Name
Fidelity "Fiddle" Astor
Gender
Female
Age
22, January 10, 1997
Sexuality
Bisexual
Nationality
American
Appearance
Fidelity has long since accepted the fact that daily life is harder for than. Short and slender she has to use her dogs as buffers to keep from being crushed in crowds and knocks objects off high shelves with her cane instead of getting assistance from someone else. She carries herself with a straight back and steady gaze, greeting most people with the same easy smile and wave.
Her clothes run the gamut from light casual wear to black leather and old jeans, Fiddle choosing outfits more for variety than any particular style. Her preferred Shadow World outfit is purposely extravagant and flamboyant to the extreme, Fiddle believing that there's no point in hijacking people's conscious if you're not going to have fun while doing it.
Height
4'8"
Personality
Aimless, reckless, and obsessive Fidelity is caught in the curious position of being able to do whatever she wants and having nothing she wants to do. With no long term goals to reach for she tries to fill the hole inside her with with constant action. The urge to keep everything neat and tidy that had been ingrained in her as a child clashes with her urge to raise hell, her apartment caught in a constant cycle of being totally trashed and furiously scrubbed clean as conflicting compulsions battle against one another.
Fiddle is certainly friendly but there's an undertone to it that can be somewhat off-putting. She'll wave and smile brightly at an a acquaintance even as she peers around them at some non-existent phantom, eyes flitting about during conversations while she nods along. She's almost weirdly friendly, letting total strangers into her home every weekend to party and allowing people to take almost anything they want.
Her access to apparently limitless wealth has imbued her with a dismissive sense charity of charity, aware that she's much better off than most people but not feeling particularly guilty about it. Her family has money and others don't, that's just how life is. She leaves fifty pound tips on twenty pound meals and gives away jewelry to people who comment on it, waving off stammered thanks as she continues on with her day. Replacing it is just a minor inconvenience. She takes money for granted the same way most people do running water, oftentimes stuffing a wad of bills into friend's hands "to get something on your way home."
Arcana
The Emperor
Persona
The Mothman
First sighted by a group of gravediggers, the Mothman seems to be attracted to death and poor fortune. Spotted flying low over forests and haunting highways, one of it's regular haunts was an abandoned munitions factory from the Second World War. Despite its fearsome appearance the Mothman seemed content to stay out of people's way, restricting itself to frightening motorists and picking off the occasional dog.
Until the Silver Bridge collapsed. A single defective eye-bar led to the whole thing tumbling down into the Ohio river, killing 46 people. Two of the bodies were never found. To this day people claim that all sorts of supernatural happenings had occurred in the days leading up to the disaster, visions of it happening before it occurred and visits from ghosts and UFOs and men in black and the Mothman circling the area as if waiting. This is of course ridiculous. The Mothman was likely just a a sandhill crane or unusually large heron, something mundane and not at all a harbinger of bad luck.
Still the legend persists to this day. If you ever find yourself out on some backwoods road at night be careful when you watch the sky. You might find a pair of red searchlights watching you right back.
Skill
Curse. The Mothman uses it's bulk and ability to fly as a form of mobile cover, tanking damage for its user and more fragile allies. It can also curse enemies, making them vulnerable to damage or weakening their attacks.
Equipment
Sword-Cane: A much more ornate version of her real world cane. The hooked head can snag on limbs and bits of clothing to drag or trip people and the blade itself is weighted perfectly to Fiddle's liking. The bottom is spiked, allowing it to be used as a spear or oversized ice pick.
Henry Rifle: The same rifle she grew up shooting. Sixteen .44 bullets (if you load one in the chamber) sent downrange with speed and accuracy. Her preferred way to fight for obvious reasons.
Education
Business BA (Hons), 3rd Year
Biography
Fidelity was born into immense wealth, the scion of a old ranching family and a more recent chemical empire. Her early years were spent bouncing between her parent's properties in Texas and West Virginia, being taught almost exclusively by private tutors and learning to ride horses and handle livestock. It was established early on that she would be inheriting one or both businesses depending on how things went, the young girl accepting her fate without much enthusiasm. She had no interest in learning the finer points of shipping nylon and neoprene around the globe and was better suited to shooting bottles and riding horses than castrating steers. But it was never about what Fiddle wanted. Her existence was a calculated affair designed to ensure both parties involved had an heir.
It was a somewhat lonely existence. What few friends she had she'd be separated from for months at a time as she bounced between states, being taken all over by one parent or another as they went about their mostly separate lives. With neither mom nor dad having much interest in her outside of her studies and general well-being she relied on her relatives for company, a private car dropping her off at all the birthdays and barbecues her parents didn't have time to take her to themselves.
Her favorite relative lived out of the country, working a meaningless upper management position for Astor Chemical Co. in London’s Canary Wharf district. Daniel was more of a parent to Fidelity than her biological ones, taking care of her for a couple months at a time when she needed to be out of the way. Fiddle sat for hours listening to him tell stories about aliens and cryptids haunting the backwoods, absorbing each tale of ghosts invading people’s heads or strange monsters that lurked in back alleys.
Daniel only fueled her interest in the supernatural, letting the girl dig through his collection of grainy UFO sightings and books on the occult. Just a bit of harmless fun, he told her. Strange stories that weren’t true but were good for a late night scare. She remained unconvinced, sure that there was more to the world than people accepted.
Those treasured days came to an end shortly after Fidelity’s twelfth birthday. Daniel had been heading home from work late one night when his elevator failed in a freak accident. He plummeted 15 stories before hitting the ground, reduced to paste almost instantly. A tragic case of bad luck, nothing could have been done. Fidelity took the loss hard, refusing to speak for nearly a month after the funeral. Less than a week after she started to talk Lady Luck spat on her again, a sudden thunderstorm turning the ground to mud while she was out riding. The horse tripped in the muck and toppled over, crushing her leg underneath it’s bulk.
It took more than five hours before she could be found and by the time she was taken to the hospital it was too late. Fidelity’s left leg had lost most of its function, forcing her to use a brace and cane to get around. After a long run of relative kindness Luck had decided to lash out and Fiddle took notice. Chance and probability became fixations for her, taking an interest in all sorts of gambling and numbers games. The randomness of it all intrigued her, watching with interest as people won and lost fortunes in moments.
From that point on she was stuck in a sort of functional dissociation. Her belief in the otherworldly only deepened with her newfound interest in chance, strange figures flitting about at the corner of her vision. She went to a private academy for high school and made up for all the stupid decisions she hadn’t been able to make, throwing herself into the drinking and drug scene with passion. More than one sports car ended up wrapped around a light pole or stuck in a ditch, substances doing nothing to temper her penchant for risk taking. It was a miracle she made it to graduation, her by now divorced parents gladly shipping her off back to London with the hope that she’d sort herself out there.
As long as she was educating herself both had pledged to support her, Fidelity’s self-destructive party lifestyle backed by seemingly limitless funds. She was now free to drift without any purpose save for hedonism.
Affiliations
-Daniel Astor:Fiddle's now deceased cousin and surrogate parent. She keeps a picture of him in her wallet and on her desk in her penthouse.
-Turner and Basker:Her service dogs and chaperones. Trained to help their mistress by serving as bulk to lean on and getting objects that would be otherwise out of reach, as well as defend her when needed. There are few people in the world capable of fighting off nearly four hundred pounds of attack dog and she has yet to one of them.
Relationships
TBD
Character Theme
TBD
1x Like