Marion von Stade had explained her name more times than she thought necessary for a person to endure in eighteen short years of life. Classes were painful, roll call torturous, and the questions spawned by curious and irreverent little bastard minds were inevitable. Born to a couple of parents on more than a couple too many drugs, she made her debut in the world as Wren Elliot Octavia Lennon-von Stade, a child with an unfortunate name unfit for the 80’s she was born into. Disco was dead, hippies were dead, the era of naming your child “Moonlight” and “Starchild” – also very much dead. But her mother, “Gemma” Gemini Marigold Lennon-von Stade (nee Maureen Parks, but later changed her name twofold; once to get closer to her so-called ‘astral self’ and the other later on in mourning over John Lennon’s unfortunate death that left her inconsolable and incurable by even the strongest tinctures for at least three months.) had married a stoner activist guitarist in a band called Republicrat and the Democrans that once had a jam session with Jimi Hendrix who very insultingly remarked that he had a painfully typical name, one Mr. Gerald von Stade.<br/><br/>Wren Elliot Octavia Lennon-von Stade endured; by thirteen, she was finding roach clips in her Sgt. Peppers lunchbox, by sixteen driving her parents to and from weed runs and roadies, and by her glorious and liberating eighteenth, had spent four consecutive summers doing arts and crafts at specially-designated summer camps to learn useful trades such as lampworking and glassblowing, which allowed her to make goddess beads for her mother’s macramé jewelry and blow intricate pipes and bongs.<br/><br/>Rebellion often comes in the form of admiring one’s parents for so long…and then doing the diametrically opposed. Indeed, 18 was a sweet time, and before buying cigarettes or pornography as some chose (she’d already taken up smoking and her mother, also a feminist, had bought her very first vibrator at 17 as a way to ‘liberate her sexuality’), Wren Elliot instead chose to file papers to legally change her name. Her maternal grandmother had proven to be the sanest of that branch of the family, providing constant support and sympathy whenever her crackpot daughter brought her dreadlocked child to stay on weekends. Mary Anne was her name, and barring anything that sounded that old-fashioned, she reduced it to a stylish Marion and thus she became.<br/><br/>But it was one thing to simply change one’s name…<br/><br/>“Detective von Stade.”<br/><br/>A degree in criminal justice was the ultimate turn on her acid-warped out-of-date parents. It started as late-blooming rebellion and blossomed magnificently into a deep love for sociology and criminal justice. At last, a detective was born.<br/><br/>“Forensics called. Seems they wanted to talk to you about the Preston case. Might wanna head down…”<br/><br/>Marion bit back the urge to make a biting comment. She didn’t want to think about it, at least not yet. Everyone knew what ‘forensics called’ meant to her – annoyance, headaches, screaming matches…<br/><br/>“For fuck’s sake, it’s 10 in the morning, what the hell could they have possibly done already today? None of those dickbags get here ‘til 9:30 at the latest. Jesus H. W. Christ.”<br/><br/>The young woman rose from her desk, adjusting the trendy, thick-rimmed glasses on her face, and turned for the forensics lab, though she realized she was unconsciously adjusting her low-slung ponytail, combing her fingers through her long, side-swept bangs. Her natural color was a light, almost fawn-colored brown, but it was now dyed black from the still-unnatural red-brown it had been a month prior. The department was generous in its dress code, allowing the woman anything from a relatively tame platinum blonde to bright fishbowl blue. She’d settled down some in her few years on the job, and black would take a long time to grow out, and besides, she’d earned her place with the other officers and moved up to detective, she was gunning further still to cement her paycheck and finally have a little seniority over the infuriating branches that did not seem to know their heads from their asses.<br/><br/>Still, despite her avoidance of excessive and stereotypical vanity, she preferred the way it made her all-American pale blue eyes stand out from behind her glasses -- typically she was a contacts kind of girl, but being maced by a confused, paranoid, and definitively non-English-speaking Asian woman while trying to track her down to question her to see if she'd witnessed anything about the Preston murders, two of which were committed in her neighborhood, was not conducive to anything being in, about, or around her eye. But she got her woman and now she had to deal with the infuriating man on the opposite side of the door she now authoritatively opened which suddenly seemed infinitely worse than getting a shot of pepper spray to the face.<br/><br/>“Well, I’m here.”