madxprofessor

[neathbowprideflag]

so im looking at articles to figure out the logistics of mail delivery in the neath and

Other experiments were more radical. An electric parcel van was trialled in the City of London in 1894. A steam driven van carried the mails between London and Reigate for nine weeks in 1897 but it struggled with the weight. (source)

and now im thinking of red science-powered parcel vans. your mail will get to you fast but it might also blow up.

[sith-shenanigans]

Amias Arling | The Calescent Inquisitive

[art by Gaudeamus_Igitur on Toyhouse]

Profile:

Ambition: Heart’s Desire

Primary Quirk: Subtle 12

Secondary Quirks: Steadfast 10 / Maganimous 10 / Ruthless 10

An individual of indistinct but not particularly mysterious gender. Watchful and Persuasive. Uses they/them pronouns.

Correspondent, specialized as a Crimson Engineer. Married to the Infamous Mathematician and Roguish Semiotician, forming an Endlessly Invigorating Union.

Their in-game profile can be found here.

History:

Previously the Artful Detective, having come to the Neath chasing a disinherited, indebted Society lady. After a stay in New Newgate caused by a sudden attack of sympathy for the target of their investigation, they escaped and began their career below working with the Honey-Addled Detective. They were satisfied to spend most of their time on Moloch Street for a few months, with occasional forays into Veilgarden to satisfy their more artistic side (‘artful’ was always a bit of a double meaning), but the deeper mysteries of the Neath drew them in before long. Courier messages for a few extra moon-pearls—but if you steal them, you get to read them. Expand your social circle, and you have so many more contacts for your cases. (And while you’re climbing the social ladder, you might even make a true friend or two; they still exchange letters with the Cloistered Diatomist.)

For a little while, it seemed like they might turn towards the Great Game. People are puzzles, they’re fond of saying, and their moral streak and sense of propriety don’t usually apply to the people they set out to betray. But the more they got used to the Neath, the less they found they cared about the Surface powers and their secrets—except that those secrets could be currency.

A sponsor took notice of their dogged pursuit of information and suggested that they join an expedition to the Forgotten Quarter. An expedition that, it soon came out, they would be leading. When they got their hands on the Correspondence Stones (before Virginia swooped in, thank you), they felt a spark that grew into a slow-burning obsession. The symbols that marked the Bazaar’s spires; the language of suns.

Alongside this, the woman they had been chasing—no longer another disinherited lady, but a Cordial Huntress, and one of their most vitriolic friends—had passed on rumors of a card game that would grant the winning player their heart’s desire. Those rumors began to pan out. They came into possession of a Cardsharp Monkey and made arrangements with a Bishop. They continued their archaeological pursuits in the Sunken Embassy, and earned enough brass to buy a spread of secrets that would take them from their drafty room to lodgings in the Bazaar. They got closer to Court with the sole intention of putting on the Topsy King’s impossible opera, and were nearly bludgeoned to death by a mob after their ‘practice run’ of an original symphony in the Correspondence.

When they returned from Venderbight—the opera not being appreciated by the Empress—and then Port Carnelian, it became apparent that their exile had overlapped with Benthic’s most troublesome pair of scholars: the Infamous Mathematician and the Roguish Semiotician. Their renewed courtship was the terror of the University; the marriage was a brief respite. Especially when the three went directly from their honeymoon to a zee voyage, allegedly for research. (The Mathematician and Semiotician certainly got some done. Their new spouse was busy convincing a One-Time Prince of Hell that they were far more terrible and callous than it; before and after that, they were keeping the ship running, though they spared as much time as they could to look over the Mathematician’s analyses of the places where zee became mirror and the currents that caused and ruined them or listen to the Semiotician’s delightfully unwise theories about drownie-songs.)

This peace didn’t last. Shortly after, at the conclusion of a line of lexical near-death experiences and brushes with madness, the ex-Detective penned a work that did to the University what their compositions had done to Court, and it was clear that they had moved on from murder cases and missing heiresses for good.

They followed this up by leaning on their place at the cutting edge of a new science, cementing their possession of a laboratory they badly needed, and only then—when they finally had an actual leg to stand on, academically speaking—delivering the dreadful news: they had been solving one last case all this while, and the Senior Reader’s murderer was none other than Summerset’s Provost.

This went over very badly, but Benthic argued a strong case against turning them out of the lab. It would, at this point, hurt the university more than it protected it. Perhaps it would be enough to shutter the planned Department of the Correspondence—in accordance with the Masters’ wishes—and keep away the students. And revoke funding, of course. Academic marginalization. The organized cold shoulder from both colleges. There would obviously not be a professorship. But so long as they were, on paper, someone’s hired and entirely-non-University-affiliated assistant… proper Correspondents aren’t an echo a dozen. Ones who will turn out research without commensurate pay, even less so.

There was a bittersweet sort of celebration at a certain flat in the Bazaar, that night. What they ended with was much less than they could have gotten—but it wasn’t the nothing they could have been left with, so long as they kept up the facade that it was something much more insulting. After all, who can bear being stripped of status without being stripped of the obligations that go with it?

Some fires burn slowly. The Calescent Inquisitive knew they could live with being one of them.

Personality:

Amias is amiable and charming, but in the somewhat nervewracking way of someone who regularly sits at Scandal 7 and doesn’t care until exile is nearly imminent. Their curiosity serves them well socially, as does their previous occupation; getting people to talk about themselves, and listening with genuine interest, are some of their best skills. They consider themself a “former introvert”—in reality, they just find the Neath’s social atmosphere a lot less discouraging. They want things on the other side of convention, and to an extent always have; what they could never get away with on the Surface is often only discouraged below. If you’re the exact right kind of unapologetic, you can pull it off.

They are, as a rule, exceptionally patient with their own plans, if much less so with others’, and too clever for anyone’s own good. They’ll spend months setting up affairs to avoid blowback they can’t handle, but they’ll also break into the Constables’ headquarters just to solve all the unsolved cases and leave the files stacked nearly on a desk.

Unsurprisingly for someone pursuing the Marvellous, the Calescent Inquisitive is best described as driven. If something interests them, they’ll pursue it, and everything else be damned. With that in mind, the rest of their contradictions fall into place; they believe in loyalty and a certain kind of propriety—if one that only ever aligns with Society’s by accident—and they make some effort to care about most of the people they meet, but they have a set of priorities, and they don’t feel the need to make those priorities fit anyone else’s. While they’d prefer to achieve whatever they’re focusing on with the minimum possible amount of harm, they won’t discard that focus for law or money or ethical qualms. Sometimes, at best, they’ll reevaluate what they want more.

For someone with such a defined list of priorities in their head, though, they don’t know themself as well as they think. Those priorities don’t help them self-analyze so much as stand in for it—they’re often unaware of their own emotions or desires, shrugging off all but the strongest and most consistent. They consider grudges inconvenient; they enjoy the Neath’s frequently-bizarre luxuries, but with a kind of patient efficiency the Bohemians would (and often do) find slightly unsettling. They take a surprising number of people to bed, but they don’t understand why people insist on gossiping about it—they’re not going to stop, unless their spouses decide it’s a problem, and there’s rarely any kind of great secret in it. They lie freely, if they feel the need, but rarely break promises. Hurt them, and they might well forgive you… just as soon as you’re no longer a threat. Everything is either a passing fancy or a project.

One might almost think that they didn’t start playing the Marvellous to win their heart’s desire—or even, as they’ve suggested, to discover the boundaries of what the Masters can grant—but to find out what it was.