Rosemary

[Quincunx]

~Rosemary~/~Rose-Mary d’Englesche de Carpathienne d’Abydos~

 

~Brief Description~

 

–OUT OF PLAY– Vampire. The astral amaranth.

Edited June 12, 2005 by Quincunx

[Quincunx]

~History~

 

The King of England did not care where the Jews went, so long as they left the country. The ship on which Rose’s family sailed foundered off of the north shore of modern-day France; the Christians who found the shipwrecked children placed them with people who were deeply in need of penance. Rose d’Englesche worked long hours for a usurious silver-smith before Maria Annika took her arrowheads and her life, renaming her Rose-Mary and turning her loose. Confused, but still mostly sane, the new vampire blundered into others and went along with them; they opened the door to their meeting-place to find it slathered with blood, and a smiling severed head sitting on their couch. It took months of work by the scholar vampire, Nicolae de Carpathienne, before she was coherent again. She was trying to plumb her visions when her tiles spelled out Nocturne, the name of darkness. Not long afterwards, she vanished—prisoner of a were-spider, abducted to another plane of life. In desperation, Rosemary tried to lift her spirit out of her body; she succeeded, but did not retain the link between body and soul, and drifted onto a plane far distant than anywhere vampires knew.

 

Tzimfemme had a fever dream on the road to Rydia’s realm, and sacrificed ghouls and zombies into a fleshcrafted carriage for the one who was to come after her; Rosemary saw the spider-legged dais and did not try to avoid her fate again. Tzimfemme joined her to Minta and set Rydia to teaching them both. Rosemary tried, but failed, to prevent Minta from losing her soul in her necromantic studies. They wandered from Blitz One, fighting an underground guild, to Server One, where they joined Calculus for the Masses!, and Rosemary discovered how to plumb her visions with numbers. She was nearly stable. . .but then the quincunx went to Ager One in reply to Tzimfemme’s distress. Rosemary flourished in the mad atmosphere, and began to speak of the spiral and prophesy in impenetrable tercets. She nearly drank Tzimfemme’s soul, and during the wild hunt of the quincunx, Rosemary did commit that unforgivable deed. When the quincunx moved to the Pen lands, she dwindled away in the calmer environment; during the magical confluences of the Quincuinox, Rosemary found and seized the lost connection to her body, and reunited with it. She will not walk in the astral plane again, no matter what the cost.

Edited June 12, 2005 by Quincunx

[Quincunx]

~Abilities~

 

Rosemary is an accomplished jeweler and secret locksmith, who conceals her lock-picking tools among her jewelry supplies. She is proficient with the longbow, preferring to hide, aim, and slowly fire rather than fire the “hail of arrows” which the English employed. She’s barely literate, yet extremely quick with mental computation, and thinks in numbers where a saner person would use words.

[Quincunx]

~Magical Abilities~

 

She can make herself invisible and sometimes be able to conceal others along with her. Rosemary can see through similar concealment, read auras. . .and minds, intruding her own thoughts. When aggravated her soul can depart her body and travel astrally, appearing as a gust of pink with petals of silver and black. She can mimic someone else's looks imperfectly, and calm or excite the onlooker's emotions. Sometimes Rosemary's words can incite psychotic fits of terror. During the time she spent at the Pen, she could also paralyze a person with eye contact, turning her pupils bright gold.

 

Her power in the quincunx is transferrence, which can either briefly snatch the victim's persona into her possession, or inflict all of her twisted perspective upon the victim. As noted, this sometimes backfires, and her soul temporarily vanishes into the victim.

[Quincunx]

~Items~

 

Longbow with arrows, regular and silver-tipped. Silver beads and jewelry of all sizes and descriptions. Silversmithing tools—awl, stylus, hammer, set of scales and weights.

 

Hanging from her belt: Keys. Wooden tiles with a number on one side and a letter on the other, in a pouch. Hand abacus. A silver goblet. A mirror engraved with the spiral, clockwise and counter-clockwise. A crescent-moon pendant enchanted to conceal the wearer.

[Quincunx]

~Physical Description~

 

Her overskirts and mantle glowed sunshine yellow, embroidered with constellations of glittering silver beads, and reflected the light painfully. Beneath that, the tunic was navy blue like a midnight sky, and her skin was deathly pale, suffocated lilac-pink on the lips. Beneath that, her eyes glazed and her mind celebrated the onslaught. The eyes blossomed from brown to gold as she rebuked someone intangible, then darkened again. With the darkening, she faded, leaving the shell as a four-foot-tall blonde woman who'd barely passed adolescence.

[Quincunx]

~Personality~

 

She is a response to madness, narcissistic and convinced she’s the holy prison of innumerable demons, and speaks more obliquely as the situation goes further out of control. When everything is in equilibrium, she has a saleswoman’s personality and tries to sell or barter her silver work. Rosemary cannot feel grief or be unsure of herself; her substitute responses depend entirely on who provoked the situation.

[Quincunx]

~Relationships~

 

All relationships are predetermined—their places in the spiral do not change. Only someone at the zero-point, the center of a different spiral, could be treated as an equal. In practice, this means she’ll only be forward towards people who are far above her actual powers. People of the Pen were mostly of the eighth arm of the spiral, too far distant to be involved.

[Quincunx]

~Other~

 

Rosemary is an odd case. Most people can’t write her, but those that can give me the cold creeps for their accuracy, either in actions or in speech. (Nobody has done both. Look up Knight in the “Chronicles of Terra CD Contest” to see an example of someone who understood the ideas.) Her speech steps around nouns; in ordinary situations she’ll use adjectives and keep close to what she means to say, when the situation is unbalanced she’ll use only pronouns and be nearly incomprehensible.