Mouse
Name: Emily MonterosNickname: Mouse the Finder
Age: 10 (22 in real-world years since her actual birthday)
Age apparent:
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Irrelevant
Occupation: Street urchin/petty thief
Languages: English
Seeming: Wizened
Kith: Drudge
Court: Courtless
Keeper: Lady of Midnight and Shadow
Faction: Unaligned
Wyrd: 2
Glamour Pool: 11
Willpower: TBD
Concept: Overlooked child-thief
Mien:
Under the tutelage of the cruel Wizened Butler, Mouse herself grew thin and frail, with something of the monkey and something of the rat about her. She has papery blue-green skin and a shock of pale teal hair, with eyes and ears each nearly half-again the size of her head. Her fingers and toes alike are long, thin, and grasping, and oversized buck teeth distort her narrow mouth.
Mask:
A thin preteen girl, clad in a shabby coat several sizes too large and with a winsome smile under a mop of curly brown hair, she looks less like a hard-bitten streetwise thief and more like the poster child at an adoption agency.
Virtue: Fortitude
Vice: Greed
Personality:
Extremely quiet. Many times people will simply forget that Mouse is even present, until she speaks up. Once she warms up (ha!), it becomes clear that she is generally a serious and focused little girl with a wry, cynical humor far beyond her years.
Passions/Goals:
Mouse wants to find a permanent home. Mouse wants to stop being afraid. In the meantime, stealing small treasures and storing them in a secret place is a perennial joy and diversion.
Stats
Attributes:
Mental
I am Smarter Than You Think. (1)
I am Always Listening. (3)
I Remember Everything. (2)
I am Greedy. (-1)
Physical
I am Quick, Quick, Doublequick. (3)
I am Ever So Quiet. (3)
I am Hard to Catch. (1)
I am Small. (-1)
I am Weak. (-2)
Social
I am Cute and Harmless. (1)
I am A Child. (-1)
I am Cowardly. (-1)
I am Contemptible. (-1)
Skills:
I can Wriggle Free. (1)
I can Open Locks. (1)
I can Move Unseen. (1)
I can Take Things that don't belong to me. (3)
I can Climb Like a Monkey. (2)
I can Scrounge for food almost anywhere. (1)
I can Make Friends with Animals. (1)
I can fend for myself On the Streets. (1)
I can't Drive. (-1)
I can't Read. (-1)
I'm afraid of Guns. (-1)
I've never used a Computer. (-1)
Backgrounds:
No one else will ever find My Hidey-hole. (Hollow 2)
I have a Friend Who Feeds Me. (Harvest 1)
I know the Homeless out on the streets, and they trust me. (Contacts 1)
Weasel-Face McGordie can find a buyer for whatever I need to sell. (Ally 1)
I am Implacably Hunted by terrifying monsters. (-2)
Rare Abilities:
I can Find What is Lost, wherever it hides. (3)
I think I have Something Useful in my pockets. (1)
Seeming and Kith Abilities
Blessings:
Extraordinary Nimbleness - Spend 1 Glamour to gain 9 again on all Dexterity checks for one scene. Spend 1 Glamour to add Wyrd to Dodge for one scene.
Unseen Labor - Spent 1 Glamour to complete a task in a fraction (normal time divided by Wyrd+1) of the usual time to complete. Must remain unobserved throughout.
Easily Overlooked - Lucky on Stealth checks.
Curses:
Spite - Unlucky on social checks, penalized for unfamiliar social skills.
Frailties:
Taboo - May not sleep under the same roof two nights in a row.
Contracts
Brief Glamour Of Repair (o)
Cost: 1 Glamour
Catch: The Contract must fix an item owned and used by another, which the character has never used. For example, the changeling using this Contract could repair a friend's car the changeling had ridden in but never driven.
Knowing Touch (o)
Cost: 1 Glamour
Catch: The owner of the device asked the changeling to examine it. This catch does not function if the changeling owns the object in question.
Tongues Of Birds And Words Of Wolves (o)
[Rodents]
Cost: 1 Glamour
Catch: The changeling gives the animal a new name.
Beast's Keen Senses (oo)
[Rodents]
Cost: 2 Glamour
Catch: The changeling sees or touches an animal of the type being imitated.
-
The Wrong Foot (o)
[Mouse droppings]
Cost: 1 Glamour
Catch: The changeling licks his thumb and smudges it on a mirror, thereby leaving another mark of his own passing.
Nevertread (oo)
Cost: 1 Glamour
Catch: The changeling must have spent at least an hour barefoot within the past day.
Shadowpatch (ooo)
Cost: 1 Glamour
Catch: The changeling must have spent at least an hour away from natural light (away from windows, open doors, etc.) within the past day.
-
Pathfinder (o)
Cost: 1 Glamour
Catch: The changeling must have plucked a Thorn from the local Hedge and shed a single drop of blood while doing so within the last day.
History:
Once Upon
There once was a little girl who stole from her stepmother. Her stepmother was terrible and fat and mean, and she treated the little girl like a slave and made her clean the dishes. The little girl once tried to run away to find her real mother, but her real mother was dead and the policemen brought her back and her father was so mad.
But the little girl's stepmother had a bracelet, and the bracelet was all of silver and had jewels all over, and it was the prettiest thing in the world. The stepmother knew how much the girl loved the bracelet and she would laugh when she wore it, just to make fun of the girl. So the girl stole the bracelet and ran away, just to teach her stepmother a lesson.
The little girl ran and ran and ran and soon she didn't know where she was. There were trees all around, even though the little girl lived in the big city and rode on the subway all by herself, twice. The girl thought she was safe because she must have gone very far away if she'd found a forest. The little girl was also sad because she thought she was all alone.
The little girl was wrong. She wasn't alone. There were people who lived in the forest.
And the little girl wasn't safe. Not at all.
Home
They'll never find me here.
It's the promise Mouse makes to herself every time, and it's always broken sooner or later. Today, she is wedged up under the pipes behind the fancy water-closet, the "newfangled" device, He calls it. Mouse thinks she remembers actual toilets, with gleaming white sides and water tanks that never ran low, but that seems so crazy to imagine. She thinks she might have had another name, back when she had shining white toilets. But now she is Mouse.
Mouse knows that she is due for a proper beating. Stealing a spoon from Cook would merit a cuff to the side of the head. Dodging would earn her a kick, too. Running and hiding for Mouse counts in her head almost an hour now, and also losing the spoon on the way, well. Mouse squeezes deeper into the crevice. Her lips move, mouthing the words again. They'll never find me here.
The Butler's footsteps are approaching steadily. They do not slow. They do not turn aside.
Mouse closes her eyes.
Flight
The door was open, and Mouse ran. She ran without a plan, without even a glimmer of thought. She didn't know where she was going. That wasn't true. She was going away.
Mouse could find a lot of things. Almost anything, really, if she put her mind to it. But Mouse had never found a way out before.
The Hedge rose around her as the lights of the Garden disappeared, winked out like a candle. The other servants had always whispered about the things that lived out there, beyond the edge of the Garden. Awful things. Monstrous things. Things that no Mouse could ever fight.
Thorns tore at her, but she wriggled through. Trees blocked her path, but she scrambled over. Mud sucked at her, but she leapt across.
Then the shadows moved, and Mouse reeled back in terror. The Shadow-Hair Man, the Knife-Man! He'd caught her once, when she'd tried to flee, and taken her back to the Pale Man's dark house, her fists pounding uselessly on his shoulders, his streaming crown of darkness stopping her mouth. Out here, in the lawless reaches, outside of the Garden and the flimsy protection of the rules and the Pale Man's patronage, what would he do to her here?
The Shadow-Man held out his hand. "Come," he told her, "we haven't much time. They're after us."
Mouse shrank away, her eyes wide.
"Quickly!"
There were lights, then, in the tangled woods behind her. Mouse knew what would happen if she ran to the lights. It had already happened once, years and years ago, and they'd given her to the Lady and then the Pale Man and then the Butler and the Cook. The lights, she recognized and understood.
Mouse stood and ran for the shadows instead.
Out There
When Mouse crawled out of the drainage pipe and landed in mucky, scummy water; real, actual water that didn't disappear or burn or turn to blood; plain, honest water in the plain, honest world, a mortal watching would have been slightly startled to see the mud-streaked, emaciated girl-child burst into gales of joyous, belly-shaking laughter.
They'll never find me here.
Home
Mouse had been gone longer than she realized. She'd missed five birthdays, maybe six, by her best count which wasn't very good; time went funny shapes in the Garden but out here, it had been a lot longer. She was old enough to drive out here. Maybe old enough to be in high school. Mouse didn't like to think about that too hard.
Her stepmother had died, and her father had moved away. There were strangers in her home. Mouse watched them for a while, hiding behind doors and under beds while they lived their stranger lives and ate their stranger meals and had stranger sex bouncing over her head. This wasn't her home anymore.
She'd have to find a new one.
Ever After
There is a tiny closet under the stairs. The Wilsons don't use it, don't even realize the lock isn't broken, except for Madeline, who is five. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson think that Madeline's new game of having an imaginary older sister named Mouse who cleans her room for her is just adorable, and they're willing to give Madeline the extra cookie every night if it means she'll keep her room as neat and tidy as she has been. Madeline leaves it on a plate next to the staircase along with a Dixie cup of apple juice, and every morning, it's been eaten. Mrs. Wilson has sometimes tried to catch Madeline sneaking downstairs to eat it herself, but never very hard.
She wonders sometimes how her little girl wakes herself up in the middle of the night, wonders how long this game will last, but all children have their own sets of rituals and private mythologies, she knows. She remembers her own, now and then, the boogies in the basement and the little man with flowers in his hair who lived out by the birdbath in her mother's garden.
Such fancy stories, she thinks, almost proud, and goes up to bed after Mr. Wilson, who has been snoring for an hour already. The cookie and the juice are still downstairs.
In the morning, they are gone.