[Epic - Part V - Chapter 1] (The Girl with the Girl Who Played with the Girl Who Kicked the Girl with a Thousand Hardcovers) M aria Frederica Morales wasn't really brought up as a typical freelance assassin. Which is to say that her parents Raul and Maritza Morales always wanted her not to entertain the idea of joining the family occupation and instead always urged her to concentrate on more professionally, financially and socially... well... amiable fields of suburban-friendly, dinner-party entertainable professions such as particle physics or global capital market analysis or evolutionary paleontology, etc. Pfftt... she'd have none of it. (Actually she majored in all three from Ivy League colleges: billionaire parents tend to pester you into studying nevertheless, you see.) Maria worked two summers as a research assistant for a boson and graviton study group at CERN..., spent a 'most vain and worthless' spring formulating complex manipulative financial d