What's In A Name?
                   copyright 1996 by Dave Van Domelen
         characters and situations TM Daedalus Entertainment Inc
              used with permission for purposes of fanfic
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     We called her Silver Fist, and the nickname stuck.
     I don't think, if you pressed us, any of the group could say for sure
who first called her Silver Fist, or why.
     Her "real" name was Annie Cho.  That wasn't her REAL real name, of
course, but it was the one she signed to the checks.  I don't think I ever
learned her full Cantonese name, but then again, we didn't like to use
those anyway.  It was cooler to use an American name, like the movie stars
did.  We were punks, but we had a sense of style, eh?
     Anyway, Joe says he called her Silver Fist because she was no Golden
Gloves, eh?  Yeah, we all knew she was the best of us in a fight, but we
all ranked on each other like that.
     Sally said it was because Annie treated her hands like they were some
kinda treasure, always paying for those $20 (US money, guys, something like
$150 or so in Hong Kong dollars) manicures which she'd go to great lengths
not to break in sparring, but always did anyway.  Mind you, Sally spent
just as much on her hair, so she didn't really have room to throw stones
in the vanity department, right?
     Me?  Well, it's kinda embarrassing to tell what my explanation for
the nickname was.  Y'see, I was always trying to get into...her good graces,
let's just say, and BOY was I a suck-up.  I would usually wax poetic on the
theme of "hard and beautiful, like the metal," and end up with everyone,
even Annie, giving me a hard time for it.
     Oh, she tried to give us nicknames to make it all even, but they never
stuck.  I used to wonder if that was why she stopped hanging with us as
much, if we'd driven her off by acting like insecure jerks.  I'd sit in the
bar we met in, craning my neck and hoping to see the red glow of her cigar
in the entrance (there's just something about watching a woman enjoy a
cigar that, well, let's just say her smoking was getting hazardous to my
heart).  And sometimes it'd be there, but less and less.  Once she came in
all bandaged up, and we tried to get her to tell us how it'd happened.
     "Got cocky against some muggers," she told us.  We didn't believe her,
of course...there wasn't a mugger in Hong Kong who could do that to any of
us without killing us first.
     Sally asked if Annie'd gotten a new boyfriend of something, which made
me kinda angry for a second...if some jerk'd done that to her and she'd let
him, I'd have to do something drastic.
     Annie just laughed, tossing her long hair back in that way she had.
"Look, Goldielocks, I may have bad taste in men, but not THAT bad!"
     Still, the mood didn't really recover, and she begged off early.
     Three weeks later, and we still hadn't seen her.  I was worried enough
to start checking the morgue for Jane Does after I checked her apartment
and found the mail stacked up.  Yeah, I coulda called in the cops, but
unless you pull down at least seven figures in this town, they don't really
care, y'know?  Not like they're corrupt (much), but they're busy keeping
the millionaires safe and hunting down the billionaire Triad type.  Really
don't have time either way for a bunch of no-names like us.
     So, here I am, sitting in the bar with the other four (Jimmy and Jimmy
plus Sally and Joe, if ya gotta know...one of the Jimmy's is a woman, don't
ask), wondering if we'll ever see our Silver Fist again.
     That's about when the guys with the tentacles grafted to their faces
came chasing Annie into the bar, and things got a little busy after that.
     At least we found out how Annie'd been spending her free time.
     We had so much fun helping her kick the whatever it was out of those
guys, we signed on with the guys she'd gotten hooked up with.  Turns out
she'd gotten to like our nickname for her, since everyone back at the
warehouse called her Silver Fist.
     "So, who're the new kids?" some big American guy asked.
     "Oh, friends of mine.  You can call 'em the Silver Band," she grinned.
     The nickname stuck.  Damn, she got us back.

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Author's Notes:

     One thing that struck me about Silver Fist when I first saw the real
card was that here we have a character who looks like she should be Unique
(cool name, personality thing, etc) but isn't.  Like, okay, Maverick Cops,
Masked Avengers, Big Bruisers and so forth are all descriptive, but what's
"Silver Fist?"  Must be some sort of nickname, and while it may have a real
life basis, I decided it was probably the sort of nickname which started
off as mocking but was eventually adopted as a badge of honor.
     And, of course, who could avoid tying the Silver Fist to the Silver
Band?