(This was updated on June 26th, by the way—realized there were a couple of inconsistencies that needed to be patched up. If you read this chapter before June 26th at about 8 PM EST, then please at least skim it again until you find the new information)

Okay, I know I said this would be planned, written, and posted after I finished The Passage of Time, but I've been inspired on how I want to see this done and can't resist starting it now. And because I’ve been so terrible at updating recently, I’ve decided to treat you guys to some Lady-POV goodness in preparation for the goodness that will be the next chapter of PoT. Wiiiiiiiiiiiink.

I'm not sure how many chapters there are going to be in this thing, but they're going to be shorter, focusing on Lady's perspective on specific moments that compliment the overall story. I still want you guys to tell me what you'd like to see in this fic (what moments you would like clarified, etc) so please continue letting me know if there's something you want to see written from Lady's perspective!

For further information on what’s to come, check out my profile—I posted when I see my fics updating again, as well as teaser summaries for upcoming chapters. It’s worth checking out! I totally wrote this at work, by the way. HAHA!

Meanwhile, I still don’t own Devil May Cry.

Warning: Do not read this until you have read The Passage of Time!! (or as much as I've posted, anyway) The prologue corresponds with events that occur before both the story and DMC3 itself, but still spoils some details that Lady reveals to Dante over the course of the story.

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Ephemerality

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Prologue

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She had taken to thinking of herself as seventeen years old, despite the fact that she was still a few months short of her seventeenth birthday. The way she saw it, she was a gun-wielding, motorcycle-driving, ass-kicking demon hunter, something that a sixteen-year-old was too immature to even comprehend. Sixteen-year-olds didn’t deal with everything she had just dealt with and was about to deal with.

Granted, seventeen-year-olds didn’t either. Neither did eighteen-year-olds, nor anyone else, for that matter. Simply put, normal people did not have to deal with this particular brand of bullshit. Demons were a silly myth to everyone else, just as they had once been to her. But now the veil was lifted, and thanks to her wonderful father she would never view the world in the same way again.

Asshole.

This was what she kept on telling herself as she rode her motorcycle into a city nearly 800 miles from her home. The trip had been as impromptu as it seemed to both the school and her estate lawyers, who hadn’t taken well to her decision but couldn’t do much about it. As far as they were concerned, she had finally succumbed to the trauma of her mother’s murder and needed some time to do some soul-searching. The school ultimately agreed with her; she would find a way to make up the rest of her assignments when she returned in two months for the second semester. Her lawyers were less pleased, worried about the balance of the account and the future of the estate as she continued to pay tuition at the school and squander her money on God knows what else, but she promised to deal with it when she returned. Meanwhile, she needed to leave, and nobody could stop her.

Four months later, she was still receiving a slew of phone calls from both the headmaster’s office and her lawyer’s office, demanding to know when she would be back, when she planned on finishing her education or at least taking some responsibility if she wanted to be an emancipated minor—and what was she supposed to tell them? That she was still driving down random roads to towns all over the region in search of her father? That said father was conspiring with some demon to unveil some mystical demon edifice or something? That the reason she had left in the first place was that the man she had been secretly paying to find her father had finally gotten a lead, and that it was time for her to take matters in her own hands?

If they hadn’t already done so they would have stopped her at “conspiring with some demon.” Either way, she ignored their calls and deleted their voicemails.

Whether or not they would have believed her, it was the truth: her father, despite appearing to be your average CEO, had always had an interest in the supernatural, which he hid from everyone except for her. He had told her stories about demons that lived in another world and of the demon, Sparda, who sealed that world away from ours. As a child it had fascinated her, filling her mind with fantasies that she and her father would share as they looked through his extensive library of demon myths. Naturally she stopped believing once she got older—it didn't help that nobody else in her middle school knew the stories or believed her if she ever brought them up—much to her father's dismay. She had always felt a little guilty about the fact that she shunning what she and her father once shared, but in hindsight she knew that she shouldn't feel as guilty about hurting his feelings as she should about dismissing such stories as silly fairy tales.

A huge chunk of her father's library had gone missing with him. The detectives had asked her what she knew about her father's interest in demonology given the fact that her mother's murder looked suspiciously like a ritual of some kind, but she had held her tongue and claimed ignorance. She knew that something was up and wanted to settle this herself, outside of the realm of the law, because this entire matter—this bullshit perversion of her life—transcended most everyone's definition of "normal."

It was funny, she thought, that her way of coping with everything was not to embrace what little slice of her former, normal life she had left, but to push away everything that was normal and good in favor of hunting down the bad. She had no family to return to, so she emancipated herself and lived full-time at school, where she avoided her friends in favor of reading up on the occult and physical training. Even her boyfriend—who was, in her words, "aggressively normal" in his ability to stand out while fitting in so well—was too much of a reminder of what had once been so simple and good. So she pushed him away, or maybe he pushed her away; she couldn't remember exactly but knew that they were apart a few months after her return to the school. Everyone knew that she had changed, but because her grades never slipped the school couldn't call her out on it and force her to see a therapist, though they could strongly advise her to do so.

Not that she listened. She was fine, really, she had just reprioritized. She needed to settle this thing with her father and stop him from doing whatever he had done to her mother to anyone else. She refused to see him commit such atrocities again, earning and breaking anyone else's trust just like he had broken hers and her mother's. That sick fuck wasn't her father anymore. He didn't even look like her father anymore, if the picture that the private detective she hired had taken was any indication—all scarred and balding with beady, familiarly heterochromatic eyes....

That was that: she would just have to kill him. She picked up and left, leaving her old name behind her and becoming some nameless person, driving down empty roads in search of the disgusting man who once was her father. She had spent a lot of time training and tricking out her new motorcycle and even newer rocket launcher—called Kalina Ann, because despite being a somewhat demure woman she knew that her mother would be happy knowing that something named after her was blowing up demons.

Demon. The word felt acrid, not scary and familiar and exciting like it had been as a child.

She crossed paths with her father on her journey, but only once: her informant had called her to report her father's location only days after she had set out. She had acted impulsively and rather naively, immediately driving to meet and confront him. Unsurprisingly, she didn't get anywhere near him, only catching a glimpse of the man at a distance—though she had been able to see in person how her father had changed, how grave he had become, and how that scar moved in waves across his neck and head. It had been a wakeup call, a confirmation of what she had already decided: this man was not the man she had once known and loved.

Before she could get closer so as to settle things once and for all, she was ambushed by demons. They were disgusting, with glowing eyes on deformed faces, twisted bodies covered in tattered robes—nothing like the divinely beautiful creatures her father had once shown her. It was her first real fight, finally fighting something other than a punching bag, or the beautiful demons of her imagination lunging at her with swords. She had been shaky and clumsy, and she walked away with several slashes, including a shallow one over the bridge of her nose. She didn't want to waste time getting them treated professionally, so she bandaged them as best as she could and resigned herself to some scars.

One good thing about this encounter, despite getting nowhere near her father, was that it had finally given her some experience against demons. As she continued following her father, he and his demonic associate—named Vergil or something, as she eventually learned—left a trail for her to follow, one of demons and death. She never got as close to them as she had the first time, but instead found herself cleaning up some of the messes they had left. While she was grateful for the experience—as she was sure that if they got to where they wanted to be, she would be dealing with more than just four or five demons—she was horrified by the deaths that she had been unable to prevent, ones that would be chalked up as murders that would never be solved because “demons didn’t exist.” Her father was letting these creatures destroy lives in his wake, perhaps as human sacrifice, just like her mother had been.

She followed him for what ended up being four months, one week, and three days, long enough for the original wounds and a few other scratches that she gained in other fights to heal, albeit poorly. The longer she waited, the more deaths she saw; and the more people died, the more she wanted to see him dead.

Now, driving into the city 800 miles from her own where her father had apparently last been spotted, she could feel something strange rumbling that wasn't her engine—the people on the street didn't notice, carrying on with their days as if nothing had gone wrong or was about to go wrong. It only took a few minutes of driving attentively down the street when, all of a sudden, the pavement around her shattered. Buildings crumbled, dropping debris both on the pavement and pedestrians alike, and she swerved out of the way to avoid getting hit herself. She barely heard the sounds of people screaming over the sound of concrete smashing into concrete and her tires screeching against the cracked ground, swerving through the streets and past pedestrians that stood, still as statues, watching the sky with their mouths agape and eyes wide with terror. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a dark tower erupt from the ground, silhouetted against the vivid orange sky above her—the clouds were thick, so it would probably rain later. Hopefully put out some fires that the firemen couldn't get to, if they survived.

The buildings soon stopped falling apart, and the sound of concrete breaking was replaced by several sharp, painful screams that abruptly cut off—people dying, she realized. Skidding to a stop, she looked around to see if she could spot anyone who was in trouble, but to no avail. The silence was intimidating: she was alone on the street, and yet there was something all around her, like death or responsibility or something else that she couldn't identify. She saw demons around her, out of the corners of her eyes, lurking in the shadows of crumbled buildings, next to corpses she could barely see in the dying light of the day. She had recently decided that these kinds of demons—the ones with mangled bodies and terrible faces—were the ones that were normal, and that the beautiful ones, if they really existed, were the exceptions to the rule of monstrosity. The demons definitely saw her, but before she could draw her gun to get rid of some of them before they got too close, she noticed exactly what was in front of her.

She was sitting on her motorcycle in front of a massive tower, tall as the sky, looking as scary and familiar and exciting as all of the drawings her father had shown her as a child. She wasn't sure if she grimaced in horror or smirked in bizarre satisfaction as she said: "I found it."

The shadows continued moving around her as the demons lurking behind her grew closer. A part of her wanted to turn around and look at her assailants in a better light—see what she was up against—but she knew that they would spring to attack if she did and she was already worried about running out of ammo. Instead she opted to take advantage of the element of surprise, revving her engine and allowing the flames that erupted from her modified tailpipe to engulf whatever was right behind her. As she sped off towards the tower, the scent of something burning barely brushing her nostrils as the demons were charred, she let the shadow of sixteen-year-old Mary fall behind for good and allowed herself to assume the identity of seventeen-year-old Someone—still nameless, and she was fine with that as long it ended with her standing over her father's bloody corpse.

It was going to be a long night.