Wandering Adoption IV

Empress

There are people who are gate keepers, and there are people who are enforcers. The Empress is both, and more. She is Crowned Head, Potentate, Supreme Ruler, Baroness, Autocrat, Despot, Killer Queen, Goddess, Ecdysiast, Bearer of the Regal Whip, Grande Poobess, Queen Sneer, Friend and Lover, Respecter of None. She fearsomely berates others for their strong convictions. She will behead a person for an errant thought. All her lines are bright. If you cross one, you risk abuse well-honed by decades of active practice.


Age has not mellowed her.


Everyone, no matter which side of the caterwauling they may be on, fears the Empress. She has no friends but other users.


BUT she is useful. Her abuse is potent, even lethal, to people who are still recovering from past abuses. Her fire breathing has caused relapses on more than one occasion. She is useful to maintain a failing power structure. Once respected, once the last best hope of people who had been ruthlessely exploited, once an oasis in the wasteland that is life after adoption for so many suffering people, it's now rotting at its core. Irrelevant, useless, failed...

Decades ago, she helped build it. Time, technology, and changes in social culture have resulted in obsolesence. Even the rats left long ago. Only a few die hards are left; they are mainly people the system has deeply harmed, who have just become aware of the loss they have suffered; and the professional hangers-on and obscurantists who peddle bogus philosophy, useless books and cheap jewelry.

She is the shock troop to be used against her own, the brownshirt who can be counted upon to infiltrate the places where the newly aware congregate -- to gently guide and instruct them, and failing that, to keep them in their place.


Barb, for myself