[ WP ] You are a `` hero '' in a fantasy world , but as you `` adventure '' , you are slowly realizing YOU are the antagonist .

My name is Elise. Having three older brothers, I grew up bullied and beaten down by boys. I used to think this made me stronger. But in a little neighborhood park at the age of 11, where all alone I had been riding our merry-go-round in my new yellow Sunday dress, I had my hair pulled from behind, and knocked off my feet. Shrieking for help, I was dragged by two young men into the back of an alley and raped for over an hour, being called horrible horrible names. When I came, they just escalated their assault. Now, might I add, nobody called the police. Lying there naked, clothes shredded and chest exposed to a cold London downpour, I swore to myself that I would never allow men to do this to another little girl, that I would never stand for it. Never again would another man lay a hand on such an innocent little flower as I was, each pedal dismembered from its sunny core, and crushed underfoot like a miserable piece of vomit. 
 
 Now, at the age of 35, I stand with gun drawn. The rain is still falling, droplets licking the lip of my Colt 1911. Beneath the barrel, on bloodied knees and shredded jeans, with crimson drool hanging like jellyfish tentacles from his beaten mouth.... there kneels a young man about the age of 20. His hair was bright blonde and what once was a blue blazer lies shredded about his shoulders. In the dim streetlight and streaked with sand from the gutter, he does n't look the part of a businessman, but that's what he was. Until we got him. 
 
 `` I have n't been following anyone,'' he pleads through broken teeth. 
 
 `` You fucking lie!'' I scream in rage back at him. `` I saw you behind her,'' I insist. But after the beating he suffered, for him to persist in his story, I am beginning to have my doubts. The other women around me, however, egg me on. 
 
 `` Do n't listen to him, he's a white male, white male privilege,'' Christina growls. `` Even if he does n't think he's racist or a rapist, that's what he is because they all are. You told us that.'' I look away from him, and drop the gun to my side. I ca n't tell if it's tears that are stinging my eyes, or if it's some kind of acid in the rain from over-pollution. Does n't matter. `` Elise, what are you doing?'' 
 
 `` Let him go,'' I murmur. 
 
 `` What?'' Sheryl responds. She's a 45-year-old black woman from BLM. `` We found him. We tracked this sonofabitch down, and you want to what? To let him go?'' 
 
 `` Yes,'' I reply, looking down at the sidewalk. I'm ashamed of myself. In my gut I know he's innocent, and that the issue as far as I'm concerned is over whether I want to save face with what has fast been growing into a cult. And I do n't want someone innocent to suffer for my ego. 
 
 `` Elise, what the fuck are you on?'' Myra interrupts. Her gun is still drawn, and she walks in front of the car's headlights. An eerie shadow crosses the young boy as he struggles to breathe through a sunken windpipe and cratered nose. `` It's *him* do n't you see? *Him*!'' 
 
 `` I know it's him!'' I snarl. The other two recoil, surprised at the rebuttal. `` It's everything we have stood against, is n't it? Lying right there. Helpless. Brought down from power, stripped of privilege in the street and color in the darkness. He's just sitting there in the rain. Waiting for us to snuff his life out, right?'' 
 
 Myra and Christina back up slowly. `` I fought my entire life to put assholes like him down. They did n't even have to commit a crime. If you were white, if you were male, if you were anything I did n't like, I hated you. All of you,'' and I turned around and waved my hands covering the whole audience, my own gang. `` But the sickening thing is... You know what he reminds me of? Me. You. Us.'' 
 
 They begin looking at each other, worry smeared with mascara down the curve of every face. Beads of water clung to the end of my nose. Something about the rain reminded me of myself, and I saw the little girl I used to be again, only this time in him. `` What truly kills me, is that it was n't those men who took my innocence. It was me. It was me who stopped being Lisa. It was me who invented a stronger name. It was me who buried my joy in the ground, not them. It was me who never wore a dress again, not men who did n't buy it for me. And it has been me who has killed over 45 men these past ten years, and for what? What did they do to me?'' 
 
 `` Listen to yourself,'' Myra warned. `` You do n't know what you're doing.'' 
 
 `` Oh I fucking know exactly what I'm doing, and more so, what I've done my entire life. How am I any different than these rapists? Because I get to them first, before the cops do? Because it's a bullet from this gun?'' And I wave it wildly in the drench, smiling bittersweetly. `` It's time I put this mask down and turned myself in.'' 
 
 `` What are you talking about!'' Tina leaned forward, mouth agape. `` Are you going to them? To fucking *them*?'' 
 
 `` I do n't think,'' Myra calmly stepped forward, her heels clicking against the lonely cobblestone roadway, `` you're in a position to be telling us what to do anymore.'' 
 
 `` What?'' I hiss. 
 
 `` I said,'' and she raised her gun to my temple, `` you are relieved of your command.'' The words felt heavy as lead against my chest, but I'd seen it coming. She'd always been about power. All of us had. And anyone who got in our way, even if it was one of us, was just fodder in the end. This is the madness of our ideology, why the whole world has turned against feminists. We think it's just because they're male sympathizers, because it's a rape culture, and that every retrenching of legislative and juridical positions away from our stated ends only justifies our ideals. But we're wrong. And for the first time since I was raped, I saw that. This boy here, had done nothing wrong than exist in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or was it that I was the wrong place and the wrong time? Did n't matter. 
 
 `` Then do it already,'' I snarled at her. I was done. Mic dropped. Her eyes narrowed in uncomprehension. But her lips pursed the way they do when you want to fake like you do n't want to do something. She had to look like the martyr or the gang would n't follow her. A couple timid voice whispered from the dark to let me go, but Myra waved them off with an angry look their way. These women only know domination, and it's we who keep them dominated, afraid of us and letting us down. We never appeal to their goodness, to their womanhood, to their conscience. Only to their ego. To our ego, to what we want to see them be, the person we could n't be. 
 
 I kneeled next to the boy. I'd always feared death, but it was n't as bad as it seemed. At last I was doing something I wanted, and in a language I could n't say but felt, I thanked God for a merciful death, to end like this, for the second chance at goodness I had denied this boy. 
 
 Two shots rang through the night sky, setting a family of crows aflight.
