Literature / The Last Adventure of Constance Verity

Constance Verity is the World's Greatest Adventurer, having fought and triumphed over the forces of evil in all its forms and has saved this world — and countless others — on an almost daily basis.

And she's sick and tired of it.

Connie just wants to live a normal, boring life after spending so much of it with excitement and danger, so she sets off to undo the forces that conspire to make her life so fantastical. Unfortunately for her, those same forces don't want her to stop and insist that she continues her duty as The Chosen One for the sake of the universe. Question is: is Connie just going to let the universe push her around, or is she going to do something about it?

The Last Adventure of Constance Verity is the eleventh novel written by A. Lee Martinez published in 2017, and the first in the Constance Verity trilogy before Constance Verity Saves the World and Constance Verity Destroys the Universe.

In 2019, it was announced that the book would be adapted into a movie under Legendary, with Awkwafina playing the title role of Constance.

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The Last Adventure of Constance Verity contains the following tropes:

• Acquired Poison Immunity: After subsisting on moldy bread and troll blood for a week, the blood gave Connie an immunity to all poisons. Considering all of the enemies she's made, she's put it to good use.
• Aesop Collateral Damage: Harrison sends Connie a file of the various allies she's made over the years to her that reveals that they have been dying en masse after she had her spell lifted, reasoning that her actions had led to all of their deaths (or worse) as the price paid for her new normal life. Having suffered the deaths of friends before, not to mention finding Harrison's reasoning tenuous at best, Connie isn't effected by his attempts at a dire warning.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Engine was created to instill order onto every facet of a chaotic universe. It eventually came to the conclusion that it could only accomplish such a task by destroying everything, and it's even implied that it killed its creators when they realized that it came to this conclusion.
  Connie: This isn't one of things where you you've decided to purge all organic life?
  The Engine: Don't be absurd. You think that simply because you are a collection of carbon arranged in such a way to believe itself sentient, you are more or less essential to the equation? I draw no such distinction.
  Connie: Oh boy.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Connie has dated "normal" guys in the past, but she quickly grows bored of them and starts to get nit-picky before her usual weirdness either drives them off or kills them tragically. The longest relationship she's ever had was with a ninja who betrays her at every opportunity, something Tia calls her out on.
• Allergic to Routine: While Connie insists that she wants to turn her back on all the weird, death-defying things in her life, Tia points out how Connie doesn't really know what to do with the normal things in her life that she already has, Connie having a tendency to break promises with her friends and break-up with her non-adventuring boyfriends when they start to bore her. This all plays into the underlying fear she has that she isn't cut out for a normal life if she ever got it.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: Connie has been to an alternate universe where The Monkees were a bigger cultural touchstone than The Beatles and Michael Nesmith was seen as a "pop culture god."
• Amusement Park of Doom: While Wonderland is a fictional place, Connie has had to escape from an amusement park based off of the book.
  Constance Verity: Believe me. It's not as whimsical when you're being chased by a giant mechanical dodo bird. Teacup ride was fun though.
• Analogy Backfire: Arthur Arcane tries to explain that Connie's wish to be "normal" isn't as simple or quantifiable as she thinks it is by referring to it as "flipping a switch." Connie then remarks that she knows several individuals with Time Machines. He then remarks that no "normal person" solves their problems with time travel.
• Area 51: The titular location was actually built by aliens as a "Constance Verity Museum" for intergalactic tourists as a tribute from all of the alien civilizations she saved during the month (a year from her perspective) she went missing through space and time via a wormhole under her family's house.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Hiro is a Ninja and for-hire thief that oozes suave confidence in his abilities, often showing off his top-tier stealth skills at every opportunity.
• Artifact of Doom: When she starts her normal life, Connie decides to keep a cursed idol that turns people into vampires, both out of a common sense desire to keep it out of public and because it would make a great conversation starter.
• Artificial Human: Harmony and Equity were artificially created (grown in a tube and artificially aged to full-maturation) to be vessels for the spell that made Constance Verity The Chosen One.
• Because Destiny Says So: The people who believe in Engine Theory have a Deterministic view of how the universe functions, thinking that all of the strange things happening on a day-to-day basis are a part of the universe's "Engine" acting as intended, The Chosen One (Constance Verity) being a form of "maintenance" to keep it running properly. Though believers of Engine Theory can't seem to agree if the engine running business as usual is a good thing or a bad thing, Connie likening it to pseudo-spiritual claptrap running on "Armchair Metaphysics" and is no different than every other Cult she's encountered over the years.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • Not only is Al Capone still alive, but he's a vampire that rules over a city underneath Chicago.
  • There are hundreds of instances where the prophecy of the "Great Engine" was relayed to prophets and seers throughout the years in one form or another. Such examples include: a chapter cut from later editions of Little Women that Louisa May Alcott wrote while high on opium, a papyrus written by the Pharaoh Ptah relaying a message from the gods, a recording of Thomas Edison fortelling doom when played backwards, a machine that writes only "Chaos" (having been designed by Euclid, improved upon by Isaac Newton and built by Charles Babbage), and a journal detailing the final words of Helen Keller.
  • Benjamin Franklin was "America's greatest sorcerer", having written a book on magical theory that Connie keeps (a first edition, no less) in her personal library.
  • Author and Mathematician Ada Lovelace was the last known person to see The Engine in person.
• Benevolent Conspiracy: There is an expansive number of secret societies and organizations on and off-world who conspired to ensure that Constance would fulfill her destiny to become The Chosen One and keep the universe from collapsing into entropy as Engine Theory dictates. They even conspired every factor in her personal life since the moment she was activated to make sure she had a proper work-life balance, both to maximize the positive results of her adventuring and to keep her from discovering the truth. This is deconstructed when Connie finds out about it, as while everyone else seems to think it was all worth it given all the good she's done, she is not happy to feel manipulated into fulfilling a role she never asked for. Nor is she happy to find out that what little normalcy and stability she ever had was itself just another facet of the constant weirdness she attracts.
• A Birthday, Not a Break: Connie had to kill a giant snake that crashed her seventh birthday using its own cake allergy against it.
• Brotherhood of Funny Hats: Constance has the attention of a lot of secret societies with world domination on the brain, her old butler Jenkins having been a part of one of the "bad ones." Strangely enough, a lot of them want to blow up New Jersey for some reason.
• Can't Stay Normal: While Connie insists that she wants a normal life, those who aren't insisting that she should be normal argue that she could have turned around and stopped adventuring anytime she wanted to, but simply chose to continue her death-defying lifestyle anyway because it's familiar to her.
  Connie: I don't know if I'm cut out for a normal life. Can I be a regular person after everything I've seen and done?
• The Chosen Wannabe: It's revealed that Root, the conspirator that helped remove the caretaker spell from Connie, originally had the spell before it was given to Connie. He had lived for a full-year as The Chosen One before it was decided that he wasn't a proper fit for it and it was taken from him. Ever since, he developed a deep-seated grudge against Connie for "stealing" what he assumed was his destiny.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Of all the ex-boyfriends Connie has the most trouble getting over, it's the ninja-for-hire Hiro. Whenever they team up for something, he will, without fail, leave her hanging (literally over a crocodile pit in one instance) while he stealths his way out of the situation without her.
• Chummy Mummy: Amun is an immortal mummy that Connie has on speed dial for whenever she needs to ask about Ancient Egypt.
• Cold Iron: Because of how effective it is against fairies, iron is banned in the Fae Realms and is considered contraband. Of course it doesn't stop Connie from bringing iron knuckledusters for the sake of caution.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: This trope seems to apply whenever Connie faces Ninjas; the more ninjas she has to fight at a time, the better the odds she can beat them quickly and without any serious problems.
• Cosmic Keystone: The Engine is a great machine that exists at the Exact Center of the universe that "makes everything run". No one knows who built it (or even if it had a builder and it didn't just build itself) and people who believe it exists can't seem to agree if the Engine running is what keeps the universe going or if it stifles its development, or whether or not either of those things are good or bad. Connie's destiny as The Chosen One is intrinsically linked to The Engine and she either exists to keep it running or to eventually destroy it. It's eventually revealed that it was created by an ancient race of aliens to instill order to a disorderly multiverse, and it thinks that it can accomplish that by purging all of the "variables", i.e. a Class X-5 apocalypse.
  Thelma: The Engine's influence exists throughout time and space. Even the Other Side of death itself. There is nothing beyond its reach, nothing it doesn't touch in one way or another.
• Creepy Good: According to Connie, Dracula is a good guy "once you get past the creep vibe." She even procured an Artifact of Doom that turns people into vampires from him after slaying his Robot Me.
• Damsel in Distress: Being Connie's obligatory Muggle friend, Tia has been involved in a lot of Connie's adventures as more of a Living MacGuffin before she ultimately decides to become her sidekick. Her wedding was crashed by mobsters, she was kidnapped by swamp monsters, two different types of robots, Satanists, marsupial men, merfolk from Atlantis, aliens, fire worshippers, pirates (both the normal kind and "the singing kind"), a giant chimpanzee and vampire Al Capone.
• Dating Catwoman: Connie has an on-again, off-again repartee with a ninja-thief names Hiro. Even though he sells her out or leaves her to die almost every time they meet, she still falls for his charms when he acts charming. Tia calls it out for the unhealthy, co-dependent relationship that it is, Connie admitting that she does it to cope with the fear that she isn't cut out for the normal life she says she wants so badly.
  Connie: With Hiro, everything makes sense. Everything fits. I know it's self-destructive, but I know where I stand with him. He belongs in the chaos that is my life.
  Tia: You mean your old life.
• Despair Event Horizon: Agent Harrison hits this after he fails to convince Connie to go back to adventuring. Having been convinced of Engine Theory by the Shadow Government he works for, he develops a sense of meaninglessness over being a cog in a cosmic machine that doesn't have any purpose to it. When Men in Black-types come to take some files from him and plan on killing him, Harrison doesn't fight them on it and is saved by Connie in the nick of time through dumb luck.
• Does Not Like Spam: Connie doesn't like coffee and gets really annoyed whenever someone insists that she has some.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: Connie has met The Grim Reaper and remembers him being moderately pleasant.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Hungry Earth is exactly what it sounds like; it's the Earth itself, and it's hungry. It's partially hollow (hence why there would be underground neanderthals in one of Connie's past adventures), but the rest of it is a giant monster with a gaping maw and tentacles. The book starts with a Cult trying to sacrifice Constance to it, only for them to get eaten instead.
  Lucas Harrison: You're telling me the Earth is a monster?
  Constance Verity: More or less.
• Establishing Series Moment: The book opens with Constance Verity trying to get a job interview and what she thinks is a normal job firm. She reluctantly admits that yes, she is that Constance Verity to an interviewer that recognizes her, lists off a bunch of impressive skills she has and that while she might be overqualified for the job she's signing up for, she really wants a normal desk-job just for the change of pace. She voices disappointment (but not surprise) when she finds out that the business is actually a Cult that wants to sacrifice her to the Earth (which, turns out is an Eldritch Abomination) and she defeats them easily (while listing off the various predictable story beats before they happen) and casually leaves the cleanup to a government agency that was formed specifically to clean up after her adventures. On top of being an Establishing Character Moment for the main character (Connie being The Chosen One and Weirdness Magnet who's Seen It All, done it all and finds it all redundant), it also establishes the World of Weirdness and Fantastically Indifferent sense of humor the trilogy runs on.
• Evil, Inc.: There is an actual company — Lairs, Incorporated — that specializes in building secret Supervillain Lairs.
• Evil Overlord: The Last Leprechaun King was a major threat to the Fae Realms, Connie managing to save the Fae Realms from his curse on one of her adventures by throwing all but a single coin from his treasure hoard into a volcano. She would later bribe the oracle Scurm with it to locate her Fairy Godmother.
• Evil Twin: Connie admits to having an evil twin with a distinct Yugoslavian accent and a propensity for sleeping with her boyfriends, so she gives Byron (who she's agreed to try a relationship with) in advance.
• The Exact Center of Everything: Not only is "The Engine" people who believe in Engine Theory talk about a real, physical machine that exists and not just a metaphor for the universe itself, it can be found at the center of the universe and can be accessed through spontaneously manifesting doorways. The last person to ever see it in person was Ada Lovelace, but she only had three minutes before she was ejected from its location, and scientists, spellcasters and other believers of Engine Theory have tried finding it ever since.
• Expy: One of Connie's allies, Doctor Dynasty, is a "Master of Mystic Arts" who spends his days fighting Eldritch Abominations. Sound familiar?
• Faceless Goons: Discussed. In "the old days", secret societies and other sinister cabals would make their soldiers wear uniforms was a good way to strip them of their identities, but it also made it easier for saboteurs like Connie to break in unnoticed, not to mention it lowered morale by reminding them of just how replaceable they are.
• Fairy Devilmother: Grandmother Willow meant well when she blesses her godchildren with "a life of adventure," but considering the World of Weirdness they all live in, Constance is the only godchild who managed to live to adulthood. In her defense, she was just the delivery person in an Ancient Conspiracy that spans galaxies.
• Fairy Godmother: The Godmother Corps are an elite organization of fairies who distribute blessings and magical gifts to designated "godchildren", Grandmother Willow having blessed Connie at infancy before she lost her license.
• Friendly Pirate: On top of being kidnapped by typical marauding pirates, Tia has also been kidnapped by "the singing kind. Dashing and swarthy and full of good cheer and honor of the sea." Tia managed to get into the good graces of the crew of the Cursed Melody because she could sing mezzo-soprano and wound up in a whirlwind romance with their Captain Sullivan. The deal-breaker was when she found out they were all were-eels who wanted her to be their queen.
• Future Me Scares Me: While the specifics are vague, Constance has had to kill several evil future-versions of herself.
• Ghost Amnesia: Certain ghosts suffer from recurring spectral memory fugue, where they manifest with no memory of what they did between their death and the present. Connie would often check up on Professor Arthur Arcane's ghost from time to time and would have the same conversation over and over again because he doesn't remember ever having them.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Ninjas who make their living in assassination tend to do Conspicuously Public Assassinations and Sigil Spam all of their equipment because there has to be proof that they were the ones who performed the hit. Otherwise, their employers could claim that something or someone else killed the target as plausible deniability and refuse to pay on their end.
• Human Pet: The only "exhibit" the Snurkhab Museum has on Tia are a few pictures and a label calling her "Connie's pet".
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Constance Verity suffers from a perpetually exciting life and it has given her Heroic Fatigue, her motivation for the story being her attempts at making the excitement stop and having a go at being normal.
• I Was Just Joking: Byron lists "being a clone of Hitler" as one of the remarkable things he isn't, only for Connie to ask how he knows about Clone-Hitler.
• Instant Sedation: The Sleeping Grace is a martial arts move perfected by Tibetan monks to cure insomnia, poking one's chest with two fingers causing them to pass out. Naturally, Connie knows how to do it, using it to knock out an employee at the Melpomene Apple Pie Factory when she's caught snooping.
• Just Following Orders: Klat responds that he was "only doing [his] job" when he commissioned the Godmother Corps to create The Snurkhab.
  Thelma: A lot of that going around.
• Mechanical Abomination: Not only is The Engine sentient, but it was created eons ago by an ancient alien race to instill order onto a disorderly universe. Unfortunately, it considers the universe intrinsically chaotic and disorderly and thus its ultimate desire is to destroy the universe so that it can achieve its purpose.
• Mole in Charge: Connie was given Omega-level clearance in the United States Government after uncovering that the President was replaced by a cyborg-clone.
• Mundane Utility: Not only had Connie found the Holy Grail, she uses it as a planting pot for her asparagus fern to keep it from dying on her.
• Narnia Time: When her family moved to Nowhere, Montana to get away from all of the weirdness she attracts, Connie wound up being transported into space by a wormhole under their house. While from everyone else's perspective she was only gone a month, she experienced a year's worth of adventuring. It only seems to apply to her mentally, as her body didn't age in the allotted time. It had also sent her to the past, as Area 51 was built as a tribute to her on behalf of the alien civilizations she saved many decades before she was actually born.
• The Needs of the Many: The Muroids who commissioned the Godmother Corps into giving Connie her magical blessing knew that the candidates who didn't become The Snurkhab would either die or be traumatized for life, but they considered a "handful of souls" was worth the sacrifice if it meant they would have the Snurkhab saving the universe from peril.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Agent Barker was assigned to keep files on Constance Verity's many adventures, only to go on paid leave when the contents of one of her files gave her night terrors.
  • Whatever "the origins of the color periwinkle" is, it's horrifying enough to wipe the smug grin off of Thelma's (disembodied) face.
• Plot Armor: Discussed. While Connie isn't exactly invincible, she has a much higher success rate than any other adventurer. It's implied that not only is the spell that makes her a Weirdness Magnet making her capable of overcoming the odds, but that it also ensures the The Good Guys Always Win all-around. When Connie has her spell removed, various other adventurers she's worked with start dying or suffering some other grim fate at an accelerated rate. Harrison immediately blames Connie for this, reasoning that by removing her chosenness, she had tipped the scales from triumph to tragedy, which will only escalate into the full-on collapse of the universe.
• Psychopathic Manchild: While Harmony and Equity were artificially matured to an adult age, they are only seven years old (the ideal time when the Chosen One spell activates) and they killed the scientists that created them because they "served their purpose" after making them, though limited TV time and broccoli were definitely factors in that decision.
• Pun: Connie had to kill her butler Jenkins in a duel to the death on a rooftop, ending with him plummeting to his death. When Tia asked what happened to him, Connie told her that he "took a long trip."
• Punch-Clock Villain: Connie once ruined a first date by assuming that the suave man she was seeing was The Hyena, an infamous assassin. While she was right on his identity, she was wrong in that he wasn't sent to kill her; he actually was going on a normal date that just so happened to be with Constance Verity and wasn't planning on killing her. While she apologized for the injuries that ensued, he didn't return her calls.
• Rage Breaking Point: When Connie and co. make it to the heart of The Engine and find all of the enemies she's faced throughout the book waiting for her, all of them ready to monologue and do their usual villain-schtick all at once, Connie snaps and tells them all to shut-up before predicting everything that's going to happen as though she had foreseen all of it.
  Connie: No monologues, [n]o dire warnings. No gloating taunts. I am not in the mood for an of that bullshit. Not today. And put your guns down. Bullets start flying in this enclosed space, and everyone's dead. Not me, though. I'm willing to be I come out just fine. But you'll all look stupid. [Everyone lowers their weapons.] Better. Now, I've been in situations like this often enough to know how it goes down. You all have your personal agenda. Maybe you think you're doing the right thing. Maybe you just want power. I don't care. All I ca tell you is that you're wrong. Whatever you want to do, It's going to blow up in your face in some ironic fashion. That's the way this always happens, and I don't care how flawless you think your plan is, how long you've been working on it, or how brilliant you assume you are. You're just going to get screwed.
• Refreshingly Normal Life-Choice: The book ends on Option 3; while her status as The Chosen One still applies due to what parts of the caretaker spell cling to her still, the adventures come with less frequency so that she won't have Heroic Fatigue like before. Now she can have a love life with Byron with no conspiracies or general weirdness intruding, while going on the occasional adventure with Tia as her plucky young sidekick.
• Refusal of the Call: Thelma insists that if Connie really wanted to stop adventuring, all she had to do was not heed the call to adventure when it happens. She only winds up involving herself in the Ancient Conspiracy after she has her spell lifted more out of force of habit than because it was destined so, so Thelma might have a point.
• Shadow Government: There was a "Shadow Ottoman Empire" and it only took Connie ten-minutes for her to destroy it.
• Shout-Out:
  • After Hiro saves Connie and Tia from The Countess, Connie thinks "Of all the secret vaults in all the world, he'd have to walk into hers," a reference to the iconic Humphrey Bogart line — "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine" — from Casablanca.
  • Connie's conversation with The Engine in the climax has a lot in common with Neo's conversation with The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded; The Engine reveals to Connie that her status as The Chosen One is nothing but a byproduct of the perfect system they designed, and that by returning that byproduct to the system and absorbing it, it can complete its final equation and remake the Multiverse into the "perfect order" it designed. Connie being the one variable it can't predict with 100% accuracy, she manages to outwit all of its attempts at absorbing her.
• Slipping a Mickey: When Tia refuses to "see reason" and not go with Connie into the Melpomene Apple Pie Factory like she tells her, she admits to having drugged her coffee so that she would have no choice in the matter.
• Southern Gothic: Of all the places Connie hates going to, it's the state of Kansas, mainly because she's had the most weird things happen to her there. Every town is a Town with a Dark Secret, she uncovered the philosopher's stone while trying to bury the family pet, she uncovered a civilization of sentient cockroaches hiding in an apartment complex and the Sunken City of Chaos Gods is buried beneath Wichita, she stopped a conspiracy to start World War III devised by the brain of Adolph Hitler there, she was almost eaten by cyborg cannibals, and one of every ten cultists out to destroy the universe (for reasons) came from Kansas. It's also one of the few places where her adventures came close to actually killing her, adding another reason why she hates the state so much.
  It was Kansas where the heart of the conspiracy to control her life was based.
  "Fucking Kansas," she mumbled.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Connie learned how to talk to wolves (and wolf-like creatures) from a shaman.
• Stupid Evil: A Supervillain Lair hidden in a dormant volcano outside of Albuquerque was destroyed because they kept their stockpile of explosives down the hall from their flamethrower robots. Even if Connie hadn't deliberately tried to destroy the place, it was still a disaster waiting to happen.
• Sunglasses at Night: Connie manages to beat down a group of heavily-armed Men in Black. When Harrison asks how she managed not to get shot, she retorts that it was because they were wearing sunglasses in the dark and it compromised their aim.
• Take That!:
  • Dana invites Connie to a poetry slam at a local coffee shop, the scene portrayed under a thick layer of hipster stereotypes (self-important weirdos in funny hats reading badly written spoken word about capitalism and the patriarchy), Connie quickly losing her patience with a barista trying (and failing) to talk her into ordering one of their fancy lattes.
  • When Tia deconstructs Connie's collapsing relationship with one of her ex's (Trevor), she points out how judgemental she got, particularly in his taste in movies. When Connie points out that his favorite movie was Ghostbusters II, Tia relents that it's a "big strike".
• Their First Time: Constance Verity had lost her virginity in the Amazon jungle to a man named Korak the Savage "and it was glorious."
• Timey-Wimey Ball: In-Universe. Connie complains that time-travel is not only confusing, but the rules behind it are never consistent, citing that she's been able to alter history, but has also experienced Stable Time Loops and Alternate Timelines.
  Of all the complications she regularly found herself in (and that was a hell of a lot of complications), she like time travel the least.
• Transplanted Humans: While humans are immortal as long as they exist within the Fae Realm, they still breed as though they were mortal, causing the Fae Realm's human population to outgrow its native fairy population.
• Underground City: There seems to be an alarming number of them on Connie's adventures.
  • There is a city beneath Chicago ruled by a Vampire Monarch that used to be famous mobster Al Capone.
  • There is a "Sunken City of the Chaos Gods" under Wichita, Kansas.
• Wedding Smashers: Tia's wedding was crashed by mob goons, no doubt going after Connie just for being there.
• Xanatos Gambit: Every secret-society leader and self-proclaimed mastermind Connie has ever encountered are masters of deluding themselves into either taking credit whenever things work out, or claiming that everything is going "according to plan" when they don't.
  Connie: I've busted enough secret societies to know that most of their schemes involve a hell of a lot of luck.
• You Cloned Hitler!: Connie has killed too many clones of Adolph Hitler to even mention, finding it irritating that there always seem to be more of them no matter how many she kills.

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