#devil's share

OC Anastasia Volkov. Snippet №2: The Syndicate. 1888 – 1894: The Devil's in the Details | The Syndicate. Manhattan, New York.

You arrive at the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge, the web of steel cables and Gothic arches towering over the East River, and plunge straight down into the shadow of Lower Manhattan. Past the grand, gas-lit thoroughfares, the city rapidly sheds its glittering skin.

You turn onto Stanton Street.

Slide through the cacophony of voices bleeding together in thick layers: Yiddish, German, and rough Black Sea dialects, packed with pickpockets, tenement mothers, and boiling cabbage stench.

There, right between two cramped tailor shops, sits the anomaly: The New Elysium Theatre.

Faded French Second Empire style, chipped stone cherubs, and grand gas lanterns throwing a warm orange glow onto the slush. To the Fifth Avenue millionaires and their wives arriving for a high-status operetta, it's just The Elysium. A taste of romantic European art. To the Tammany Hall politicians and street enforcers who know what lies beneath the floorboards, it's The Ely. A perfect front where a wealthy man can leave his wife in a velvet-curtained box upstairs, and slip away to the hidden underworld below.

Anastasia was still green. But she knew, nobody was coming to rescue her. And when she got an innocent offer to work on playbills and promotional posters for The Ely, she took it without a second thought.

She did her best without knowing that every day was a test.

Of course, Charles Solomon didn't tell her his grand plans. He wanted to see if she was capable of replicating the intricate, flowing typography of American advertisement. Then came the ledger book for the theatre's ticket sales. She didn't ask why.

Then, the official business correspondence with uptown suppliers. She did it all with cold, unyielding precision. Solomon watched, noted her discretion, and finally, they had "the talk" in his private office behind the stage. She agreed to work for his shadow syndicate.

That was when the real education began.

Solomon didn't just leave her to figure things out. He brought in his best men to put her through her paces. She was trained in the brutal, pragmatic physics of American crime. But the real masterstroke? Solomon used his immense political leverage to personally introduce her to the very men who sat on the other side of the paper: corrupt bank lawyers, shady maritime clerks, crooked treasury officials.

They sat across from her under the low gaslight of the underground rooms, showing her exactly what the law looked for. They taught her what raised a red flag on a maritime manifest, how a bank teller's eye scanned a signature, and where the microscopic flaws lay in a federal bond.

Over those six years, Anastasia didn't just become a good counterfeiter. She became an elite, hyper-professional penman and engraver.

By 1894, she could determine the exact weight and cotton-to-linen ratio of a piece of paper simply by pinching it once between her thumb and forefinger. She could differentiate standard iron-gall black ink from a deeply concentrated indigo blue under a single flickering candle.

She mastered the "true fluid" test, knowing exactly how fresh ink ought to pool and dry into the fibers of parchment without creating a telltale bleed. She learned how to use a razor-sharp steel burin to engrave copper plates with copperplate script so fine it mirrored the government printing presses, and how to artificially age a document using tea-stains and a precise dusting of ash to mimic decades of dust.

She lived rent free in my head for the past few years. Anastasia Volkov. Volkova, if you want to want to delve into the specifics of Russian surname pronunciation. But I personally settle for Volkov.

An OC for the incredible masterpiece that is the Red Dead Redemption 2 universe.

Now, I want to be honest. I went full on the historical accuracy, writing the character and the constructing her backstory like a ten thousand lego piece build. Each event leads to her skills, her trauma, her "the way she is".

My main objective was to write a strong female character without falling into Mary Sue territory. Is she someone you can relate with? Hardly, I personally cannot. Does her life feel like Dostoyevsky had a fever dream? Definitely.

Expect twists, drama and that deep melancholia of the Old World.

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1877 – 1886: Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens. Europe’s first educational institution for women. Doesn't tell you a whole lot, just the name of it, does it? Allow me to put on my nerdy glasses and correct that little inconvenience.

Back in the time, the name Smolny was associated with the crème de la crème of Russian society. The best education one can possibly get in Russia, as a woman. A status symbol. Naturally, you would assume only the wealthy could get in. Yet, it wasn't entirely true.

See, the institute was separated by the "Alexander wing", for the bourgeois, and the "Nicholas wing", the everyone else. Noble-ish bloods, wealthy girls would live in a slightly better conditions, not having to share a military grade beds to sleep on. But that was, mostly, it.

In other words, it was a disaster. Wrapped in a pretty bow for the onlookers.

Don't get me wrong, you would get a brilliant education for the time and age. Think the full package: literature, mathematics, geography, history, biology, physics, languages, dancing, arts, music, household skills. The list goes on and on. But the living part?

First, food. It was outrageous. The quality of it was mediocre at best, and the quantity was scarce. Because the girls were have to keep up with the standards of being sickly thin and pale. And because the fundings were far from what they were since Catherine The Great.

Second, the monastic life. At the time Anastasia joins, she's 8 years old. Previously, through history, the institute accepted girls from the age of 6. Would you be able to see your family? No. For the next 9 years, your life is of studying and becoming something exceptional.

Third, the "exceptional" part. You better be one, otherwise your life would become a nightmare. Grades were a thing, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. The girls had to pick a "favourite" among the older students. And nobody would pick someone who isn't the goody two shoes.

How did it work? Assume you're in a class learning to mend a sock. You might be good in mathematics or speak French fluently by this point. But oh, is this stitch uneven? Did you daydream while having a needle in your hands? Well, congratulations, miss. Now you're the laughingstock. The unevenly mended sock is being pinned to your pristine uniform by a wincing teacher. You're going to be laughed at and whispered about in the corridors, you'll loose those who looked up at you, and...do you really deserve to have supper after such a shameful performance? No. You'll have to stand on a stool in the middle of the canteen, watching your classmates dine without you. Girls fainted from that venomous cocktail of shame, under-eating and cold.

Coldness. See, the underfunding was not only in the food. It was in the heating as well. Smolny is a massive building, and to keep it warm through the cold late autumn up to the early spring was enormously expensive. In some real diaries I've read, books getting moldy, in others, girls wrote how hard it was to fall asleep. Saint Petersburg, where the institute stood, was built on a swamp. The humidity there was already punishing.

And so, nine years of living like this would, without a doubt, leave a mark on you. If you were diligent, at the end, you might grauade into the "Golden Students" — usually, just a handful from hundreds that attended. Six, maybe eight people. And you would get the cipher: a pretty bow pin with a golden "E" for Екатерина Вторая, Великая (Catherine the Great) — the ideological founder of Smolny, the tsaritsa long since gone.

Your graduation would be something women all over the world could only dream of: the immaculate ball, the guests from the royal family, connections that were supposed to settle you for life.

But was it worth it?

Shaw: Just between us...not my first time.