They should have been punished.

It could have been anything, so long as it did not result in death. Constant trauma and toil had taken the sanities of many of the Sisters; some grew sadistic, others depraved. So long as their mental infirmities did not interfere in their cognitive judgment, the priests saw no reason to discipline or even ever restrain them.

After all, in the Zabaniya, loyalty mattered above all else.

Back then, oh-thirty-three had expected oh-one to be much the same. She was as legendary a figure as one could be in these backwater wastes. A skilled, ruthless assassin, oh-one had managed to kill a senior clergyman of the church of the gods at an astounding age of six, slipping into the Brass Cities as an orphan of the slums and slaughtering an entire squadron of templar soldiers to reach her target. A person who could do such a thing, oh-thirty-three had thought, could hardly be sane.

None of the Sisters were. Some were just slower to realize it than others.

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But instead of horrifying punishment and tribulation, what awaited oh-thirty-three and her fellow gang of misfits was something none of them had ever expected.

After a moment’s consideration, oh-one laughed. She laughed so long and hard that had it not been for the fact that their current location in the alcoves of the cathedral scaffolding was particularly sequestered, the priests would have heard the commotion mid-ritual.

Oh-thirty-three, forty-seven, and thirty-nine watched the girl tremble from her hysterics, clutching her shoulders for support, in bemusement. Whatever their presuppositions of the elusive prodigy had been, this had squarely fallen outside of their expectations.

Eventually, oh-one exhaled, wiping away a tear from beneath her hood. Then she turned away from them, walking to the center of the cathedral.

At the entrance to the scaffolding proper - a place only the highest-ranked, most loyal Sisters could enter - the girl spun, beckoning them to follow. Her hood was pulled down, allowing her rouge-brown locks to tumble down her shoulders.

“You wanted to see, right? So y’all coming, or what?”