My Little Puppeteer [NCT]

the prologue: shin aera

My name is Shin Aera.

Shin for God. Aera for love.

Now, one who would come across this name would think I was prim and proper—fluffy dresses and ballgowns while suiters bowed down to my feet, asking me for my hand in marriage but life wasn't that easy for me. My father died when I was ten when my younger brother was first born; our little family living in isolation in a small shack on the Mountain of Eunice.

The death of my father had led us to the heart of N-CITY, the city where dreams came true if you worked hard enough. At ten, I had no concept of what a career was or what money was, my infant brother fresh out of my mother's womb.

Aro, my mother named him, derived from Aaron.

A warrior, she told me.

A warrior he would be.

And like every good mother out there, she tried to find ways to keep a shelter above our head and keep food on a table.

I didn't understand at first was a 'courtesan' was, but as I grew older, I slowly realized that it was just another word for a whore. My mother was selling her body for us while we lived at a whore house, a combination of moans from both genders going on throughout the whole day and louder at night.

How I hated her until the day she died and that left us without a mother and me, in fear that they would expect me to take her place.

And three weeks ago, was when I grabbed Aro and ran away, a small backpack with me.

How would we survive on the streets of N-CITY?

I didn't know but I knew one thing—I would do my best to do so.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It's been three weeks since we've been on the streets and I found myself turning into a con woman. A fortune teller one day, a shoe shiner the next.

Aro, I began to realize, was much wittier than I thought. My eight-year-old brother was a blast of energy and more often than not, he somehow brought food back to where we stayed—under a small bridge we called home.

I didn't expect today to be different.

We had been living off one ration of bread the past few days and today was our last day.

Aro wasn't happy. Aro wasn't happy at all.

I stood in the middle of the street, hungry and cold, trying to find my next victim. Sometimes a fake fortune could be told, sometimes a wallet could be stolen. It was my eight-year-old brother who usually scouted the victims out. He could read people and since he was a child, they were naturally nicer to him than to me.

I didn't expect a loud yell to come from down the road. Twenty minutes prior, Aro had told me that he would go and cry to a guard for a donut. It would at least last us until noon, wouldn't it? All we were doing is trying to survive hour by hour.

"Noona!" My brother could be seen rushing past people that were crowded around each market stall. I narrowed my eyes at him, a hike in my blood pressure rising when I could see that he was being followed by city guards. "Noona! I got the bread!"

He also got five people trying to catch him.

"Hey! You! That was little kid from last week!"

Aro had stolen a bag of muffins the week before. I had berated him for being so impulsive but he assured me that he wasn't impulsive. He simply lied to them that he would be pack to pay them. Little debts were going to the death of us and three weeks of us trying to cater to our empty stomachs had made me wary of even walking down the street.

I guessed today would be the day we would finally get to see how the Sooman prison would be like.

My thought didn't linger, my brother squealing and shoving the bread into my arms.

"W-What—"

"I was so hungry! Run, Noona! Run!" Aro urged, pulling me along with him and I quickly pushed him forward. "Maybe you should put the bread under your cloak and pretend to be pregnant!"

"Aro—"

"Never mind, they won't buy it." He was quick to toss the idea out, my brother leading me down a dark alleyway. The houses were larger and we had more hope of hiding in the shadows than out under the bright light of N-CITY's morning sun.

Our feet padded against the ground, both of us entering an almost forbidden part of N-CITY when my body slammed against a cloaked man... Four cloaked men; flashes of green, red, and blue from the edges of their cloak prominent, my body flying backward to a dead-end alley when a burst of energy could be felt from them.

"Oh. Johnny, did you just blast a commoner into an alley?" A grunt sounded and my brother screamed. I could hear him rushing to me, his icy hands going to feel my face when the sounds of guards catching up stopped right in front of me.

"Can one of you not be impulsive for once?" This voice was different, very demanding, and almost snotty. "Should we check on her?"

"Please, Doyoung. She probably is a criminal." A drawl this time.

My eyes blurred and my lids flew open at the sound of Aro crying. I sat up, my brother trying to fight off city guards, the cloaked men at the side of the alley looking in like I was part of a circus.

"Noona!" Aro wailed and that was all it took for me to lift a hand up, a surge of energy coming from me when the panic began to arise. "Noona! They're taking me away!"

A wave of a certain dark color flashed out of my hands towards the guards, my body levitating above the ground and through the midst of that, the voice of one of the cloaked men echoed through the alley.

"Johnny, I think something is happening."

My body knocked back against the wall from a red energy shield and the last words I heard were.

"Oh, will you look at that? We found ourselves a Shield Bender."

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________