Tragedy in the Sierra Azul

Description

The incident that came to overshadow, if not totally define, Andrea’s early adulthood, which, when she can bring herself to mention it at all, she refers to only as “the accident”, occurred around midday on Tuesday, Week 50 of Spring 777 somewhere in the Sierra Azul. Although not directly involved herself, Andrea bore witness to the moment that Erin (her beloved and only zeroth cousin), Vienna Valentine (her biological mother) and Radclyffe Collier (her biological father) inexplicably tumbled from the side of the mountain they were climbing. It was supposed to have been a relatively safe and straightforward ascent.

Vienna and Radclyffe had both died of their injuries before Andrea could get to them. Erin, however, had not though she was too badly injured to move or for Andrea to safely carry her off the mountain. In a spot too remote to hope that help might come unbidden, Andrea ran off the mountain to summon assistance like she had never run before, heeding her own safety and well being only so far as was necessary to complete her mission. Having done so, she was utterly spent; exhausted and dehydrated to the extant that the rescue party would not allow her to accompany them back up the mountain.

Erin was, by all accounts, still alive when they found her at the scene of the accident but she did not survive the descent. It was some small comfort to Andrea that Erin did not die alone but it remains a source of inextinguishable anguish that she had been too weak to return to the mountain to aid in her rescue or, at the very least, to have been with her when she passed away.

Cause

An official (but somewhat cursory) investigation into the incident reached no firm conclusions about the cause; the local coroner recorded verdicts of death by misadventure without so much as a hint that it might have been anyone’s fault. Not even the Butterfly Club, which takes rather more seriously the unexplained deaths of any of its operatives (in this case Vienna Valentine), was able to uncover any evidence or come up with any credible conjecture which might suggest otherwise - at least none that has ever been communicated to Andrea or to the official authorities…