#of the pose itself like ugh.......... theo is so.......................... yeah.

[bigskydreaming]

Garrett is definitely obnoxious enough to where he would have his shadow do pantomime annoyingly. Garrett definitely plays up how dangerous his shadow is, lets rumors spread about how it totally assassinated some rich fuck when really it was Violet. Theo is rubbing his temples because he won't shut up

LOLOLOL. And everyone who really knows Garrett and how his magic works knows that he’s full of shit and Violet’s the real dangerous one of their duo. And Theo’s constantly mumbling to himself, like, arguing the pros and cons of just fucking killing Garrett despite how useful he is. He’s like ugh, if only I could just figure out where the seat of his magic is so I could steal his shadow for myself, and he’s always contemplating like….okay, there has to be someone down in Answers Alley who could tell me how to kill that little asshole in such a way as to let me absorb his magic….I just can’t decide if its worth admitting that I don’t actually know how to do it or how to figure it out for myself, or potentially risk letting someone in on how my own magic works if they don’t already know that.

Plus he’s aware of the possibility that like, even if he did find someone who could give him the right answer there, they might just lie or not tell him because y’know….they don’t like him either.

And some days he’s just like fuck it, I can’t listen to one more word from that little shit, I’m just gonna kill him and be done with it, nothing’s worth this and there are plenty of changelings with like, scrying magic. Only stopped by Tracy pulling him back and pointing out; “Yeah, but you’d have to convince them to work for you first, and that’s easier said than done. I mean, I’m your right hand lieutenant and I’m mostly just meh on you myself.”

Theo, acidly: Thanks ever so much for that.

Tracy: Any time, boss!

Anyway, speaking of Answers Alley, the street sandwiched between Mercy Row and the edge of the Seventh Circle district, with one end of the Alley running all the way up to the Rose’s Garden right at the very heart of Bordertown, and the other end letting out in Shadowsmeet (the roofless warehouse turned ampitheatre that houses Jake the Drake, and where changelings gather for a kind of 24/7 street fair that showcases all kinds of art from the tangible expressions like painting and sculpture to music playing, dancing and storytelling and theater) -

Some of the Changelings found in Answers Alley - Aaron, Melody, Eloise, Rashid, Hiromi aka Compass Rose, and Jackie:

Aaron - an eighteen year old black boy whose body is covered in scrolling gold script from all kinds of different languages, the texts of books, scrolls, and tomes that have been lost to history. The text on his body is always relevant to whatever question he was just asked, information that’s applicable or relevant if not the direct answer itself, but it will vanish and be replaced by new words the second another question is posed to him, and even re-asking the first question isn’t guaranteed to bring back the original text instead of more linked text pulled from other sources. 

Aaron always knows how to read or understand the words on him, even if they’re written in a language that he doesn’t otherwise know, which means that he’s still usually the only one who can give a person the answers they’re seeking (and assuming he even wants to). But just sneaking a peek at his arm isn’t going to help anyone when the words on it are from a dead language that hasn’t been read or understood in millennia. Aaron’s both the answer and the key to understanding it.

Melody - a twenty-two year old, mostly mainstream appearing Latina changeling with brown skin and eyes and dark, curly hair offset by two sharp silvery horns that make a V shape like a kind of stylized tuning fork. Her only other visible change is that her ears have a pointed elfin shape and natural holes in them up and down the cartilage like she has multiple piercings in them and just wears no earrings. But with her, the true change and magic isn’t seen, but heard - its almost never completely silent when she’s around, because the very air around her seems to constantly hum when anyone is speaking in her vicinity at all. How harmonious or not the ambient music her magic produces around her is though, is entirely dependent on whether its truth or lies that are being spoken within her exceptional hearing range. 

Like most changelings, her magic is only fully accessible to her….to everyone else, the song surrounding her might be pleasing or not, but only she has the magical sensitivity needed to detect the slight changes in her song, enough to pinpoint when a lie is spoken or a truth is told. But the real gift of her magic is that its attuned to universal truths rather than just perceived truths….meaning she can detect whether something said to or around her is true or not regardless of whether or not the person who says it believes it to be true…..thus making her a sought-out changeling not just for settling disputes, but for anyone who seeks to know whether something they’ve been told or believe is actually true or not. 

The more specific the question though, the more definitive her answer for them is. She’s not good with settling matters of philosophy or religion, because as she puts it, most everything stemming from those have at least an element of truth to them, and so those kinds of questions usually prompt a veritable symphony around her, with so much harmony and discordance both, that its all but impossible for her to declare anything definitive. But personal truths, especially ones with a finite yes or no answer, she excels at - such as if someone relates a memory to her and asks if they’ve remembered it correctly or if there’s something about what actually happened that eludes them, that sort of thing.

Eloise - a dreamy, absent-minded seventeen year old white changeling of French descent, whose ‘shop’ is set back from the rest of the street a little ways, intersecting with one of the many canals that criss-cross Bordertown and allow the aquatic or amphibious residents to come and go between the mainland of it and the undersea neighborhoods that make up Sub Francisco. Her skin tone is a pale pink coral hue, and instead of hair she has a voluminous head of white sea-foam that appears and acts as if its a long, thick tangle of hair. Her shop is a fairly large one story room that’s mostly filled by the waters from the canal with the exception of just enough floor by the front entrance for most visitors to stand on while visiting her, assuming they’re not aquatic Changelings themselves.

Her magic, and the reason for her almost constant daydreaming, is that her magic makes any water she touches a scrying pool that plays out visions of whatever location she pictures. She doesn’t have to have visited herself, she only needs a point of reference for her magic to hone in on…..which can even just be someone’s description of a place they wish to view. Then all it takes is for her to sweep one languid hand through the water around her and the whole surface will shimmer and then show that place and whatever’s happening there, not as a static image but as though watching it on video.

There are a couple of caveats to her magic, same as anyone else’s…..people have to be careful when asking her to show them what’s happening currently in a place, that they describe something about it that’s true of now for her to hone in on…because her magic can just as easily show those places in the past, and if they’re describing from memory, what Eloise shows them might actually be something out of date or no longer relevant. But then again, this also allows her to show specific events that have already happened, as long as someone provides something specific to that point in time for her to hone in on as well as the place. Also, there’s no sound to her moving images, which is why she usually just says something like “people are boring” when asked to hone in on what a particular person is doing right now instead of asking about showing a specific place. Only a few Changelings have figured out that Eloise is a lot sharper than she pretends to be and is perfectly capable of spying on any individual from the safety and privacy of her scrying pool….and does, for the right price or her own personal agendas.

Rashid - a twenty-year old blind Lebanese-American whose change takes the form of glowing beads of orange light that wrap around his arms and all the way up to his neck in double-banded spirals that usually take people a minute or two to place as just vaguely familiar, before the realize that the sight reminds them of a DNA helix.

Just as all Changelings’ magic takes something about who and what they are and just….amplifies that, externalizes it, makes them more of it in some kind of unique magical expression of that, Rashid’s natural scientific curiosity resulted in his magical ability to touch a thing and feel the building blocks that make it what it is, and if he wants to, break things down into those individual components.

There’s a wide array of ways he’s able to use this, beyond just exploring his own personal studies of things…..bring him a bloody weapon, and just by touching an unbloodied part of it he can name where the ore that weapon was made from was mined, as well as name whose blood is on it, and even whose fingerprint, if someone left one and it was handled by gloves afterward. The answers just come to him as names and place names, etc, and they don’t usually have context, so he can’t help beyond that if the names he mentions are unfamiliar to him or the person asking, he can’t tell where they are now….just that these are the basic truths he’s reading off the weapon he was handed, the things that combine to make it what it is now…the blade made of metal from this location, the fingerprint of this person, the blood of this person, etc.

And then on the more physical side of his magic, the breaking things down into their individual building blocks, one example of this is he can kinda distill something down into just what he or someone else wants it to be….like if he touches water that’s been poisoned or drugged, he can split it into just the pure unaltered water and then with the poison or toxin bubbling up to the surface like separating oil and water, easily then filtered out. Or he can touch a complicated piece of machinery or construction of some sort, and make it just tumble down into pieces of its individual components.

As with many other residents of Bordertown though, he’s got his secrets and his true limits are known only to a few. He’s one of the town’s earliest arrivals, back when they were all still fairly few in number and shaping their new society and what roles and degree of influence they would all occupy within it….so only a few remember that he early on established himself as being in the way of certain agendas of Theo’s, and in response, Theo sent one of his most dangerous assassins after him, a Changeling no one ever knew by any name other than the Doppelganger. Unfortunately for the Doppelganger, his own magic required putting his hands on his intended target to activate it…..and that was all Rashid needed to feel the essential building blocks of the Doppelganger and use his own talent first…..to strip the Doppelganger of his magic and leave him separated from it and as he was before his own Change.

Those who were aware of this feat have been careful not to speak of it since, or the reason Theo and his people so carefully avoid Rashid now. Leaving him as he likes it, sought out for his help in reading truths and other aspects of his skills, rather than known as one of the more dangerous Changelings and capable of something no other Changeling has ever managed. But that doesn’t mean nobody knows or remembers - after all, the Doppelganger hasn’t forgotten. And as far as he can tell, that magic that was stripped from him had to go somewhere….and he wants it back. 

A quest that has him give Answers Alley a wide berth, as instead he seeks out Madame Midnight and promises any favor she wants from one of Bordertown’s most dangerous residents, if she can just help him regain his Change and his magic first…..   

Hiromi, aka Compass Rose - a sixteen year old from Chicago originally, and a third generation Japanese-American, she shares a loft in the Aerie with five or so friends with their own flight-capable Changes, and just pops down to the small stall along Answers Alley that’s all she needs. She’s got a sign hanging on the front of it that declares “Don’t bother me unless you’ve already got your own ride back. Round trip service not provided.”

Hiromi’s Change makes her a mish-mash of flora and fauna….she’s got hawk-like eyes and her eyebrows are feathered, and she has short, dark hair that’s crowned by short, branching antlers between which sits her signature rose. From her back sprout two large, bat-like wings whose skeletal frame are actually made of branches rather than bone, and with the material of her wings being more akin to green leaves than feathers. Her wings are the largest thing about her, as she’s fairly tiny except for them, only about five feet tall, and nobody has any idea how they fly aerodynamically, other than well…magic.

But other than the innate magic powering her flight, Hiromi’s actual gift is a form of teleportation with very specific parameters….hence why she sends away anyone who hasn’t first procured the help of some other teleporter or transportation inclined Changeling before seeking her out. Once they do come back with another Changeling willing to help them return later, someone asks for her help finding something….could be a person, an item, or even something ephemeral, like the solution to a problem…..and Hiromi’s magic, a combination of teleportation and dowsing rod, activates upon her command and whips up a tiny miniature whirlwind around the asker and whomever they designate as their company for the trip, like another teleporting Changeling. And when her whirlwind dies down, they’re gone, having been teleported to the location of whatever it was they asked her help in finding. Even if it is something ephemeral like the solution they need to something….her magic can’t spell out for them how its the answer to their problem….just send them to where it is that they’ll find it, as long as they can figure out from there what it is about their surroundings that will help them.

Jackie - a twenty-one year old agender Native American of the Choctaw tribe, originally from Mississippi before coming to Bordertown, Jackie’s magic and Change make them the sum of not just their parts, but all their possible parts. Basically, Jackie’s appearance is like a flipbook, constantly flickering through all possible appearances they might take, making them a somewhat dizzying blur of constant albeit low-intensity motion. Even when they’re sitting totally still, their appearance isn’t, shifting hairstyles, colors, accessories, all without them doing anything at all.

The constant motion of their appearance does slow however, depending on how many aspects of themselves they split off to go accomplish various tasks…usually in pursuit of some knowledge, information or answer. Whenever they want to, they can kinda….shrug off one of the many dizzying possible appearances they have….which splits off to become another Jackie, standing right next to them, but with a steady, static appearance….as they’re only one of the seemingly infinite possible selves contained within Jackie. 

This version of them has the same experiences, knowledge and even priorities of the original Jackie, as they’re all them, the same single person…..the second Jackie is just a specific iteration of the many possible ways they could be….them. And then these other Jackies, however many of them there are, can act independent of the original and go anywhere and do anything the original can. There’s no limit to how far they can range, or limit to how long they can remain separate, and they can fairly easily go about in mainstream public without attracting much attention, as they don’t have a Change of their own….they ARE the Change. 

But then at any point they can and do all eventually return to the main Jackie and add their accumulated knowledge and experiences to the whole, and reshelving their appearance within the flicker-book of possible appearances and selves contained within Jackie.

#changelings 'verse #garrett and violet #assassination tango #cast of characters: answers alley