Dancy Flammarion (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hellfollowedafter) wrote2015-06-07 11:57 am
hellfollowedafter) wrote2015-06-07 11:57 am
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User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW: vibishan
E-mail:
Other Characters: Shuos Jedao, Dogma
Character Name: Dancy Flammarion
Series: Alabaster Comics (Note: I’m also going to be drawing on the novel Threshhold and the Alabaster: Pale Horse prose short story collection which are technically all the same continuity, but as the mythos has been developing over time, in the case of any conflicts, I’ll be using the comics as the official version.)
Age: 17ish? She’s “almost 17” in Alabaster: Wolves, and then spends “a year, maybe a year and a half” fighting monsters in montage in Alabaster: Grimmer Tales before her death. Hell time is not being added to her age.
From When?: From her hell in “The Good, the Bad, and the Bird”
Inmate/Warden: inmate - Dancy is much more about stabbing things on instinct than doing her due diligence, and also, while she no longer rejects “monster personhood” 100% out of hand, she has not at all applied the concept of “my werewolf GF deserves to live” to other nonhumans with any particular universality or rigor. She’s definitely killed at least one 100% innocent person because she stabbed first, on the information of eldritch evil entities that she KNEW were evil (and just her own jumping to conclusions), and asked questions later, and while she felt really bad about it, it didn’t really change her MO at all.
Item:
Arrival: Dancy will be taken from some time after her death, being nabbed from the White Hell without her permission.
Abilities/Powers: Everything in Alabaster is ambiguous spooky magical realism/horror, and Dancy is presented as very much Dubiously Sane, or at least her understanding of the magic around her is very much filtered through her understanding of the world. I’m going to lay this out as cleanly as I can.
1) The Sight. Dancy can See The Monsters that are hiding amongst humans, and sometimes know things she shouldn’t know. Throughout the series, one of the tip-offs that someone is Not Human is that they call Dancy by name even though she never introduced herself - but Dancy herself pulls the same trick on Maisie, calling her by her name before ever hearing it. She also correctly identifies Maisie as a werewolf based on the fact that she smells like wet dog. On the other hand, Dancy carries around a human finger in Threshhold to prove that she’s killed “real monsters”. There’s a lot of implications that people see it as human because they’re in denial, but I like that Dancy is a zealot and not really on the same wavelength as observable reality and is totally convinced of her own perception. I’d like Dancy to have this ability on board, but also for it to be unreliable and sometimes accurate but ~thematic~ instead of factual. IE, if NBC Hannibal were still on board, she would See him as a creepy stag demon based on the aesthetic of his canon. Basically, Dancy perceiving things in Magical Realist terms.
2) Some Swamp Magic taught her by her grandmother, details never given, except that she identifies many protective symbols drawn around a drugstore. I’d keep this to similar wards/drawn charms with only a small effect.
3) Powers She Got From the Angel, Now Revoked: true visions of the future, information that she explicitly knows about monsters she will encounter and things to do/say. I’m adding this for completeness but it will never apply on the barge (except maybe in an event where there’s a version of Dancy that didn’t repudiate the Angel, where a short-term plot could be worked out about it).
4) Powers from the Culhwch Book: Dancy has basically become the mortal conduit for a whole pack of sometimes-conflicting eldritch deities, all of whom are pretty much Capital-E evil. She tries to fight them and play them against each other, but she keeps using their power and information despite knowing better than to trust them, which slowly gives them more and more power over her. At the end of Grimmer Tales, a yellow-eyed Dancy is basically the book acting through her, and the pink-eyed Dancy tries to beg and bargain and fight the Book to protect Maisie, ending up stabbing herself in the shoulder before Maisie kills her. While using the Book’s powers, Dancy is confirmed to a) just fucking incinerate a guy b) bring a talking blackbird back from the dead c) get information about monsters that the various entities in the Book have beef with and use it to kill them. Someone else merely in possession of the book is able to create a one-way roach motel force field barrier around an entire town, and create and spread monster curses. Dancy won’t have access to any of this power when she arrives, although I would like her to have to deal with the temptation of it/repudiating it/finding a way to get free of it in game eventually. Any time she uses it, it will gain more strength over her.
5) Dancy is fucking feral. Human parts she has canonically bitten off: the aforementioned finger, an ear, a chunk of cheek. She’s not particularly well trained, and when she has no deeper powers backing her she’s far from unbeatable in a fight, but she has a certain manic ability to stab far outside her weight class even when totally on her own, and she knows how to use a larger opponent’s momentum against them.
6) She’s a true albino, and consequently bright light hurts her eyes and she sunburns horribly.
7) tALkiNg to aNImALs? She talks to a blackbird throughout Alabaster: Wolves, and to a (stuffed!!!) bear in Pale Horse. The blackbird also talks to Maisie, although only after Maisie becomes a ghost. The blackbird appears to be, to all intents and purposes, an ordinary blackbird. It's deeply unclear whether the bear thing was real or not. I'd like this to crop up occasionally when it's cool/thematic but never reliably.
Personality: Dancy Flammarion is a study in the sad truth that disillusionment does not lead directly to wisdom. She is a person of incredible will and devotion, abandoned and written off by human and divine powers alike, potential left to fester. She has very little to start with, and loses everything quite young.
Dancy is used to isolation but not really used to solitude or privacy: most of her life was in the swamp, but she always had her mother and grandmother in the same one room house, and after they died she had the presence of her Angel or the Book. Dancy has never really had the space to be her own person or the support of friends or peers to learn from. She would likely be blunt anyway, but blunt she certainly is, which sits awkwardly with her ingrained southern manners and rusty religious rules in place of social experience, such as repeatedly telling the blackbird “Don’t blaspheme” - although she herself does shortly after.
She is also used to being mocked and looked down upon. Her albinism makes her visibly different on top of her low class. She’s used to being written off as stupid white trash, or people asking if she’s retarded because of how she looks, or else treating her with pity and insincerity. She’s defensive about her intelligence and how few years of school she’s had, quick to snap at Chance Matthews that she knows what a geologist is, or that she can obviously read a sign if she’s asking a question in reference to what it says. She herself doesn’t call herself white trash, but she flinches more for that label. She’s not ashamed of where she comes from, but she does find it impossible to imagine that she’s good enough for anything else - has trouble even imagining anything else.
She’s not stupid, but she existed in a very insular world, and saw out of it only through very small peepholes. It’s canon that they had only 6 books (whether or not this includes the bible is unclear) - but the two of those confirmed in canon are Collected Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Beowolf. Dancy often thinks in quotes: bible verses mixed up with Beowolf mixed up with songs she heard on the radio, trying to make sense of a wide and sometimes cosmically incomprehensible world through the bits and pieces of culture she has. She also takes in whatever seems grand and important, whatever makes her grand and important, more important than a white trash orphan nobody albino freak. She might be a freak, but she’s the white death, the red right hand of god - or the pale horse, and it’s rider, she is Death and the black Book’s Hell follows after her - either of these is equally appealing to Dancy, who hates the idea of being no one, unwanted, and worthless. This is a girl whose literal, personal Hell is to be a smudge of filthy imperfection in a gleaming void.
Dancy isn’t stupid, but she is emotionally motivated, not logically motivated. Her desire for importance leads her to be a willing tool for multiple violent powers, none of which care for her at all, and she can be a hypocrite in things large and small, from blaspheming to murder. Her sin is not so much hypocrisy itself as a failure to think things through, running on conviction and stubbornness, momentum and fumes. She knows that she shouldn’t trust the Book, but with its information right there in her head, she barely thinks twice before acting on it. In Culwhuch’s gas station, she tells herself on the way in that she won’t steal - but then later she does, and rationalizes it to herself. Now, she’s only stealing a can of sardines or similar, it’s no great avarice, just a kid wanting to survive. But Dancy tells herself that she’s better than she is, makes up rules she can’t uphold because she doesn’t have any other system besides austere righteousness under which to measure her own value.
Along these lines, she has a bad tendency to think in absolutes. At first it’s the sharp division between humans and monsters. When she comes to care for Maisie more than most humans, and is guilty of killing a human herself, her black and white thinking moves on to thinking of herself against her Angel. She goes from saying she knows she broke the rules and accepting the Angel's judgement with a broken heart, to refusing repeatedly to serve the angel again, not because she ever really had a clear epiphany that her Angel was asking her to do something wrong, but because she was tired of being hurt and scared and alone and doing all the killing and receiving no thanks and not enough help. And after she breaks her oath on the Angel’s name, she is indeed hurt, and scared, and alone, and left to do the killing on her own, after which she refuses all its offers of help, because it wasn’t there when she needed it, was it?
Dancy has a distinctly Catholic streak of self-denial. Once she starts saying no to something, denying and resisting temptation, she will not stop saying no even to things she wants quite badly, whether that’s all the monsters that offer to take her away to the fae court to be a princess, or the Angel taking her back. She’s proud in some ways but not in others - she’s used to panhandling and hitchhiking and surviving on the kindness (or pity) of strangers in between the grandiosity of her lethal missions.
Despite all this, she’s also young, curious, and has a bright, snarky sense of humor on the few times it peaks out. She reads National Geographic in public libraries, sasses with Maisie and the blackbird, and in one memorable instance, politely encourages a kindly grandmotherly figure to sit beside her on the bus - displacing Maisie’s ghost, invisible to everyone but Dancy, and with whom she had been bickering.
She wants to be good, and to protect people; she tries so hard to protect Maisie from the Book, and is immediately willing to hurt and sacrifice herself. She goes to Hell and believes she deserves it - even from the minute she first kills Maisie, which is bound up with her broken oath. She says “I saved my life but lost my soul.” Dancy is about as congenial as a snapping turtle stuck in mud, and twice as stubborn - but she isn’t as lost or as damned as she believes.
Barge Reactions: Dancy will be firmly convinced she is still in the White Hell, since it’s shown her fake visions of being brought back to life before, and the admiral’s “redemption” sounds a lot like her angel’s demand to repent and serve it again. Breaches will only reinforce this.
Path to Redemption: Dancy wants to be a good person. She was once a devout Catholic, and she used to believe she was doing right, protecting people from things that eat people, and following the orders of her Angel, doing god’s work. She was also, from quite early on, actually very tired of being the one doing all the dirty work. She’s taken one of the most important steps already, in accepting Maisie (a werewolf and then a ghost) as a person worth protecting, abandoning her absolutist ideas about monsters vs humans.
However, Dancy doesn’t really have any idea what to do with herself that isn’t 1) taking orders and 2) killing things. She knew the Book was Bad Fucking News but she still used it and let it use her to kill things, and eventually lost not just her soul but her whole self.
Dancy needs to believe that she can be redeemed, that she isn’t Just Damned, and she needs to learn that there’s a middle ground between selflessly sacrificing herself to a mission of death and selfishly risking everything and killing a girl to get a cigar box of keepsakes back.
The biggest hurdle for her warden will be to convince her that 1) she’s not still in hell, and 2) redemption doesn’t have to mean going back to her angel. After that, she needs to believe she can have a life of her own, that she really is worth more than being a tool for one power after another, and capable of building a life worth living.
Deal:
History: Dancy Flammarion was born into a family of “genuine swamp folks” in Shrove Wood, Okaloosa County in the Florida panhandle. Most of that family was dead or incarcerated by the time she was born, and she grew up with her mother (who had her out of wedlock at 15, after running off to Pensacola for the summer) and her grandmother. When Dancy was fifteen, a monster killed her mother and grandmother, and Dancy managed to kill it. Then she burned the one-room pine shack she grew up in, with her mother and grandmother’s bodies inside, and started wandering. She was picked up the highway patrol, and placed in a state mental ward after 1) screaming that one of the deputies was a monster and biting part of his face off 2) insisting that she was the hand of god commanded by an angel to kill monsters. She eventually escaped from the institution and spent a year or so hitchhiking and panhandling through the Gothic/Cosmic Horror South, following the orders of her angel and slaying various monsters, including a troll that does eat people but is pretty nice to Dancy herself, offering her fair hospitality during a storm.
[There’s a timeline in Threshold that was made to un-happen by Deep Time creatures of Darkness from the Devonian, where Dancy dies and is absorbed into a horrible monstrous mass below the mountains, but when Chance Matthews tries to blow up the water tunnel that accesses their reality, the timeline is unwound, and Dancy’s angel never sends her to that town. She still has some weird knowledge and visions about it, though, and it may be in this clipped timeline that she lost her box of keepsakes. It’s unclear and very fucked up.]
Eventually, she comes to a town infested by an eldritch cult of werewolves, and a young girl werewolf comes to talk to her. They threaten each other and bicker, and then Maisie reveals that she has a cigar box of things Dancy originally saved from her house before the fire, but somehow lost: there’s a bloodstone rosary that belonged to Dancy’s grandma, a few photographs, a pair of sunglasses, feathers, tiny saint icons, a Patsy Cline cassette tape, bits and bobs. Dancy challenges Maisie to a riddle game: if Dancy wins, Maisie will give her the box and not try to eat her; if Maisie wins, Dancy won’t fight back. Dancy swears on the name of her angel, which infuriates it. When Dancy loses (Maisie rigged the game, but Dancy agreed to her terms) she breaks her oath and kills Maisie anyway. The Angel is furious, and forsakes Dancy.
Delirious from her injuries in the fight, Dancy tries to patch up her infected arm. She goes to the church, where she fights several of the werewolves, including Maisie’s mother, who originally bit her, kills Maisie’s mother, and sets the church on fire. Maisie’s ghost, eager to use Dancy to get free of her cursed town, pulls Dancy from the fire and tells her about Emil Fortescue, the original cursed confederate zombie werewolf currently in possession of an evil Book containing the gospel and power of eldritch gods, which he’s used to erect a Hotel California force field around the town.
Dancy goes to confront Fortescue, and her Angel reappears, and Dancy refuses to beg it to take her back, out of wounded abandoned pride and resentment. The Angel’s scream of fury actually scorches a lot of the remaining werewolves to ash, and Fortescue invites her into the basement, where more of the werewolves have been horribly tortured to death to appease the dark gods of the Book. Fortescue tries to convince Dancy to join him. She steals his confederate cavalry saber, and Dancy uses it to strike the Book in half. Instead of severing the connection of the Gods to the Book, Dancy herself becomes the new host of the Book’s powers, and it’s highly ambiguous in the narration whether Dancy understood this would happen or not, whether she was really trying to destroy the book or accepting the offer, or simply telling herself the former while part of her knew the latter.
Dancy atomizes Fortescue and is able to leave the town, with Maisie’s ghost and a resurrected talking blackbird in tow. They travel to a coastal town called Black Hammock, which is basically a cult of an evil mermaid who sacrifices one person a year so that she is able to stay on land in humanism form. Dancy tries to kill the Siren and fails; she grows tentacles from the wound when Dancy stabs her hand. Dancy refuses to cut a deal with the siren to leave, but when she attacks during the ceremony, she kills a woman with a gun - Dancy assumed she would execute the intended victim, but in fact she was the victim’s mother, planning to kill the Siren herself. Later, Dancy convinces one of the book’s many contributors, an entity called Mother Hydra, to tell her how to kill the Siren, and does so.
She then spends a long time alone, killing monsters who had somehow pissed off any of the Book’s members, until eventually she was almost entirely under the book’s sway. Maisie, who at this point had become corporeal again thanks to a freak incident in a revival tent, and the blackbird have both been having strange dreams of Dancy, and they all converge in an abandoned barn. Maisie reveals that she is in love with Dancy, while Dancy fights a desperate inner struggle with the Book that Maisie is hers, not the Book’s, while outwardly raving and threatening. Dancy stabs herself in the shoulder, and eventually Maisie skewers her on a pitchfork in self-defense, killing her.
Dancy goes to hell, which she experiences as an endless expanse of perfect empty white, in which she is a night-sky-filled “ugly blot of something” ruining the perfect nothing, and also as a maze. Her angel sometimes appears, and demands that Dancy fight for it again, but Dancy repeatedly refuses. She experiences a hallucination of waking up naked in the swamp, fighting an alligator for her life, and getting a ride from a mysterious person known only as The Bailiff, who gives her a jacket and takes her to the motel where Maisie is staying. They fuck, and then a pair of incestuous lesbian twins dressed like an SPN parody (who originally prayed to Shub-Niggurath to resurrect Dancy) kidnap Maisie to use as leverage against Dancy. Dancy finds them across town in a cabin, and Hunter and Carson Nolastname explain that they want Dancy to go to the lower dreamlands and steal the Djinns’ key of shackles from the homeland of the Ghul in exchange for Maisie’s life. Dancy is dubious from the outset, convinced that 1) this plan is dumb as shit, and 2) they’re going to kill Maisie anyway. There’s a lot of bloody fighting. Even though the twins have Dancy’ knife, Dancy skewers one of them in the ankle with a corkscrew. As the standoff deteriorates into bloody screaming, defiance, and futility, and the blackbird summons a whole pack of Ghul to attack the twins (and the Ghul then attack everyone). Dancy realizes that the twin she stabbed with the corkscrew has clean boots again. The vision dissolves, and her angel is there, once again demanding her allegiance. Dancy refuses.
Sample Journal Entry: who you calling unmannered
Sample RP: skulking
Special Notes:i'm so sorry about this nonsense canon
User DW: vibishan
E-mail:
Other Characters: Shuos Jedao, Dogma
Character Name: Dancy Flammarion
Series: Alabaster Comics (Note: I’m also going to be drawing on the novel Threshhold and the Alabaster: Pale Horse prose short story collection which are technically all the same continuity, but as the mythos has been developing over time, in the case of any conflicts, I’ll be using the comics as the official version.)
Age: 17ish? She’s “almost 17” in Alabaster: Wolves, and then spends “a year, maybe a year and a half” fighting monsters in montage in Alabaster: Grimmer Tales before her death. Hell time is not being added to her age.
From When?: From her hell in “The Good, the Bad, and the Bird”
Inmate/Warden: inmate - Dancy is much more about stabbing things on instinct than doing her due diligence, and also, while she no longer rejects “monster personhood” 100% out of hand, she has not at all applied the concept of “my werewolf GF deserves to live” to other nonhumans with any particular universality or rigor. She’s definitely killed at least one 100% innocent person because she stabbed first, on the information of eldritch evil entities that she KNEW were evil (and just her own jumping to conclusions), and asked questions later, and while she felt really bad about it, it didn’t really change her MO at all.
Arrival: Dancy will be taken from some time after her death, being nabbed from the White Hell without her permission.
Abilities/Powers: Everything in Alabaster is ambiguous spooky magical realism/horror, and Dancy is presented as very much Dubiously Sane, or at least her understanding of the magic around her is very much filtered through her understanding of the world. I’m going to lay this out as cleanly as I can.
1) The Sight. Dancy can See The Monsters that are hiding amongst humans, and sometimes know things she shouldn’t know. Throughout the series, one of the tip-offs that someone is Not Human is that they call Dancy by name even though she never introduced herself - but Dancy herself pulls the same trick on Maisie, calling her by her name before ever hearing it. She also correctly identifies Maisie as a werewolf based on the fact that she smells like wet dog. On the other hand, Dancy carries around a human finger in Threshhold to prove that she’s killed “real monsters”. There’s a lot of implications that people see it as human because they’re in denial, but I like that Dancy is a zealot and not really on the same wavelength as observable reality and is totally convinced of her own perception. I’d like Dancy to have this ability on board, but also for it to be unreliable and sometimes accurate but ~thematic~ instead of factual. IE, if NBC Hannibal were still on board, she would See him as a creepy stag demon based on the aesthetic of his canon. Basically, Dancy perceiving things in Magical Realist terms.
2) Some Swamp Magic taught her by her grandmother, details never given, except that she identifies many protective symbols drawn around a drugstore. I’d keep this to similar wards/drawn charms with only a small effect.
3) Powers She Got From the Angel, Now Revoked: true visions of the future, information that she explicitly knows about monsters she will encounter and things to do/say. I’m adding this for completeness but it will never apply on the barge (except maybe in an event where there’s a version of Dancy that didn’t repudiate the Angel, where a short-term plot could be worked out about it).
4) Powers from the Culhwch Book: Dancy has basically become the mortal conduit for a whole pack of sometimes-conflicting eldritch deities, all of whom are pretty much Capital-E evil. She tries to fight them and play them against each other, but she keeps using their power and information despite knowing better than to trust them, which slowly gives them more and more power over her. At the end of Grimmer Tales, a yellow-eyed Dancy is basically the book acting through her, and the pink-eyed Dancy tries to beg and bargain and fight the Book to protect Maisie, ending up stabbing herself in the shoulder before Maisie kills her. While using the Book’s powers, Dancy is confirmed to a) just fucking incinerate a guy b) bring a talking blackbird back from the dead c) get information about monsters that the various entities in the Book have beef with and use it to kill them. Someone else merely in possession of the book is able to create a one-way roach motel force field barrier around an entire town, and create and spread monster curses. Dancy won’t have access to any of this power when she arrives, although I would like her to have to deal with the temptation of it/repudiating it/finding a way to get free of it in game eventually. Any time she uses it, it will gain more strength over her.
5) Dancy is fucking feral. Human parts she has canonically bitten off: the aforementioned finger, an ear, a chunk of cheek. She’s not particularly well trained, and when she has no deeper powers backing her she’s far from unbeatable in a fight, but she has a certain manic ability to stab far outside her weight class even when totally on her own, and she knows how to use a larger opponent’s momentum against them.
6) She’s a true albino, and consequently bright light hurts her eyes and she sunburns horribly.
7) tALkiNg to aNImALs? She talks to a blackbird throughout Alabaster: Wolves, and to a (stuffed!!!) bear in Pale Horse. The blackbird also talks to Maisie, although only after Maisie becomes a ghost. The blackbird appears to be, to all intents and purposes, an ordinary blackbird. It's deeply unclear whether the bear thing was real or not. I'd like this to crop up occasionally when it's cool/thematic but never reliably.
Personality: Dancy Flammarion is a study in the sad truth that disillusionment does not lead directly to wisdom. She is a person of incredible will and devotion, abandoned and written off by human and divine powers alike, potential left to fester. She has very little to start with, and loses everything quite young.
Dancy is used to isolation but not really used to solitude or privacy: most of her life was in the swamp, but she always had her mother and grandmother in the same one room house, and after they died she had the presence of her Angel or the Book. Dancy has never really had the space to be her own person or the support of friends or peers to learn from. She would likely be blunt anyway, but blunt she certainly is, which sits awkwardly with her ingrained southern manners and rusty religious rules in place of social experience, such as repeatedly telling the blackbird “Don’t blaspheme” - although she herself does shortly after.
She is also used to being mocked and looked down upon. Her albinism makes her visibly different on top of her low class. She’s used to being written off as stupid white trash, or people asking if she’s retarded because of how she looks, or else treating her with pity and insincerity. She’s defensive about her intelligence and how few years of school she’s had, quick to snap at Chance Matthews that she knows what a geologist is, or that she can obviously read a sign if she’s asking a question in reference to what it says. She herself doesn’t call herself white trash, but she flinches more for that label. She’s not ashamed of where she comes from, but she does find it impossible to imagine that she’s good enough for anything else - has trouble even imagining anything else.
She’s not stupid, but she existed in a very insular world, and saw out of it only through very small peepholes. It’s canon that they had only 6 books (whether or not this includes the bible is unclear) - but the two of those confirmed in canon are Collected Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Beowolf. Dancy often thinks in quotes: bible verses mixed up with Beowolf mixed up with songs she heard on the radio, trying to make sense of a wide and sometimes cosmically incomprehensible world through the bits and pieces of culture she has. She also takes in whatever seems grand and important, whatever makes her grand and important, more important than a white trash orphan nobody albino freak. She might be a freak, but she’s the white death, the red right hand of god - or the pale horse, and it’s rider, she is Death and the black Book’s Hell follows after her - either of these is equally appealing to Dancy, who hates the idea of being no one, unwanted, and worthless. This is a girl whose literal, personal Hell is to be a smudge of filthy imperfection in a gleaming void.
Dancy isn’t stupid, but she is emotionally motivated, not logically motivated. Her desire for importance leads her to be a willing tool for multiple violent powers, none of which care for her at all, and she can be a hypocrite in things large and small, from blaspheming to murder. Her sin is not so much hypocrisy itself as a failure to think things through, running on conviction and stubbornness, momentum and fumes. She knows that she shouldn’t trust the Book, but with its information right there in her head, she barely thinks twice before acting on it. In Culwhuch’s gas station, she tells herself on the way in that she won’t steal - but then later she does, and rationalizes it to herself. Now, she’s only stealing a can of sardines or similar, it’s no great avarice, just a kid wanting to survive. But Dancy tells herself that she’s better than she is, makes up rules she can’t uphold because she doesn’t have any other system besides austere righteousness under which to measure her own value.
Along these lines, she has a bad tendency to think in absolutes. At first it’s the sharp division between humans and monsters. When she comes to care for Maisie more than most humans, and is guilty of killing a human herself, her black and white thinking moves on to thinking of herself against her Angel. She goes from saying she knows she broke the rules and accepting the Angel's judgement with a broken heart, to refusing repeatedly to serve the angel again, not because she ever really had a clear epiphany that her Angel was asking her to do something wrong, but because she was tired of being hurt and scared and alone and doing all the killing and receiving no thanks and not enough help. And after she breaks her oath on the Angel’s name, she is indeed hurt, and scared, and alone, and left to do the killing on her own, after which she refuses all its offers of help, because it wasn’t there when she needed it, was it?
Dancy has a distinctly Catholic streak of self-denial. Once she starts saying no to something, denying and resisting temptation, she will not stop saying no even to things she wants quite badly, whether that’s all the monsters that offer to take her away to the fae court to be a princess, or the Angel taking her back. She’s proud in some ways but not in others - she’s used to panhandling and hitchhiking and surviving on the kindness (or pity) of strangers in between the grandiosity of her lethal missions.
Despite all this, she’s also young, curious, and has a bright, snarky sense of humor on the few times it peaks out. She reads National Geographic in public libraries, sasses with Maisie and the blackbird, and in one memorable instance, politely encourages a kindly grandmotherly figure to sit beside her on the bus - displacing Maisie’s ghost, invisible to everyone but Dancy, and with whom she had been bickering.
She wants to be good, and to protect people; she tries so hard to protect Maisie from the Book, and is immediately willing to hurt and sacrifice herself. She goes to Hell and believes she deserves it - even from the minute she first kills Maisie, which is bound up with her broken oath. She says “I saved my life but lost my soul.” Dancy is about as congenial as a snapping turtle stuck in mud, and twice as stubborn - but she isn’t as lost or as damned as she believes.
Barge Reactions: Dancy will be firmly convinced she is still in the White Hell, since it’s shown her fake visions of being brought back to life before, and the admiral’s “redemption” sounds a lot like her angel’s demand to repent and serve it again. Breaches will only reinforce this.
Path to Redemption: Dancy wants to be a good person. She was once a devout Catholic, and she used to believe she was doing right, protecting people from things that eat people, and following the orders of her Angel, doing god’s work. She was also, from quite early on, actually very tired of being the one doing all the dirty work. She’s taken one of the most important steps already, in accepting Maisie (a werewolf and then a ghost) as a person worth protecting, abandoning her absolutist ideas about monsters vs humans.
However, Dancy doesn’t really have any idea what to do with herself that isn’t 1) taking orders and 2) killing things. She knew the Book was Bad Fucking News but she still used it and let it use her to kill things, and eventually lost not just her soul but her whole self.
Dancy needs to believe that she can be redeemed, that she isn’t Just Damned, and she needs to learn that there’s a middle ground between selflessly sacrificing herself to a mission of death and selfishly risking everything and killing a girl to get a cigar box of keepsakes back.
The biggest hurdle for her warden will be to convince her that 1) she’s not still in hell, and 2) redemption doesn’t have to mean going back to her angel. After that, she needs to believe she can have a life of her own, that she really is worth more than being a tool for one power after another, and capable of building a life worth living.
History: Dancy Flammarion was born into a family of “genuine swamp folks” in Shrove Wood, Okaloosa County in the Florida panhandle. Most of that family was dead or incarcerated by the time she was born, and she grew up with her mother (who had her out of wedlock at 15, after running off to Pensacola for the summer) and her grandmother. When Dancy was fifteen, a monster killed her mother and grandmother, and Dancy managed to kill it. Then she burned the one-room pine shack she grew up in, with her mother and grandmother’s bodies inside, and started wandering. She was picked up the highway patrol, and placed in a state mental ward after 1) screaming that one of the deputies was a monster and biting part of his face off 2) insisting that she was the hand of god commanded by an angel to kill monsters. She eventually escaped from the institution and spent a year or so hitchhiking and panhandling through the Gothic/Cosmic Horror South, following the orders of her angel and slaying various monsters, including a troll that does eat people but is pretty nice to Dancy herself, offering her fair hospitality during a storm.
[There’s a timeline in Threshold that was made to un-happen by Deep Time creatures of Darkness from the Devonian, where Dancy dies and is absorbed into a horrible monstrous mass below the mountains, but when Chance Matthews tries to blow up the water tunnel that accesses their reality, the timeline is unwound, and Dancy’s angel never sends her to that town. She still has some weird knowledge and visions about it, though, and it may be in this clipped timeline that she lost her box of keepsakes. It’s unclear and very fucked up.]
Eventually, she comes to a town infested by an eldritch cult of werewolves, and a young girl werewolf comes to talk to her. They threaten each other and bicker, and then Maisie reveals that she has a cigar box of things Dancy originally saved from her house before the fire, but somehow lost: there’s a bloodstone rosary that belonged to Dancy’s grandma, a few photographs, a pair of sunglasses, feathers, tiny saint icons, a Patsy Cline cassette tape, bits and bobs. Dancy challenges Maisie to a riddle game: if Dancy wins, Maisie will give her the box and not try to eat her; if Maisie wins, Dancy won’t fight back. Dancy swears on the name of her angel, which infuriates it. When Dancy loses (Maisie rigged the game, but Dancy agreed to her terms) she breaks her oath and kills Maisie anyway. The Angel is furious, and forsakes Dancy.
Delirious from her injuries in the fight, Dancy tries to patch up her infected arm. She goes to the church, where she fights several of the werewolves, including Maisie’s mother, who originally bit her, kills Maisie’s mother, and sets the church on fire. Maisie’s ghost, eager to use Dancy to get free of her cursed town, pulls Dancy from the fire and tells her about Emil Fortescue, the original cursed confederate zombie werewolf currently in possession of an evil Book containing the gospel and power of eldritch gods, which he’s used to erect a Hotel California force field around the town.
Dancy goes to confront Fortescue, and her Angel reappears, and Dancy refuses to beg it to take her back, out of wounded abandoned pride and resentment. The Angel’s scream of fury actually scorches a lot of the remaining werewolves to ash, and Fortescue invites her into the basement, where more of the werewolves have been horribly tortured to death to appease the dark gods of the Book. Fortescue tries to convince Dancy to join him. She steals his confederate cavalry saber, and Dancy uses it to strike the Book in half. Instead of severing the connection of the Gods to the Book, Dancy herself becomes the new host of the Book’s powers, and it’s highly ambiguous in the narration whether Dancy understood this would happen or not, whether she was really trying to destroy the book or accepting the offer, or simply telling herself the former while part of her knew the latter.
Dancy atomizes Fortescue and is able to leave the town, with Maisie’s ghost and a resurrected talking blackbird in tow. They travel to a coastal town called Black Hammock, which is basically a cult of an evil mermaid who sacrifices one person a year so that she is able to stay on land in humanism form. Dancy tries to kill the Siren and fails; she grows tentacles from the wound when Dancy stabs her hand. Dancy refuses to cut a deal with the siren to leave, but when she attacks during the ceremony, she kills a woman with a gun - Dancy assumed she would execute the intended victim, but in fact she was the victim’s mother, planning to kill the Siren herself. Later, Dancy convinces one of the book’s many contributors, an entity called Mother Hydra, to tell her how to kill the Siren, and does so.
She then spends a long time alone, killing monsters who had somehow pissed off any of the Book’s members, until eventually she was almost entirely under the book’s sway. Maisie, who at this point had become corporeal again thanks to a freak incident in a revival tent, and the blackbird have both been having strange dreams of Dancy, and they all converge in an abandoned barn. Maisie reveals that she is in love with Dancy, while Dancy fights a desperate inner struggle with the Book that Maisie is hers, not the Book’s, while outwardly raving and threatening. Dancy stabs herself in the shoulder, and eventually Maisie skewers her on a pitchfork in self-defense, killing her.
Dancy goes to hell, which she experiences as an endless expanse of perfect empty white, in which she is a night-sky-filled “ugly blot of something” ruining the perfect nothing, and also as a maze. Her angel sometimes appears, and demands that Dancy fight for it again, but Dancy repeatedly refuses. She experiences a hallucination of waking up naked in the swamp, fighting an alligator for her life, and getting a ride from a mysterious person known only as The Bailiff, who gives her a jacket and takes her to the motel where Maisie is staying. They fuck, and then a pair of incestuous lesbian twins dressed like an SPN parody (who originally prayed to Shub-Niggurath to resurrect Dancy) kidnap Maisie to use as leverage against Dancy. Dancy finds them across town in a cabin, and Hunter and Carson Nolastname explain that they want Dancy to go to the lower dreamlands and steal the Djinns’ key of shackles from the homeland of the Ghul in exchange for Maisie’s life. Dancy is dubious from the outset, convinced that 1) this plan is dumb as shit, and 2) they’re going to kill Maisie anyway. There’s a lot of bloody fighting. Even though the twins have Dancy’ knife, Dancy skewers one of them in the ankle with a corkscrew. As the standoff deteriorates into bloody screaming, defiance, and futility, and the blackbird summons a whole pack of Ghul to attack the twins (and the Ghul then attack everyone). Dancy realizes that the twin she stabbed with the corkscrew has clean boots again. The vision dissolves, and her angel is there, once again demanding her allegiance. Dancy refuses.
Sample Journal Entry: who you calling unmannered
Sample RP: skulking
Special Notes:i'm so sorry about this nonsense canon