Ada's mother, whose name was Monique, was a member of the Rosanth Blades, one of the most respected and skilled soldiers in the entire country. She was a tall, proud-standing woman, with fiery auburn hair and a hard face.

"Where is my treasure?" she would demand, throwing open the door of their apartment, and Ada would come running to her, to be swooped up in her mother's strong arms and drawn into a crushing hug. And then would come presents and stories of the places her mother had been, and sometimes of the battles she had fought, and for a time they would be together as a family, the three of them, and Ada's father—whose name was Luc—was always more collected and focused when his wife was around, she made sure of that, kept him on track, and so Ada never believed her parents when they called her their treasure, because she knew that it was this time, when all three of them were together, that was the treasure.

But always there would be further assignments, and the family would be split up again, and Ada's father would become unfocused on Ada and refocused on whatever experiments he was currently running, and for Ada there would be a sense of lost time tempered only by the knowledge that her mother would eventually return.

Monique was killed in a border skirmish a few days after Ada's ninth birthday. This was during what would later be called the Scattered War, a series of several dozen small-scale incursions across the Rosanthian border by Targan forces. Monique was posted in a small city called Abelard, very near the Rosanth-Targe border. She fought valiantly and fiercely, defending the border and the citizens of the country that she loved. She fought until she could fight no longer, and she died bravely, a hero of the nation.

She shouldn't have been there.

This was not just wishful thinking. Her squad should have received orders of relocation the previous week, but these orders never reached them. It was only later that the reason for this was discovered; a cat had caught and killed the pigeon carrying the message. By the time the mistake was noticed it was already too late.

To Luc, this was unacceptable. Irrational. Stupid, foolish, insane, a terrible mistake caused by a chance occurrence, by the instinct of a near-mindless animal. Why did this happen? How could a cat destroy the carrier of such an important message? But to the cat, the pigeon was merely food, or perhaps not even that, a plaything, a momentary diversion, or even less than that, a fast-moving object that instinctively it leapt upon.

Instinct. This was what Luc fixated on. The carrier pigeon was so much more than a source of food, so much more than a plaything, so much more than something to be leapt upon and killed. If only the cat could have understood that! Forget the stupidity of the conflict, some trifling dispute over borders, forget the inherent foolishness of war, this cat ... this bird ... and a husband is robbed of his wife, a daughter of her mother. How utterly ridiculous.

And so Ada had watched her father become obsessed with animals and with instinct. What caused these impulses? Could they be controlled? Could an animal be made to realise the consequences of its actions? His was a gentle madness, one that, in turn, infected Ada as she found a fixation of her own; taking care of her father. She made him food, put out clean clothes for him in the morning, drew a bath for him at night, put him to bed, guided him through the necessities of life.

In this way, both of them coped. The years passed. The sharp pain of loss dulled to a manageable ache. As Ada grew older she became more interested in her father's experiments, in experimentation in general, in observation, in gaining knowledge and applying it—they lived at the Trinity College, one of the largest in Rosanth, located in the city of Grand Cerveau, and all of their needs were met without question. They wanted for nothing, except what they could not have.

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"Ada! Ada, my treasure, where are you?"

Luc swept through the apartment to find his daughter sitting in the lounge, quietly reading by the window, a single lamp lit above her.

"Ada, there you are, thank goodness. What are you reading? No, that's not so important. Do you see this rain? This storm we are having?"

Ada nodded, not looking up from her book.

"Are you scared, my little wolf?"

Ada shook her head.

"Oh. Well then." Ada's father turned to leave, to return to his laboratory, but then he suddenly turned back again. "Ah, but yes, there will be thunder, and lightning too, there hasn't been such a storm here for some time. I remember you were scared by the thunder, during a storm like this."

"That was when I was four years old, Dad, I'm not small now," said Ada, still not looking up from her book.

"This is true. So you will not be scared?"

"I think I can handle a little bit of thunder."

"That's good. You're very good. Did you know I'm so proud of you?"

At last Ada looked up at her father, as he stood there looking anxiously at her, his posture sloppy and his bearing weak, as he always looked when outside of his laboratory—deflated, somehow. Not quite his true self. She smiled at him.

"I know, Dad."

"That's good, that you know. Well, I'll return to my experiments."

"Have fun."

Ada's father hesitated at this, as he always did, no matter how many times she said it to him, and then he nodded, just a little, as he always did, as if making the realisation for the first time that, yes, experimentation and observation WERE fun, this aside from being necessary and important, of course, and that in doing them he would, in fact, HAVE fun. With a little stutter of a step, he left Ada alone.

Several minutes later Ada looked up from her book again, out the window this time—it was evening, and already dark, so she couldn't see anything except for the rain, pouring down outside the window, but a second after she looked up there was a bright flash that illuminated the college grounds and sent a tingle through her body—she didn't even hear the rumble of thunder immediately afterwards, the feeling was so surprising and so strong. It took Ada a moment to even identify it, and once she had she felt sure that there was something wrong with her—after all, how could one feel sympathy for a storm? The feeling slowly faded, though it did not disappear completely, and Ada went back to her book ... but several minutes later she felt her gaze being drawn to the window once more, and once more there was a flash of lightning just after she looked up, and this time the tingle was stronger, almost like a buzzing throughout her body, enough to make her put down the book and stand up. She walked to the window and put her hand against it, felt the coolness of the glass, and she leant forward to press her cheek against it—she wasn't hot, but the coolness felt somehow right. She stayed like this for a while, then looked back outside again, her gaze falling on an area of the grounds below—she couldn't see it through the darkness and rain, but there was—

Ada gasped as a fork of lightning shot through the sky, grounding into a bushy elm tree directly where she was looking and splitting it apart, this accompanied by a crack of thunder so loud and deep as to be painful, and as Ada stared in shock through the darkness a small, rational part of her mind said: 'There are about half a dozen lightning rods dotted around this college, it seems highly unlikely that a lightning bolt should strike that tree instead of them—or any of the taller trees in the grounds, for that matter'.

How random, Ada thought. How unbelievably random that I should look out of the window three times, and each time see lightning flash—even be looking straight at the spot it hits. She reached up to push her glasses back, and gasped as a tiny spark jumped from her finger to the metal frames.

"Ouch," she said, although in truth it hadn't hurt. She hesitated, then pushed her glasses back again, this time with no spark. After a final glance out the window, Ada yawned and picked up her book, put it back on the bookshelf, then wandered off towards her room.

"The lamp," she muttered, when she was almost out of the lounge. She'd forgotten to turn it off. She turned and walked back to her chair, leaned over it to turn the little key at the side of the lamp, it was always a stretch to do this, whoever installed the lamps in this apartment put them FAR too high—

Ada yelped as a bolt of white lightning shot from her outstretched fingers towards the brass lamp, grounding into it with a crackle of energy. She stared at her fingers and at the lamp and then, without much of a say in the matter, she fainted.