@protectthevulnerable call
Nearly twenty years ago, a terroristic cult called Diablo's Canyon planted a bomb on a California dam. The bomb was rigged with a biochemical agent manufactured to poison the entirety of the water within the dam, rendering it utterly undrinkable. During this act, the cult's leader, one Velvet von Ragnar, toppled over the dam and fell to her death. It wasn't until after Ragnar's death that reports of what she and her cult had been planning came to life, and the people of California let out a collective breath as they realized the danger that had almost come to pass.
The larger problem was that while the cult had been disbanded, Ragnar herself hadn't actually died. She'd fallen; she'd survived; she'd put herself back together; and now she was making her homecoming debut in a bar that twenty years ago had been called the Incinerator Club, thirty minutes away from the abandoned facility where she'd first built Diablo's Canyon.
Velvet "Vaughn" stepped into the low light of the bar without any particular kind of plan beyond some amorphous idea about recruiting better shitheads than the worms she'd gotten before.
Her long black leather duster swept behind her with each click of her heels on the concrete floor, her eyes sharp in their dark makeup as they swept over the bar's patrons. Not much had changed in twenty years: new name, new management, same shitty clientele. Velvet was just considering her other options when a new sight walked through the doors, dark-haired and pale and with the kind of walk that spoke of a woman on a mission. Red lips pushed up into a smirk.
She didn't quite beat the other woman to the bar, but it didn't matter: both were equally ignored by the bartender, at least for now. "Hiya, sugar. You're not one of the regulars here."
Spoken with the confidence of somebody who was a "regular here," despite Velvet's own absence from the scene.