Lauren had just started her first year of high school when she first met Shura. Lauren was an awkward kid and she was picked on a lot, but Shura was the most cruel about it. She decided to start a rumor Lauren was a lesbian. To be truthful she didn’t even know what that actually meant until someone explained it to Her. She only knew that those around her considered it the cruelest of insults.

  Lauren felt alone, powerless. She don’t know how that stupid rumor found its way to her parents but they believed it. Her father had never laid a hand on me before but that night… she was left with bruises that didn’t fully heal for weeks.

  When the Anchors approached her. They told her she was special - that she had power and she could make the world better… she thought it was finally her way out. She ran away from home, she stopped going to school. she put everything I had into training and mastering her new abilities.

  That lasted a few weeks before they introduced me to the other newest recruit. They called her ‘Cosmic Anchor’ but Lauren knew who she really was. The person she hated most in the world.

  The Anchors wouldn’t tolerate her abusing Lauren out in the open, but she’d always find a way. Little things, petty bullshit and insults on the sly and Lauren’s hate only grew with each passing day. She tried to be better than Shura, to ignore the smug looks and the pain but it was all the time with her.

  Lauren practiced even in secret, focusing on how to take herself out of the world. To understanding what the pocket of space her powers took her to was. That was until she figured out she could hold out, instead of allowing herself to be pulled into the space, she held herself outside of it as the opening tried to pull her in. It took a whole minute the first time but she was able to create a doorway. The space was small, no floor, no ceiling, just an empty sphere about 8 ft in diameter.

  Objects placed within stopped moving, stopped functioning, a watch placed inside froze in place until it was removed.and trying to reach her hand hurt badly. She figured out quickly time didn’t flow the same in there. She tried again and again, with few results, eventually she didn’t just close the doorway, she used my powers to remove it.

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  When she finally made a new doorway things had changed, it took less time to form and the space was larger, the few objects she’d left inside were gone, and it seemed to me the space had collapsed without a door to hold it. she repeated the cycle, documenting and experimenting, making the space bigger, allowing time to flow within it, giving it gravity and ground and air to breathe.

  She forged it into a sanctuary and lab, a place all her own where no one could disturb her. She could tell the Anchors were growing suspicious as she kept disappearing for hours at a time but she knew, she thought she knew… that she wasn’t doing anything wrong and that the greater good was being served.

  Still she continued her other training, she began to fight the denizens of the hells leaking through the incursion rifts.. Many of them were human once, souls banished by Freyja or Loki to work off their sins in the endless wars waged between the overlords. She became the Anchors premiere ambusher, able to strike before the denizens and their demon masters were even aware of her presence.

  She would become a whirlwind of light, her golden celestial blades shining like diamonds as she fought heroically to defend the world.. Yet, Cosmic always hung over her. She tried to tell the seniors what had been happening all this time, what Shura been doing to her behind their back. None of them believed her, they didn’t trust Lauren or anything she had to say. She became more and more of a recluse as the days went on, when the calls to fight the demons came, she began to arrive late or not at all. What was the point? She heard them speaking about how they all expected she was going to stab them in the back. There was no fighting it, and she continued to try and make the world a better place on her own. If their vision had a place for Cosmic in it, She wasn’t sure she wanted a part of it anyway.

  She didn’t truly understand the nature of the doorway to her pocket dimension at first. Didn’t realize it was only invisible to those who didn’t know it was there. And one day… she was spotted going inside. Exposing her secrets to the Anchors, they saw her careful experiments dismantled and destroyed. Months of careful research tossed aside because they decided augmenting their powers with technology was… inherently villainous without a single scrap of evidence to support that claim.

  She did manage to escape. Her ability to shift in and out made it impossible for them to pin her down for very long and the more they forced her to jump the further and faster she thought she was able to. They hunted her for weeks and their pursuit pushed her to what she thought were her limits and beyond… Eventually she tossed aside the name they’d given her and after faking her death she took up the mantle she made for herself.

  Fatal Range.