She's nine when she first tries to do something about it. Dad keeps the painkillers she's looking for (the ones that say on the side of the bottle they can kill you if you take too many of them) in the cupboard over the fridge, so she and her sister can't get into them. She puts a chair on top of a stool, brings over the other stool, and climbs her jungle gym to get at her prize.

The chair falls off the stool, because she's a stupid fucking idiot, as her Dad will soon tell her, and she falls too, the back of her head hitting the countertop. The next thing she remembers is waking up in the hospital.

She tells him, when he attempts to berate an answer out of her, that she had a really bad headache, and didn't want to bother him. (He hates being bothered, after all). He tells her that she sure fucked that up, didn't she? 

(Her balance never fully recovers, after that. Probably something wrong with her head, her dad says, and he never takes her to a doctor about it. Why should he? Actions should have consequences, after all.)

When Ira is eleven, she finds in the library a book that changes her life. (Probably not for the better, in the balance of things. But it certainly does change it.) 

It's the autobiography of an esper, Hillary, who was born in a boy's body, but wanted to be a girl instead. Her life was bad in the same kinds of ways Ira's life is bad.

And then Hillary awakened as an esper, and she got to be a girl after all, and even though her life wasn't easy after that and her backlash was horrible, nobody could ever take that from her.

(There's a note at the end, mentioning that the author died at age 33, heading back into a dungeon to try and rescue some victims she thought she could still reach, before the portal closed.)

Ira reads, and for the first time she can remember, she wants something more than she wants to die.

She wants to be an esper.

She's thirteen and puberty has been hitting the kids around her and it's starting to hit her too, and she's scaredscaredscaredscared of it changing her, ruining her, making her more like dad. But if she awakens, it'll save her. Trans espers usually awaken early, the rumors online say. If it's going to happen, she shouldn't have to wait long.

(There's meds that some kids can get to keep them safe from puberty, even if they aren't espers. But nobody's even told Ira they exist, and she knows better than to ask about such topics where her dad might hear about it, which is anywhere with an adult. She only ever reads online about trans espers at the library, alone in the corner, and even that feels stupid and horrible and wrong.)

She's fifteen and it'll be a year before there's any chance she can be saved and it feels like an impossibly long time to have to wait. She shaves her face every day and cuts herself doing it open and she can still feel the hairs creeping in and it makes her want to die, much louder than usual. (The hairs on her arms and her chest and her legs are so much worse, but she doesn't dare shave those.) She avoids mirrors habitually, almost automatically. They make her angry.

...anger comes to her more easily, these days. Sometimes it feels like she's angry all the time. In the few places online that she talks she gets into arguments and the words ring in her head over and over until she wants to punch something, or someone. It's one of the few emotions that makes it past the depressive haze that is her emotional landscape, along with fear.

(She's still not stupid enough to pick fights with her dad. She considers trying to run away, and even experiments with first steps, but whenever her location tracking shows her somewhere she shouldn't be, he notices, quickly, and he gets mad. And it's bad for her, when she gets mad.)

She's sixteen and she hasn't awakened yet, but it's only been a few months since her birthday, the odds are really low. But she can't stop herself from thinking about it, and when she starts noticing symptoms, any kind of symptoms, she can't help but wonder if it's happening, if she'll be free, if she's lucky enough to get to have a life worth living. 

She's angry all the time, now, blindly angry, at her teachers and her peers for not noticing or not caring about how miserable she is constantly, at her sister who gets to actually be a girl and doesn't even seem that happy about it, at her mother for leaving them and not looking back, and at her father for everything. But mostly, she's angry at herself, for being such a useless hopeless freak. 

She scratches the skin off her shoulders habitually, so often that she learns to move her arms slowly to reduce the shock of the pain. 

She's seventeen and she's back in the hospital. (She thought the horrible overwhelming pain might have been her hell week, so she did her best to ignore it. It was appendicitis.) 

Her nurse think she's crying because of the pain, and pats her gently on she shoulder. Ira bites her cheek instead of screaming at the women. 

Her body is covered in hair. She can feel it constantly, even when she's trying to stay perfectly still. It makes her want to throw up. (She wants to die. She can't, not yet, just in case, but she wants it so so badly.)

She's eighteen and she barely talks anymore, the sound of her own voice viscerally upsetting to her. Her stolen copy of Hillary's autobiography has almost entirely stopped acquiring tearstains, as her mobile torture chamber of a body has stopped letting her cry. 

She's seen the statistics. If she's not an esper by the end of this year - most espers awaken by this point. (It was a stupid thing to hope for, she thinks miserably. Could have ended it years ago, saved myself the pain.) 

...she doesn't, though. Not yet. Just in case.

She's nineteen and she's out of school, having managed to scrape by and put in the bare minimum get her diploma. (She didn't apply to college; her dad wasn't even mad about it. College is expensive, even when you get a scholarship, and her sister doesn't have a job to pay for her expenses.) She doesn't go to graduation, obviously.

She gets a job driving supplies to and from dungeons, with a partner, in case one of them gets kidnapped. (Espers don't get kidnappe- why would that matter.) 

The people she works with are mostly older than her. Some of them are quiet, almost tolerable. Others talk, and expect Ira respond. She puts her headphones and ignores them, when she's driving, or turns up the radio when she is. They learn to leave her alone. (One of them, Starla, is trans. After the first time they drive together, Ira starts calling in sick when they're assigned to work together, and gets put on probation for it. Luckily for her, Starla leaves the company, and it stops being a problem.)

She doesn't make enough to pay for her own place, but her dad doesn't charge her much rent, at least. 

The anger that burned within her is still there, but it sometimes feels like it's running out of fuel, leaving her hollow. (The hope is mostly gone. She's not going to be an esper. She knows, she knows, she knows. But she'll wait it out. Just to be sure.)

She reads online someone saying that people lost in dungeons are reborn as espers. She makes a throwaway account, writes a scathing and mocking reply, gets dogpiled for harassing someone who lost a spouse to a dungeon, and is banned from the platform. She scratches her shoulders until they bleed.

She's twenty one and the last two years of her life have bled together into a formless, endless misery. She shaves twice a day and still feels the hair on her face. She showers every day and still finds herself soaked in sweat. She wears too many clothes for the endless summer of southern California and if she feels like she's being baked alive, well, it's at least a distraction from the way almost everything she thinks about makes her want to die. 

She works every day of the week. The weather doesn't really change with the seasons, not here. She only notices her twentieth birthday two months after it happens.

(It's not the one that matters. The one that matters is twenty four. And then she'll wait a few more months, just to be Totally Sure. And then -)

She's twenty two and she drinks more than her dad, these days, though she never shows up to work drunk, because she's better than him. 

She doesn't really remember much. She's still miserable, of course, but it's a bit quieter, at least at night. She's been waking up with a splitting headache every day for months, and she usually skips breakfast.

She's twenty three and her dad gets kidnapped by a dungeon for thirty hours and she barely notices, though the quiet is nice.

When he comes back, he's different. Haunted. He doesn't yell at her, anymore. He stops drinking, too. (Ira doesn't. Why would she?)

One day he brings home takeout from a restaurant she apparently used to like, and says, gruffly, that he's worried about her.

...the anger dies down before she can overcome the decades of fear, and so she doesn't scream at him. (It wouldn't change anything.)

Instead she shrugs, and doesn't respond. They eat in silence.

She's twenty four and a half and she has waited long enough to die. 

She burns her stolen copy of Hillary's autobiography, on her half-birthday, the pages curling up in flames and smoke along with the pitiful remnants of her hopes. It hurts to watch. She forces herself not to look away. This is what you waited for, after all)

She considers buying a gun, but it seems like a hassle. She moves guns for work, every day. She'll steal one.

She remembers the post, about people who never make it out of dungeons, and some part of her decides, with a bitter laugh, that it's a fitting way to go, proving that idiot wrong.

On September 23rd, 2023 at 3 am, Ira Shoemaker helps unload a crate of guns at the site of an unnamed B-tier swamp dungeon. 

When nobody is looking besides the cameras, she sneaks into the portal.

She dies, presumably, either of whatever kills people when a dungeon collapses or of the pistol she brought just in case.

Her story ends.