"Ughh..." Destiny put a hand to her forehead. That house... Her eyes had alighted on a strangely familiar suburban dwelling. That's the house where those two boys had the coin! They said I was... I was... somebody else. She couldn't quite grasp the name. That I wasn't really a stripper.
Her fingers tightened, nails digging into her palms. "So it wasn't just a dream?" she muttered. Could it be real? But she couldn't account for why she was here -- unless it was to perform for them, as she remembered. And... fear twisted her stomach and gripped at her heart. She didn't have anything she ought to have as Destiny -- no car, no purse, no phone to call... who? She knew, as a clandestine prostitute, that she needed to be in touch with a friend while working in case the client turned out to be bad.
But she couldn't actually remember knowing anybody. Just faceless "people" who filled in necessary spots in her... mostly empty... life. She couldn't even remember the address of her apartment.
"Damn it," she swore under her breath. "Get a grip, Destiny..." She'd dealt with bad situations before -- never so bad as the idea she had never really existed, but... she could handle it. Slowly the panic subsided, and the anger returned.
She knew she had been born and raised in India, learning some belly dancing there, before moving to England, her father's home, in her mid-teens. There she had learned pole dancing and burlesque, and became a full-time sex worker. Than moving to the States when she could no longer stand England's cold, damp climate.
Other than that skeleton of life history, the only thing she could remember was the hard-won knowledge of how to use body and mind to get what she wanted. She was a stripper and prostitute, and a bloody good one... but not a person.
"Whatever happened, those two boys did something to me," she reasoned. Whether they had screwed with her mind to hallucinate a crazy transformation, and blur all her memories -- taking away the faces of her family and friends -- or whether... whether she really was someone else. She vaguely remembered turning into a short, overweight girl when they had said... something... and the idea of being that fat Yankee chick again horrified her nearly as much as the possibility of her whole life being a lie.
The coin. That was the key. Whether this was all just hypnosis, or whether there really was some identity-altering magic at work here, she knew she needed to get that coin back. She checked her pockets to make sure, but no -- she must have dropped the coin when she panicked.
When I was transforming... She bit her lip. "Well, those two brats haven't seen the last of Destiny... Bodyshots?" She scowled. That can't possibly be my name. It was far too stupid to even be a stage name. The sort of name horny, brainless boys would come up with.
Her stomach twisted again. This seemed like a pretty irrefutable confirmation that she had been, somehow, created by those boys. She combed over their words again. They hypnotised me to become a stripper. If that's... if that's true, then the coin can transform people. I should be able to use it to insure that I REMAIN Destiny -- as well as turn them into something to punish them for screwing with my mind and body.
Mind made up, she walked away from the house after making sure that neither of the boys was nearby. Presumably they were still inside -- her goal was to double back, approach the house while keeping out of sight of the windows, and ambush them for the coin before they could use it again on her.