OOC INFORMATION Name: Kira
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact:
narwaCurrent characters in the game: Channing/Parasol Protectorate, Charley Mason/Mage: The Ascension (WoD)
IC INFORMATIONPREINCARNATIONName: Liselotte "Louise" Beck and Liselotte "Lottie" Beck
Canon: New Wold or Darkness, specifically Changeling: The Lost.
Age: Louise is 43 (officially 44), Lottie is 3.
Species: Lottie is a Changeling (a human who got abducted by Fae and thus turned fae herself) and Louise her Fetch (the fae creature left in her spot to conceal the abduction).
Appearance: Louise is about 1.70cm tall, with long dark brown hair, grey eyes, a light skintone and a distinguished look to her. She doesn't use perfume and keeps her nails short and neat, but does have very neatly kept hair and tends to wear light make-up. She speaks English with a Kentish accent.
Lottie speaks similarly to Louise and is a very lively three year old. She has short, dirty-blond hair, and looks exactly like Louise looked at three years old.
...That is what they look like to most people, anyway. They both have Masks, which hide their true appearance from pretty much everyone in Louise's case and from everyone but fae creatures in Lottie's case.
Lottie is a cross between a woodlouse and a human child. The back segment of the woodlouse replaces her hair and then curls down over her back and down the back of her legs, splitting under her butt to let her walk. The back segments are of a stone-like texture. She also has woodlouse antennae on her head, and the parts of her that look human are not covered by skin but by a structure that feels like very soft, clammy chitin. Everything about her is some shade of grey.
Louise looks like a haphazardly strung together doll, made of bad teeth wrapped around dentistry tools and held together by dental floss.
History: Liselotte's world is just like ours. Or at least that is what most people think. But no, it's not - vampires, werewolves, fae, mages, and many other supernaturals hide in plain sight. Most supernatural creatures stay not only hidden from normal humans but also hide from one another, and that is certainly true for fae creatures, which Liselotte are.
Their world consists primarily of three areas: Our world, Arcadia, and the Hedge, a vast fae realm that connects the two.
Changelings like Lottie are humans that were abducted to Arcadia by the True Fae, the powerful and inhuman Lords and Ladies of Arcadia, and somehow escaped back to our world. Returned, they realize that invisible to regular humans they have been changed deeply in body and mind. Thus they don't fit in anymore and also are in constant danger of being kidnapped back, so they form Freeholds, political entities structured in courts, for their own protection and sanity. Many try to live regular surface lives, but not all manage.
Fetches like Louise are not organized and generally a very varied bunch - the only thing that they have in common is that they were crafted with varying skill from whatever was at hand to replace faenapped humans in their lives so that nobody would notice the disappearance. Due to this, they typically have an exceedingly mutually negative relationship with Changelings and their organizations.
Liselotte Beck was born 44 years ago in Maidstone, Kent, England. Everything was quite normal - a nuclear family with mum, dad and two older siblings - until her first birthday, when... well, she changed. Her mother felt the change the most keenly, of course, but the whole family thought so, and the family doctor was a bit worried about the sudden set-back in development. But soon enough, normal development continued, and the child quickly caught up with her peers.
Just that it wasn't the same child any more. Because you see, on the night of her first birthday, an envoy of a True Fae, Gentry, or whatever else one would name the Lords and Ladies of Arcadia, had taken the baby out of her cradle and brought her home to their Lady. In return, the Lady built a replacement out of refuse lying around her place. And since she loved nothing more than teeth and her whole realm was filled with them, the replacement for the baby was built out of what she was brought by her helpers and didn't want, or had already used: Brown and diseased teeth, malformed and modded teeth, fillings and false teeth; used dentistry tools of all ages; and dental floss.
This replacement was then carried over to the human world by the envoy and placed in the cradle moments after the baby had been taken away. Because time isn't an absolute in Arcadia as well as in the Hedge, the area that connects Arcadia with our world.
The new Liselotte grew up like any girl would, got excellent grades in school, and from an early age on was fascinated with dentistry. She went on to study it after school, graduated, and started working as a dentist while continuing to read literature on dentistry like others would read novels. She also met a nice young fellow student during uni, and having similar outlooks on and expectations of life, they got married and... didn't have children. They tried, and tried, and felt terrible about the lack of offspring, and started to fight about every little thing. It destroyed their marriage, eventually.
...And Liselotte, suddenly forcibly freed of the perfect biography, childless in her mid-thirties and divorced, relaxed a bit. She moved back to Kent, specifically Canterbury, and settled down. And then as it sometimes happens, things just fell into place. She met a local, nice fellow divorcee named Gillian with two small children who easily accepted her as their mum, they moved in together, and when equal marriage was legalized in 2014, they got married. Things were perfect.
Meanwhile, things weren't going so well for the real Liselotte. She was turned into something resembling a big woodlouse and tasked with sorting good teeth from bad teeth and carrying them to the assigned locations, and spent two years scurrying around tunnels in a realm where the buildings and everything else were made out of teeth. Very soon, she'd completely forgotten what it had been like to be a human baby in the mundane world.
Back in Kent, things went haywire. There was a niece of her wife who would sometimes babysit the children, but one day when Liselotte came to her sibling-in-law's house to pick the kids up, something was wrong. She rushed in to find everything in chaos. The niece had vanished and she couldn't make sense of what her children told her about her whereabouts. And then a group of strangers showed up and asked what had happened.
You know, some days you just need to go "I have no clue, but if you're going to get her, you have to let me tag along". Not on your most sensible days, but that wasn't a good time to think rationally.
For some reason they let her tag along.
...And then her world turned a bit upside-down and topsy-turvy, because the trip after some shenanigans ended up bringing her into the very realm that the real Liselotte was living in.
And replacement Liselotte learned who she was: A Fetch, a being made out of crap and probably without a soul, whose very identity was stolen from someone else, with fae powers and and fae issues. And she realized that her original, her Changeling, was very close by.
And no older than three. Maybe a bit younger.
When they finally returned to our side of the Hedge, they hadn't only recovered the niece but Liselotte was also carrying a baby on her hip. The logic behind tracking down the toddler and dragging her back with her went somewhere alone the lines of an acute identity crisis and existential angst spiked with lots of guilt, the stark thought that this would be the closest that she would ever get to a child of her biological own (because Fetches are infertile), and a kneejerk reaction.
And that is where the story of Louise and Lottie starts - the names were the group's idea to let both of them keep their name while still being clearly separate people.
After the motley, the group of Changelings - because that was what the group of strangers and her niece were - returned with Louise and Lottie in tow, some quick politics and dancing around issues was done, and Louise and the local Freehold - the local political body of Changelings - ended up with a situation of watchful tolerance of each other. Normally, Fetches and Changelings are (due to their nature) inherently hostile towards one another down to murder, so it was quite a feat to get all four courts to declare a truce with this one Fetch. It helped a lot that the motley and Louise had kind of befriended one another on their adventures, and they decided to vouch for her.
Lottie was first placed with a Changeling as a foster parent, but after a while she was allowed to come and live with Louise. ...Some forgery of paper later, she was a next-of-kin adoption from some distant cousin, who just happened to have the same legal name as one of her new adoptive mothers. Louise's wife and other children were surprised by the sudden addition to the family, but everything can be figured out with some excuses, forgery, and a bit of magic.
Over time, Lottie joined the Summer court, and that was also the court that Louise ended up getting along with the best. Both things influenced one another. Currently, they live a fairly regular life, except for that Louise has started to specialize some in supernatural teeth with her dentistry, and that sometimes they get pulled into court politics and general fae shenanigans.
REINCARNATIONName: Louise Beck and Lotta Beck
Age: 44 and 3
Appearance: They look the same as their Masks.
History: Louise Beck was born 44 years ago in Folkton. Everything was quite normal - a nuclear family with mum, dad and two older siblings. So far, so similar. But unlike her preincarnation, Louise lived her life more according to intuition than prescribed narratives of successful biographies. She still went to school and had good grades, but without Liselotte's inherent affinity with dentistry, she dabbled with various fields for a while before eventually ending up working for the postal service. She never managed to stick with a partner - one thing or the other always ended the relationship. At one point, she even got engaged to a nice young man a few years her senior by the name of Alexander (
peerofthewaistcoats), but when she introduced him to her grandmother (
grainneog), the woman took him aside. Louise never found out what had been said (it was "you may be too deep in the closet to realize what you're doing, but I will
not let you make my grandchild unhappy"), but he called off the engagement directly after, and Louise has had a fraught relationship with her grandmother ever since.
A good while later, she decided to get pregnant, figuring that there was no point in waiting for Mr or Ms Right, and Lotta was born. Having moved to central Mossgate a good while earlier to open up a café there, her family was just a little bit too far away to use them as an emergency babysitter. This predicament facilitated her to grow closer with the family next door, as the parents (
rules_the_north and
moimin_papa) had arranged their schedules so one would always be at home with their children, which meant that in a pinch she could always dump Lotta on them. As one of them worked for IKEA and the other for marimekko, they also helped her do the interior design of her café on employee discounts.
Lotta is set to start play school this summer.
First Echo: The first echo went to Louise. When she was still in school, her class made a trip to Moss Manor and she went into the hedge maze with two of her friends. As they wandered around the maze, she suddenly remembered a different
hedge, much bigger and more dangerous, with magical creatures hiding in its vast expanse. Her friends and family, when she told them about that place, disregarded the lively memory as a fantastic story her imagination had made up, impressed by the experience of wandering around a hedge maze, and she soon subscribed to that explanation, too.
PERSONALITYPre-Incarnation Personality: LouiseLouise wasn't born. She was created as a one year old, and while she is an exceptionally skilfully made Fetch who grew up human from a very young age, which means that in most regards she enjoyed a perfectly regular human upbringing and development, with all the up-and-downsides that that brings, she still fundamentally isn't human. For one, all the very early development from conception to a year of age, the big foundations of one's inner landscape - one's emotional constitution and mental resilience, for example - as well as some cognitive and physical capabilities (which she caught up on quickly) and last but not least early but fundamental lessons about social relationships: All that had to be learned at a later date. Secondly, she doesn't have feelings quite the same way as humans do, both the fleeting kind like 'oh I like that flower' and the deeper kind like the love of one's children. It's not that she does not have those, but they are ...less rooted in her biology and more in her personality, one might say. She learned them, observed them in her surroundings, and they took deep root within her, but she wasn't "born" with them.
An effect of this is her aversion to standing out, which in turn means that she (subconsciously!) tends to try and follow social narratives when they aren't in her way. Her biography up to her divorce is a result of this: The intelligent-girl-studies-medicine-and-has-career-while-having-a-family narrative was one that she had observed in her surroundings and had seen being deemed "normal", and had been presented to her as one that she should follow. She did. ...until it didn't work any more, and the search for a new narrative threw her into a deep hole for a while. She mostly clawed her way out of it by getting the next closest thing - the most conservative queer family in Kent. She still tends to speak of her "spouse" instead of "wife" to not stand out, not that she really realizes that. Her decision to adopt Lottie was also motivated by this - somehow integrating the existence of her 3-year-old Changeling into a regular woman's biography.
Related to this is that she, if possible, just wants to live a quiet life. She isn't someone who likes to go out on adventures. There is one thing that keeps drawing her into going outside of her comfort zone in that regard, again and again: Feeling responsible for someone or something, necessities of her own survival, and Lottie (this kind of ties into both of the other options). She followed the group of Changelings into the Hedge because she felt responsible for her niece-in-law, she keeps getting involved with matters of the local Freehold and especially the Summer Court because being on their good side means that an entity that could be a powerful enemy will be on her side instead of potentially trying to kill her - and that she will be able to keep Lottie. Being in the Freehold's good book is also tantamount to creating a safe environment in which she can prosper for Lottie, whom she considers her daughter and treats as such. She will be there asap if Lottie needs help, and because Lottie has a tendency to crawl into places where she shouldn't be and talk to and befriend people who make both of them get into trouble... Well. She doesn't do more than she needs to do, but she still leads a much more exciting life than she'd rather.
Louise loves her job. She became a dentist instead of going into academia because academia didn't seem to allow for mothers when she was at that point of her life, but she still devours scholarly magazines and ever since she realized that no, not everyone can see the stranger parts of the world like she can, she became fascinated by the special challenges that supernaturals face with their teeth and jaws. At first, after gaining enough trust, she started to serve Changeling patients (and was always there with a scientific eye, keeping book and asking more questions than strictly necessary for treatment), but after a while word about her got out and members from other supernatural communities started to frequent her office as well (and then there was an incident with a few people who don't like supernaturals, and after that she was suddenly under the protection of multiple, otherwise hostile towards one another communities, and gained so many new supernatural patients that they make up the majority of her patients these days). She even managed to make some professional friends (or well, at least friendly acquaintances) with a similar tilt to their medical careers.
Lottie and her job are two important items in her life. Her wife, her step-children and Liselotte's parents are the other important people. Her connection with them might not be as essential as the one with Lottie, but Liselotte's parents raised her and she loves them like any daughter would love good parents, because she has learned to do so. Love is always not only a feeling but also a performative and generally a thing that makes one act in a certain way, after all. She visits them regularly and makes sure that Lottie spends time with them often as well, because even if she's their grandchild to them, that at least means that they will have a close relationship. Louise's relationship with her wife is a very loving and unusually (for Louise) relaxed one: Not because it is open or anything - Louise eyes the idea of open or poly relationship with rather a lot of distrust, and generally has a very conservative stance on all matters partnership and family (with obvious adaptations when it comes to things like equal marriage). It's rather because her wife is a pretty laid-back person, and because Louise spent all her high-strung expectations on her first marriage. Her step-children, she loves and regards as if they were her own. Being a Fetch, and thus infertile, she'll never truly have children of her own, and while that was a harsh reality to come to terms with, she can cope because well. She has children, right? She supports them seeing their father regularly (see above - children should have a father), but that doesn't mean that they are any less hers.
Generally, Louise tries to be a friendly and pleasant person, even when she is exhausted. ...And she fairly often ends up exhausted, which is understandable because she is stretching herself a bit thin between her mundane family, Lottie and the whole Changeling politics, and her job. But she is a very resilient person (something she shares with Lottie) and will mostly power through things. Maybe sit down and need a tea somewhere in-between. But then get up and carry on. And she does better keeping busy. She's never been one for idle hands (metaphorically speaking - she can sit perfectly still for hours if you give her an interesting scientific paper about a new approach to root channels), and will find a way to keep herself busy in a normal-life way. Preferably in her field, but if necessary any type of academical or (medical-)help oriented activity will do or at least be considered. She is also a curious person. A curious person whose common sense and wish for safety is much stronger than her curiosity, but if she considers it safe to inquire, experiment and study, she will do so.
LottieLottie is a very curious child who likes to approach people and will talk to everyone around at least once. She also doesn't have a very good sense of danger and gets bored easily, so she will at times slip away, crawl into things, address the wrong person, ...[insert shenanigans], and get herself into trouble.
Being a Changeling, she also has very specific hang-ups, and will often be completely unphased by things that would upset or delight other children her age, while reacting strongly to others that others might not care about - someone who has a mouth full of sharp teeth? She's touched a vampire's fangs and knows a guy why has literal razors for teeth. Pointy teeth are peachy. A place that is completely white? She'll absolutely freak out.
Generally, she is open, makes friends easily, and is a very good-natured child. She isn't exactly a loud or exuberant one, though. You'll rarely find her yelling while running about - she's more likely to sit and watch, peer over things and study curiously, edge towards something or someone quietly to look at it. As stated above, she doesn't have particularly good risk assessment skills, but she doesn't storm into trouble, she rather quietly, curiously pokes her head into them.
Most of her risk assessment is done by proxy - will say, she copies a trusted person's approach to the situation. Most of the time, this will be Louise - if Louise is nervous, Lottie is nervous, if Louise trusts someone, Lottie assumes she's good to go. The rest of her risk assessment is done by listening to things she's been told to do or not to. But she's significantly more ...selective about listening to those things than about copying trusted people's approaches.
Something to note about her development is that much like Louise's, but in a very different way, it was stunted in areas. Between her first and third birthday, roughly, she wasn't treated as a child or allowed to develop and grow the way a child would. All that was important was that she followed orders to carry things from A to B and sort them according to specific criteria, and during that time she mostly learned to firstly perform those tasks well enough to not get in trouble and secondly stay out of almost everyone's way when she hadn't been tasked with something. That's where her fairly quiet and watchful nature comes from.
Two things have helped her opening up and getting over the trauma of her Durance as well as catching up developmentally afterwards: One is her own inquisitive curiosity. Yes, she knows that often it is better to not be seen, and confronted with danger her reaction will be to bail the fuck out of there or hide behind someone if that's impossible. But those things, that she'd consider common sense if she knew the word, are always weighed against her curiosity, and coupled with her tendency to not recognize dangers (or rather, be unable to tell if it is or is not a danger, and when in doubt, curiosity always wins), she often approaches despite that common sense. The other thing that helped her was the stability and loving care of her new family and the best effort of multiple supernaturals to raise her into as stable as possible; the united efforts of both sides to offer her surroundings in which she can be a three year old, neither more nor less, (to the point where there is an unwritten rule about not involving her directly in court, or any kind of, politics); and the existence of Louise (and to a lesser degree the cousin-in-law) who unites both worlds, helps her integrate them, protects her from slip-ups betraying her other-ness to outsiders, and is a solid guiding figure to look for on either side of the humans-fae divide.
Even if Lottie always has to make sure if she should call her "Mum" or "Louise" right now - Mum is for being around humans, Louise is for being around Changelings. There are important lines that she should not cross, and that is one of them. Another is to not tell regular humans, or non-Changelings in general, about anything relating to her not being a regular little human child. Those are rules that she abides by whenever she can identify the line, with occasional slip-ups.
Any differences?: Lotta is physically, emotionally and mentally a perfectly normal 3 year old. She has no PTSD or changes from her Durance and no supernatural abilities, experiences or knowledge that need to be kept a secret from the outside world.
The most obvious changes in her really are things that she
doesn't do. She never sits there, perfectly still, and just watches what is happening without a movement, she never is cautious about an approach. Lotta wouldn't know why; she doesn't expect negative responses from engaging with a situation that she finds curious. Instead, she will toddle over immediately when she thinks that something is interesting, and freely approach people or touch things.
She also hasn't had a reason to learn how to lie past a three-year old level. Mom is Mom. There are no other layers that there are to observe. There are no things that she is not allowed to tell others about. She will freely talk about all her observations and experiences with about everyone, perfectly unaware that some topics are better not mentioned to some people.
And her relationship with her mother is entirely unmarred by Louise not being her real mother, because in this life, she is. Nobody ever thinks that Lotta should not live with her, nobody suspects Louise of manipulating her or wanting to kill her, and nobody who likes Lotta openly dislikes Louise. They are mother and daughter, and there is no reason to call that in question, and no reason to pretend that they are not. And Lotta, unlike Lottie, would never expect a stranger to wish her mother anything ill. Things are a lot more uncomplicated, and thus Lotta's relationship with her mother is a lot more uncomplicated.
Louise, in turn, has a much more relaxed approach to Lotta than her preincarnation. She can hand her off to friends or family for an hour or a day without stressing about the things that Lotta might do spilling secrets. Nobody sees Louise as an illegitimate copy of Lotta. And Louise's identity doesn't revolve around Lotta - yes, she loves her daughter, and she went out of her way to have her, but she still only remains a small part of who she is. Having Lotta did not send her into a crisis of identity.
Continuing in that vein, Louise is very secure in who she is. She is in touch with her emotions and intuition, and she always followed them instead of outside narratives when deciding what to do next with her life. She might have experienced all the small crises that a human goes through, but she never had the huge, crashing shatterings of her entire biography that her preincarnation experienced.
Louise is less focused this time around. Where her preincarnation sat down and laid out for herself what she should do, like or want to achieve, her reincarnation let herself be guided by emotions, intuition and her friends' interests as much as by her actual plans. She is less cognitive and more emotional about her decisions and in the way in which she perceives others and their motivations, simply because she
can. Where her preincarnation had to read everything about a person and then put it together and match it to patterns she knew from observation or books, her reincarnation can judge by intuition.
Finally, she is a lot less anxious and paranoid. Preincarnation Louise had very good reasons to be both. Her acceptance by the Changelings was tenuous, and in trying to keep their favour and protect Lottie, she pissed off a few
other people. Her dentistry made her help various people that
other people didn't like. Peincarnation Louise's life was a constantly fragile net that always needed to be watched and kept in balance. Reincarnation Louise's closest experience is dealing with her enormous extended family. Their politics are perhaps not much less complicated than a fae court, but they are significantly dangerous. Whom she serves in her café has never pissed anyone off. This means that she is a lot more relaxed and open to people, strangers and acquaintances, and even friends, alike.
Abilities: Both Lottie and Louise are fae beings. That means that they
- can see the real appearance of another fae creature as well as the human guise that hides them from all non-fae beings.
- can open entrances into the Hedge: They can turn any kind of passageway into a mystical opening into the Hedge, the realm between Arcadia and our reality.
Lottie- has a Mask, a perfect hiding mechanism of fae magic that makes her look like a perfectly regular child and will adjust the perception of everything that she wears and touches or that touches her to support that illusion. Mask deceives all senses and sensors (a doctor could examine her and find nothing unusual). The only people who will be able to see through it are other fae creatures (this includes Louise) or people in sufficiently fairytale-y situations - virgins in the light of the first ray of the new moon, a person looking through a midsummer fire, and so on. Sometimes the fleeting impression out of the corner of one's eye before you blink might also show something being off. There are only two ways to let others see her real form: Burning all her Glamour and dropping her Mask, and the Oath of the Rose and Thorn, which allows the person who takes it to see the true form of any fae creature for a whole month.
- can and has to harvest Glamour, which is the energy that fae creatures use for their magic. She can harvest from any emotion someone with a soul has, though supernatural Glamour can have side effects and members of her court harvest most efficiently from anger and wrath.
- is a lucid dreamer and thus capable of altering and fighting inside dreams, though Lottie's skill level at this is very low.
- can get through spaces, either with her whole body or with parts of it, that should by all rights be just too narrow to get through them (think of a cat's ability to get into that tiny crack behind the fridge, or of someone who can get out of handcuffs despite them being tightly secured).
- can make people very lowkey frightened and much more susceptible to being scared by something, all the way to making them more susceptible to panic
- can enhance physical conditions that limit perception to make it harder to notice her - make the night around darker, distracting noises more distracting, smells in the surroundings strong enough to overpower her own scent, and so on
- can make all sleeping targets that she can see or hear at that time neigh impossible to wake
- can run along any solid surface, like a ceiling or wall, and will move on slippery surfaces like ice like she would on regular ground.
- is comfortable in all temperatures, and may even heat a whole room - and if she concentrates especially hard, the warmth will stay no matter the circumstances (so even if someone leaves a door open).
- she has a mantle of the Summer court, which is a supernatural nature that denotes court affiliation to other Changelings. If a person stands nearby her and it is perfectly still, they'll get the impression of hearing the wind in the ears on a hot summer's day.
- can eat about everything, not get sick from it and even gain nutrition from it, including things that are not food items (mouldy bread, tree roots, teeth...)
- will be difficult to harm with toxins, poisons, drugs etc. The downside to that is that desired effects of those substances (painkillers, for example) also have a much harder time impacting her.
- can do basic math and quickly and effectively organize small items in any quantities and according to a multitude of criteria.
Louise- has a power that hides her true form from fae beings as well.
- can and has to harvest Glamour, which is the energy that fae creatures use for their magic. She can harvest from any emotion someone with a soul has.
- is a lucid dreamer and thus capable of altering and fighting inside dreams.
- Is a Fetch. Most Fetch abilities are dependent on Changelings, or the Changeling they were made to replace. For one, they can sense every Changeling within 50 foot, and single their own one out - so if Lottie is within 50 foot of her, Louise will know exactly where she is, if she's moving, etc. In addition to this, Louise is unusually finely attuned to Lottie and has an intuitive understanding of her actions and mindset that goes far beyond what a mother would usually have, which gives her an edge over the Changeling - if Lottie reaches for something, Louise will usually get there before she does, and such (in rulebook terms, if they draw on an action, the action goes to the Fetch, and they always use the same initiative).
- can teleport via shadows. The reach of this teleportation is a maximum of 100 yards. She steps into a shadow (that she can fit through) and springs up from another shadow (same size restriction) at the desired destination. She doesn't have to see the destination, but she gets no supernatural knowledge about that place, so if there's a problem on the other end, she'll learn about it when she gets there if she can't see/etc. it from her original location. This ability requires the expenditure of Glamour.
- has a very good sense of direction and unusually strong for a woman her size and build.
- is a skilled dentist with a strong interest in research and a specialization in supernatural dental issues.
- is a skilled archer.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLES
- 3rd person/action: Here! - 1st person/network: Here!ANYTHING ELSE? N/A