open/close all folders
The Thunder Bay Council
The Lord of Thunder Bay
She Who Drowns in Moonlight
A powerful Other made out of living water.
Type: Elemental
- Big Good: For the Thunder Bay arc. She's basically concerned with keeping Thunder Bay running smoothly, and dislikes it when people abuse the Practice.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: While she's reasonable overall, she doesn't understand humans, human society, or human needs very well, which can lead to many of her decisions coming across as this.
- Lord of the Ocean: A lesser version of this trope but has command of storms as well as water and the sanctum where she holds council meetings is in the ocean itself. Further, as a Lord she holds an entire city, fighting off all comers.
- Making a Splash: She can control all water across Thunder Bay.
- Murder Water: As an elemental being composed of the element she represents, she's quite capable of using herself to attack.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: She allows Avery to settle down in Thunder Bay, and is generally reasonable as a Lord. She doesn't understand humans very well, though.
Practitioners
Ann Wint
Assistant Lord and cleaner for Thunder Bay; she's among the leadership of the council.
Practice: Chainer and Destroyer
- Action Mom: Mother of two children and a powerful practitioner.
- Cuckold: Her husband sleeps around with younger women, but Ann is not only aware of this, she claims that she doesn't mind.Ann: I really don't care what he does in his free time. He does a fine job fucking me and taking care of the children. Let him think he's getting away with something.
- Dragged Off to Hell: Part of her Practice as a Chainer and Destroyer. She can "condemn" people to realms like the Abyss, which practitioners have historically mistaken for hell.
- Killed Offscreen: She dies during the final fight against the Carmine Faction, with the details being told in an Interlude.
- Number Two: Shares the position of assistant Lord with Deb, she acts more as the enforcer for Thunder Bay's Lord than Deb's role as an assistant.
Beatrice "Bea" Wint
Ann's oldest daughter, who she awakens into the Practice.
Practice: Chainer and Destroyer
- Harmful to Minors: She gets involved in a battle that has her mother die in combat.
- Like Mother, Like Daughter: She has a similar personality to her mother, to the point that Avery refers to her as "Little Ann" before learning her name, though it's implied that a lot of it is due to her trying to directly emulate her.
- No Name Given: For a good portion of the story, even in Ann's personal Interlude, we never learn her name.
Deb Cloutier
One of the assistant Lords.
Practice: Storm Chaser
- Number Two: Shares the role of assistant Lord of Thunder Bay with Ann.
- Pet the Dog: While she's uncompromising most of the time she in her own way comforts Bea after her mother's death and even tells her it's okay to cry.
- Small Name, Big Ego: According to Avery, she overestimates how much power she actually has, and is less an 'assistant Lord' than an 'assistant to the Lord'.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Despite her and Ann viciously fighting and giving the impression that they only barely tolerate one another's presence, she tells her daughter as they're mourning over Ann's body that she considers her one of her best friends.
Florin Pesch
An amiable practitioner who seeks to get on Avery's good side when she arrives in Thunder Bay.
Practice: Puppeteer
- Affably Evil: He genuinely does like Avery and finds Snowdrop amusing, though she realizes this is in part because he's afraid of her, and wants to keep her from becoming a threat by being fair towards her.
- Challenge Seeker: Admits to Avery that once he's dethroned the Lord of Thunder Bay, he'll probably give his throne to an appropriate Musser family scion and go to do the same thing elsewhere.
- The Chessmaster: Describes himself as a long-term planner and this largely bares out in what we see of him, having set up his moves well before Avery even came onto the scene.
- Demonic Possession: Florin's family practice is binding of possessor-type Others who he uses to control Innocents.
- Graceful Loser: Takes his loss to Avery that has him trapped on a Path as just him losing a minor game.
- Manipulative Bastard: His specialty is using mind control on specific individuals to disrupt and destroy whole organizations.
- The Minion Master: When he goes all out he can control crowds of people with his jockeys.
- I Owe You My Life: Chooses to see Avery trapping him on a Path rather than killing him for what it is, an act of mercy, so he gives her a card saying he owes her a favor to be collected in less fraught times, possibly part of him being the social expert.
- People Puppets: His magical practice is "Puppeteer" and he controls people using Jockeys and Doppelgangers.
- The Social Expert: Every interaction he has is handled adroitly and amicably to make sure he isn't making enemies while he's doing so. His abilities with his controlled Others largely seem to be an extension of his understanding of the human mind.
- Victory Is Boring: He doesn't want to actually rule Thunder Bay. He just wants to take it from the current Lord for the sake of the experience and the resources he can turn it into.
- Villain Respect: He's aware of what happened to Lawrence Bristow and Alexander Belanger, and treats Avery with appropriate caution.
Odis Saulsbury
A crotchety old man who was a crotchety young man who killed a monster worse than he grew up to be.
Practice: Black Forest
- Human Resources: What Black Forest practice is, explicitly compared to the witch of Hansel and Gretel. He is a bit of a Hunter of His Own Kind in that he has his busses capture those who hurt people and enjoyed it.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: He's better than his predecessor who targeted the elderly and possibly his successor who targets children. This still makes him an evil, evil man.
- Liquid Assets: His busses drain the memories from those who have hurt others and what's more enjoyed it.
- Meaningful Name: 'Odis'note sounds like odium, perfect for a hateful man.
- Morality Chain: He's somewhat of one to Thea, as his influence is what keeps her from being an even worse person than she is already.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: Odis' practice isn't exactly the most moral, but it's mainly targeted at people at least as bad as he was if not worse.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Points out to Thea that having their practice target terrible people helps against having ideological rivals try to mess it up on principle.
- Professional Killer: His implied past is that of an assassin, such that running bus lines that pickup and Mind Rape people is a step up.
- Retired Monster: Considers himself this, freely acknowledging his past was evil but claiming that his present is much less so.
- Too Broken to Break: The only reason Odis has his practice now is that he was on a magical bus that leached out all the happiness "warmth" the victim had to offer; he had none. So he threw the owner under the bus and took everything she had.
Hugh Legendre
The practitioner equivalent of pest control.
Practice: Sealer and Exterminator
- Almighty Janitor: Played With, he and his family do a legitimately important job of binding and sealing dangerous threats and keeping them from hurting humanity at large. What isn't covered is the respect and power that they should be receiving but aren't.
- Dude, Where's My Respect?: The Legendres as a whole are just a tad bitter about how their work is vital to society, but they get very little respect, mainly because they're not especially cut-throat and they're not evil enough to use serious threats to release the Others they bind as weapons in their negotiations.
- Would Hurt a Child: He handed over his own nephew to an Other who stole children in order to get it bound.
Theodora "Thea" Knight
A woman who lost her childhood to the machinations of an Other.
Practice: Black Forest
- And You Thought It Was Real: She and five friends were trapped in an illusion where they believed that they were playing a Jumanji-like game. Years later, Odis rescued the two survivors and they had to come to terms with the fact that none of the events in the world were real in the first place, except all their deaths.
- Badass Boast: Mentions to the council that she stays out of politics because when she does, she takes people's heads.
- Human Resources: What Black Forest practice is, directly compared to the witch of Hansel and Gretel. Unlike her mentor, Thea targets children, trying to suck elements of imagination and numinosity from them.
- I Choose to Stay: Deconstructed, she liked the world she and her friends were trapped in so much that she chose to kill all those who attempted a rebellion in order to leave.
- Jerkass Realization: Seems to have a minor realization of her past asshole behavior as she councils some kids she's hanging out that they shouldn't be mean to their friends.
- Liquid Assets: Siphons out imagination, which she calls the tendons of the soul, and has been doing so for some given the strength of her power battery.
- Never My Fault: When she has the Ornithologist attempt to kill everyone in her pocket dimension, she tells Verona and Avery that the deaths of the children are on their heads for their interference, even though she's responsible for the whole situation in the first place.
- Trapped in Another World: Her childhood was spent in a pocket dimension along with a group of friends. She relished the experience and killed her friends until she was freed by Odis.
- Womanchild: She's around her late 20s but comes off as a petulant teenager in the Council meetings. When entering magical realms and spaces she even takes the form of a child, suggesting that she might still see herself as one on some level.
- World Limited to the Plot: She and her friends were trapped in one for over a decade, picture Evil!Narnia and you're not far off. Only she was on the side of the Evil rulers and systematically hunted down and killed her friends in the front of an army of talking animals. After being freed, and the Other that owned the world was dealt with, she started collecting magical objects that had similarly limited worlds in them and uses them for her own purposes.
- Would Hurt a Child: Siphons off the imagination of children in order to power her practice, and is willing to have them killed in order to avoid having to be responsible for them as Aware.
The Childs Family
Family that deals with incarnations, which includes not only the big things like Death, War, Nature, and Fate, but also concepts like Boredom, Anguish, and Wanderlust.
Practice: Incarnate Contacts
- Chess with Death: The trope is namedropped, as they're explicitly described as the type of magician who could set up such a situation, as they have the contacts necessary to deal with Death.
- Pals with Jesus: A professional variation of this trope, as they're able to put people into contact with powerful anthropomorphic personifications of concepts.
- Portent of Doom: They have Omens not only of Death, but also things like Fortune or Ennui.
Sebastian Harless
A lawyer and Law-magic practitioner who assists with several points of contract law.
- Crusading Lawyer: He says that he has devoted his life to "serving the disadvantaged who would otherwise be in tough legal situations and situations in Practice", and from what we see he lives up to this.
- Good Lawyers, Good Clients: He becomes the girls' go-to reference for magical contract law, and is generally one of the more decent practitioners in the setting.
- Nice Guy: When Lucy is attacked in her home by the Wild Hunt while on a videocall with him, he not only contacts her friends, he stays on the line afterwards to give her moral support so she can recover, and insists on waiving his fees for the session.
Others
Gilkey
A humanoid Other composed entirely of living poison, created by an alchemical accident.
- Bad Powers, Good People: His 'power' is that anything he touches or interacts with, even conceptual things like Practice aimed at him, become tainted and poisoned and eventually wither away and die, to the point of his being a Walking Wasteland. Nonetheless, he's a generally decent person who tries to do his best to minimize the damage he does to the world around him.
- Put on a Bus: Well trapped as an elemental poison inside a primeval beast that intends to keep hunting for years before dying and thus releasing Gilkey, the principles the same of course.
- Blessed with Suck: He's a living touch of death... which he cannot turn off, ever, completely barring him from any sort of normal life.
- Hypercompetent Sidekick: Since She Who Drowns in the Moonlight doesn't understand human society well, Gilkey often has to fill in the gaps as her right-hand man.
- My Greatest Failure: He is the result of a horrible mistake by someone who he considers the previous version of himself; though he doesn't remember much, said blunder killed his entire family.
- Nice Guy: He tries to avoid limiting the damage his poison does to those around him, and when Maricica tries to bribe him with a cure for his condition, he refuses... but she is able to manipulate him by putting him in a position where an innocent person will suffer if he doesn't act.
- Poisonous Person: He is the poison; anything he touches is poisoned and withers away, even inanimate objects.
- Walking Wasteland: When he relaxes, he becomes a diffuse aura of poison over an entire area. And he can't rest in the same place for more than two nights, for fear that it will be permanently blighted.
Ashumare Ashumare
A mysterious friend to children who is happy to help!
Type: Unknown
- Ambiguous Gender: The text refers to them as they/them, and they haven't indicated that they use other pronouns.
- Auto-Tune: Has this quality, their lips and the sound they make don't quite line up, but it's always musical or "sweet to hear."
- Bunnies for Cuteness: If they are a real imaginary friend, then the common children's fondness for fluffy rabbits shaped their appearance.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Has a reputation for this in the local magical community.
- Living Drawing: Appears this way a few times on paper and even a TV screen, showing up as rabbit-shaped scribbles when they're passing on messages for some council member.
- Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Gives off these vibes as they "gets blamed for things little girls and boys do".
- Rhymes on a Dime: All of their dialogue rhymes in some way. The best way to interact with them is to respond in rhyme.
- Verbal Tic Name: Their name is a common refrain in their speech.
Innocents
Sylvia Hayward
Verona's mother, who lives in Thunder Bay following her divorce with Brett.
- Like Parent, Like Child: In terms of personality, Verona takes far more from her mother than from Brett.
- Parents as People: Her divorce with Brett has put a strain on her and Verona's relationship, with the latter feeling that the former doesn't really want much to do with her beyond parental obligation.
- Small Town Boredom: Is noted to have felt stifled living in Kennet, which is why she moved to Thunder Bay following the divorce.
- Strong Family Resemblance: Looks enough like Verona that were it not for her age lines, she could be mistaken for an older sister.
Nora
One of Avery's new classmates in Thunder Bay.
- Animal Lover: Passes the "Snowdrop test" when she finds Snowdrop cool rather than creepy.
- Cannot Talk to Women: She keeps stumbling every time she tries to talk to Avery, and seems to be developing a crush for her.
- Closet Gay: At least at the beginning; she's unwilling to let people know that she's gay because she's not sure she could deal with the attention it would bring.
- Goth Rock: Self-describes as a goth rocker and impresses Avery with a drum solo.
- Official Couple: With Avery, but it takes a while for them to get there.
- Previously Overlooked Paramour: Avery likes Nora, but doesn't consider her a potential girlfriend, since she doesn't fit her usual "type." However, after 14.2, she seems to have developed feelings for her.
- The Quiet One: Is very quiet in school, but opens up to Avery.
- Welcomed to the Masquerade: During the epilogues Avery reveals the Practice to her, and by the final epilogue she's implied to have become a practitioner as well, as she explores various Realms alongside Avery.
