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Welcome to Shadows Over Bradshaw: The Summer of Broken Mirrors [C:tL2e]

15:04, 24th April 2024 (GMT+0)

Mielikki Hart

Mask

A young woman with long dark hair and a thousand yard stare with very dark brown eyes.  Her body is long and lanky with a trim athletic build.  There's an olive tone to her skin.  She often looks disheveled, uncomfortable and rugged, tending to have a stain here and there from some natural material and she tends to smell like, well, a forest.

Mien

The true Mielikki is a sinewy, lithe green skinned dryad.  Her hair is longer and has leaves, twigs and small bones in it.  At first these look like they're caught in her hair or woven into it, but a close look reveals the horrible truth these are part of her.  Creeper vines and leaves tend to cling to her, indeed in the realm of her Keeper she often wore little but these and a fur loincloth.  The uncanny stare from her Mask doesn't stack up to dark eyes that look like they properly belong to a wolf or jaguar or some other predator, and her teeth are pointy with pronounced canines.  Despite this, she's sculpted into a shape that pleased her Keeper with an idealized form, very elven in features and appearance with long pointed ears.

Crib Notes!

Mielikki's Durance:
The real Hope was taken to a Fae who styled himself simply as The Silver King.  He has many names, but they change daily, depending on what suits his mood.  All of the Gentry are cruel in their own way, and The Silver King was no exception.

His particular brand of torture is to sit on his plush throne all the day long and hold a mockery of royal court in his castle.  Rather than decide matters of state or resolve disputes or plan strategy like a proper monarch would, The Silver King instead merely constantly indulged his own whims and pleasures.  Gluttonous, both metaphorically and literally applied, is the correct term, as is Slothful.

Like other Gentry, he is rather like a child given demigod-like powers.  He simply demands to be entertained all the time, given pretty things, fed wonderful food and he wanted everything and everyone he saw to be beautiful and majestic.  In fact he only pauses his revelry when he judges his servants to not be beautiful or majestic enough, that he may break and re-mold them.

The Silver King makes all his servants and himself enchanting and otherworldly, but it's very telling that the King gave himself (and his favorite chef) a porcine body, but insisted all his servants be slender, athletic and beautiful because that pleased his eyes.

He has many servants, for he wants many novel entertainments.  Some servants sing and dance for him.  Others cook (every meal is an exotic and extravagant feast).  Some make him beautiful items as “tribute” (he is quite keen on armor and weapons, though he never actually fought anyone himself, but he has an astonishing collection).

But he has other servants as well, servants whom he sends on far ranging quests for glory and treasures and conquest, for he enjoys it when they came back with prizes and treasures and tales of his glory (for the servants are wise enough, at least after the first trip, to give The Silver King all the credit for the deed).  These are his favorite amusements.

Hope became one of these questing servants, she was his Knight Huntress, and her task was to hunt and defeat all manner of exotic beasts.  The King liked to give the pelts, horns and fangs to his other servants so he might have exotic boots or other goods.  He liked to give the meat to his chefs for the feast, the more rare and choice the cut the better.  He liked the trophies, and the tales of the Hunt.

However, The Silver King is incredibly fickle.  If he does not like what a particular servant presents to him, well the less said about the consequences the better.  And it is never possible to know what will actually please him.  And it actually does no long term good to please him, you avoid torture today but he was never grateful and quickly demands another labor of you, and your long term success/failure ratio is sure to be half and half.

Mielikki Hart figured out a loophole though; by seeking more and more exotic prey, she had to make fewer audiences, and thus there were fewer chances of agonizing torture.

Eventually, the Huntress ranged out so far, she found herself in the Hedge.  The real Hope also isn't sure what has happened to Timmy, and wants revenge for her father's murder, is aware her mother's become a useless drug addict and her remaining brother a two bit thug, and blames her Fetch for everything.


Personality:
Mielikki is adolescent, yet hardened and grim and amoral.  Her maturity has not advanced naturally or evenly.  Fetch Hope is certainly not perfect, but she is a much better person as an adult than she ever was as a teenager.  Basically, imagine a pretty cheerleader who really didn't need to laugh at other people's appearances or misfortunes to keep at the top of the social ladder, but who did it anyway because she valued her own standing over the feelings of others.  But at the same time she's Rambo.

The key is to realize she has been seriously abused, but at the same time now that she actually has the chance to grow up she seems to be refusing to.  Mielikki is somewhat delusional, she believes if she just figures out the right thing to do, somehow she will resume her life right where it was and everything will work out like she wanted it to when she was seventeen.

Fetch Hope got to work through the trauma, learn the hard life lesson that sometimes people's appearances, situations, etc. are not their fault, and ultimately grew out of being a little shit and found humility and empathy for other people.  Mielikki never did any of that, but has the potential to. Mielikki should be more violence prone (at least when provoked or stressed) and emotional (in all the wrong ways) than Hope.

Mielikki's thinking can often be shallow in terms of her personal ambitions and insecurities (she's vain and insecure about her appearance for example), but when things get nasty or it otherwise comes to situations that hit her role as The Huntress, she should descend into silence and deft, deadly precision.


Icons:
Broadheads - When Hope was taken into the Hedge the first time, she somehow managed to cross over with a few of her arrows.  Mielikki isn't sure what happened exactly, she might have tried to save herself or Timothy or her father and grabbed a bow and arrow as the closest available weapon perhaps.  The arrows didn't last very long, but the metal broadheads did, and they were her most treasured possessions during her Durance.  How she ever managed to keep hold of them she never knew, but when used, they gave her arrows that flew true rather than arrows that were controlled by The Silver King's reality warping powers.  They saved her many times, even if the Silver King always won out in the end.  They were lost forever when she managed to escape, probably fired at her last quarry in the nightmare realm of her Keeper.

They represent her solid grasp on her former life as it actually was, not the delusional perfect version she has talked herself into.  Mielikki forgets that her high school "friends" she values so much were shallow and two faced,  that her brother Ronnie was always getting into trouble even as a kid, etc.

Troy's Class Ring - Her high school boyfriend's class ring which Hope wore on a chain at the time.  Yes, absolutely cringeworthy, but it shows that at one point Mielikki, despite not being the kindest person, did have a sentimental side.  She actually thought her high school relationship was going somewhere and was emotionally invested in it.

It represents a tender, more innocent side of Mielikki that she lost due to the sheer cruelty of her Durance.  It also represents the loss of her gullibility, because Troy was actually an asshole, and The Silver King ruthlessly exploited her belief that if she just played along he wouldn't hurt her again so many times.