"Well..." She sighs gently as she once again lifts the glass of water up to her somewhat plump lips for another sup. The few seconds that pass in this moment somehow feel more like minutes to her as she considers the loaded question. 'What was my life? What did I accomplish? What was my worth? Who am I, really?' In this fragment of time, all these questions rushed around in her head as she decides on an answer. Any answer. Despite having only come into this position over the course of a couple of years, it felt like it was decades ago that she was a normal Kusarian civilian, even though it was only about two years. Slowly, she sets down the glass, and another few moments pass in silence. For once, she was the one bothered by a personal question into her earlier life. As the pieces of memories recollect themselves within her mind, she decides it's not worth it to keep running from her regrets.
"It's not really that interesting. Before all this, I lived on New Tokyo. Shibuya archipelago. I'm the middle sibling in a set of three, and my father is a small business holotainment producer and developer. My mother was a local model for certain digital magazines... We frequently had to tag along on trips throughout Sirius when we were young because they couldn't leave us alone to care for ourselves." She pauses to catch her breath and lubricate her throat with another swig of water. My younger sister, she was the rebellious and crude type, always misbehaving in school. My older brother, he was the one who kept us all in order and was very well behaved. Being the middle one, I suppose I was influenced by them both. Their juxtaposed personalities rubbed off on me enough to make me neither too disciplined nor too unruly. We were quite a handful for our parents, but for the most part, we lived normal lives."
She relived it piece by piece, becoming more invested by the second. Her gaze was glued to Anna as she tried to summarize what she could to make a long story short. "But as we got older and approached college, my sister was expelled for leading a school protest based on some kind of illegal material. She's an excellent hacker, so she must have acquired it from some kind of secure neural net portal. My parents kept it a secret from us and banished her from our home. Many confusing feelings about the situation prevented me from speaking up about it, and my brother, well, he reluctantly agreed with them. By the time we went to university, he was attending a military college to join the Navy, and I was in a technical institute to get a bachelor's degree in computer science. Eventually, I joined an extracurricular club that seemed normal, but in actuality, it was a coterie of people sympathetic to the Dragons. Out of fear, and believing the propaganda at the time, I... followed along with them. They told me that I was the chosen of a lost bloodline, and that it was my destiny to lead them to glory."
And for once, her collected and calm nature started to show cracks. Her poker face started to collapse. She wasn't sure if it was the drink, or the memories flooding back she didn't describe, or even both, but she didn't care. "It's not like they did anything bad, don't get me wrong. But the elders won't tell me anything about what they said, and it still haunts me. What exactly did they know about me that I didn't? Why did they choose me out of the thousands of other people they could have found? I know that this is the righteous path, a choice which faces the ugly truth of Kusari as the rest of the public chooses ignorance, but still... I can't help but want to go back to how things were. I miss my siblings and my parents deeply. But even if I could go back, it'd be a betrayal of what I believe now." With that, she stops. She sighs again, but rather deeply. Thank god that nobody was sitting near them and that she picked a booth in the back of the bar for this meeting, or else she would have been incredibly embarrassed. She returns her attention to her mango fizz and swills from the straw. After spilling all those beans, she felt somewhat spent.