Disclaimer: All the characters from the "Magnificent Seven" T.V. series are property of Trilogy Entertainment, The Mirisch Group, MGM Worldwide.
There are moments of clarity in ones life that define everything a person will ever be.
For Laurel Chase that moment had come when she was ten years old.
The venue for her divine revelation occurred, oddly enough in the most unlikely of places, the schoolyard in Philadelphia where she would spent the first eighteen years of her life. Until then, she had adults make mention of it and had listened to the other girls whisper unkindly about it behind her back. She had never understood in the beginning why they would do that, why they would refuse to allow her into their games and ensured that she knew that there was something about her that threatened them. It confused her just as much as the hungry stares of young boys who had no idea what so mesmerising but were still slave to the yearning nonetheless.
However, at the age of ten it became all clear to her.
A veil had lifted from her eyes and the light of understanding came to her in what could only be called a religious experience that explain to her what the rest of her life would be in that one second. As she watched Tommy Wallace and Russell Townsend rolling in the dirt, fighting for the privilege of walking her home, Laurel realised what it was she possessed that made the other girls so jealous with craving, so utterly envious that they could only tolerate her presence with scorn. What she would always have that was capable of giving her the kind of power women dreamed of from the moment that they first discovered their reflection in the mirror.
Her lineage was nothing extraordinary although in later years, she would tell people that her mother was an exiled Russian Empress and her father, a deposed warrior. The tales would get more fanciful as time wore on and as the face that became everything she was, negated the desire by anyone to learn the truth, Laurel actually began to believe a little of the lie herself. However, the fabrication of her past was as much illusion as she allowed herself because had she been merely beautiful, she would have hardly been memorable. However, she was not simply beautiful, she was intelligent and with an intellect that was formidable to say the least and utterly self-serving.
In truth, her father had been a bookkeeper and her mother a seamstress, hardly the stuff of legend that little girls liked to construct in their fairy tale world in the clouds. Both were hard working Christian folk who attempted in their way to instil her with good values even though she could not imagine how she had come from them because there was nothing of the stunning beauty in them that everyone else saw in her. Until that day in the school yard, Laurel had not thought much of her features and had gone through her days confused at the hostility received by girls her age and adoration from the boys. When she learnt how easily manipulated the male of species could be, she lost interest in them rather quickly and soon boys did not impress as much as men.
By the time she was thirteen, Laurel knew she that she could manipulate men as easily as she could use boys. With dark coloured hair that sheeny to the touch, she had been described in later years by one lover as having the face of an angel and a body made for sin. With emerald coloured eyes and full lips, she shook the resolve of every man she encountered and was particularly chagrined when she could not. Those she could not acquire she went out and took, as if an unseen gauntlet had been dropped whenever she was refused.
By the time she was fourteen years old, her schoolmaster had become her first lover and there she discovered just how power she truly had at her fingertips. He not only became her teacher in that most primeval of arts but he opened the possibility of what her mind was capable of conjuring without any aid from her body. She discovered an affinity of the sciences for she possessed a remarkably logical mind, a by-product of her calculating manner. With an appetite for learning that was almost as insatiable as her need for sexual conquest, she found that the world of chemistry, physics, biology and other sciences were almost as easy to understand as it was for her to keep the men in her stable pliable.
Her parents suspected nothing and indulged the desire for an education even though it was always assumed that like any respectable young woman, she would tire of it by the time she reached a marriageable age. Of course, their expectation for the kind of suitor she would attract was higher than one would normally expect of a working class family but Laurel was no ordinary beauty and it was always expected by those around her that she would marry well.
She had no intention of letting them think that she had plans of her own and sought to disappear when the time was right. While her father was not exactly a man of means, he had squirreled away a stipend, which was invested wisely and soon amounted to a delightful sum of 50,000 dollars. Unfortunately, she was to learn that the princely sum was being held in anticipation of her future marriage and would never be hers to control. By the age of seventeen, she was dreading the moment when suitors would come calling at her door.
Unknown to her parents, she had written to the Emma Willard Academy in New York, one of the few colleges in the continental United States that offered college level education for young women and was ecstatic when she was accepted with a place waiting for her. However, her parents were not prepared to send her there, believing that it was a waste of time when she should be thinking about marriage, not an education. For the first time in her life, Laurel found that it was time she discarded those who were a liability in her life and it surprised her how truly easy it had been. All it had taken was a whisper in the right ear and by morning, she stood with the rest of her neighbours as she watched the house that had been home all her life burn to the ground with her parents in it.
The money that was held in trust for her marriage was soon hers to do with when she seduced the lawyer who had been left to execute it and then blackmailed him into complacency by threatening to expose him to his wife. Before the ashes of her parents had even grown cold, Laurel Chase was on her way to New York to begin her first year at the Emma Willard Academy for young ladies. Once there, she excelled as she knew she would, graduating as its valedictorian at the end of her tenure and deciding that she had no taste for school teaching since that was the best an educated woman could hope for.
For a time, she wandered aimlessly, having no outlet for her genius even though it waited in the depths of her like a snake coiled patiently in tall grass, waiting for the foot that would provoke it into being. She travelled extensively, allowing her inheritance to dwindle into nothingness, refusing to allow the lack of funds to reduce her to panic for she was never a woman who would be in dire circumstances. There was always a man who was a willing savant to her needs both financial and occasionally sexually. She enjoyed her relationships with them and was of the belief that they were terribly misguided creatures.
They seemed to have this incredible arrogance which gave them the audacity to claim that the female of the species was emotionally weaker when they could be guided by their baser instincts to commit the most ludicrous of acts. While she enjoyed her encounters with men and found pleasure with them, there had not been one she had encountered yet that gave her any indication that men had a right to call themselves masters of the earth. Nor did she equate love with sex. She had no difficulty discarding a tantalising lover if he became inconvenient.
Laurel was travelling in the west when she had another one of those defining moments almost as clear as the one she had in that school yard so many years ago. It had been the same thing as watching little Tommy who ended up marrying some dour face girl and becoming a baker just like his father and Russell who ran off to join the war even though he was too young and got his stupid self killed at Bull Run. Two men had been fighting on the street, beating each other senseless with bloody knuckles and teeth bared, determined to show everyone that he was better than the other.
Laurel had watched with just as much fascination, the crowd who were witnessed to this spectacle and how they relished the opportunity to show their lust for blood, unhampered by confining thoughts of morality. They cheered with each blow struck, with every tear of skin and with each spurt of viscous blood as if it was a streamer to be carried in a parade. It was barbaric and it was just as captivating for man as it was for woman, although personally Laurel saw nothing compelling about it. When the fight had come to an end with both men still standing but exhausted, she realised something even far more profound.
There was no satisfaction in a fight halted before death.
The crowd was disappointed. They wanted to see one man down, not a fight ended before the natural conclusion had been reached. They wanted to see pain, blood and smell victory, not the hollowed version of boxing matches and legal competition but the true brutal product borne of Cain that would mark him forever. They wanted to see that most brutal of battles, the one from which all others began and they would pay anything for it.
Of course men were not as willing as they were in those early dark days of mankind to fight for no reason and to see it through to its bloody end. Ten thousand years of civilisation had stripped the beast from the man and left him a creature of reason; powerless and robbed of everything that had made his climb the evolutionary ladder as the true king of the beasts.
Man was the lion.
The memory of that primitive past was hidden beneath a veneer of reason and civilisation that had to be stripped for the power of him to surface once again. She had seen men fight for a woman but even the need for sex could not outweigh the desire to survive. No, if there was a way to reach that part of him, it was not though the womanly arts. What was needed was something special.
Something that was capable of reminding him of who he was in one simple application.
Laurel spent the next year after that discovery, finding that very something. At times, she thought that perhaps her ambition had outweighed her each but stubbornness refused to make her give up. She had any number of volunteers who were willing to play her guinea pigs, all she had to do was promise them a taste of her flesh and they would do anything for her almost as willingly as the task she was attempting to accomplish.
Eventually she succeeded, there was never any doubt that she would not and with that success, Laurel Chase gave life to the Arena.