At 13, she brought up to her father that she explicitly felt uncomfortable with being his son, to which he immediately threatened to send her to war then and there. That same night, she ran off to the only place with other women she knew of— the Farm. She hid in the attic for some time, living off the rations she had packed, until she found a group of kids (Rager, Seer, Winner, and Girl) already living there. They panicked and made to run, presuming she was a boy working for the Servants, but she told them that she wouldn't tell anyone so long as they brought her with them to wherever they were going.

She wandered with them in the Desert for some time, making easy friends with the warmest of the group, the girl later to be named Winner. Winner was the first person to not treat Mad as though she were a freak for saying she didn't feel much like a boy, and taught her out to experiment with her outward appearance. Mad's insomnia got her to wander through the night and find runaway girls trading substances that none of them quite understood, one of which she took because she was told it would make her more feminine.

Rager had the most aversion to Mad because of her fear of men as a trauma response due to what the Servants had put her through. It took them longer to get closer, and she opened up more when Mad began talking of how she felt herself to be a woman, not a man. After some time, the two of them caught each other when they were both having sleepless nights, and Mad soon allowed Rager to also get lost in the substances they found, sometimes only coming back to groggy lucidity after days of wandering, being found again by Winner and Seer. Even with the small joy it brought her to be accepted, the looming misery of living in the Desert and the horrible mood swings caused by her substances made her develop severe depression, and she soon began to seek freedom from it through putting her own knife to her skin, cutting herself and Rager open in their late-night sessions.

At 18, Rager embraced Mad close and gave her her name, Mad, and gave herself her name, Rager. After a moment together, Rager proclaimed Winner and Seer's names, as well. It was a night of extreme celebration, that resulted in both of them too hungover in the morning to barely walk. But Seer saved them from needing to trudge along, for he sacrificed Girl in the name of the Divine, and the Divine in turn gave them a Chariot. After Winner driving them for a few nights, Mad noticed how Rager's spirits had still not yet lifted. Knowing of what Rager had told her of the Servant who had raped her, one night the two of them took the car back to the Farms and gathered the women who Mad had been trading substances with the past few years, and would consider herself friends with. They held a bacchanal, parading his head around a bonfire, a late coming-of-age ceremony for Rager.

Then, a few months of aimlessly driving east, and they arrived at Neojerusalem, where they would deliver Seer. Over those years, she and Seer had agreed to keep their distance from one another, both jealous of the other's closeness to Rager, but in that moment, Mad knew she would miss him. She waited outside Neojerusalem with Winner for a short while, but she knew she had to move on. In those dazed, drug-addled nights, she had witnessed the Divine, and knew she needed to chase it. Leaving Winner with the Chariot, not knowing when next she would see Rager, she left.

ACT II

There had been an anchor, Winner, when Mad had first started forcing herself into trances. Winner had been someone to lean back on, take care of her when she was sick and hardly lucid. Mad had thought her loneliness would free her, but it was choking. Her blades no longer brought her comfort, but still she would carve Rager's face into her arm, seeking the Divine in the blood.

She had heard Seer's small-voiced ramblings after delirious visions, and thought her experience with the Divine would be anything similar. She realised then that Seer thought himself equal to the Divine, but Mad felt small and insignificant to it. She lived her life in fear, not knowing where she was in any given moment, unable to handle the manic ups and pure ecstasy, when just as quickly she would fall back down again, cutting herself open and eating at the wounds.

She met with Rager a few times, but she could not tell the times apart, how far apart they were from one another. She offered impassioned, fervent, avant-garde explanations of the cruelty of the Divine, the beauty of that cruelty, the falsehood of morality. When she was semi-lucid were the best moments for her, when she was awake enough to control herself, but not just enough to lose that feeling of divinity that unconsciousness brought. She would talk to enraptured audiences of enlightenment, freedom from the oppressive systems of institution and government, promises and threats of violence to Lord Fame and all those who served him.

The net of women whose faces she did not know, who she knew no word for other than "her friends", began to devote themselves to the fanaticisms of Mad's escapist fantasies. She was their Dionysus, they were her Maenads.

When she was 27 Rager informed her, one of their sparse meetings, that the 200th year was soon to dawn. She had had a vision, something between what Seer had described and what she felt around Mad, about the future of Neojerusalem and Truebabylon as a whole. Mad, to comfort her, baptised her into her Bacchae, and walked with her to Neojerusalem to see Seer making a speech of his divinity, that he was more powerful than the sun, and could darken it as he wished. The sun was covered by the moon as the first day of the 200th year arrived. She and Seer regarded one another a moment, seeing how different and yet so similar they had become. Seer was easier to digest, and so therefore more popular. He was a prophet of the people, and Mad was only a prophet to her own people, the small intimate group she had cultivated for herself.

ACT III

Mad's habits slowed down as she found herself needing to be lucid enough to defend herself and her bacchants more and more. Seer had, on that 200th year, started a war across all of Truebabylon. She sheltered herself occasionally in the Mines at first, but soon they were flooded with liquid plague. They kept close by the Heart, closer to the Divine, and farther form the armies. With all of the Camps conquered by Neojerusalem's Havedom, more people came to her to convert, for comfort, for a hope that if this war would kill them, the after would not be so cruel. She tried not to institutionalise herself, but she knew that is what she was beginning to do.

At 30 years old, it reached a turning point. Rager came to her for the first time in 3 years, and told her to baptise Haver, the emperor leading this war. Rager promised peace between the Havedom and the Desert, against the real enemy, Lord Fame. She promised Mad that baptising Haver would bring peace, and so Mad baptised her.

This stance gained Mad more attention that she had ever had before, and quickly thereafter, Lord Fame stole her away and kept her in a cell with only a small blade, and walls made of images of his face. The new alliance she had with Haver did not save her, the devotion her followers had to her did not save her, the prayers she sent to the Divine did not save her. All she could to was sit there and cut herself, wonder each day if that should be the day she should cut deep enough to free herself from mortality.

She stayed strong for as long as she could, running off of the fervent trances she would induce in herself, the occasional food that would be dropped from the hole above her, often rotted but edible. She did not know how long she was down there until she was out— a year, she spent in Lord Fame's prison. But who had saved her was someone she had never met, Worker. She offered Mad a place to stay in her Workers' Sanctuary, where she could get medical help for her injuries and infections. Mad blinked into the sunlight she hadn't seen in a year, and swore she saw the Divine in Worker's face. Emotion seizing her, she threw her arms around her with what little strength she had left and kissed her, to try to encapsulate her gratitude.

When she was taken back to Workers' Sanctuary, there she found her maenads, whoever was left. They were well-fed and glowing with satisfaction. That night they held a great festival to honour her return, to honour the occasional mercy of the Divine, for bringing Mad back to safety.