Origin Story

 

 

It was said she should stay inside for fear of what happens to seven-year-old girls who wander off on their own. She had always been restless though, never content with the same four corners. Now she craved fresh corners, new maps to shred, so upon overhearing her brothers speak of the Unmappable Place, she set her sights behind the house only to be caught by her dainty wrist on the way out.

 

To kill her curiosity, Maximilian and Rubia would conspire to use the same lie Alex once used on his brother: aliens there would snatch her up, scramble her brainwaves and atomize her tart bones. This strategy would backfire, however, for the world had always seemed too small for Emilia Cress.

 

No, that wasn’t quite it - her body had always seemed too small, her skin too constricting, somehow insufficient to contain her. Alas, the promise of an encounter with extraterrestrial life would only draw her closer to the creek, bristling as she was with answers to a question she had not yet learned to ask.

 

She had seen a movie once about a samurai whose bravery was like some magical coat he could slip on to render him afraid of nothing, not even his own aloneness - and striking her as a neat trick she would decide to adopt her own secret samurai identity by wrapping her broken broomsword in tinfoil, brandishing a glow-in-the-dark yoyo, and donning a silver cowboy hat.

 

ZERO SAMURAI, she would call herself: hunter of aliens and other assorted monsters.

 

Thus would begin her nocturnal adventures outside of the house—of pretending to sleep and sneaking out to patrol the creek as Zero Samurai by night, resuming her unassuming alias of Emilia Cress the Plain, the Boring, the Unremarkable, by day.