GORMGHLAITH MUIR



PLAYED BY: l.amoureuse.de.le.fantome@gmail.com

RACE: Fey/Clanless (She's largely a solitary faerie, but would choose the Unseelie Gentry over the Seelie any day.  But at this moment she's very interested in pretending to be a vampire, because she's writing (she thinks) a book on them.)

HANDS OF POWER: Glamour Like all faeries, glamour comes natural to her, but she's not so great at glamouring other things, because she's never really had to. She's quite skilled at glamouring herself, though.  However, the iron in NYC really gets to her and it fatigues her, making it so that it takes more energy to glamour herself.  And with feet like hers this is not a good thing.

MERITS: Performance (Dance), Seduction, Kenning, Intelligent: She's sort of bright (she gets things quickly, and she's cunning), curious, and in general a sort of innocent. While, yes, she's sort of gullible, she quickly figures out what's going on.  Emotional, sensitive, and highly intuitive.  And a pretty good dancer, when it comes right down to it.

FLAWS: Pride, unshakeable self-confidence and happy-go-luckiness, and she loses her temper easily.  She's too nonchalant about other people's tender spots (like, she calls anything that was human a human, no matter how altered) and too fierce about her own (Leanan Sidhe?  Bite me!  Succubus!  Am not!  And so on) She is also a newborn of sorts as she has only been 'out' since the 70s, aside from her brief excursion just before the French Revolution.

MEANING OF HER NAME: Gormghlaith means 'sadness', Muir means 'fen'

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: A very petite young woman—just beneath 5'2'' due to her short legs, which are most commonly hid beneath long skirts, very difficult to disguise in this modern age when long skirts are uncommon and the blasted iron in the cities keeps her glamour constantly second-rate.  But then, if you had a humanoid torso and goat's legs, we reckon you'd be kinda on the small side also. Unglamoured, she's got very sleek goat's legs, and generally off in Scotland, she would have trusted farm families shoe her like a horse just because she's so unused to being on her feet—water fey and walking?  The terms are mutually exclusive!—but here in NYC the faithful (you know, the ones that still say "Wee Folk") are hard to  find.  Impossible, in fact.  So the constant walking has got her understandably grouchy with people she doesn't care for. (In other words, this glaistig's not one to split hairs with—um, hooves.)  Her skin is beige, not very pale, per se; but up close all the little blue veins are very visible, as though her skin is translucent (you try being an etheric being sometime).  Her hair is long and blonde and streaming, very fluid; all the bones in her face are pointed, and her eyes are black, and heavy-lidded.  Glamoured, she makes it so that her eyes look human, but unglamoured each is totally blacked out and quite glittery, with a feral gleam.  Her hands are very slim, and she too is very slim, and ultimately rather sexless, without sizeable breasts. Her neck is unusually long and thin, and her teeth poke out from her ears, pointed.  All of her bones are prominent, but not in a way that suggests anorexia.  This is typically fey.

CHARACTERISTICS: Of personality, she is playful, demanding, and generally very quiet. She watches people and observes, and whenever her unpredictable faerie nature gets a hold of her she interferes to amuse herself.  Water fey are the most emotional there are, but unfortunately this most often leaves her slightly confused.  When she is tired she is grumpy, and she can be sarcastic in a very soft-spoken, non-sarcastic-sounding way. She is also very curious, and a little condescending sometimes.

HISTORY: The Past - A Scottish water faery who lives in fens and marshes, Gormghlaith was a nameless entity who usually got confused between Shellycoat and Lhiannan Sidhe back home.  Actually, neither were in her home marshes; she did both the luring away and the lurid blood-drinking all by herself, and gave the remains to an ever-delighted kelpie that lived near her.  Then, of course, one day she was having a grand old time misleading four young men—three in a group, one elsewhere—leaving them hopelessly mired in the, uh, mire.  The three young men she couldn't touch—they wore their jackets inside out.  The fourth was a very pretty amber-eyed dandy who wasn't too much taller than she, which she liked.  However, while she watched, he proved himself to be a blood drinking human.  Intrigued by the prospect, she watched as he drained each of them, then she stepped out (customary green dress cloaking any strangeness).  She could tell from the way he stared at her that he had the Sight, and that he still thought she was human.  What was the word for this kind?  Oh yes…vampire.

She told him he was a vampire.  He agreed readily and leaned forward to drink her blood.  She saved him the trouble. After that, life was never really the same. She packed up (i.e., got herself shoed) and went off to France.  She became entranced by ballet and depressed that she could never have pulled it off without serious glamour.  So serious glamour she tried. She liked it very much indeed; glaistigs, after all, lure men to dance with them before drinking their blood.  So then she learned to dance. She danced with the court and glamoured herself to look just like any other noblewoman when, oh, dear, the French decided they didn't like their court anymore.

Some excursions with a human mob and an iron knife sent her back to Scotland to nurse her pride and ego. Then one day she was talking to the resident kelpie, who remarked that the pretty human she'd given him (the one that had been special in that it never decayed, the vampire) had disappeared.  Knowing this could only mean he'd been revived, she skipped off to the marshes of Louisiana.  (Because she liked French still, but didn't want to go to France because there was too much a chance of meeting that vampire of earlier.)

This was all good fun until she got into a fight with an ushtey and left in a hurry.  She waltzed right into a bookstore, actually, and what did she find?  The oddest thing.  It was a book that had just been published.  And it wasn't really very good, actually.  But the subject matter was vampires, and this interested her greatly. She dawdled all around New Orleans for a good amount of time (that was where they were in the book, wasn't it?) before she got sick of the place and headed off to New York, having heard rumours of them being there.  In fact, she soon found, there were other faeries there, too, and she figured that if her vampire guise failed (how could it, though? she thought, though then she is very proud) she could always go pout prettily to some of the Host and go off with them.

Since she has decided, after finding no vampires like the one she saw in Scotland off in New Orleans, to write a novel that is more informative in New Orleans, her muddled, unformed plan (all very clear to her) is to pretend she's a vampire and get in on the real humans' good sides.  Well, if they have them.

SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET AND THE LIKE: Skeletons?  Bah, no.  They're far too messy, and besides she travels so much; but then the Gentry have always been somewhat of collectors, haven't they?  It was only the kelpie that liked to keep skeletons. Of course, except for the vampire, who never became a skeleton…Oh, dear!  You mean secrets.  Yes, that's right, she has some nasty ones. Like, the fact that if that pretty French dandy aristocrat bloodsucker is in New York, he'll still have the Sight, and want to go after her, but…no worries!  No worries.


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