Vicenta's Questionnaire

Vicenta lives aboard the 33-foot cruising sailboat Bergamot, a cutter rigged 1978 CSY-33 retrofitted with an electric motor and solar panel. The trim and foresails are a reddish-brown color, while the hull and mainsails are white.

Inside, the raised pilothouse’s large windows and glass door provide abundant natural light during the day, while at night a few incandescent bulbs provide adequate visibility; not great lighting, but better than the obnoxiously blue, buzzing fluorescent tubes that were originally there. The interior was painted ivory when the boat was purchased secondhand, but the paint has since been stripped to reveal slightly damaged wood. In the living area, the walls above the built-in seating are covered in stickers and taped-on business cards, a scrapbook of the crew’s travels and contact book at the same time. The triangular berth was once made up into two distinct beds, but has long since devolved into a nest of blankets and pillows, used indiscriminately by both members with no sense of ownership.

Currently docked in Manzanita, Washington, near to her friend Lukas’s apartment in Nehalem, she is reluctant to undertake any long cruise in the immediate future. Bergamot is managable by one person, but all of her experience sailing it has been as a duo with Thalia.

Completing gigs and doing favors as a professional psychopomp is hard when you have no supernatural abilities. Viki’s job has always been to assist and protect Thalia as she deals with the ghosts, and to make sure they get paid. They don’t live an especially expensive lifestyle, so occasional gigs have usually been enough to keep something in their pockets for living expenses, with a little padding for whatever emergency might come up.

Now, an emergency has come up, and the padding is rapidly disappearing. Viki is considering trying to find gig work as security, or maybe look into prizefighting; unfortunately the latter doesn’t really exist in the United States, though she doesn’t know that yet. She finds the idea of stalling her search to scrape together cash to live off of galling, but is going to run out of options soon enough.

Viki has one and only one motivation in the present moment: Get Thalia back.

She doesn’t know what it’s going to take, but at this time she has nothing else to live for. Her entire way of life was built around this partnership, and she can’t even begin to conceptualize starting over, with no purpose, without her best friend.

Though not difficult to anger, she isn’t someone driven by revenge. If she needed to kill the former friend who betrayed them both in order to retrieve Thalia, she wouldn’t hesitate; a life for a life, and she wasn’t the one who started it. It would basically be self defense, wouldn’t it. He earned this. He deserves a hundred deaths, so he ought to be grateful she would only deliver one.

If she had the opportunity to kill him, but it wouldn’t advance her search, she would let him go. She isn’t a complicated person.

July 10th, 2010, 5:02 AM, Surses, Switzerland

Even in June, at this hour there is still a cold mist lurking between the trees' feet, and the windows are wide open allowing cold air to rush past our faces. We are a group of eleven, ten campers and one instructor.

He's not taking it slow, even on a narrow mountainside road like this, and the van lurches every few seconds from hitting tree roots, causing my seatmate's head to smack against my shoulder. Eventually I put my hand up for support. We're all exhausted, sunburnt, bruised, scratched, starving, and covered in insect bites. My seatmate is also covered in a rash; she's allergic to something in the trail bars they've been giving us. All are completely silent and most are trying to sneak in an extra scrap of sleep on the way to another fucking “activity” none of us agreed to.

The only ones fully awake are me and the girl seated ahead of me: tall, quiet and about my own age, with brilliantly red hair and wide, dark, haunted eyes. We've never spoken.

For nine days I've either spoken Spanish to Italian speakers or English to other campers whose English is as minimal as mine. The girl in front of me is Greek. She doesn't seem to speak French, German, or Italian, so she's been speaking to no one.

Suddenly, she raises her hands, gesturing wildly, whispering to herself; she seems increasingly frantic, and soon stops gesturing. I realize she's undoing her seatbelt, and at first I don't understand why. (Though it isn't as if I'm wearing mine. Way I see it, if I die here, then I die. Better than staying here, and better than going home too. It’d be doing my parents a favor, both getting rid of me for good and giving them an excuse to act sad and sue the camp for the wrongful and tragic death of their precious but terribly troubled daughter. It’d be the best thing they ever got out of having me.)

I don't realize her intention until she's already thrown open the door beside her and vaulted out, and it's too late to stop her. The van is now jerking wildly, but the instructor doesn't brake. The other campers are mostly startled awake by now, and I hear voices raised in confusion. My seatmate is still dead asleep on my shoulder until the moment the bottom drops out of the world.

There’s a hard impact on my shoulder, then my hip, while the world spins violently around me. For what feels like ages, I'm just floating, disoriented but free, and then there's nothing.

When I return, everything is still upside down. There's a ringing in my ears, and when I try to sit up, I instead fall onto my side, and realize it was me that was upside down, my lower half resting against a tree trunk.

Someone is speaking, but I don't understand it. I manage to focus my eyes on the figure ahead of me, and after a moment, a few shimmering shapes beyond her. Further behind her, the van lies on its roof in a wreckage of shattered trees, smoking. (Whether I see a pale, rash-covered hand limply protruding from the crushed rear windowframe or simply imagine it, I'll never be sure.)

The red-haired girl is gesturing again, her voice becoming louder and more frantic with each second, and then my world goes white for a second time; this time, it's not a loss of consciousness, but a blinding white light filling my field of vision.

After it fades, she turns to face me, visibly shaking in every limb. Blood streaks down her left leg from a messy, shredded area on her knee, and tears are running freely down her calm, smooth face. In simple and hesitant English, she makes her proposal:

We run.

She's dispelled the violent spirit here, but there are others that could guide us to safety. There's nothing we can do for those who remained in the vehicle-- she knows-- but we have a chance, perhaps our only chance. We take it. We take new names and start new lives.

I reach up and take her trembling hand, and I don’t let go after she helps me up.

Thalia, 31, Viki’s best friend and life partner of 14 years. 5’11, full-figured, with short and vibrantly red hair. A calming presence, too compassionate for her own good. Can clearly see and communicate with ghosts, and has some amount of true sight, allowing her to percieve things that have been supernaturally hidden.

Lukas, 31, Thalia’s childhood friend and on-again-off-again lover. A transgender man who traveled with Viki and Thalia between 2012 and 2015; specializes in integrating technology and wizardry, moved to Washington State in 2022 for a software engineering job. He has stayed in close contact and the three remain on good terms, even when he and Thalia aren’t dating.

Gavin, 29, a writer and amateur competitive shooter who can turn into a wolf (not a werewolf.) Traveled with the team between 2013 and 2017. Highly proficient with firearms. Still trying to hack it as a comedy writer, but pays the bills as a bartender in Genoa. Best described as “friend with benefits.”

In case it wasn’t clear, Vicenta was raised by narcissists. They were Catholic, though their faith was mostly for social clout, and extremely restrictive and demanding. Even a perfect, neurotypical child with no issues would never be able to measure up to their expectations (because the expectations weren’t real, they were a form of control and leverage) and Vicenta was… not that. She was highly athletic and became bored and understimulated easily without physical activity, and while she liked dance, she also found the only form her parents thought was acceptable (ballet) to be uninteresting and draconian. While they made it clear that her role in life was to make herself attractive and find a rich guy to marry and raise their status, they also demanded excellent grades. (in theory to get into a good school to find a rich husband, but also as a form of control.)

Her home life was never especially good (her parents were loving and affectionate in public, leading to her acting out in public to get their attention and be indulged, only to be punished when they got home) but as she became a teenager it became worse; multiple fights resulted in her mother calling the police for protection, sometimes claiming that Viki had threatened to kill her.

After being shuttled between various schools, programs, therapists and “behavior specialists,” her parents sent her to a Christian wilderness therapy program in Switzerland, lamenting to their friends that they just didn’t know what to do with her, and just wanted to save her soul. When they received word that a van carrying their daughter and nine other campers had apparently lost control and rolled 75 meters down the mountain before coming to a stop, they were horrified. For the first time, they genuinely questioned their behavior. For about 12 hours, and then they basked in the outpouring of sympathy and attention from their friends, neighbors, and church. The end, as far as they were concerned.

If you were to ask this question, the answer that would come to Vicenta’s mind isn’t a word, but an image: A soft, oval face, large and soulful eyes the color of black coffee, bobbed hair the color of tawny port. It’s a feeling too: a soft and cool hand leading her through a strange forest, holding onto her in a crowd, touching her sternum to cast a veil of protection over her, stroking her hair in rhythm with the halyards hitting the mast on a windy night. It’s the sound of laughter on a rooftop at daybreak after staying up all night, words chanted to defend or soothe or dispel, a mundane comment shouted over the sea wind or the rumble of wheels on the road.

But it’s not like that, she’d think. That isn’t what they meant. No, she’s never had a lover. It wouldn’t feel fair, making them always be second place. She’s had flings, but always with the understanding that she couldn’t give them her whole heart, or even most of it.

It isn’t unrequited, whatever it is. What they have is all she wants.