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Barnaby

Here’s a little mood music, folks:

Five Man Electric Band - Signs with Lyrics

Barnaby Graham b. July 3, 1300. Barnaby lives in the attic of Hyacinth’s house, with numerous boxes of papers and a very few household goods. He is a retired state augur whose sixth sense has gotten out of control in his old age. He does not like to leave the house or even come downstairs, preferring a simple environment he can arrange to his liking. He sees the past, the unknowable present and the future in the random objects and patterns that surround him, and he can’t turn it off. He’s sick of it, and sick of everything in general, ill-tempered and often bizarre. He tolerates Hyacinth due to their shared history, and everyone else in the house due to their vague association with Hyacinth. He feels something of a kinship with Calliope and enjoys her arrangements of things to the best of his ability, but he refuses to exist near anyone long enough to develop a relationship and she is only vaguely aware of him.

He prefers isolation in all cases and will only ‘help out’ in his own weird way, usually by breaking things. If he ventures downstairs at all, there is either a sweet comestible involved, or something he thinks is hilarious is about to happen. Mostly he busies himself investigating the future and trying to rearrange the patterns he sees to make things more favorable. Even he is uncertain whether he actually has any effect or is just pushing around deck chairs on a sinking ship, as it were. He makes occasional forays into discerning the nature of reality via his metaphysical awareness, but he’s never very happy with what he finds.

Barnaby’s natural psychic ability was discovered at an early age and trained from that point forward. He knew the risks and may even have considered his eventual difficulty inevitable. He is still terribly accurate when he puts his mind to it, but his signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. The only limit to the information he is capable of gleaning is that there is no limit to the information he is capable of gleaning. He needs to get very focused and very specific to get something useful or applicable, like finding a needle in a haystack. He prefers to cut up animals, as he was taught in school, to narrow things down, but dice rolls, coin flips and astrology (even the bullshit kind in the newspaper) are effective limiters as well. Past, present, future or theoretical, if you need to know it, he can find it for you. But he hates you, and he’s not fond of doing his old job, so he’ll probably just wander away muttering to engage in research of personal import.

Apart from having stretched out his psychic control like a cheap pair of pantyhose, decades of high and fast living have worked their ravages on his body. He is old for his age, with numerous pains, creaking joints, varicose veins and hypertension. Greasy and spicy foods give him indigestion. Hyacinth has tried to limit his sodium intake, but he found out about it and ate an entire tablespoon of salt in front of her, so now she doesn’t bother. He does not require glasses, but this may be because he does not need his physical eyes to see.

Description

Barnaby has shrunk somewhat out of age, but he’s still large enough to be intimidating, particularly if he’s screaming. His white hair is missing on top and ragged at the sides, with a tendency to twist into corkscrews. He is perpetually in a bathrobe and silk pajamas, with broken-down gray slippers, as he has little intention of ever leaving the house. When he has his shit together, usually during magic season, he may comb his hair and put on his one remaining suit, which is dark gray with pinstripes, and a pair of old shoes with cracked leather. This is the outfit he was wearing when Hyacinth found him. He has a hooked nose and large ears, and gray eyes which still do not look terribly incisive, despite his abilities. He is fond of raising one eyebrow above the other to look disbelieving or ironical at people.

In the original concept of the household as two sets of people with each of the four classic temperaments, Barnaby is a choleric. He is combative, irritable, and arrogant as all hell. The choleric temperament corresponds to young adulthood, and he is in a decades long door-slamming hissy fit about his stupid, uncool parents, Fate and Reality. When he displays any kindness at all, it is alongside a heaping helping of derision and condescension.

Barnaby’s fondest wish is to be in control. He has been able to see out of every possible window, and a few impossible ones, from a young age and there appears to be some kind of maniac driving the car. If he can’t get a hand on the wheel, and it seems he can’t, then he is going to make the ride as unpleasant for everyone else as it is for him.

Blindness is a common affliction among seers, and Barnaby has his share. His variation on the theme is metaphorical: he often becomes so bogged down in the minutiae that he misses the big picture. He did not notice his marriage disintegrating around him, he did not notice his best friend hiding a terrible pain which eventually killed him, and he did not notice Hyacinth preparing to abandon him out of fear. His response is invariably to fixate even harder on the details, combing over the past to find what tiny thing he missed that might’ve warned him in time. He has grown to suspect that any disaster he discovers and averts may have been fated to be resolved that way from the beginning, and he is only some kind of device or excuse being used by the gods. This looming feeling of exploitation makes him even more irritable.

Beneath all the irritation and outright hatred is a disused curiosity and easy-going nature which started him down this path towards rage and insanity in the first place. He usually takes this part of his personality out of storage during magic storms, like his old suit, but he can’t quite get rid of it even under normal circumstances when it pisses him off. He has always wanted to know what will happen next, and he used to be a great deal more accepting of it — a fine quality in a seer, which may have kept him sane a bit longer than most. Decades of experience have left him with the impression that whatever happens next will be horrible, so although he would still like to know what it is, now he awaits it in hopes of destroying it.

In his day-to-day existence, Barnaby vacillates between helpless fatalism, a manic desire for more information and understanding, and total dissociation from reality. He finds none of it very enjoyable, but anything like suicide or a lobotomy would be an admission of defeat. Besides, he is fairly sure he’s not fated to do that, at least not yet.

It was Barnaby’s great misfortune to come of age during the advent of synco music, analogous to disco, but named for the synthetic drum machines that drove the genre rather than the records, of which there were none. He does not really enjoy music anymore, as it contains too many patterns, but he still sometimes gets the greatest hits of ABBA, the Bee Gees and the 5th Dimension stuck in his head.

History

A Beautiful Mind

Barnaby was born the third son of a third son — three being a very respectable number, if not quite as good as seven. Besides, even in 1300, large families were passé in the upper classes. He was not expected to inherit the family business, and traditionally would have joined a church or busied himself in academia. His wild talent was discovered when the private tutors grew suspicious of his test scores, given that he seemed to spend more time looking out the window at birds and dribbling random watercolors on paper than reading his assignments. A career in divination was also considered quite respectable at the time, so he was spirited away from his annoyed tutors to an expensive private school.

In making the transition to secondary education, he was supposed to be housed in a single. Solitude was very important for the study of mental arts and all of the divination students were supposed to be sequestered in private rooms. However, he found a dark-haired boy eating cookies in his bed. This boy claimed to be very much younger than him and studying under a special scholarship, but unable to get into his own dorm room because of all the intent lines. Thus, at the age of fourteen, Barnaby Graham met David Dickenson (or Valentine, or Crisp, or whatever the hell his name was), and began to suspect that Fate was a blind idiot with a sick sense of humor.

At fourteen, he was dumb enough to attach himself to this new, exciting crazy person, and to allow the crazy person to attach itself to him. By the time they managed to get David back into his dorm room — it required a cannon — Barnaby was in too deep to extricate himself.

Two Wild and Crazy Guys

A misspent youth was also considered respectable enough for gentlemen of a certain standing, so Barnaby and David encountered only token resistance to their deviant behavior and hell-raising. Both of them were easily able to keep up with their studies — Barnaby by throwing all of his effort into divination and cheating and David… even Barnaby never figured out how David did it. He suspected amphetamines, but those might’ve just been for fun.

Post-education, Barnaby set out to do the bare minimum required to remain respectable, despite David’s insistence that this was silly and not at all fun. He fell into a government job with prospects for steady advancement and lenient hours (seers were expected to be fickle) and, when the gossip started to get a little too specific, he found himself a pretty wife who seemed willing to put up with him and his proclivity for showgirls.

David’s Pet Lesbian

It seemed to be going quite well, with only occasional disruptions, wars and arrests, when David got it into his head to adopt a child. Or steal one. The circumstances were always murky with David. But he had definitely made an attempt to repair this child at an earlier point and the parents were not satisfied with the result, which David took personally. Anyway, there was something seriously wrong with the girl, which may or may not have been David’s fault.

When David found out this girl liked other girls, he decided to name it ‘Alice,’ like that song from his favorite album.

Clearly David could not be allowed responsibility for another human being, especially a damaged one, and Barnaby found himself intervening more and more often — and having less and less fun doing so.

Still, the girl was less crazy than David and sometimes helpful.

Come and Live with Me!

Possibly because of the escalation, possibly because Veronica wanted to make something better out of her life while she was still young, possibly because of the vacuum cleaner he got her for their tenth anniversary — Barnaby’s marriage fell apart. Veronica got the house, and regular alimony payments. There seemed to be nothing for it but to go live with David and ‘Alice,’ which David thought was a fabulous idea. Barnaby, less so.

Death and Taxes

When Barnaby was fifty, David was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer, after hiding the fact that he was in pain for some time. Barnaby managed to bully him into trying to fix it with metalwork, which only prolonged his suffering.

With David gone, Barnaby and Hyacinth found themselves missing a large, loud, insane chunk of their lives, with a lot of money to split between them, and rather at loose ends.

David’s inevitable demise pushed Barnaby past another threshold, adding to a fixation on control which had been building since his divorce. He busied himself trying to leverage David’s money into a force for positive change, in the stupidest possible ways, such as trying to influence the random fluctuations of the stock market to prevent the impending war.

His attempts at financial wizardry had no impact on Marsellia’s ill-considered act of terrorism, and soon the war with Prokovia was in full swing.

He was aware that he would be called back into service as a state augur. What he neither expected nor stumbled across in his frequent research was Hyacinth’s sudden decision to leave and train as a medic. She did not write to him.

Blindsided again, when he was called up himself, he sold the empty house and threw himself into his work.

Sick of It

The war was not kind to Barnaby, or Marsellia, or anyone, really. With growing evidence for another, harsher conflict gnawing at his mind, deteriorating cognitive function, no friends and no house, Barnaby found himself in a downward spiral with nothing to arrest him — save the police, on occasion. Even Barnaby is not too terribly certain what he did with himself just after the war. He may have been renting a room, because Hyacinth was later able to send for his things. Perhaps he retained the wherewithal to collect his pension, or had some of David’s money squirreled away somewhere.

In any case, things did not start to make even a modicum of sense until several weeks after Hyacinth found him screaming and beating up a stop sign with a hammer.

He found himself existing in the attic of a deteriorating building with ill-omened wallpaper, most of his papers, a bunch of idiots, and ‘Alice.’ He hates it, but not enough to put in the effort to extricate himself. Alice is willing to let him get on with his research most of the time too.

The Future

Inevitably, it’s all going to go wrong, of course. Apart from the war, which is going to be even worse than the last one, there seems to be something wrong with the future itself — some defect in the nature of it. This has resulted in a kind of double vision for all predictions past a certain date. Barnaby has hesitantly christened the phenomenon ‘the bifurcated path,’ but shortly after understanding its nature, he died, and he did not care to ruin existence for the people he left behind by explaining it.

Anyway, it’s obvious enough Milo and Calliope will produce a child together, Erik and Maggie will have some kind of significant entanglement as adults, and the fate of empires may hinge on Erik’s head injury. Barnaby will be long dead by the time any of this happens, knowledge he welcomed.

It was also evident they were going to eat the salmon puffs no matter how hard he tried to prevent it, although he did try. Barnaby was not looking forward to the circumstances surrounding his death, but by the end, he was simply thrilled to be done with it. He is likewise thrilled to have exited the plot before Erik’s magic shoes, Maggie’s stab wound, Sean’s culturally-ignorant play, the Pension Riots and subsequent explosions, Diane and John’s reluctant adventures in politics, Milo punching a hole through reality, The Author trying to fob off a story that has had everything to do with Erik as Maggie’s story, really, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show filler. Honestly, he understands the purpose of Side A, but you’re going to have to come up with something interesting to do with it, Satan. You’d better not sideline the female characters just because their doppelgangers happen to be male either!

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