the Fierce & the LintKing's Amber Bits

Anomaly is Fiona's daughter, and this comes through in some ways...but not so much in others. Fiona's been busy, so Anomaly has been left significantly to her own devices.

The way that it's most notable is that she's a rather disturbing young woman. She follows the Sweeney Todd model in that she seldom laughs but often smiles...and it's a small, secretive smile that makes people nervous. Similarly, her smile isn't the only thing secretive about her. She's very big on secrets, actually. She holds a number of secrets very close to her heart - her favorite color (green), the name of her mouse (not an Item or anything, but she has a pet mouse in her room named Aniseed), her lucky number (44), that she finds Lord Rein quite handsome but all of Bayle's daughters simply beautiful, and the word "Loquacious", which doesn't describe her at all but she likes the feel of.

She keeps the door to her room locked, and changes the lock - herself - periodically. Inside her room is a desk, each drawer of which has its own lock, including the secret one in the back. Her dresser, also, has an individual lock for every drawer. She has a safe in the wall, with a combination lock that numbers from 1 to 50, with six parts to the combination. She has a chest at the foot of her bed, locked. Within the chest is a smaller chest, also locked, and it in turn is filled with small locked boxes, in which are small keepsakes and knicknacks...the majority of which belong to her legitimately. Under her rug is a locked trapdoor, which opens to reveal a cubby area - it is *just* large enough for her, padded, with, of course, airholes, and a small magical light - she sleeps there sometimes, or crawls in to read. Needless to say, she's not claustrophobic. At all. There is a locked case in one corner in which she keeps her lock making tools, and whatever new locks she's working on. She has a bookshelf, with sliding wooden covers over each shelf, all locked. The door to her closet? Locked, and within her closet are locked cabinets. And what the heck, give her a collection of exotic handcuffs and other locking devices.

She wears a small locket that requires an even smaller key, within which is simply a tiny mirror.

She wears, as a bracelet, a large keyring, with scores of keys dangling from it. Many of them are the keys to her room. Many others are keys to other things. Some of them are keys she doesn't know what they go to, or to locks that no longer apply, or to things that simply aren't kept locked. She has a key to the case in the library with the family Trumps. She has a copy of the key to the Pattern Room. She has an interesting little key that wiggles when you hold it, as if it's trying to get away. She has a shining silver key that she found in the Hall of Mirrors when she was a child, and has never found a lock for. She has a very, very tiny of a black metal, that weighs at least a pound. She even has the key to the chastity belt that Oberon gave Florimel when she was a teenager, though the chastity belt itself was melted down centuries ago in a ceremony that some still remember fondly. Anomaly knows each key intimately - what each of them looks like, precisely; she knows them by feel, and exactly where each one is on her ring. If anyone has ever done something like work out a spell to teleport one of them off, she would have felt it immediately.

The interesting thing about it is, she's far more interested in locks than in keys, and while she's interested in KNOWING what's behind locked doors and inside locked boxes, she doesn't especially want to take it OUT.

In one way, she's very reliable. If you tell her a secret, she'll keep it. She won't tell *anybody*. She won't even whisper it to Aniseed. She also won't forget it. It doesn't matter if it's an important secret, either...afterall, many of her own secrets might not seem important to someone else. People have, sometimes teasingly, told her to keep something secret just because she does. She doesn't care if they don't always mean it; she keeps them anyway, and adds them to her collection.

Her real name, incidentally, is Annette, but she has a way of Looking at people who use it that has everyone [but Flora] referring to her as Anomaly. Not that her real name is a secret, mind...her SECRET name is Miasma, and she's never told anybody, even her mother.

She has fair skin and deep green eyes, with wild, midnight black hair. She is, of course, fairly small - she is very often still mistaken for a child, an impression she sometimes encourages. Among her skills is definitely contortionism, as she's learned to maximize her ability to fit into small places...people put such interesting things in them. She rarely wears actual black, but wears colors dark enough to be mistaken for it - very deep greens, dark reds, and mahogany browns are her tendencies, preferably in velvety fabrics. Her key ring jingles when she walks (except when she doesn't want it to, in which case it doesn't even when she jumps - she knows it well enough), but that's generally the only thing she likes to have making extra noise. When she does balance out her arm to keep her keys from making sound, she's quite eerily silent.

Her hair was, of course, her mother's red when she was born, but she decided to hide that a very long time ago, and found a dye that not only stays with her hair, but shields her thoughts quite effectively...indeed, with her hair dye, she simply doesn't project psychically. People don't `feel' her when she walks into a room, or stares at someone's back, or even, for that matter, looks them in the eye. Making any kind of psychic connection to her requires physical touch or Trump, and even those are somewhat muted. Of course, her making such a connection to anybody else requires the same, and it takes her a little longer than most to actually activate a Trump in return. She's been using the dye for a very long time, and Fiona's not sure it isn't having a permanent effect.

Her sword, SecretStealer, was actually crafted for her by...well, somebody, I'm sure. Caine might work well, if you're doing him the way we often do, but a good Crafter, to be sure. When her sword touches someone - whether it actually cuts them or not - she learns something about them. Depending on how close it is to their heart, she learns deeper secrets. Its Combat Skill comes in that if she simply touches, say, their sword, as she or they parry, she often gets a sense of what they're about to do next...or sometimes if they have hidden advantages (like an amulet of regeneration)...or, sometimes, things like the name of their trainer or that their technique comes from a small village deep in Eregnor, or something. SecretStealer's psychic resistance is to keep this touch from being a two-way connection - for all that the sword has a psychic resonance, it's very difficult to force a connection to her through it, having to go through both its and her resistances. And, obviously, her own secrets don't leak.

What I want for the `shapeshifting' isn't, really, but they put a lot of things under that so it fit there better than anywhere else I could find; It's hard to see. Rather...it's hard to know exactly where it is. When she's wearing it, people don't tend to notice. When she's holding it - you can tell she has a sword out, but exactly where it's pointed or what angle it's moving at or precisely how fast...all of those get somehow muddled. People - including Anomaly - would be hard pressed to describe exactly what it looks like, also. It's some kind of longish sword, but it could be a full sword, or a rapier, or perhaps a bastard...it might possibly curve, it's hard to tell, or it may have those wound-enhancing waves, though then again it may also be perfectly straight. It's probably basically steel colored, but has been described as grey, black, and red, also. Anomaly finds the hilt by feel, not sight, and it took practice and the fact that the sword is actually bonded to her. Other people trying to pick it up are, frankly, likely to grab the wrong end. It's also worth noting that if somebody else does hold it, it will start learning their secrets, and Anomaly will know them the next time she picks it up. [Fiona, frankly, has never touched the thing. It's not that she's not sure her defences are up to it, but she has no reason to, and she's smarter than to test it without reason. There's just no telling what the thing might pick up.]

Generally speaking, for what it's worth, I'm not actually expecting you to come up with new stuff all the time - if we actually end up in any swordfights, it's safe to assume the edge in combat and some trivia, and if she touches anybody with it outside of a fight...well, that'd be deliberate. I would LIKE it to have some psychometry - mostly just in the sense of being able to pick up, I guess, passive imprints, rather than just things with active psyches. So just tapping a cobblestone or chair or something would be blank, but if an object belonged to someone in particular, or had been used in a very emotionally charged way, she could at least potentially find out by tapping it with her sword. (This also means that if we're fighting zombies, she'd probably be getting some sense of who they WERE, or possibly of what happened to them, which could have good drama/descriptive potentials...but I am, of course, just guessing there might be zombies.)

Oh, as to her wanting to go to Rebma...she's wanted to go to Rebma ever since it happened. She just wants to see it, and, well...to learn Moire's secrets.