Congratulations on Your First Dance Kill!

When you first meet Ezerelda you won’t really know what to make of her. She’ll seem very sad, very graceful, very alone, but she’ll also seem like she grasps beauty in a way that few people really can. It’ll seem like she’s made beauty something she can carry with her, something that is meant to be shared but never held, never captured in a moment. She’ll be the most exacting teacher you’ll ever have had, but with good reason. So much depends on you on this mission, on your training being perfect.

That’s why it will be volunteer only. There will be no room for doubt, no room for error. Only one who believes entirely, as Ezerelda will frequently tell you, could accomplish this seemingly impossible task and, more importantly to her, survive.

“It might seem I don’t like you,” she’ll have said at your first meeting. “That I want nothing more than to see you fail.” She’ll have taken all of you in with her lingering glance. “This is far from the case. Everything I teach you, every exacting lesson, is to insure that you may kill and leave without enduring harm. More than anything else I want to see you live and leave. I want to see you succeed and thrive more than anything else in the world. I am cruel only towards this purpose.”

And cruel she was. The hours of pirouetting, of gracefully bending and then using your dance-shoe-blades to decapitate marionettes in Korean uniforms, all of them winnowed away at your classmates until only a handful of you remained, a handful trained towards the most brutal purpose imaginable: dance fighting. But you and your companions now stand, the finest weapons that the United States government can muster that aren’t flying robots that fire missiles at small human targets, killing them with massive collateral damage.

So tonight, when you perform in front of a massive crowd of North Korean dignitaries you will do so without fear. And when you’re invited back to perform for Professor Park Kim Sun, also known as Doctor Roboto, you’ll remain calm and self-assured right up until the perfect moment when you strike out with your fearsome dance skills and murder him and his entire entourage in a rain of blood and body parts. Then you’ll elegantly groove your way into a vent shaft and dance-climb all the way to the Special Forces extraction team waiting for you on the roof-top.

As their helicopter speeds you away you’ll smile, gazing out at the invisible city-space below. You’ll think of all the hours you spent with Ezerelda, the sore muscles and bruised bones, and you’ll thank her for every last one. Without her efforts you wouldn’t be on this helicopter, riding home to see your dad while he undergoes treatment for his bone-cancer on the government’s dime.

Congratulations on Your First Dance Kill!