"I'm Constance Danger Verity. I've defeated magical Nazis in four different alternate realities, and saved the King of the Moon from a literal army of ninja assassins. I can do anything."
— Constance Verity
The Constance Verity Trilogy is a book series by A. Lee Martinez. The first book was published in 2017 and the last book was published in 2022.
Set in a world where every Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror plot you can imagine is a day to day occurrence, the books follow the extraordinary life of Constance Verity, or Connie to her friends. She's the World's Greatest Adventurer, the Chosen One of every prophecy, the Hero of every battle between good and evil, whether she wants to or not.
The Constance Verity book series:
- The Last Adventure of Constance Verity
- Constance Verity Saves the World
- Constance Verity Destroys the Universe
Tropes prevalent across the whole series:
- Ancient Artifact: Connie keeps a personal hoard of unusual objects from her adventures in her apartment, including a book-shelf full of grimoires, the last gold coin of the Last Leprechaun King, a cursed idol that induces vampirism, a petrified snake that grants wishes, an alien ray gun, a part for a time-machine given to her by her future self for reasons she'd need later, etc. After she has her spell lifted, the first thing she does when she gets home is pack all of them up and sends them to various allies and acquaintances that would get more use out of them than her.
- The Chosen One: Constance Verity is "The Snurkhab", a sort of Messiah Archetype who's destined for greatness, a grand, intergalactic conspiracy having been established to ensure that she fulfills her destiny and save the universe(s) from whatever threatens it. In her case, it makes her into a Weirdness Magnet that has to slay every monster, unearth every Ancient Conspiracy and free every oppressed civilization she stumbles across. Root describes her as a sort of "corrective measure" for a universe that requires constant maintenance. In the climax of the first book, it's revealed that her status as the Chosen One is the result of an anomaly within The Engine's attempts at instill order onto a disorderly multiverse, making her "the embodiment of everything unpredictable."Tia: Connie carries the caretaker mantle.
The Guardian: The what?
Connie: I'm a cosmic lynchpin that keeps the universe from falling apart. - Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: The world has so many secret societies — both evil and benign — that it's a wonder that they aren't all busy going to war with each other instead of Constance. And that's not even going into Area 51, mind-controlling fungus, androids, the Loch Ness Monster (which Connie had to save four times), The Great Engine that regulates the universe, supervillains, etc.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype: The titular Constance Verity is what a Regular Caller looks like after a while. Having heeded the Call to Adventure since she was seven years old, she has been at the center of every Ancient Conspiracy, mythical prophecy, fantastical war and cosmic event you could possibly imagine. Being the protagonist of every story comes with a lot of Plot Armor and interesting stories to tell, but it also makes her a Weirdness Magnet for every evil plot, two-bit thug, savage beast and other dangerous things that think it's a good idea to pick a fight with her, often for no good reason. Having Seen It All, she's Genre Savvy enough to know how everything plays out, but she still has to endure all of the cliches everyone else insist on playing out. Since the novelty of the fantastical is so common for her, she prefers in relishing in the more ordinary aspects of her life between adventures... except she discovers that the more ordinary parts of her life was itself fabricated by yet another conspiracy that she has to uncover and dismantle.
- Genre Savvy:
- Having been in every high-octane plot you could imagine, Connie can predict where the story is going as it happens. She in particular finds the Genre Blindness of her countless foes mildly annoying and will usually recite their own villainous monologues back at them before they can even say them, accurately assess their Evil Plans and (when she's especially annoyed) point out exactly what's going to happen to them in the vain attempt at skipping steps.
- To a lesser extent, Tia's many adventures as Connie's tagalong (both as a sidekick and Damsel in Distress) have given her a form of savviness herself.
- Hero of Another Story: While Connie is The Chosen One, she isn't the only adventurer out there thwarting disaster. There's Professor Arthur Arcane (ghost-expert), Dr. Ishiro Hirata (the world's leading Kaiju expert and mech-pilot), Doctor Dynasty (Master of Mystic Arts), Eloise Purvis (leader of the World Crime League Task Force), Mariana Challenger (Explorer of the Unknown), Caligula Fox (World's Greatest Detective), Amun (an immortal mummy from Ancient Egypt), Peter Tachyon (Master of Time), Professor Perfect (who is only mostly perfect), The Amazing Howard (the World's Greatest Living Escape Artist), Archimedes Lovelace (Engineer of the Impossible), Susan Lash (a rogue archeologist), Jonathan Zhou (Secret Agent) and countless others.
- Magnetic Plot Device: Being a walking, talking Weirdness Magnet, Connie doesn't have to go out seeking adventure. It usually finds her, whether it's a MacGuffin everyone's after turning up in her shopping bag, Mooks knocking on her front door wanting to pick a fight with her, getting sucked into spontaneously appearing portals or her friend Tia being kidnapped by some form of organized villainy.
- Master of All: Being a globe-trotting adventurer, Constance Verity is fluent in seventeen languages, can type two-hundred words a minute, can fix any machine, can run a mile in four minutes (if she has a good pair of shoes), knows shorthand, is moderately talented at softball, can live on only an hour of sleep a night, learned Escape Artistry from the ghost of Harry Houdini and is even able to fight in the Seven Deadly Styles of Martian Kung Fu, a martial art that wasn't even designed for the human anatomy. Really, it's easier to explain what she can't do, and she never went to school for any of it.
- Noodle Incident: The series is packed with vague references to countless past adventures Connie has been on that are just barely alluded to, from having to subsist on moldy bread and troll blood to survive, to an Evil Twin with a Yugoslavian accent sleeping with all of her boyfriends, spending a week dueling a sniper in Cambodia with no sleep, stomping on an evil hamster to save Australia, dangling off a cliff surrounded by hyenas, discovering the blueprints to a cosmic decimator station array hidden in a vending machine on Betelgeuse 7, and having to kill countless clones of Adolf Hitler.
- Seen It All: Much of the series's humor comes from the fact that while the various villains and heroes of the many adventures Connie goes on are matters of great importance to them, Connie has been on so many adventures and thwarted so many disasters that she has grown numb to all of it and acknowledges how ridiculous it all is.The Countess: You have spirit, Miss Verity.
Connie: You'll enjoy breaking it. [Beat] That was what you were going to say next, right? - Sliding Scale of Free Will vs. Fate: A Central Theme of the series is the deterministic battle of free will and predestination, with destiny being less of a carefully designed set of dominos and more an attempt to interpret pure chaos. The Caretaker Destiny, the immutable force that makes Connie The Chosen One and gives her the ability to save the day, being the unintended by-product of the Great Engine trying to instill order onto a disorderly universe, is framed by Connie as the source of the constant chaos in her life and spends the first book trying to get rid of it because she wants more control over her life. Even Shia, a retired demigoddess of fate and Connie's neighbor, admits that destiny is nothing more than "coincidences all the way down."
- The Omniscient Council of Vagueness that ensured that she had the Caretaker Destiny in the first place barely understand how it works themselves and have spent eons studying it, yet they're still no closer to understanding how it works, why it works, where it came from and what the point of it even is. Their theory that the Caretaker Destiny is the universe keeping itself from collapsing completely into entropy is just that: a theory they have with no way of proving concretely.
- The antagonists of the series (Root, Lady Peril, The Great Engine, The Foundation) antagonize Connie because her Caretaker Destiny makes her the one thing that prevents them from having absolute control, wanting it for themselves under the assumption that it will let them achieve what they see as a one-way-ticket to being the center of the universe.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: While the freedom fighters and supervillains that traffic in Connie's adventures certainly take their work seriously, all of the normal people in Connie's off-hours all seem to find the fantastical elements that permeate their world as more quant that anything worth fussing over. The exception to this is Tia, who's been Kidnapped by the Call so often that she gets antsy the longer she goes without an adventure.
- Weirdness Magnet: Half the time, Constance isn't looking for unusual Speculative Fiction-style adventures, but she winds up stumbling into them and has to fight her way out. Being that she's Constance Verity, she's capable of doing just that, but having done it for so long, she begins to suffer from Heroic Fatigue.Everywhere Connie went, adventure might be lurking.
- World of Weirdness: Pretty much every Speculative Fiction plot, setting and mechanics you can imagine exists within the world the series is set in. Time travel, space travel, barbarians, lost civilizations, aliens, demons, mole men, magic, fairies, ghosts, wormholes, alternate universes, alternate timelines, clones, fish people, eldritch horrors from beyond; you name it, it exists here.
