P.S. Finch nearly lost her life as another pitiful victim. She was on her way home from a rather ordinary job, at a most ungodly hour. She felt a leather hand over her mouth and a sharp pain at the back of her head. The next thing she noticed was a blurry sidewalk… and a tiny river of blood filling the cracks.
Then all was black. Her surroundings smelled… sweet?!
“That roses I smell?”
Blackness lifted from Miss Finch’s eyes. Her surroundings faded from quazar-burn to white-hot to blurry-silhouette… eventually a nun removing bandages was visible. She seemed more of a smile clad in a habit than an actual person.
“Welcome to the jungle,” she said as she offered a small hand with an incredible grip. Another nun with the face, literally, of a dog, was holding a shovel. There was much blood on her thumbs.
Do dog-women have paw-thumbs? wondered Finch. But what she dared ask aloud: “Am I in a spot?”
“Oh, don’t mind Sister Boomhand,” the halfling nun replied. “She’s just tending to the rose garden.”
A large blue-skinned nun tossed a male body into a hole. The dog-faced nun started to fill it with dirt.
“Did he…?”
It took a while for a whole gaggle of overzealous nuns to explain, but P.S. Finch eventually gleaned that hers was a case of mistaken identity. One of the nuns from this super-secret sisterhood was a red-haired fashionista with an affinity for a fine hat and a tall pair of boots.
“So he was trying to kill her, but almost killed me instead, but y’all killed him instead. I get all that right?”
Finch could have gone home and returned to her mundane life, but she stayed with the red-haired nun. She learned much about Milani, and became so enthralled she wanted to become a weapon of the goddess. “Tattoo a rose garden over my entire body! I’m in for the long haul!” (She also learned that nuns take requests like this literally, and with much enthusiasm.)
Several months had passed before Finch realized she was not quite fit for the convent. “Ladies, the meditations were a joy and the ink on my skin’s lovely and all, but I’m just too spaghetti-armed for your ways. I’ll always cherish the many moons here, but there’s a time when the coyote howls at the New Moon…”
It was a long tearful goodbye. The first thing Finch wanted to do was go home to her old apartment to wash the snot from her sleeve.
She expected new tenants would be there. But she didn’t expect them to be rats and roaches. Her snotty sleeve didn’t seem so gross now, so she skipped to the second thing she wanted to do—
That is, open the secret compartment in the baseboard! The box labeled O.S.F. was still there! Even the rats and roaches didn’t mess with it.
Inside was a battered radium masterwork mercy pistol! The gun her dad, One Shot Finch, used to take down Mad Dog Tannon! “Thanks to you, dad, he’s in jail for life. That your enemy outlived you just don’t sit right with me, but hell, I’ll follow in your footsteps anyway! Say hi to Ma for me!”
And with dad’s gun at her hip, and Milani’s roses all over her skin, Pumpkin Spice Finch set off in search of adventure!
