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Ann

Here’s a little mood music, folks:

Ann Rose b. July 1368-February 1369. Ann lives in Room 201 of Hyacinth’s boarding house. She is a singer at the Black Orchid, a drag club. Ann is, not to put too fine a point on it, Milo in a dress, but much more than the sum of her parts. Ann and Milo consider themselves two different people; they each have their own job, their own wardrobe, and their own character page. Ann was born from Milo’s love of dresses and his need for someone to love and protect him, during the final seven months of the siege of San Rosille. Milo is Ann’s best friend, but she tends to make friends with everybody. In the house, she is most at ease with Erik, Hyacinth and Sanaam. She and Sanaam have similar outlooks on life and he makes an excellent co-conspirator for mischief, sometimes with Maggie’s assistance, but since he is not often home, she usually teams up with Hyacinth or Calliope. Her relationship with Mordecai is complicated and often painful, made more so by an incident with a plate of hash brownies that he told her he made when in fact he did not. Likewise, she can have some difficulty with Calliope, due to Calliope’s relationship with Milo, but a sisterly affection goes along with her exasperation and concern. In her interaction with Milo, Ann takes the lead. This is by necessity and design, as Milo is a timid person who would never try anything new if he had his way.

If an idea or a direction is required, Ann can provide it, although it is not always the most sensible course of action. With most others in the house, she knows she has less knowledge and experience, and she is willing to take a secondary role, but she will still provide input. Often completely irrelevant input, but input nonetheless. She adapts well, sizing up situations at a glance, and she is almost never at a loss for words. When a stage is unavailable, any area with lots of people to interact with will do, indoors or out.

Ann exists to do the things Milo can’t. That means that while she is capable of math, magic, drawing and design, she never bothers with them. Milo was well aware he could do those things by the time he made her. Ann’s domain is all things social. Smiles. Eye-contact. Hugs. Love, both giving and getting it. However, her ability to compensate for Milo extends beyond that. If it is required to keep Milo safe and happy, she can no-sell anything from hypnosis to divine magic. Mordecai has had occasion to wonder if she can see things with Milo’s eyes closed. She is more than just Milo in a dress, but how much more can be surprising.

All of Ann and Milo’s things have long sleeves. This is because Milo has a tendency to self-harm that he picked up while being abused in the workhouse. Their arms are covered with the scars of old bite marks, and occasionally with new ones, although Ann tries to keep him from hurting himself that way. Ann is mildly nearsighted but too vain to wear glasses, so she has difficulty with distance reading.

Description

Ann is six feet tall, and almost always in heels, which adds a few inches. Her shoulders are a bit broad and the tops and sleeves of her dresses tend to be form-fitting, even if they’re not meant to be. She wears corsets and padding, to help with her figure. The top half of her dresses also makes convenient storage for small objects, usually soft ones like tissues and handkerchiefs. She will tuck Milo’s wallet in there if it is inconvenient to be carrying a purse, for example if she is going shopping and needs to tote a basket. She has seven dresses, a different color and fabric for every day of the week, all of them with frills and ruffles and feminine embellishment, all of them worn with at least one petticoat. She has more than seven pairs of shoes. Boots with high heels and buttons are her (and Milo’s) favorites. She and Milo have a good eye for what colors go well together, but they don’t mind about subtlety, so bright mauve boots may be paired with a yellow dress if the contrast is pleasing. None of her things, not even her underclothing, are black, white, or gray — those belong to Milo. Her eyes are dark brown, and too pretty to cover with glasses. She wears her waist-length, dark red hair loose and cascading, except for special occasions. It is naturally wavy. She is proud of her hair and does not own any hats, but she will wear them for shows — the more ostentatious the better. When it is required that she wear something sleeveless, she will pair it with shoulder-length opera gloves. She is good with makeup, she carries herself well in heels, and there are various magical products available to inhibit that pesky five o’clock shadow. Her voice is a bit low, but very feminine in inflection. Her height and the occasional glimpse of Adam’s apple are the only things that would make one suspicious of her gender. She is almost always smiling.

In the original concept of the household as two sets of people with each of the four classic temperaments, Ann is a sanguine. She is chatty, relentlessly optimistic, and makes friends at the drop of a hat. If you fired her out of a cannon into a brick wall, she would bounce… and then tell you a story about that one time she met the human cannonball at the fair. She needs to be that positive and resilient, because Milo isn’t. If she wasn’t pushing down on the other end of the seesaw with all her might, he would sink into the mud and stick there.

Ann’s fondest wish is for Milo to be happy. Everything else is secondary, even Milo’s own desire for constant safety. She is therefore willing to push him, scare him, even make him unhappy, for a chance at better, more permanent happiness. The brass ring is Milo as a well-adjusted person who can go out and get the things that make him happy for himself. She is holding him up and yelling at him (but not really yelling, because that is not how you get Milo to do things) to grab it, over his repeated protest that he does not want it, it is scary. She is certain that one of these days they are going to get it, but Milo is so slow and stubborn that sometimes she gets frustrated with him.

It is important to remember that while Ann and Milo are different people, they are also the same person. Everything about Ann is a reflection of what Milo is, or isn’t. He can’t talk, she can. He needs love and attention, she needs it too — and she can go out and get it. He needs protecting, she will protect him — and everybody else, if it looks like they need it. She is more than his friend, she is his translator, caretaker and psychologist. She is his hero, and the person he would be if he wasn’t so afraid. Ann is free of Milo’s damage, his abusive past. It happened to him, not her. Thus, she knows about it and can help him about it, but she has not been hurt by it. Ann was born in an abandoned department store, with a supportive parent who unconditionally loved her and gave her everything she needed. She has never seen the inside of a workhouse.

Because of her protective nature, Ann makes a brave and tireless defender. However, if you get on the wrong side of her and she decides you’re a real threat (not just something Milo’s afraid of) she will turn on you like a rabid dog. This rarely happens. Milo, being Ann’s reflection, is also capable of true viciousness in the name of protection, but this even more rarely happens.

Ann is aware of her gender and physical sex and she identifies as a straight male, like Milo, but she considers it rude to refer to her as male, or by Milo’s name. They worked very hard to be two people and they desire to be treated as such. However, if there is honest confusion or a mistake, she and Milo are both understanding about it.

Ann’s taste in music conforms to Milo’s exactly. If it’s happy, it’s good.

History

Fail

In the workhouse, when he was still reasonably well-adjusted, Milo received a school assignment to draw a friend and write something about it. Feeling that he didn’t like anyone enough to call them a ‘friend,’ he made one up. He gave her lots of pretty red hair, and a dress, and a red smile. He decided to call her Ann. He wrote: Ann is my best friend. She can talk to anyone. She has long red hair and she can have all the pretty dresses she wants. When the sisters got it out of him that there was no such person and he made her up, they scolded him for lying and wrote Fail on the drawing in red pen. He never saw it again.

Lost in Hennessy’s

Ann, as a concept, came into being when Milo saw his smiling reflection in a dress in a cracked piece of plate glass. He decided to leverage this happy feeling into a full-blown psychosis. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do — save staying alive, and that wasn’t any fun. His initial supplies were a hand mirror, to practice smiling, a fashion magazine, so Ann would know how to be pretty, and the dress. This necessitated a suitcase, to keep everything portable and together when running from gas and bombs. Eventually, Milo found semi-permanent housing in an abandoned department store. He had only the vaguest idea of what a department store was, and there was no merchandise remaining, but there were a lot of mirrors.

In the beginning, they shared things. The suitcase. The dress. Trying to be Ann required only a reflective surface and being happy. That usually meant the dress, but he could be Milo in the dress too. As Ann began to diverge, first as a dissociative state and then as a personality, she began to make demands. The first was no glasses, if Milo wanted to be her he had to take off the glasses so people could see her pretty eyes. The dress and all dresses forever (he could no longer be Milo in dresses, only Ann) eventually followed. She also wanted more things. A corset, to help with her figure. Something to hide how short her hair was. Makeup. More magazines, so she could learn how to use the makeup. Pretty shoes. All the pretty shoes forever. All the colors. She was a petty tyrant at first. She needed to take things if she wanted to live. Milo happily gave them. They developed a ritual of exchange, silently addressing each other in the mirror. Milo would ask if what she wanted would make her happy. When she said that it would, he would ask her to smile, and he would praise the smile, even when she was very new and she wasn’t very good at it. He supported her in everything. He nurtured her.

When San Rosille broke up and the fighting stopped, they each had their own things, and their own suitcase (Milo’s was smaller, he didn’t have much of his own) and lines of identity had been more sharply delineated. They continued to diverge over the coming years, but by the end of the siege, they were two.

A Voice

From her very inception, Ann could talk. To anyone. She could always talk, she could always smile, and she had long hair and all the pretty dresses. It just took some time for reality to line up with the concept. She didn’t want to talk yet, was how she and Milo handled it. They would practice in the mirror alone and he would ask if she wanted to yet. Not yet, she would always reply, even when she could manage it aloud. Not to other people. Not yet.

Sufficient motivation came via a pair of very pretty shoes in a store window. In the chaos following the siege, Milo was able to support them by stealing, selling dead people’s things, fixing stuff and finally, when there were newspapers again, circling ads in the classifieds and taking odd jobs from people who didn’t mind how weird he acted. They had enough to eat and, after some careful budgeting, enough for the shoes.

Milo put her together very carefully, using everything they knew about makeup, and a corset, and a hat and kerchief to cover her hair, which was barely over their ears at the time.

Ann’s first words were, “Size ten, please,” regarding the shoes. Followed by, “Thank you.”

There was a delirious celebration in the alleyway beside the store. Over how pretty the shoes were, of course. Ann could always talk.

A Steady Job

With a voice and some social skills and resiliency (once she was able to interact with other people, she picked things up fast), Ann was the most qualified of the two of them for work — which was increasingly necessary now that there weren’t any dead bodies to loot or as many bombed-out buildings to raid. With her shoes and dresses, she was able to find employment as a prostitute, though not housing as one. Being a boy dressed as a lady left her unwelcome in brothels, and earned her the hostility of other working girls, who considered her a con-artist stealing their legitimate business. She was also under-aged and unlicensed, which left her at odds with the police. She learned how to run very well in high heels and she still can. During this period, they lodged mostly in doss houses — as Milo, since he tended to attract less negative attention. They changed clothing, and personalities, in pay toilets, that being the only privacy they could afford. It was still a desperate and dangerous existence, with a lot of bruises and other abuse. Ann could handle it, but she was wired to seek out safety and happiness for Milo. She pressed him for more.

Room for Two

Milo was never any good at saying no to a pretty girl. Ann pushed him into a real job and, soon after, a real home. They hid their dual nature, since it had gotten them into trouble previously. Ann’s dresses stayed in the suitcase. In solidarity, Milo kept his things in his suitcase too. They continued to change in pay toilets. Though Ann no longer needed to work, she still needed to engage in smiling and living and being happy. Hyacinth, their landlady, caught her doing so on a park bench near the house.

Ann at first denied being Milo or having any knowledge of Hyacinth, but eventually broke down and explained the situation, for Milo’s sake. She also, as it proved necessary, defended Milo’s sanity. Hyacinth was not too hung up on her lodgers being sane, but she did manage to absorb that Milo did not wish to be called crazy, and that when he was in a dress he wished to be addressed as female and ‘Ann.’ She thought it was ridiculous that they carried suitcases and changed in pay toilets, not to mention dangerous, and she took Ann home and introduced her to the whole household as a real person — one who would be rooming with Milo.

The household, small children and insane old man in the attic included, were remarkably understanding.

Ann and Milo’s things went into the closet. Ann’s dresses and shoes multiplied. With Hyacinth’s house as a safe, supportive base to explore from and the ability to store lots of clothes and makeup and put herself together even better, Ann began looking for her own job. She found part-time employment singing in a drag club, the Black Orchid. She made lots and lots of friends.

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