“ open the box you gave me, the little ballerina– glittering, indifferent, the size of a bullet– unfolds. she stands, poised. If i turn the key she’ll turn. trapped on her stage with that killing music. ” arielle demarco.
at least for today.
“ yo, yo!!! ” scott sprints over to the passerby, and practically jumps in front of them. he hands (or shoves) them his phone, and leans on his back foot as if to naturally pose. “ wanna get involved in something awesome? this natural light is hittin’ all my right angles. it’d be rude not to tiktok the shit outta this. ” a smile. “ don’t ‘cha think? ”
@gallagherstart
arielle’s thought process runs like this:
what the fuck——oh.
what the fuck is tik tok?
wait, she knows this——
why the fuck is someone above the age of sixteen, particularly someone on a campus just coming off of lockdown, trying to make a publicly-available tiktok?
she says none of this, and instead laughs indulgently, adjusting the phone in her hand. “pov or dancing? actually, no—i love you, but i do not want to play the role of your nintendo ds lite as you pictochat your crush.”
hiya i’m argo i play this loser and this other loser. find me on d*scord @argonaut#0826 or here if ur into that.
⌠ tashi rodriguez, twenty, cis-female, she/her/hers ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, arielle demarco! according to their records, they’re a first year, specializing in undecided; and they did not go to a spy prep high school. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of (waves crashing against the shore in the moonlight, the glance of a reflection in a perfectly polished mirror, & perfectly manicured fingernails). when it’s the (aquarius)’s birthday on 02/03/1999, they always request their malasada from the school’s chefs. looks like they’re well on their way to graduation.
dislikes: authority, grapefruit, incompetence, shelves that are too tall, mac & cheese
birthday: feb. 03
hogwarts house: gryffindor
history—
all things considered, arielle demarco had a pretty unremarkable, if not rather interesting childhood. sole daughter to a career navy family, she spent her first ten years of life being shuffled around various naval bases, particularly around the pacific theater. she picked up a number of languages there, including korean, japanese, tagalog, and vietnamese.
even though arielle’s parents both loved their daughter and wanted to be present in her life, the combination of their jobs and their desire to make sure arielle fulfilled to the family legacy of naval officership ultimately led them to leave arielle with her grandmother in honolulu, hi.
their logic was that stability would be good for her education; their goal was to ensure that their daughter attended the us naval academy.
and that was great in theory, but it ran into a problem: ari. quickly bored of the rote memorization of traditional education, arielle became your typical “highly intelligent but poorly motivated” case of teen idle ennui, more likely to be found on the beach or at zippy’s than in the classroom. her relationship with her parents quickly became strained—they continued to mount pressure on her to pursue the usna, but she just wanted to live a trouble-free life on the beach. it also probably didn’t help that her grandmother was staunchly against the military complex (as her grandfather was killed in war) and that she had become an incredibly influential figure in her life.
but in the midst of all this, one day his grandmother came to him with a proposition: what if you could prevent future wars?
and here’s the real kicker: arielle’s grandmother was a retired cia agent and proud gallagher alumna. and perhaps it was unethical to manipulate her granddaughter to recruit her, but she knew potential when she saw it, and arielle would have been wasted as a surfing instructor—or worse, as a navy lackey.
except—
arielle demarco doesn’t really exist. well, she does, but only as a mask for agent llorona of the ghost agency.
the fact of the matter is this: llorona doesn’t have a grandmother they’re close to, they weren’t raised in hawaii, and their parents certainly aren’t navy officers—or hell, maybe they are. they’re an orphan. how could they know.
they do have the language proficiency they claim, but that’s because they learned a great deal of languages as a part of cultural assimilation. they’ve been a part of ghost for as long as they can remember, and they’ve grown to see themselves and their organization as a necessary evil. frankly, the more they’re deployed, the more they’ve come to align with their organization’s purported ideals.
their specialization is covert assassination, but they’ve been sent to gallagher for...information gathering? it’s admittedly somewhat baffling to llorona.
but they’ve never been one to ask questions, and they know that they were assigned to this site for a reason, even if they don’t yet fully know what it is.
worth knowing—
tl;dr: ari’s a double-agent sent to infiltrate gallagher. we’re gonna ignore the fact that infiltration isn’t her primary skillset because she’s ignoring that fact so. yeah.
she’s trying to hold back her skill, particularly in fighting, but if there are any situations where she gets a lil too close to blowing her cover i think that could be fun!!
yes, her codename comes from la llorona. yes, it’s because of the connotations.
is in danger of being compromised with things including, but not limited to: feelings of friendship, a sense of purpose and meaning beyond being a living weapon, existential doubt, etc.
thinks salamanders are the cutest animal alive.
has no real sense of taste; pretends to be a big foodie because arielle is, but sees the whole thing as rather superfluous.
a lot of kicking and screaming, a lot of crying (endless crying), a lot of bumbling confusion, a lot of late night reckonings, a lot of bruises, many self-inflicted (some permanent, stamped in the bone), a lot of learning to look at my life like cultivation, not a destination, a lot of accepting that there is still - will always be - more to grow into, and out of, that nothing is set, nor should it be and that who i ‘am’ is really just a soft and quiet nothing, only a momentary flicker, a series of responses & impulses that arise to whatever circumstances i’m in right now, that i won’t be her a year from now, a month, a week. the light will shift and so will i. but so it goes, bb.
