(This isn’t really the beginning to anything in particular, just something I wrote a couple of months back as a sort of warm-up before delving into PG. I liked it, though, so I now I share it with you.)

Alison Venture was a badass.

At least that’s what she liked to tell herself. In her more private moments, when she was in an introspective mood, she knew that this was less than true.

Her badassness — or badassitude, if you will — was actually a front, a cloak she would don when she was working. It allowed her to face all the nastiness and evil — human and otherwise — in the world, and overcome it. But underneath it, she was just a nervous and mildly self-conscious 24 year old girl.

As she hung upside down, wrists and ankles bound, over a grated pit of alligators, it occurred to her that her current line of thought was probably not the best or most conducive to her survival.

So the cloak went back on.

“Look,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy hanging out with you, but I’m starting to get a little bored. And my head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds. Is there any chance that you might just get this over with already and kill me?”

The old man puttering around her prison chuckled, a phlegmy sound. “Oh, you are quite funny. I know my pets will enjoy your sense of humor as they rip you apart and devour you.”