"The triumvirate of reality, unbalanced and maddened further splintered. Each of the three entities, Weaver, Wyld and Wyrm evolved forth a new Aspect of Themselves so that the trinity of trinities could be complete. The Wyrm, raped by the Weaver turned Himself to Destruction, in an attempt to tear down the Weaver's work long before their time was done. The Weaver in Her sorrow for Her lost children, became Vengeance. It now comes full circle as the Creator learned to harm and how to kill as was Her want in that ill-thought ploy so long ago. The Wyld, waning and waxing with the seasons as the Wyrm and Weaver warred assumed the mantle of Redeemer in a desperate attempt to restore the lost Balance. A million million souls hold some small shard of the Cosmic Triumvirate striving in a billion realities to carry out the will of their accursed benefactors. Imbued with the essences of the Triumvirate, they become pawns in a war for the foundations of reality itself. I am sure Master Bison is one, as is probably Sensei Rose. But what am I? Am I an Aspect as well or am I just another pawn to be shifted upon the chessboard to be sacrificed later?"

- Revelations of Insanity Most Divine
- Gregory Matheson

M Bison grinned smugly as he read poor, unlamented Gregory's words on the flickering monitor. He had distributed his discoveries of Psycho Power and the Triumvirate on the Internet in hope that someone would notice. Perhaps it was better that Gregory was rotting in Rose's old house. No one believed him nor would those who might have an inkling of what he spoke about be connected to the World Wide Web. Pity that enlightened mystics had little use for technology........

The Bella Reve Asylum for the Criminally Insane was meant to be a place where those who proved themselves a menace to society could be rehabilitated until they once more could walk among their fellow men. It was hardly a penitential institution where individuals convicted of heinous crimes were incarcerated as fit punishment. Bella Reve was an edifice dedicated to healing the shattered psyches of its patients, people who had lost their ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. At least that was the stated intent.

As Dr Strauss sat on his couch and reviewed his patients, as was his routine for the past eight years, he knew that most of the sociopaths would never be functional again. The stark walls and bare floor were hardly conducive to sanity. The howls, gibbering and hysterical laughter that bore a hint of sadness would drive any man insane. And Dr Strauss had been working here for eight long years.

These were not slightly disturbed individuals who clutched at imaginary butterflies. The inmates were examples of just what depraved and twisted depths the human mind could sink to. "Artists" who painted with blood and bile, sculpted with human flesh and bone. "Purists" who immolated entire congregations to announce the coming of their new god. Predators that dined on human flesh, feasting on their fellow men so that they could grow strong. Occultists who made blood sacrifices to unnamed gods.

And of course, Alice. Silent, catatonic and undeniably scary Alice.

Dr Strauss stretched himself in his couch and grew a single claw on his fingertips to scratch a particularly irritating itch. In Makai, there were perhaps better specimens of the diseased mind but there that definition was subjective. Darkstalkers are not intrinsically evil as defined by the ephemeral standards of human morality but they *were* inhuman.

That was why in his quest to dissect the mortal mind, Dr Strauss had taken up residence here in the Asylum. Nowhere else held such a collection of fine specimens for his research. Nor was there another place where he could act with such impunity.

Torture, deprivation and castigation were only some of the tools available to him. It was Dr Strauss' hope that his study of the psyche would unlock rituals that would be the unholy grail of many a Darkstalker. Like most nobles, he had a proficiency with the High Magic of the Old Ones. Unlike others of the peerage however, he was more than just passingly versed. He was a magi of skill and prowess to rival any member of the Royal Houses. Many innate abilities of the Darkstalker races gave them power over lesser beings. As a vampire of his clan, Strauss could entrance mortals with his voice and his gaze. Such gimmicks however generally failed when used upon another Darkstalker. Their wills were too strong, their essences too pure for parlor tricks such as this to affect them. It was rumored that Maximoffs could command the fealty of anyone who gazed upon them but Dr Strauss chalked it up to pure rumor. It was just as real as Succubi holding some mystical attraction over the opposite sex.

The vampire rubbed his weary eyes as he scanned the reports again. This latest case, that of Alice Cheshire intrigued him. According to the police reports, she awoke screaming one night at her orphanage and murdered twenty-three staff and residents with a carving knife. The only survivor, a kitchen maid, was spared for some unfathomable reason. The damnedest thing was that there were no carving knives in the entire orphanage or on her person.

Brought to his care, she exhibited a reaction to stimuli but refused to speak to anyone. Her days were spent in complete, utter silence staring into space or gazing intently at her singed teddy bear. Dr Strauss had attempted to interview her once and was struck by an immense feeling of *wrongness* emanating from the fourteen year old. It was as if her humble frame was the vessel for things much greater than herself.

At the moment she was doing something rather incongruous in a building populated largely with maniacs. She was talking to her singed teddy bear.

Dr Strauss sat up and turned up the resolution of his monitor. That she was actually talking might represent some major breakthrough.

"And now you know what you are and what you must do," said a disembodied voice in her head. Most fourteen-year-olds would either run screaming or doubt their sanity when they heard voices in their heads. Alice however was strangely comforted. Teddy had been her friend and companion ever since her parents had been murdered. The orphanage had been rough but the sudden acquisition of her powers had driven her skating across the brink of madness. Only long, slow work by her spiritual guardian had restored any semblance of humanity to her.

Alice nodded once, perfunctorily. "I am the Balance. I am to cleanse the world of all impure souls."

The teddy bear almost seemed to radiate disquiet even though its physical façade never changed. "I sense great turmoil in you, my friend. Is there something wrong Alice?"

The young girl remained impassive. "No Teddy, something's broken."

"What's broken Alice?"

"Me."

"So what will you do now, Alice?"

"I will find the man who had my parents killed. And then I will break *him*."

The teddy bear nearly stood to hug her before he remembered that they were being watched. "The Corrupter is a mighty foe Alice," he said slowly as if trying to reason with a stubborn child. "You may not be ready for him."

Alice summoned her knife to her hand. "This will be all I will need to end the Corrupter's reign on Earth."

Dr Strauss was calmly sipping his cappuccino as he took notes on what Alice was saying. Just because he was an undead blood-sucking demon did not mean that he was ignorant of the finer things in life. What she said sounded a lot like a one-way conversation but that was typical of schizophrenia. He nearly spat out his drink however when he noticed that she was now holding a carving knife.

Pressing a red button, he summoned security to relieve Alice of her weapon.

Inching forward with his baton Lou, slowly pushed open the door to Alice's cell. She was just a kid with a knife right? He had a baton and a stun gun, he surely could overcome her right? Behind him, Mike chewed noisily on his gum. If only his partner was not such a bum, Lou might have felt safer for having him there.

Lou was still praying under his breath when a white blur buried her knife in his skull.

Mike took an instinctive step back as Lou's body toppled onto him, spattering him with blood and bits of brain. Fumbling with his holster, he finally got his stun gun out to point shakily at the scant girl standing before him. With pale skin, long unkempt hair and clad in a white, shapeless frock, Alice looked very much like a restless spirit out for blood. A vision much enhanced by the blood dripping from her knife. Mike was cursing in three different languages when he noticed the innocuous teddy bear in Alice's arms. The teddy bear turned it head towards him as gave Mike a cheerful smile. One full of needle-like teeth as it leapt out of Alice's arms towards the warden.

Mike's howl of fear was cut short by a horrible gargling which was soon replaced by the sound of tearing flesh as something fed messily.

"Don't you think that was excessive?" asked Teddy worriedly.

Alice simply turned her head sharply and stared at him. The innocent girl that she was retreated before the Avatar of Balance, an implacable force of nature.

Dr Strauss tried to pry open his window desperately even as the screams of the inmates assailed his ears. Far from their usual cacophony of madness, their screams now held a note of fear as Alice strode among them harvesting their lives like wheat. The wardens who confronted her died, as simple as that. The vampire looked at one of his security monitors that depicted some of his guards trying to clamor over the gates of the asylum. Every exit, every egress had been sealed by means beyond his ken. Not human desperation nor inhuman strength had proven enough to gain one escape from the slaughterhouse that Bella Reve had become. As he watched, the guards died in moments, mowed down by his pet patient.

Running down the hallways, Dr Strauss headed for his last resort; the artifact that had allowed him to cross the boundaries between Makai and Ningenkai in the first place. It would mean that he would not be able to return for a good long while and abandoning all of his work but still that was preferable to the Final Death.

His footfalls as silent as a shadow's caress, Dr Strauss turned the last corner to his laboratory. He came to an abrupt stop however when he noticed the slight figure of Alice Cheshire. Breathing a sigh and a prayer to the Old Ones that she had her back to him, he used his innate powers to become invisible to mortal senses. All that it would entail now would be patience. Once Alice grew bored and walked away, he could access his lab and flee.

Then Dr Strauss realized that he had counted his blessings too soon. Alice's head cocked to one side as if hearing a non-existent voice and then to the vampire's horror, her head turned a full hundred and eighty degrees to stare at him. Alice's feet lifted off the floor as they inverted such that they now faced him while her elbows reversed their natural juxtapositions so that the hands faced backward with regards to the direction her body was facing.

In the end, although her back was technically to him, Alice walked forward with an arm lifted up to stab him with her weapon. Her unnatural bobbing gait, with the knees still pointing where she ought to be facing, and the strange way her arm moved with its elbow essentially pointing backwards to stab him drew his scholar's eye before Alice drove her knife into his heart.

Alice shrugged once and all of her appendages restored themselves to their natural positions. She had a long road ahead of her in order to track down the Corrupter, best to start now.

Cammy tossed and turned in her bed as nightmares long buried assaulted her anew..........

Cammy White, Shadoloo's top agent crept with the stealth of a hunting cat as she invaded the home of one of Shadoloo's adversaries. He was some sort of mystic who had challenged the might of Lord Bison so he had been sentenced to die. And Cammy was his executioner.

Wards against evil and intrusion fizzled uselessly as the Psycho Power augmented agent used her lord's teachings to circumvent the mystic's feeble defences. Cammy sniffed derisively as the last ward burnt away to ashes in a vain attempt to halt her progress. Such a weakling dared oppose her Lord Bison? The impudent fool, he had signed his own death warrant!

The door to the couple's bedroom swung open silently on freshly-oiled hinges. Creeping up on the sleeping couple, Cammy prepared to enact the vengeance that Lord Bison had mandated for the fool.

Dr Leopold Cheshire was once a magus of the Third Eye in good standing. That is until that Bison chap revealed his true colors and tried to take over. He wanted to fight tooth and claw for the preservation of the Society but his wife had urged caution. She had seen Bison's avatar on the astral plane and had blinded her own avatar with just a single glimpse. Whatever he was, Bison was no longer human; perhaps no longer mortal. With that, Dr Cheshire reluctantly fled far away from the Society and continued to launch his magickal attacks on Bison when he could. The man's power was immense, staggering in its magnitude. It was all he could do to make attacks of opportunity upon Bison's avatar. It was like bouncing a ping-pong ball off an abrahams tank.

The good doctor murmured in his sleep as he felt something damp on his chest. Still groggy, he groped the object with his hands and felt its silky-smooth hair. Maxine must have placed her head on his chest again. Smiling with thoughts of his wife, he tried to move her heavy head away. Only to have it come off entirely in his hand. Coming to horrible sobriety, Dr Leopold bolted upright in his bed and goggled at his wife's decapitated head. A gag had prevented her from cry for help and her wide, pleading eyes bespoke a death laced with terror.

Clad only in his bloodstained nightshirt, Dr Leopold scrambled to his feet and began weaving a protective ward about himself. His magicks were not the stuff of battle but subtle, ephemeral manipulations of the psychic plane. Still he was a magus with all the power that the title entailed. Maxine's murderer would rue this day.

"Lord Bison wanted you to see that before you died," came a voice from the shadows. Dr Leopold spun wildly, trying his best to locate the source of that dire intent. Despite the fact that he could see as well in the dim light as he could in the noonday sun, he could not detect the speaker. "He wanted you to know that it was your foolhardiness that doomed you all." Dr Leopold's eyes widened as he caught a glimpse of his attacked in the vanity mirror. A pair of impossibly blue eyes and a gleaming dagger was all he could see of his adversary. He tried to turn and confront his foe but he only managed to tense before having four inches of sharpened metal buried itself in the base of his neck.

Gurgling, the magus toppled gracelessly to the floor. Gasping, he called out a name with his dying breaths. Why he wasted his last few moments calling for an Alice, Cammy would never understand. Perhaps he had believed that this Alice person could save him. Shrugging, Cammy wiped her dagger clean and sheathed it. Turning around to exit the way she came, Cammy noticed a witness to her mission.

A pale, pale girl stood in the doorway. Straight black hair and luminous eyes gave her a Goth look even though she hardly looked intimidating while clothed in a Teletubbies T-shirt and clutching a teddy bear.

Finely honed killing instincts took over and Cammy whipped out her dagger and hurled it at the girl in one smooth motion. A meaty "thunk" accompanied the blade as it sank to the hilt in the child's skull. Instead of toppling over, the child remained upright much to Cammy's surprise. The blade fell to the floor in a clatter to the floor as the flesh knit itself shut over the wound.

The child's eyes pierced Cammy with a baleful stare as if she were bestowing a malediction but that did not deter the Shadoloo agent from drawing a silenced pistol and firing off a couple of rounds into the girl's torso. The force of the impacts knocked the tiny child off her feet but her thrashing was not that of a person in her death throes. They were those of a person struggling to get up despite the damage the rounds has inflicted on her body.

Screaming incoherently, Cammy stepped on the girl and unloaded the entire remaining magazine into her vulnerable form. The child's body was nothing more than a bloodied mess at this point but it still twitched spasmodically, clinging tenaciously to life. Hyperventilating with both fear and....something else, Cammy grabbed her dagger and stabbed the girl multiple times but she just refused to DIE. One remaining eyeball in what could not even charitably be described as a face transfixed Cammy.

Kicking the child down the stairs, Cammy liberally splashed kerosene on her body and set it alight. Even aflame, the girl still kept moving as the voracious flames consumed her body.

Cammy sat alone on the pavement hugging herself tightly. Rocking on her knees, she watched the entire building as it was consumed by the inferno. "Burnburnburnburn......" Cammy repeated to herself as she tried to erase that last image from her mind. The picture of the girl child wreathed in fire as her childhood home turned to ashes around her. In Cammy's mind she could still hear her words. "I am Alice Cheshire. Remember me for I will *come* for you."

Cammy screamed and bolted upright as the memories came back, memories suppressed with help from Lord Bison's Psycho Power. Somehow, Cammy was sure that Alice was once more on the prowl.

She did not sleep very much that night.

M Bison smiled that trademarked maniac grin of his as Shadoloo scientists decanted his latest project. He was offended by that Yugure girl's arrogance so he decided an object lesson was necessary. Thick yellowish liquid drained from the gestation tank as his creation opened her eyes.

Clad in a fuku, with a headband and karate-ka gloves, she was a face familiar to anyone on the Street Fighter Circuit.

Sakura Kasunago.

The psuedo-Sakura opened her eyes and smiled at her creator. With unbounded enthusiasm, she leapt from her iron womb to embrace the man before her.

"Daddy!" she cried as she had her first taste of human contact.