App For The Unfinished Library

[lady_lichfield]

CW: This app/interactions with Charlie may include discussions of death, necromancy, cemeteries, murder, bigotry against those with special abilities, late 1800s morality, and corsets. She really really hates corsets.

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[lady_lichfield]

Player Name: Chicklet
Player Contact(s): ChickletLARP Or DM this journal.
Are you over 18? Yes.
Do you have any other characters in game?: No
Who invited you?: NA.

Character Name: Charolette "Charlie" Halloway/Fitzroy (she's Fitzroy at canon point, but spends most of the series going by Holloway.
Canon: The Ministry Of Curiosities by C.J. Archer.
Canon Point: During her wedding to Fitzroy, right after it was legal but before they could return home, let alone go on their honeymoon.
Age: 18
History:
Wiki link
Is this character an AU? What type?: Nope, pure canon.
Personality:

Charlie spent her teens passing as a boy on the streets of London not long after the Ripper murders. Even before that, she was middle class at best. So she has some... clashes with the expectations put upon her as the Lady of Lichfield, a title she unofficially held long before she married Lincon Fitzroy, who is as close to upper crust as one can be. She can be a little prickly at times, especially with people who treat her either as a well bred but somewhat useless society lady, or on the other side those who treat her like a monster. People like the man she thought was her father for most of her life.

The thing is, Charlie is a necromancer. As far as she knows - and she has access to some fairly impressive files on the subject - she is the only currently living Necromancer in England. Perhaps in the world. She discovered that when she was 13 and the woman she thought was her mother died. Begging her mother not to leave her, young Charlie accidentally put her spirit back into her body. Her father, a man of the church, lost his mind and chased her out, calling her a monster - among other things. That was enough to give her some trust issues.

She learned quickly however, how dangerous it was to be a homeless young girl in London and quickly passed herself off as a boy. "Fleetfoot Charlie" was a young lad who moved from street gang to street gang, leaving whenever anyone began to suspect her true gender. Thanks to this a lot of the late 1800s feminine attitudes were expelled from her personality, most of which were never to return. Even as an adult and a "proper lady" she still tends to prefer to be called Charlie. She takes nearly any excuse to change into pants and a shirt when she's in a dress, and is one of the first people to run headlong into danger when the people she cares about her are in danger.

Charlie can be called stubborn if one is being polite, but obstinate is probably a more accurate word. She refuses to let how others see her define her, she refuses to be coddled and protected, she refuses to bow to social pressure. She will stand firm when her friends need her to, and even to the man she loves she can be a solid wall of firm resolve.

Between living as Fleetfoot Charlie, working for the Ministry, being kidnapped more times than she cares to count, and her time in finishing school, Charlie has learned the hard way how to survive. She thinks fast on her feet, she can act like she is going along with a madman long enough to get away, and she made sure that she learned how to fight. How to defend herself. How to defend others. She's still learning, and perhaps is more confident than her skills really deserve; but she is more the type to bluff and bluster than cower. She left that behind in the dungeons of finishing school.

Over all, once she is a friend she is stalwart and true, but until then she can be argumentative and defensive. She also has rediscovered a love of reading, and she will find the unfinished nature of the books available to her to be an unending source of frustration. Also as she has met both Victor Frankenstein and Wonderland's Alice... I look forward to much confusion.


Powers and Abilities:

Charlie is a necromancer. As such she can summon any dead spirit as long as she knows its full name in life. She can see and speak with them, though others cannot. She can also give them commands that they cannot disobey. She can put them into any body that does not currently house a spirit - so no taking over a living body, corpses only - so long as there is enough of it left to be functional at all. The body does not have to belong to the spirit, and when it is inhabited it is significantly stronger than the person whose body it is could ever be. The corpses have a strength somewhere between olympian and anime character. She can also banish any spirit if she knows its full name. In or out of a body, no dead person can refuse her spoken orders, but if she is gagged so she can not send them away they can do as they please so long as they violate no orders already given. This... has been a problem for her in the past.

She cannot control the living, nor can she imbue spirits with any additional powers other than the strength they gain when she puts them into a corpse.

She also has a "pet" imp trapped in a pendant (listed below). She can summon it only when her life is in danger. It then, if it agrees she is in danger, transforms into some weird form to protect her, lingering only until it decides she is safe, then returns to the pendant to rest. She was told that if she summons it when her life is not actually in danger it can wreck mischief, but so far she's never been able to intentionally summon it when it didn't agree she was in imminent danger. And it then needs to rest/recharge a while. (One example of how it looked, specifically the most recent time she summoned it before canon point: "By the time they turned back, the imp had grown to its largest size, higher than the windows of the house. It wasn’t a pretty creature with its wrinkled skin, oversized ears, and lack of fur, but it was the best sight I had ever seen." It was later also called a "cat-like beast towering over them as if it were the devil incarnate".)



Inventory:

At canon pull point she is in a rather plain dress that has clearly been hard worn in the last few hours, having both plaster and some blood on it. She is also wearing:
Her engagement and wedding rings
A pedant with a small imp trapped in amber.
A chatelaine with charms and small useful items
A nosegay of blush pink roses

She she is arriving during the wedding itself, she will have nothing with her she isn't holding, save the flowers, and a slip of paper in her pocket that has magic words in it. Words useless without a specially spelled item from Wonderland, the two together allowing the one who holds the item when the spell is spoken to travel back and forth between Wonderland and London. Will be useless in the game, I presume.


Sample:


Charlie was still not accepting of being trapped in this place. She was at best biding her time. After everything she went through to be with Lincoln to be stolen from his arms just as they were wed was beyond the pale. She would not accept it. She refused. Clearly there was something supernatural at work. She might not yet know who was behind this or why - and she didn't believe the stories she'd been told - but she was no longer a helpless child.

Shaking her head she checked that her candle had enough wax then turned back to her task, her small wedding flowers scenting the desk, sitting beside her papers. She was carefully making notes about everyone she had met thus far. The Ministry would need these profiles for their files once she returned.

She paused and found herself thinking about that. The Ministry looked very different now than the body that seemed not to care that Gillingham had tried to beat answers out of her. She shook her head and set back to work. Lincoln would be able to memorize everything she wrote as soon as he read it, but Alice and Mrs. Vickers would want to add these pages to the official files, so they had to be done properly. Thankfully she'd had more than ample exposure to the files and could recreate the format that seemed to best work.

A shiver ran through her and she set down her pen. She stood and looked around. Much in this odd place made little sense to her, such as these beds, stacked one upon another. She ran her hands over her arms to warm them as she looked at the beds then shook her head again. They reminded her too much of the narrow beds at that horrid school.

Surprising herself, she found a small smile growing. She had found many supernatural girls at the finishing school, girls like herself. Sent away with no intention of ever being allowed to return home. She had organized the girls there, helped them find and understand each other. She could do that here, could she not? She didn't trust what she had been told about how they came to be here, of course. She wasn't an idiot. But that didn't mean everyone here was lying to her. They could be caught in the same trap she was. And that... that she could do something about, couldn't she?

She rested a hand on her pendant. It was cool to the touch. That meant at least that she wasn't in any immediate danger. Probably. Maybe. Okay, so maybe she shouldn't rely on the imp to tell her if she was in danger. It clearly had a different definition of dire peril than she had. It hasn't saved her from the dungeon at school and it was steadfastly refusing to awaken here. But that was fine.

She had a mission now. To gather those who were like her. Supernaturals brought here against their will. If they compared notes perhaps they could figure out a pattern. And from that... a way to get home.

And even if not, getting to know them would allow her to fill out her files on them, and a productive task would keep her occupied. Keep her heart from crying out. For Lincoln. For Lichfield. For the home she finally had and the people she loved.

She could do this. The trick would be getting their trust without giving out her own secrets.

Smiling, she sat to her writing again, smiling at her candle. In recent months she had developed a love for tricky problems, and this one seemed almost consuming enough to serve as a distraction until she was either rescued or figured out how to rescue herself. Perhaps without ripping her feet to shreds this time.




When presented with a choice, is the character more likely to stick with tried and true methods? Or make something new up on the fly? Make up something new on the fly. The closest she comes to tried and true is the Ministry way of doing things, and that is still new to her. And she does question that too. So, new for sure.
What is more important to your character, preserving the past or forging a future? Forging the future. The past saw people like her quietly vanished by the ministry. It saw people like Gillingham treating his wife so horribly. It saw Mrs. Vickers' second marriage as scandal. Over and over she saw how the old ways were holding them all back. And if the future was one without corsets, that would be a bonus in her eyes for certain.

How does your character influence their own story? What about the stories of others?

Charlie is a force of change in her own story, though she tends to do it on a personal level where possible. She got Lincoln who was nicknamed "Death" and "The machine" by the people who best knew him to show more of his actual self to others. To open up. She managed to become like a little sister to Seth and that in turn made him protective. Rather than just doing a job, she pulled him into the community she was unknowingly building around herself. Without her, Seth might never have brought his mother to Lichfield. She did the same for Gus, and even for Cook. Seth, Gus, and Cook went from people who worked for Lincoln and through him the Ministry, thinking he did not care about them into his family. And hers. Even the new staff as they brought them on, became part of a home rather than just a household. She helped Harriet find the courage to go from doormat to the alpha of her own pack as well as the power in her marriage. Yes, she also had a hand in Julia and Andrew's domestic drama, but those two were a disaster before she got there, her presence just pushed things to a head.

When not given her choice though her power makes her a part of the story in other ways. She uses it to solve crimes, sure, but more often her power is used because she is in danger, she is being threatened, or she is trying to save someone. Too often she has been kidnapped for her power by doctors who wanted to use her power to bring life back to the dead, create immortality, or in one twisted case, create an army for her majesty that could not be stopped. In those cases being able to shove a spirit in a corpse can change a lot of things rather dramatically. But she'd rather use her power to speak with spirits only, if that.

As for how she affects other people's stories the best examples come from Alice (Alice In Wonderland) and Victor Frankenstein. With Frankenstein, her influence is more straightforward. She is, biologically, his daughter. He wanted her for the same reason he wanted her mother before her. He wanted to use her to bring his creations to life. In his story he intended her to be a tool to his greatness and possibly a successor. The reality, however, was that she was instrumental in his downfall and death.

For Alice her effect was perhaps less final, but more overall influential. Alice was a young girl she met at school who kept having dreams that broke into reality. Alice started out as a scared girl with little confidence who blamed herself for everything. By the end of her time with Charlie she had gained a lot of sense that she had value as a person. She learned from Charlie's courage and found the courage to also stand to protect others, including holding herself hostage at gunpoint to help Charlie use Wonderland's army to go after a pack of shapeshifters. After Charlie's canon point she even figures out Wonderland's issues and stays there not out of self sacrifice but out of strength and responsibility. Charlie was more than just an example to her, she was also her first true friend. And Charlie helped her find her way to stand up to her adoptive parents to choose her own life. Charlie also helped her navigate the waters of her first almost romance.

Are you alright with your character’s canon being used as a Recommended Reading?: Sure! C.J. Archer is awesome, and I am cool with Charlie being 4th walled too.