[[File:Stalker Irene B.jpg|thumb|730x730px|🎨 https://bsky.app/profile/dreadtie.bsky.social (commission)]]

== Gear ==

=== Haley Strategic X Chest Rig (D3CRX) (black) + X-Harness ===
[[File:D3CRX.png|center|thumb|D3CRX chest rig configuration]]

=== Zephyr Grom MID ZX06 Boots ===
[[File:98726 Buty-Zephyr-Grom-MID-ZX06-Black-glowne.png|center|thumb|Zephyr Grom MID ZX06 Black]]

=== Mechanix Wear Tactical Specialty Breacher Covert Gloves ===
[[File:Mechanix Wear Tactical Specialty Breacher Covert.png|center|thumb|Mechanix Wear Tactical Specialty Breacher Covert]]

=== Clothing ===
Same bodysuit as in the original version, stockings as in the original version, thigh holster as well[[File:Pentagon aphrodite.png|center|thumb|Pentagon Aphrodite Sweater - Wolf Grey]]
[[File:Mini cargo shorts2.png|center|thumb|mini cargo shorts]]
[[File:Belt.png|center|thumb|belt]]

=== Primary weapon ===

==== AK-308 ====
Taken from the diverted shipment that marked her escape, the AK-308 was never meant to be hers. She claimed it deliberately, knowing exactly what it represented: proof that she could take instead of be given. It is the first weapon she chose for herself, and she treats it as such.
* Strike Industries Viper MOD-1 stock
* Trijicon ACOG 6×48 riflescope + RMR TYPE 2 red dot sight
* Magpul AFG foregrip
* Suppressor
[[File:Ak-308.png|center|thumb|Customized]]

=== Sidearm ===

==== Walther P99 DAO ====
A gift from Margaret Hale, Irene has carried this sidearm since she was twelve. It has stayed with her through every assignment and escape, and she will not part with it under any circumstances.[[File:P99 FB RADOM.png|center|thumb|No attachments]]
== Story ==
Born at the turn of the millennium, Irene Barrett was a girl who found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The child of two British humanitarian workers doing their best to provide aid in an unnamed conflict zone in the Middle East, she was orphaned suddenly and violently in an American air strike at the age of nine. With no surviving guardians and no way to leave, she spent the next year fighting for scraps in a war-torn country where she was visibly foreign and unable to communicate with those around her.

At first, survival meant hiding. She learned which streets emptied before nightfall, which buildings still had intact stairwells, which groups to avoid entirely, and which she could steal from without immediate consequences. Hunger forced her closer to people than caution allowed. She stole when she could, scavenged when she could not, and learned quickly that being small only protected her until it did not.

On her tenth birthday, not that she realized it, she killed a human being for the first time. A man noticed her following a supply route too closely. He grabbed her, shouting in a language she did not understand, dragging her aside. She fought on instinct, clawing and biting. When his grip loosened, she found herself holding his dropped weapon. She did not hesitate. She pulled the trigger because she wanted him to stop. And he did.

She did not stay to understand what she had done. She ran until her lungs burned and her legs failed, then ran again when the shaking passed. After that, something fundamental shifted. Killing became a tool, one she now knew she could use, and one she did not yet understand the world would not readily forgive her for using.

Within another year, she had learned how to be dangerous. She did not pick fights. She watched. She followed. She took from those who would not notice the loss until it was too late. When violence happened, it was over as fast as she could make it.

----

She was found by a fellow countrywoman by accident, not design. A woman passing through the region on business that was the polar opposite of aid work. She noticed Irene because she was watching her with silent, careful attention. Because she did not beg. Because she did not run.

She spoke to Irene in English. Irene did not answer at first — by then, silence had become a habit. When she finally spoke, her accent marked her immediately as out of place.

She was offered food. Shelter. Safety. The woman did not call it rescue; she offered it in exchange for work.

Irene followed her because hunger is persuasive and because she had learned that refusing adults with power rarely ended well. The terms were simple. Obedience for protection. Utility for survival.

Only later did she understand that what she had really been offered was ownership.

The woman's name was Margaret Hale, and she had come to the war-torn country to ply her trade as an arms dealer. She did not insist Irene call her anything. Names, she explained, were for paperwork and introductions. What mattered was attention.

The first work Irene did was not violent. She was given errands that looked meaningless on their own: walking routes, sitting in rooms, carrying small packages that were never opened. She was taught how to keep watch without drawing the eye, how to listen without appearing to, how to remember details without writing them down. Hale didn't frame this as training. She framed it as teaching Irene to be useful. Nothing was ever outright promised, but completed tasks were always rewarded. Food arrived on time. Blankets were provided for cold nights. Shoes and clothes were replaced.

Dealing with violence came later. At first, Irene was simply present when armed men argued. Hale positioned her nearby, silent and unobtrusive. Irene learned where to stand so that Hale was never the most vulnerable person in the room if things escalated. She learned angles. Lines of fire. When to move, and when being still mattered more than speed.

Hale corrected her rarely. Praise was rarer. When it came, it was understated and devastatingly effective.

As Irene grew older, her work expanded. She became a courier not just for packages, but for information. She learned which questions not to ask and which answers to remember. She was dressed carefully, taught how to disappear into crowds, how to look like a dependent, a niece, a nobody. Men underestimated her. Women dismissed her. Guards waved her through checkpoints that would have stopped anyone else. Hale used this deliberately, and Irene understood that being overlooked was now her most valuable trait. She removed obstacles, human and otherwise, when ordered. Hale spoke freely around her, not because she trusted her, but because she had made Irene complicit. Another leash.

By the time Irene was a teenager, the pretense of choice had fully eroded. She did not ask what would happen if she refused an assignment, because she already knew. She had seen what happened to people who became inconvenient. Hale never threatened her with violence. She did not need to. Hale called what she provided a home. Irene had learned quickly that homes could be withdrawn.

By the time Irene was old enough to recognize it, her conditioning was already complete.

----

At eighteen, Irene had nearly outgrown the ambiguous space where Hale could plausibly frame control as protection. Despite her small frame, deliberately preserved through Hale's interference with her growth, she was now a fully trained, adult operative with nothing left to develop. From Hale's perspective, that meant one thing: Irene had reached the peak of her usefulness, and it was only going to fall.

The new girl arrived without announcement. Young. Quiet. Kept close in the same way Irene once had been. Hale did not explain her presence, did not reassign Irene, did not change her tone. The pattern was unmistakable: the same errands, the same positioning in rooms, the same deliberate neglect punctuated by small, conditional rewards.

Certainty settled in Irene's chest. Hale did not discard assets impulsively. She replaced them when they outlived their usefulness.

Nothing was said aloud. Nothing needed to be. Irene understood then that her survival had acquired an end date. The clock was already running, and when it stopped, she would simply no longer be useful enough to keep.

----

Irene did not leave immediately.

That, too, was something Hale had taught her without ever naming it. Sudden departures drew attention. Panic left traces. People who ran too quickly were remembered. Irene stayed because staying was safer, and because she needed time to be certain.

She prepared the way she prepared for everything else: quietly, redundantly, and without assuming she would get a second chance. She cached supplies in places she already had reason to access. She altered routes just enough to test who noticed. She let minor tasks fail in ways that could be attributed to chance, simply to see how much slack she still had.

Hale noticed nothing, or noticed and saw no reason to intervene yet. Irene was still useful.

The opportunity came in the form of a shipment Hale had been cultivating for months: firearms destined for the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Not the crude kind sold in bulk to bandits, but clean, modern weapons broken down, serialized components scrubbed or altered, meant to be reassembled once inside. Guns that would disappear the moment they crossed the perimeter, traded hand to hand until no origin could be proven.

Hale treated the job as routine. Irene was assigned oversight, not command. Walk the routes. Verify contacts. Be present where decisions might turn violent. The new girl was kept away, close to her new owner, watching and learning, exactly as Irene once had.

Irene understood what Hale was doing. This was not an execution. It was just a job dangerous enough that casualties would be acceptable, deniable enough that questions would not be asked. If Irene died in the Zone, she would simply vanish into it. If she survived, then there would be other such jobs.

That made the choice simple.

Irene diverted the shipment at the last possible point. Not by stealing it outright, but by doing what she had been trained to do best: adjusting details. A changed rendezvous time. A rerouted vehicle. A guard reassigned under the pretense of efficiency. Small changes that accumulated into separation.

By the time Hale realized something was wrong, Irene was already inside the Zone's margins with a portion of the shipment and no intention of returning. The Zone did not care about ownership or contracts.

Irene did not look back.

Inside the Zone, the rules were brutally honest. Territory was unstable. Alliances were temporary. Authority was enforced only at gunpoint and only for as long as someone was willing to hold it. For the first time, obedience was not assumed. It had to be negotiated, earned, or refused openly.

She sold part of the shipment to survive. She kept part of it because she knew better than to arrive unarmed. She learned the rhythms of the place the same way she had learned every other hostile environment: by watching, by mapping patterns, by assuming that anything not actively trying to kill her was only waiting for the right moment.

Hale did not pursue her into the Zone. That, more than anything, confirmed Irene had been right. The Zone was not profitable enough to reclaim a single asset, no matter how well-trained.

For the first time that she could remember, Irene existed somewhere she was not owned.

The Zone did not make her safe, but it made her free.

Irene Barrett/STALKER/JP

2026-04-11T20:16:47Z

Reki:

2026-03-21T02:14:01Z

Reki: Created page with "== Cruel Wonders == A researcher enters the unstable Warsaw Altered Reality Zone to search for her wife. cw: existentialism i guess?, grief and family loss"

== [[Cruel Wonders]] ==
A researcher enters the unstable Warsaw Altered Reality Zone to search for her wife.

cw: existentialism i guess?, grief and family loss

MediaWiki:Mainpage

2026-03-21T02:12:43Z

Reki:

Topics

2026-02-25T15:11:05Z

Reki: /* Content warnings: */

==== Content warnings: ====
* psychological horror,
* reality distortion,
* grief,
* quasi-religious themes,
* ambiguous loss.
<nowiki>-----</nowiki>

= Cruel Wonders =
"I came to the Zone to search for my wife."

That sentence remained stable longer than anything else, along with my memory of her name, her face, the simple fact that she had existed. I repeated it like a mantra. The mind, it turns out, is sometimes more reliable than instruments at keeping the chaos of the Warsaw Altered Reality Zone at bay.

I had been working here for six years. Or thought I had. Time here blurred, doubled back, abandoned its own rules. No one could track its passage with any reliability, despite the technology we built to stabilize and anchor our work and living spaces to what might optimistically be called real time and space. ''Optimistically'', because no one was entirely certain which fragments of this tangled spacetime we were actually meant to belong to.

Maria had entered the Zone on her own. There was no dramatic argument, no sudden disappearance in the night. She told me where she was going and why, with the calm certainty of someone who believed they were finally making sense of the world. She had fallen in with a group she met online, a loose congregation that spoke in careful, reverent language about revelation and thresholds. They believed God resided within the Zone, not metaphorically, but literally.

At first, I assumed it was a phase, a coping mechanism. The Zone had been in the news for decades by then, framed alternately as a scientific anomaly, a geopolitical liability, and a miracle waiting to be claimed ever since it appeared in the late stages of the war. It attracted people who wanted answers, and people who wanted meaning. My wife had always belonged to the second category, and after we lost so much— well, that craving intensified.

She filed the forms, passed the screening tests, and crossed the perimeter fully legally. I never heard from her again. I was cleared to join a research team three years later.

The research barely mattered. We cataloged phenomena that refused to stay cataloged. We stabilized pockets of normalcy and called them labs. Experiments changed depending on who observed them, or who remembered them later. Papers were published, retracted, then published again under different names. I stopped caring about results. I focused on searching for patterns, anomalies in records. Eventually, I found something that aligned just enough to suggest a trail.

In one of the semi-stable border areas, explorers consistently reported the smell of flowers. Some of them even ventured a guess that they may have been peonies.

Maria's favorites.

The reports placed the phenomenon in what the maps called Area C-17, though that implied a stability that did not truly exist. It was a region where teams commonly lost orientation for minutes or days and returned convinced they had been somewhere else entirely. Still, it was passable often enough to be visited more than a few times, which meant there were logs, timestamps, witness statements. Enough paper to find a person in.

I volunteered for the next rotation without offering a reason. No one asked for one.

-----

The transition into C-17 was uneventful, which in itself felt suspicious. The perimeter gates hummed, the pressure shift made my ears pop, and then the world resumed its shape. Asphalt. Sky. A line of ruined buildings leaning slightly out of alignment, as though they disagreed about where gravity ought to be. Normal enough.

The smell came an hour into the patrol.

It was faint at first, easily dismissed. Floral notes appeared often in reports, sometimes linked to other plant-related hallucinations or memory bleed-through. But this was different. Heavy. Sweet in the way peonies are, almost excessive.

I stopped walking.

The path behind me had changed. That was not unusual — I checked my position with my instruments, and waited for the disorientation to pass. It did not. Instead, the scent strengthened. The other two members of the patrol I had joined were nowhere to be seen.

I called out their names. The sound was softer than usual, as if the air had decided my voice was no longer worth carrying. Training dictated I should mark the separation and attempt to reestablish contact for a fixed interval. I did neither. The instruments in my hands were still reporting data, still pretending there was a coherent environment to be measured, but my attention had narrowed to the smell. It was no longer ambient. It had direction.

I followed it.

The buildings grew denser, closer together, their angles subtly wrong. Windows repeated themselves across facades that should not have supported them. Doorways opened into shallow darkness and closed again when I passed, as if embarrassed. The scent of peonies thickened with every step, stirring memories.

I slowed, not out of caution but because the space itself seemed reluctant to let me move quickly. My boots touched pavement that felt soft, as though the ground had not fully committed to being solid. The buildings pressed inward further, misshapen windows judging me from on high for pressing on.

I told myself I had to turn back, rejoin the patrol… somehow, even though I was not sure that was even possible. Instead, I kept walking. I squeezed myself through the small gap that the path forward had become, and emerged into a courtyard, or perhaps a clearing.

It opened between two buildings that should not have allowed space for one. Peonies filled it wall to wall. Pale pink, deep crimson, white edged with bruised purple. They grew directly from cracked concrete, from broken stairs, from the hollow shell of a tank half-sunk into the ground. No wind moved them, but they shifted anyway, a slow collective breath. The instruments at my waist emitted a soft tone and went silent.

I slowly entered the clearing.

The smell was overwhelming now. Nearly sickening, cloying, as if I was drowning in it as I pressed on, memories of Maria surging. The scent caught on something small — her scolding me because I always forgot to take off my boots at the door.

''and there she was, arms crossed but smiling, as happy to see me as ever. Lilia ran up to me and hugged my knees, and I reached down to ruffle her hair. She asked me, 'mom, how was work?' and I replied 'oh, the usual. All good.' Maria shook her head. She could always read me like an open book. 'Do you want something to eat?' she asked, and I''

I squeezed my eyes shut as hard as I could. The smell of peonies surged once more, and I felt weak, woozy. The vision subsided. I took three deep, shaky breaths — through my mouth, not through my nose.

When I opened my eyes, all the flowers were gone.

No — all but one. A yellow peony stood alone in the exact center of the clearing. The scent did not let up one iota.

My instruments remained silent at my waist. I reached for them out of reflex, pressed the reset sequence, watched the display flicker and then fill with symbols that meant nothing. The characters rearranged themselves when I blinked.

The flower seemed to lean to the side, guiding my eyes to the edge of the clearing, an opening between the ruined buildings. I saw a flicker of red hair disappear around a corner.

My mouth had gone dry.

"Maria!?" I gasped, before I could stop myself, and immediately started running, boots digging into the soft cobblestone-turned-mud. I slipped, nearly fell, the instruments in my hands sent flying as I barely caught myself. I didn't care. "Maria!"

The clearing shifted.

The mud under my boots hardened, becoming the uneven tiles of our kitchen floor. The air warmed. The smell of peonies thinned, joined by coffee and something frying in butter. I could hear plates clacking, the muted hum of a refrigerator, a life arranged into small predictable noises.

"You're late," she said lightly, from everywhere and nowhere.

My throat closed. I ran into the gap between buildings, the walls becoming increasingly domestic, doorways and windows shifting into furniture. I stumbled forward, the air thick with warmth and familiarity. The sharp edges of concrete softened into painted walls I knew by heart, pale yellow and slightly uneven where we had argued about doing the renovations ourselves. My breath sounded too loud in the space, as if I was intruding.

The hallway narrowed, then widened into the kitchen. Light spilled across the table in the same angle as late afternoons used to, though I could not remember what time it was supposed to be. The refrigerator hummed patiently.

Maria stood with her back to me, red hair tied loosely, one shoulder bare where her shirt slipped. For a moment I could not move. The scene held itself together with frightening precision: the cracked mug by the sink with cutlery in it, Lilia’s drawing stuck beneath a magnet shaped like a strawberry on the fridge.

"You're really late," she said again, turning slightly, smiling without looking all the way at me.

My chest hurt. "Maria," I said, softer this time, as if speaking too loudly might break whatever spell had gotten hold of me.

She reached for a pan, stirring something that hissed in butter. The smell rose warm and ordinary, pushing the last traces of peony back toward the edges of the room. A single yellow flower, in a vase on the windowsill. "Did you forget to call again?" she asked. "You know she worries when you disappear like that."

I looked toward the table. A small backpack sat on one of the chairs, half unzipped. A worksheet peeked out, covered in messy handwriting.

The room flickered.

The refrigerator hum dipped lower, stretching into a tone I had heard before in the Zone. Shadows gathered where they should not have, pooling beneath the cabinets.

I took a step toward her. "Is this real?"

She laughed quietly. "You always ask questions like that."

Another flicker. The walls breathed outward, then drew back in. For a moment I saw the ruined buildings beyond them, a sliver of gray sky wedged between cabinets and ceiling. The scent of peonies surged, sweet and suffocating, threading itself through the smell of food.

"Lilia is gone, Maria. Or — are you even actually her?"

Maria paused, spatula held still above the pan. The sound of sizzling softened, as though the room itself leaned in to listen. She considered the question with an expression I recognized too well — the way she used to look when deciding whether honesty would hurt more than comfort.

"I don't know," she said at last. She set the spatula down and turned a little more toward me, enough that I could see her profile, the curve of her mouth uncertain now.

"I thought I knew," she continued. "Back when I came here. I thought there was something waiting. Something bigger than us, something that made all of this make sense."

The refrigerator hummed again, the note wavering at the edges. The walls gave a faint, slow breath. She shook her head.

"We kept saying God was in the Zone," she said softly. "That was the story everyone liked."

Her fingers traced the edge of the counter, absentmindedly, like she was grounding herself against it.

"But that's not right."

The yellow peony on the windowsill tilted toward her, petals trembling though no air moved. It's shadow lengthened, as if the sun was going down exclusively for it.

She looked at me then, properly, and for the first time her smile was gone.

"We didn't ''find'' God in the Zone," she said.

The words arrived gently, almost apologetically. The room shifted slightly. The light over the table brightened and dimmed in uneven pulses. The hallway behind me lengthened for a breath, stretching into impossible distance before snapping back into place.

I swallowed. "What does that mean?"

Maria's gaze dropped briefly to the backpack at the table, to the drawing clipped beneath the strawberry magnet. She smiled, gently and almost serenely.

"I think you know what it means."

The pan hissed again, too loud now, the smell of butter turning sharp, almost burnt. Underneath it, the peonies thickened — sweet, invasive, pressing into my lungs. The cabinets flickered. For an instant they were concrete walls again, wet and cracked with age. Then the kitchen returned, warmer than before, almost unbearably warm. My hands trembled.

"So you're not real."

She smiled.

"I didn't say that."

The refrigerator tone dipped lower, starting to resemble that familiar Zone hum. The shadows beneath the cabinets deepened, creeping outward like spilled ink. Maria leaned against the counter, watching me carefully.

"You came here looking for me," she said. "You found me." A small smile touched her lips. "Does the difference matter to you right now?"

The question hung between us. Behind her, the yellow peony shed a single petal. It drifted down in slow motion, taking far too long to reach the sill.

"Lilia," I said. The name came out with difficulty. "Is she...?"

The smell of peonies surged so hard my vision blurred.

"Careful," she continued. "The more certain you are about what this is... the more it will be ''just that''."

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the edge of the table, feeling the solid weight of it under my palms, the faint stickiness where something had spilled and not been wiped properly. The detail was so small, so wrongfully ordinary, that my breath hitched.

Don't decide, I told myself. Don't believe anything. Just observe.

The room shivered.

The shadows thickened, swallowing the space beneath the cabinets until it looked like the floor dropped away entirely. The refrigerator hum deepened into that endless Zone vibration, a sound that always made my teeth ache. The yellow peony bent further, its stem bowing as though under invisible weight. The petal drifted down from the flower like it was moving through something far thicker than air.

Maria watched me quietly.

I swallowed. "If I don't choose," I said, the words thin, "then maybe it can't settle. Maybe I can keep it... open."

She tilted her head slightly. There was pity in her expression.

"You're already choosing," she said.

The kitchen flickered — cabinets turning to damp concrete, light collapsing into gray, the smell of butter burned away by the suffocating sweetness of peonies. The shadow of the flower, ever lengthening, flowed over my boots like thick tar. My chest tightened. The walls pushed inward.

I closed my eyes.

Not to reject it. Just to breathe.

I pictured the hallway as it had been. The uneven paint. The way Lilia's shoes always ended up kicked half under the table no matter how many times we told her not to. The safe, predictable rhythm of evenings I used to think were ordinary.

The pressure in the room eased. When I opened my eyes, the kitchen was whole again. The humming quieted. The shadows retreated into places shadows were supposed to be.

Maria exhaled slowly, like someone who had been waiting to see what I would do. I felt the choice settling around me, not like a decision but like gravity — inevitable, gentle, impossible to argue with.

"I know this isn't..." I stopped. The words felt unnecessary. The truth I had carried for years felt brittle. I let it go.

My voice came out smaller than I expected. "I don't care anymore."

The sentence hung in the warm air.

The peony on the windowsill straightened. The petal that had been falling finally touched down.

Maria's shoulders softened. She turned back toward the stove, stirring the pan again as if nothing unusual had happened. The quiet hiss returned, steady and comforting.

I moved without thinking and crossed the room. My legs felt weak, but the floor held. When I reached her, I hesitated only a moment before wrapping my arms around her from behind.

She was warm.

Not like a memory. Not imagined. Solid. Present.

I pressed my forehead to her shoulder. For a long moment neither of us spoke. The peonies faded to the room's edges, replaced by butter and coffee and the clean soap scent of her skin. Far away, the Zone hummed like a storm behind thick walls.

"I was so tired," I whispered.

She covered my hands with hers.

"I know," she said.

The kitchen light steadied. The air stopped shifting. The world, or this small piece of it, settled into place.