Alice Sparks

From Changeling Venue

Seeming	Wizened Oracle
Court	Autumn Court •••
Freehold	DeKalb, IL
Player	Raechel Henderson Moon

1 Overview
2 Character Information
3 Player Information

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Overview

Alias(es): Alice Sparks

Real Name: Unknown

Age: 30s

Concept: "psychic" detective

Entitlement: Bishopric of Blackbirds

Mask: The kind would describe Alice as “thin” and striking. The unkind would use words like “gaunt” and “weathered.” While the artistic might liken her to an Alberto Giacometti sculpture. Her slender frame doesn’t make her appear weak, however, as taut muscle and strength can be perceived beneath her pale, almost translucent, skin. She moves with deliberateness and perfect posture which makes her seem even taller than she is. Her hair and eyes are muted colors and even those humans who have known her for years would be hard pressed to positively describe them. Her most notable feature is the iciness of her hands when she shakes one’s hands.

Mien: Alice retains the height and boniness of her mask in her mien. Her hair is tangled with seaweed and her face still carries the mark of the sea in the form of sand and shells. Her coloring is that of the tide swept beach and the depths of the ocean.

Mantle: The smell of the fields after the first frost clings to Alice like a perfume while the rustle of plants as they give up their last fruits The fear she exudes is that of the anxious parent, the frightened child, the object which has been lost to its master.

Character Livejournal:itsnotroach

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Character Information

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A Very Ordinary Girl

Alice Sparks (not her real name of course) was unexceptional in every way that counts. As a freshman at NIU she shared most of her fellow students’ excitement and indecision. While her parents pushed her to go for a teaching degree, she vacillated between multiple majors like the needle of a compass unable to find true north. This wavering wasn’t indicative of a flighty nature, however. Alice dedicated herself to whatever passion had caught her imagination for that moment, day, week, month. She was sure she would eventually find her true calling.

Nature and the universe--it is said--abhor a vacuum, and her very ordinariness may have attracted her very bad luck on the 23rd of September.

On her way to a morning art class (Art Appreciation 101), Alice stepped in a shallow puddle. Her next step carried her into Arcadia and into her Keeper’s shackles. The Great Northern Hermit--for such was her Keeper’s name--stripped from Alice her human belongings, storing her clothes, books, pens and jewelry in his great lighthouse and clothed her in hoarfrost and seaweed and set her to the task of combing the frozen beaches of his demesne.

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No Day at the Beach

Through the tireless, unchanging hours, Alice collected driftwood, shells which echoed the susurrant sounds of the sea, rusted bits of metal, coins, sea tumbled bits of glass and pebbles, common and exotic aquatic animals both dead and living. On occasion the sea would provide more interesting bounty: scraps of fabric, the shattered timbers of shipwrecks, chests of jewels, rigging, caskets, ambergris, pearls, and on one memorable day, a maiden’s hand, perfect in form, wearing a simple wedding band. Everything not sand or the occasional stand of beach grass went into a basket on her back which she carried up a steep path cut into the cliff face to the lighthouse at the top. In her keeper’s home she presented her salvage earning nothing more than a grunt and an order to return to her chore. What the Hermit did with the flotsam Alice never knew. What entered the lighthouse was never seen again.

Alice wasn’t the only beachcomber in the Hermit’s service. Another, older, woman (who’s name, not coincidentally, /was/ Alice) worked with her, searching in the opposite direction. Each day they would work from the far ends of the beaches, passing each other at midday, and continuing on their way. In the precious few moments they had in each other’s company they came to know each other. Alice’s companion had been in their keeper’s service for so many years she had completely forgotten her home and life before. Her body had become shaped by the wind, rimed and wiry, behind her voice was the cry of gulls, and her icy gaze missed nothing: not the smallest shell, nor the least speck of seaweed.

During her rounds, as Alice plodded, her feet lapped at by frigid waves, freezing winds cutting her to the bone, her body slowly calcified by sea salt, she kept a small flame alive in her heart. She relived every moment of her brief student’s life. She threw her mind forward, imagining the outcome of every decision she had made: how her life would have turned out if she had followed her parents’ wish and became a teacher, where her passion for art would have taken her, who she would have been if she had concentrated on computers or botany or chemistry, or any of her other interests. In her head she lived a thousand lives, each of them different, and none ending with her on a wind swept beach.

It was her companion, dedicated in her duty, lost to her human self, who turned Alice’s mind to escape. Each trip to the lighthouse took her companion longer, and when she returned to the beach there seemed less of her than there was before. Her features had weathered to mere suggestions of nose, eyes, mouth, ears. Underneath her skin the wind whistled through her bones and carved away her internal organs. “One day I’ll blow away, or fall from the cliffs and shatter on the rocks below, and you’ll be sent to collect me to go into the lumber room,” she told Alice. This, Alice realized, was all the future she had to look forward to. Already her fingerprints had faded, seaweed was growing where hair once did, and barnacles dotted her skin.

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Escape

On the day Alice escaped a mighty storm pounded against the beach. Despite the crashing waves, howling winds and freezing rain, Alice was expected to stick to her duty. Alice paused and looked out on the black-gray sea. If she died trying to escape it was a better death than what she faced. Without looking back Alice plunged into the stinging water, so cold it stole the breath from her lungs, but instead of spitting her back out onto the beach the sea pulled her farther into its embrace. The touch reminded her of her companion and Alice kicked and clawed her way deeper into the darkness.

The details of her struggle out of the sea and hedge are jumble of sensations: crushing cold, the taste of salt and blood, her nose stinging and the rattling panic of facing her own death. What she remembers clearly, however, was her first lungful of air outside of Arcadia: the flatness of it, the way it moved through her lungs without the tang of glamour. She opened her eyes to bright sunlight streaming through the trees. She was naked and soaked, but free.

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Living in the Real World

Return to the mortal world was just half of the struggle. She had lost track of time in Arcadia, never knowing how long she walked the Hermit’s beaches, but in the mortal world twelve years had passed. The world she once knew had changed so much that Alice found she had more in common with older mortals than those her own age. Computers, music, movies, popular culture, politics, literature: all of it was strange, wonderful and frightening to Alice.

How fortunate for Alice that--in this brave, new world--she fell in with the DeKalb freehold. The DeKalb changelings helped Alice find her way and taught her how to live. Her first contact with other changelings was through Roger Tenpenny, a darkling antiquarian of the Winter court. Roger found Alice huddled in the bushes. He took her in, helped her make sense of what had happened to her, and set her up with a place to stay as she got acclimated to the mortal world. After a year of forging ties through friendship with the various courts, Alice joined the Autumn court, having decided she’d use what she’d become to protect her new, albeit adhoc family, and to strike back at the True Fae when and if the opportunity arrived.

Terrified of running into her fetch, Alice refused to seek out her family, instead creating, with Roger’s help, a new identity as Alice Sparks. In repayment for his help, Alice joined the Bishopric of Blackbirds, pledging to aid the others of her freehold. It is indeed a tragedy that she no longer remembers Roger. He was carried off during the 2007 rains and with him any memory of him. As the season has turned to icy winter, Alice sometimes suffers a pang of loss but cannot place the cause.

She makes a living using the talents she brought back from the Hedge. If a mortal goes missing, fearful families can engage Alice’s “psychic” powers to track down their loved ones. She has a fragile relationship with the DeKalb and Chicago police departments, providing occasional help on the psychic front, a relationship they keep silent. In between searching for missing persons, Alice hits the psychic fair circuit, telling fortunes and offering advice.

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