years before the organization was finally shut down. In that time, Jojo and Stella grew feelings for one another. They tried a relationship in their time on the run, but it ultimately didn’t lead anywhere beyond friendship. These things happen from time to time and there’s no shame in admitting that romantic feelings don’t always lead to romantic endings. Sometimes, they simply lead to “And they lived happily ever after as friends.” That’s still a happy ending. Jojo ended up meeting a person by the name of Jonathan Stark. They were a lean fellow with blue eyes and prematurely greying hair. Jojo’s relationship with Jonathan was a rather loving one, all things considered. Stella was her maid of honor at the wedding, which was attended by a number of people greater than 20, most notably Claire Smith, who knew Jonathan from a coffee shop she worked at three years prior and never expected more than to be a trustworthy stranger to him, the kind of person one meets and has a good rapport with, but doesn’t know. Claire was a rather unassuming woman with a nine to five job and no relationship with the criminal underworld. Claire was never on the run from a terrorist cell, never went blind, and never stepped foot off of Mars. And yet, she and Stella hit it off instantly. It was as if there was an inherent rapport to the pair like reincarnated lovers dancing the stars and centuries looking for one another again and again and again. They dated for thirteen months before Stella popped the question, to which Claire asked a question of her own. They both laughed. Returning the favor, Jojo was Stella’s maid of honor. Her life since marrying Jonathan had been a delightfully daft one full of adventures some would call absurd, or silly. One might even say Jojo went on some bizarre adventures (though one would have to ask them about their taste in obscure and ancient anime as most art of the 20th and early 21st centuries was lost). Stella and Claire lived a less adventurous life than their friends. Though, to be fair, their friends had adventures involving exploding ancient castles and AI who believe themselves to be Gods. Stella and Claire remained in the mundane world of crime. It was Claire who noticed the systemic issues that allowed such things as Lucifer to arise. For all her empathic abilities, Stella was shockingly blind to the way the world contorts itself towards cruelty like a man whose wrist is being snapped by the people he owes money to, but with the ease of a snake chasing a mouse in a cage. They didn’t fight about it, all things considered. Stella, more than anything, was disappointed in herself for not noticing the obvious staring her right in the face and felt some shame, to which Claire comforted her the way many a lover comforts. They reopened the Lovely Angel so that Claire could pay for law school. Even in those brief months open, the Lovely Angel made a large profit, most notably because the pair could make a fantastic drink in a good amount of time. Their specialties included Martian margheritas, Tharsis, and Woolong Deluxe, which was said to leave the mouth tasting like cherries and the feeling of a first kiss. Claire went to Mars University and graduated with high honors. Stella cried at the graduation ceremony. She still worked with her contacts in the criminal underworld to get people out. Though no longer from within. Her bar would act as a base of operations working to systemically fight the syndicates infesting the universe. Along the way, she discovered time and time again a name crop up. Usually, it was tucked away in a list of subsidiaries and dummy companies. And yet, the Bohemia Corporation kept showing up. At first, she thought it was a wild goose chase, an attempt to get her to focus her energies on some phantom organization. And then, they tried to buy the Lovely Angel. What followed from there was a legal battle that lasted close to a decade that ended up altering the shape of the universe, killed 37 people, revealed a coverup that killed 345,091,923 people, and effectively spelled the doom of capitalism in the same way most financial crises did. Which is to say, the government bailed out the banks caught up in the scandal (which ever ones weren’t openly part of it at least) and laid the blame at foreigners, which was certainly a flex considering this was an interplanetary crisis. And while many a nationalist tried to use the claim for their own ends, it was typically agreed upon that the government was full of crap. The ISSP tried to keep the peace as they did with the various gang wars, but the scale of outrage was too high for even them. The riots that ensued could be best compared to the French Revolution in terms of carnage and the Civil Rights movement in terms of not being taken over by cruel, vicious brutes who wish to replace those in power with themselves. The fallout ended with the collapse of society much in the same way as the collapse of the divine right of kings. Entropy, so they say, is an inevitable process that consumes us all in the end. Stella, Claire, Jojo, and Jonathan survived the war along with several other people they fostered in their own little community in a small town called Jackston, which was about 27 miles from Tharisis. The Lovely Angel that they fought for had burned to the ground as a symbolic opening salvo to the war that would follow. They made a home for themselves in Jackston, They loved and cared for one another. They would spend the rest of their lives in Jackston, Claire even becoming the defacto leader for a short period of time before it was someone else’s turn. Rebuilding this brave new world took close to 25 years, but people were able to communicate with one another in time. Stella was quite pleased with herself near the end of her life. She saw things she never would have dreamed of. Loved people so dearly. She was good with seeing people’s character and she was happy that those she met had grown to be better. There were some mysteries in her life that alluded her. She never again met Roco’s last friend. She never even saw him. He had an air of lightness to him, like he was perpetually dreaming himself anew each night. She wondered what happened to him, even his name, which she long forgot if she ever knew it in the first place. The sun was setting on Stella Bonnaro. Fitting, she supposed. The first thing she ever saw with her eyes was a sunrise. The last would be a different story. Three people, all of whom she loved, walking towards her as the sun began to set. Claire with her blonde hair cut in a style Stella thought to be rather rubbish (who only cuts the sides of their hair), Jojo with her big eyes telling stories of love and happiness, and Jonathan, their beard trimmed haphazardly, but nonetheless wonderfully. Their forms silhouetted by the waning sun but illuminated by the fireflies that dance on the Martian fields like snow on a Venus. Her first memory was the feeling of something akin to snow hitting her on the face. She cried and cried to her parents when it happened. She didn’t feel like crying now. She felt tired. Ready for bed. All things considered, Stella Bonnaro lived a good life. It wasn’t the best life she could have imagined for herself. No one gets that. But she would have liked to have seen Roco’s face, even if it was just the once.
And when she opened her eyes…
Ramble on…
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