On paper Rosita “La Flor” Cuellar was probably the least prepared person in the world to inhale a bee. A community college graduate of no great ability. A degree in business, a minor in economics. Mild mannered accountant at an aspiring restaurant. A quiet nobody in a Texas border town. Someone you’d see on the street and pass without a second thought.
TRANSMIT
Everyone in the The Secret World knows that looks are deceiving.
Flor sighed as she stepped into the cramped kitchen bathroom. It smelled dank originally, though the new scent of hot copper was filling it as rapidly. She stepped into the shower and let the water caress her skin. Her richly crimson painted skin. The water slicked her hair against her back, briefly turning the skeletal La Muerte tattoo there into Venus shrouding herself with her hair.
From each shoulder a brightly colored Calavera Catrina turned brighter yet. Waves of crimson washed over both the smirking and weeping images of death inked into her skin, until they swirled as pink ribbons down the drain. And slowly, slowly, the scent of blood was cleansed from Flor. The last mortal remains of her most recent victim vanished down the drain.
Rosita’s abuela was a wrinkled old crone of a woman who lived alone out in the desert mountains. As a little girl she’d listen to tales of the old ways, stories preserved though conquistadores and generations in the small village her grandmother came from. She filled that impressionable little head with the seeds of ravenous ambition. The Aztec traditions of bloody magics, brutal warriors, and living sacrifices to flayed gods.
RECEIVE
Sweetling, the lesson is simple. Power only comes through blood and sacrifice.
Rosita had resented being drugged and kidnapped at first. She’d done it often enough to know how it usually ended. In her experience, it did NOT end with being locked in a room full of weapons and luminous holographic targets. The hammer felt light, but had a satisfying heft to it. The sword was a gleaming razor ribbon, quick as the light dappled across it. But it was the crimson tome that grabbed her attention.
Something in that soft, leather bound volume spoke to her. Quite literally, in the dialects of her ancestors in fact. Blood called to blood, a chant in the old tongue of obsidian daggers. When she touched the book the knowledge came to her, an idiots guide to the bloody feats her grandmother had described. She closed her fist and WILLED, then a sanguine halo boiled up around it. And she smiled.
La Flor really was an accountant, though she was doing the books for Los Zetas cartel. La Flor funneled millions through American banks to her cartel masters. She’d started young, and had proved to be both mathematically intelligent and vicious even by cartel standards. La Flor was an alias she’d earned, both as a pun on her real name, and a tribute to the patterns of arterial spray left in the wake of her “aggressive collections strategy.” With a background in money laundering, organized crime, and the judicious application of power tools to debtors, it’s small wonder she’s fitting right in with the Illuminated.
WITNESS
A seed that blossomed into a vibrant flower, when it felt the touch of a bee.
Rosita had the night manager run the day’s cash drop to the bank, and the bus staff were well used to hanging tarps over the food prep surfaces in the kitchen for a round of pest control. She herself stripped down as much as possible before donning a disposable clear plastic rain poncho. She nibbled on a taco as she sat by the back door and waited for her guests to arrive.
The uniforms had changed. Her vibrant cartel tattoos were alone in the sea of dark blue suits that brought in a struggling figure blinded by a hood. Some things never changed. The screams for mercy, the protestations of innocence, the vile curses and empty threats. But she did have to admit, as much as she had liked her Gator Lopper for this kind of thing Blood Magic was infinitely more flexible.
She took his hood off to very calmly and reasonably discuss the matter of the “clerical errors” in recent shipments. And then boiled all the blood in his toes until the bone stumps that were left cauterized. You had to be firm when setting the tone for this kind of asset management.
Source: The Secret World #IAMTSW Backstory for Rosita “LaFlor” Cuellar
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