Within the crowded horde of bustling civilians, a lone man - shrouded underneath a dark beige trench coat - walks diligently past the distracted masses through the dark. The bearded man was disguised underneath a smoky grey fedora, alongside glare-proof glasses that sealed his anonymity, smoking a cigarate underneath his hairy muff. He firmly held onto a jet-black, silver-lined briefcase in his right hand. One might assume that he was on his way to an important business meeting of some kind, or perhaps on his way to a seal a shady deal with some seedy folks. And in a way, both answers would work in this case.

According to various sources, his client had been recently reported to be found within a tiny old bar, snuggled up between two well-known department stores and apartment complexes. It had already taken him three days just to get a grasp on the client's location and it's already been a solid half-hour since he was debriefed on the location. After all, his client was a busy gal. She was always following where her next paycheck was.

The grizzled man then proceeded to enter the red-lit bar as he opened the rickety doors. He eyed his entire surroundings, trying to spot his client. At first, he could only see nothing but a few lone stragglers, some of which were already eying him as soon as he entered. Most simply brushed the man off and continued to what they were doing, but a few droopy-eyed, mean-looking folk continued staring with inquisitive notions. He didn't mind it too much. He was rather used to getting them. He slowly made his way towards the counter and signaled a bartender to come.

"'Ello there," the bartender asked casually with a hint of scottish in his voice towards the new customer," How can I help ya?"

"I'm lookin' for someone." the man spoke in a moderately raspy voice as he sat on a metal stool, "Have ya seen a gal wearing a red coat with a large hat enter here recently?"

Just as the bartender began to look around for anyone matching the description, they would hear a certain feminine voice answer them.

"Ya lookin' for me?"

The coated man cocked his head to the right to identify the culprit. Sure enough, it came from the same person he was hoping to see - Marie H. Lockhart - a mysterious blonde woman covered in red who was eying him mischievously with her slowing amber-colored eyes. She was seated by a table farther to the back of the bar, with her legs casually perched up on the table. He couldn't help but be drawn in by her exquisite looks, already becoming mesmerized by her eyes alone. He had to struggle a bit to bring himself back to reality. He rose from his seat and began to walk over to her seat.

"I mus' be." the man would answer as he took his seat opposite of her's, "Ya must be the legendary bounty hunter I've been hearin' about, yeh?"

Marie smirked as she sipped on a hard glass of chilled whisky.

"The one n' only." she confidently replied before looking back at the man, "Got somethin' ya want me to do?"

"Ah, save it for now," the man chuckled as he attempted to make himself comfortable. He took off his hood to reveal his hardened face and blond beard, "No need to dive straight in on a night like this. We oughta enjoy it a bit, don't ya say?"

"Sorry, hun. I ain't interested." the huntress snarkily blurted out as if she figured out what he was going to say next.

"You break my heart, love." the man sarcastically responded, casually going along with it, "But nah, that's not where I'm goin' with it. If ya don't mind, I'll just be askin' ya a few questions just so I get to... well, get to know yeh a little bit more. After all, there's so much that stories can tell someone about someone. Think of it as an "on-the-fly" job interview of sorts - ya dig?"

Marie gave an amused chuckle as she took another swig of her glass of whisky, exhaling loudly as she plopped the shot on the table with a thunk.

"I suppose I got sum' time for that." she replied with a sigh, "How many questions do ya have lined up?"

"Just a few." the man replied as he readied his notepad and clicked his pen, "It shouldn't take too long. Wanna do it now?"

"Shoot." Marie responded with a flick of her head.

With that the bearded man proceeded with the first question.

"Yer fightin' a worthy opponent who yer about to defeat, but then they forsake their humanity and give up their self just to beat ya. How would ya react?"

"Beat 'em to a pulp like any other scoundrel." the huntress replied with a hint of intensiveness, "Don't matter if they worthy or not, their efforts will go up in smoke."

The man nods and writes a quick summary before continuing with the next question.

"Ya just lost a fight. Waddya gonna do 'bout it?"

"Get up n' try again." Marie answered, "Come up with a good strategy, ready the appropriate weapons, and kick the livin' shit outta them next time."

"A good friend of yours abandons yeh and everyone they know in the pursuit of strength or some other force. How do ya feel about that?"

"Feelin's mutual. Course, if it means that they wanna kick my ass, I wouldn't give 'em a chance in hell. I'd kill em at their place before they'd even get the chance to formulate a plan against me."

"Where do ya go when you die?"

"Straighta Hell. God doesn't want me up there and really I don't mind it. I'd much rather to be dancin' with the devil then to act all goodie-two-shoes with Jesus - 'less he can supply me with a lifetime supply of wine and booze that is, heh heh."

"One more question for ya," the man mentioned before flipping his notepad, "This may sound a lil' dumb, but bare with me 'ere. Would you consider ya'self a... bad person?"

Marie's left eyebrow rose questioningly at his statement.

"Define 'bad'." she asked cautiously as she took another swig of whisky.

"Both the underground and the public Media considers ya as a malevolent, blood-thirsty, killa'. Ya killed many in yer time and I bet you're ready to slash a few throats and bust a few brains out right 'bout now. Where do ya think you stand in the moral circle? Ya kill to kill, or ya got reasons to kill?"

Marie slowly plants the bottle back on the table as she flips over her legs.

"I reckon' ya knew why I've gotten myself in this line of work." she replied somewhat disappointingly at his question, "Yeah, I get one hellova rush when it comes to fightin' and muderin', but at the end of the day it's all about the money, darlin'. I don't give a damn on what ya want me to do, so as long as the price is larger than the competition. It's what makes the world go 'round really. Course that doesn't mean I form any opinions 'bout it personally, and I'll admit there's a few lines I don't wanna cross. And believe me, I've done some reaaaaaally fucked up shit in the past. But overall, I just go where the money flows. Give me a target and a price, and if I consider it worth my time, I'll get you results and more if possible."

The man continued to write his notes before withdrawing it into his heavy coat.

"Much obliged, Ms. Lockhart.", he replied humbly as he began to get up from his seat, "Expect to hear from my boss in a few days time. I think you'll enjoy what he has planned for ya."

Marie's gaze pierced into his as she tipped her hat in a teasing manner.

"Don't disappoint me, hun." she replied with a playful wink, "And don't keep me waitin' for too long... or ya might see me comin' for yer boss next."

At the early age of six it was a school day just like many others. She went to school, attended her classes, received her homework and tried to avoid the other students who picked on her often. This day however was not going to be just like every other day of hers.

Just as she was getting ready to head back home to her dreary household a couple of students were up to some horseplay. One of them ended up tossing a book over his shoulder which fell and hit her square in the head. It was at this moment that something in her head was shook loose. In that very instant it was as if the whole world was exploding.

Shoes stepping, phones ringing, people talking, chalk on chalk boards, lockers closing, cars driving, birds singing, hearts beating, she could hear it all. Every sound, even down to the most shallow of frequencies, could be heard at a volume beyond which any other human could ever conceive. Every foot fall was akin to the explosion of a thousand atom bombs, every voice a crashing cacophony of meteoric proportions. It all went well past the point where human ears would simply break as there was no limit imposed on the method she received each sound. If a sound so much as existed by the time it reached her it was heard at the loudest possible volume such a noise could possibly exist at. Of course there was no way to discern each sound from one another. The louder sounds overlapped the quieter ones and blended with each other until it formed an astronomically loud concert of discordant noises.

Of course nobody else could hear this. From the average spectator's point of view the girl was struck across the back of the head by a heavy book and then proceeded to collapse to the ground clutching her head and screaming in agony while writhing about.

Her parents took her to every doctor they could find. Not a single one of them could identify what was wrong. It was hard to find something that wasn't there. In the end the most they could offer was that it might of been psychosomatic, a diagnosis which offered no satisfaction for neither her nor her parents.

It was only when a certain man had overheard of the incident and sought them out did something resembling an answer appear. Invited to his office he told them that the issue was a rare and complex psychological disorder, something which could only be remedied through years of treatment in a specially equipped asylum. He offered them a choice: Keep their daughter and let her suffer uselessly for the rest of her life or hand her over to him where she could be treated and perhaps eventually cured.

Olivia (Her name at the time) could offer no counsel to her parents on the matter. She had been screaming from the pain for so long her voice was gone. All she could do was shiver in pain. In the end they chose to surrender her to the doctor. While it was natural for most decent parents to feel at least some reluctance towards parting with their child in truth she was more burden than joy for them. While their suspicions warned against the choice they couldn't help but yield to the voice of authority in the subject before them.

And so she was taken...

To Redrum Asylum.

On the surface it appeared to be exactly what it says on the tin, a rehabilitation and/or containment center for the mentally ill. They had their fair share of mentally ill there too. These people were treated according to the standard for psychiatric care, at least so it seemed. What the public couldn't see was that the very same building was also designed to contain and study the recent anomalies that have been appearing within the country. Built on a grant from the government the asylum itself was simply a front for them, a means of isolating these strange new phenomenons from public view so they could exercise greater leeway in their pursuit for an answer to what makes these entities tick. The less obvious beings were kept alongside the psychologically unstable while those who were more blatantly different were kept in the subterranean levels, barred from public access. For those stuck amongst the insane it didn't matter what they told others. Who would believe someone who's a patient in an asylum? Who would believe someone who claims to have special powers that the government wants to steal from them?

Nobody who didn't already know the truth.

The doctor ran tests on these entities be they human or otherwise. The tests were designed to either bring out these hidden powers in those who had trouble manifesting theirs or to observe the phenomenons in captivity. Full brain and body scans were common practice in the asylum. At her first test when she was brought in Olivia had no idea what was in store for her. Due to the purposefully sound proof design of the test chambers her pain had subsided for the most part, only flaring up at the occasional noise from the doctor himself.

When he brought her into the room he had her hooked up to a strange helmet and had several wires stuck onto with pads to measure her body's various responses to the stimuli. At first she was measured as resting rate and it was all normal. It was the only moment of peace she was granted. Then the helmet emitted a quiet tone, the tone growing louder after each phase was documented. Her pleas for them to stop fell on deaf ears as, due to her sensitivity towards sound, the test became utterly unbearable. Even the outdoors were nothing compared to the pain she suffered from the sounds being blasted into her head through the helmet. She couldn't even pass out to escape this suffering. The test only ended after the helmet had reached a volume just below the limit of what a human eardrum could take. She was dragged from her chair and back to her room, left to lay on her padded cell's floor, her eyes too dry from crying to cry anymore.

Every tear was a tear of pain.

This continued without end for the next eight years. Every three to four days she would be subjected to these horrible tests, all designed to bring out her latent powers so they could find it's roots. Outside of testing life was no less awful. The orderlies were largely men who would happily keep this all a secret for the power they had over the patients and a low hourly wage. There was no recourse for their actions so long as no one from the outside was watching so for a majority of the time they did whatever they felt like when they weren't actively working. Patients who were disruptive were no strangers to beatings. The doctor was fine with this since it afforded him useful blackmail material to ensure none of the staff involved would spill the truth of the asylum's real purpose to the public. Such amorality was a valuable tool in getting his men to help him subject the abnormal patients to truly horrible experiments, up to and including live dissection. All the while Babble was a spectator to it all, forced to listen to every crime against morality carried out.

In the midst of all this horror and misery was an issue of a far less ethically dark nature but still awful nonetheless. Every night the orderly on night watch would always leave the radio on all throughout the night, blasting rock music until morning. No matter how much she begged them to not leave the radio on her words were ignored. While the music was disruptive to all the patient's sleep on that wing none were more disturbed by it than Olivia. While the padded cell afforded her some protection from the outdoor sounds it did little to abate the sound of the radio. She was all but incapable of falling asleep naturally, forced to stay awake for days at a time until she simply passed out from exhaustion.

Between the tests, the sounds of human suffering and the radio keeping her from sleeping it was impossible to remain wholly sane for long. It all took a toll on her mind, loosening her grip on sanity year after year. It was this slip into madness however that started to allow her to begin seeing sound in a new light, both figuratively and a bit literally. Out of a need to protect herself from the sounds around her she started to interact with the sound around her in an attempt to silence it. Her practice was met with mixed success. At first she'd fiddle with sound only for it to come out even louder or distorted like the sound of aluminum foil being chewed. After a couple tries however she was starting to grasp just how to shrink and grow wave amplitudes.

This was just the start to her awakening.

While Olivia was starting to succeed the doctor's own success was slipping. None of the phenomenons were showing any clear evidence of the source to their strange abilities. Compared to the larger and better funded secret facilities his own operation was under-performing. He needed results and too many of his subjects were dying before they could yield any telling evidence. His frustration grew with each failure and it started to wear on his pride. He often took his frustrations out on the subjects, frequently berating Olivia, often calling her a "Babbling imbecile".

As for her she was understanding more and more the longer she had to test different ideas. She discovered that the vibrations in her voice, the infrasound, was great for scaring the orderlies. Refining the sound so as to remove the audible aspects to the noise she was able to project a sound which was imperceptible as a sound but created the feeling of anxiety, irritation, nervousness and a subtle ghostly figure which was always just out of sight. The visual effect was a result of the infrasound causing the discs in the eyes to vibrate subtly causing such visual trickery. Between the air feeling colder, their minds becoming more agitated and their eyes perceiving things out of the corner of their vision the infrasonic waves created the very feeling of being haunted in all who heard it.

Night after night, day after day she filled the halls with infrasound. What was once an easy job had become a dread filled experience for the amoral employees of the asylum. The patients had become increasingly difficult to handle due to the fear which filled the hearts of everyone. The ghost sightings became a common rumor all across the hospital and soon hysteria was all too common amidst both patient and orderly.

The time was right.

That night when the lone watchman sat at his desk, the radio left off as he could no longer appreciate the music when the concern over the ghost which roamed the halls was ever present, she set her plan into motion. All around the night watchman the walls suddenly erupted with laughter. The phantasmal cackling filled the air sending the man into a panic. He ran, leaving his desk and fleeing from the asylum. Using her power over sound she sent vibrations through the lock of her metal cell door, wiggling the tumblers in the locking mechanism about until they finally clicked open. Pushing the door open, a greater effort for her than for others given how her body was weak from the stress and the pain she had endured, she stepped out into the hall and made her way to the orderly's desk. With access to the command console for the locks she ran her palm across all the buttons, opening all the doors to the cells across her wing of the building.

What followed was a riot as lunatics and stranger things alike fought their way to the exit, smashing at the gates to make their way to freedom. Before she could make her own way out of the asylum however a hand grabbed her by the hair. The doctor had been watching her this entire time, secretly observing her progress. With people running about all over she had mistaken his footsteps for that of one of the patients.

He dragged her behind him down the halls until they reached the operation room. He strapped her arms down and picked up the buzz saw. Having a patient who had manifested her powers quite so fully there was only one step left: To remove her brain and study it to find the neural branches developed from learning her power. He was certain that he could find the breakthrough he needed there.

Focusing on the bolts holding the straps in place she sent vibrations through the straps into the metal, wiggling the bolts free as quickly as she could. Just as the doctor was about to cut open her head her straps came free and she reflexively reached up to block the roaring blade. Instead of her cranium the saw chewed into hands, the metal rending through them. Seeing as she had suffered for so long and so much the pain was little more than a distraction, especially now as fresh adrenaline enriched her blood. Luckily for her the straps around her wrists had slowed the saw down enough that it didn't cleanly cut through her arms and into her head, allowing her the time she needed to bolt from her chair.

She ran from that room, from the doctor, down the halls and out the front doors which swung open now. The rest of the patients had made their escape, lunatics and other beings flooding down into the city nearby. As she stepped out, looking up at the outside world for the first time in eight years, she could see smoke in the distance. No doubt the others were wreaking havoc upon the town amidst the chaos that their escape brought. She would not return to the city, at least not where she could be caught. She instead fled to the forest flanking the asylum, running past trees and over brush. Branches caught her clothes like so many tiny hands, tearing here and there at the fabric. Burs clung to the cuffs of her pant legs and thorns cut at her feet. She was hurt, she was bleeding, she was tired and her lungs burned from the effort of running for so long but she dared not stop, not until she was free from the doctor's reach once and for all.

At last freedom was hers.

She continued to walk when she could no longer run, staggering on for quite some time. She passed out only to awaken a short while later in the care of a couple hikers who had found her not far off the trail. They had done what they could, luckily for her one of them had a limited medical kit on him. Her arms were bandaged at the stumps and she had been given some water whilst she was out. She could hear the one hiker talking on the phone. He was speaking to police, calling for an ambulance.

She was not about to be taken in again, not by more doctors, not where he could find her. When the two weren't looking she canceled out the sound of her moving with waves of equal amplitude and length, getting up in total silence and running off into the woods. By the time the two noticed she was gone it was too late for them to chase her. They couldn't see which direction she had fled.

Since then she had taken shelter in an abandoned warehouse out at the edge of another city that was not too far from the one she had fled. This is where she resides, for now at least.