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Milo

Here’s some mood music, folks:

Milo Rose b. May 24, 1353. Milo lives in Room 201 in Hyacinth’s boarding house. He is a minor enchanter, similar to a code monkey in our universe, who has a part-time job enchanting windless watches in a factory. He can hear but he does not speak, electing to get himself across via preprinted cards and drawings. He has severe social anxiety and related difficulty conducting himself around people. He grew up in a workhouse and has a very traumatic past which he conceals from everyone — save Ann, his best friend. 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 is the one who understands him and whom he relates to the best. He does reasonably well with Hyacinth and Mordecai, who both have an idea of how he operates and the allowances they need to make for him. He very much dislikes Barnaby and the General for their bombast and intractability. Since his injury, and his gift of subtitles from the gods, Erik is increasingly able to understand Milo and help him. Calliope’s addition to the household has been a source of incredible stress, and although he adores her company she also scares the hell out of him. Both he and Ann have grave doubts as to his ability to carry off any kind of relationship with her, but for different reasons.

Milo is most comfortable far away from people and anything else stressful, but he prefers a support position if absolutely necessary. If this support position requires enchantments and machines, so much the better. Despite his preoccupation with safety, he has only a rudimentary sense of what it is not a good idea to design and/or build. If you were to ask him to make you a nuclear-powered toaster, he would enthusiastically comply, just to see if he could. (In fact, he has already done this. For fun. Hyacinth has no idea.) He is most at ease alone in the basement, but you will find him hiding under the worktable or in his closet upstairs under stressful circumstances.

Milo is skilled with enchantments, drawing, and design. Magic and magical notation essentially allow one to code for reality. Milo prefers to anchor his designs in physical things like gears, metal and machines. He can usually work his way around the no metal and no electricity requirements of the house, but he may find it either frustrating or a fun challenge depending on circumstances. He designed Erik’s metal eye and helped Hyacinth and Auntie Enora improve the repairs to Mordecai’s lungs. He also keeps the house supplied with toasters and other small appliances that Hyacinth is forever using up.

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.

Description

Milo is six feet tall and has a more muscular build than one would readily attribute to a guy who spends most of his time in the basement building toasters. This probably has something to do with being Hyacinth’s go-to person for hauling heavy objects around when Sanaam isn’t home (which is usually). His pale complexion is entirely suited to his indoor existence, however. It also goes well with his red hair, which is waist length, a dark shade, and naturally wavy. He wears it pulled back, tightly braided, and tucked down the back of his shirt, due to the large amount of conveyor belts at work and the uncomfortable stares and comments a guy with waist length wavy red hair gets in public. He is mildly nearsighted and his brown eyes are obscured by round, rimless glasses with silver temples and bridge. Milo has all of two shirts — both button-down work shirts, one gray and one white – and two pairs of pants — both dark gray. His top button is usually undone and the shirt collar askew, and he never rolls up his sleeves. He wears black oxfords without any fancy detailing, and black suspenders. He gave colors and dresses and pretty shoes away to Ann, and he is not allowed to wear them. He is allowed black silk stockings and ladies’ panties, but these are rarely visible. He has difficulty making eye-contact and smiling, and his default expression is mild concern.

In the original concept of the household as two sets of people with each of the four classic temperaments, Milo is a phlegmatic. He desires peace in all things, pathologically avoids conflict and offense, and couldn’t make a command decision if you had a gun to his head. Milo seeks the path of least resistance like water flows downhill. As he believes his dearest friends are only one misstep away from hating him forever, being meek and inoffensive is practically a survival strategy. He will attempt to solve problems and make peace if it seems necessary, but only in the nicest possible way. Weirdly, he has the least difficulty with people he doesn’t like, because he doesn’t care as much about hurting them.

If something stressful happens, Milo is sometimes capable of manipulating himself into bravery by imagining the consequences of failure, which also tend to involve a loss of safety and people hating him forever. Otherwise, he melts down like a gaming system with no cooling fan, withdrawing and engaging in repetitive motion, and sometimes self-harm. In all adversity, he prefers to change and be Ann, who is much better at handling things.

Milo’s fondest wish is for everything to be safe. Ideally, the entire world should be made of pillows, or possibly something safer that he would need to invent, because pillows can smother people. He knows that is never going to happen, and he has created Ann to soften reality for him. She does the things he is afraid of, and the things he badly wants to do but can’t. Smiling, hugging, singing and getting a lot of love and attention are all functions of Ann. Milo keeps to the safe things he understands: drawing, magic and machines. In these matters, he has been known to display pride and arrogance and even smiling.

It is important to remember that while Ann and Milo are different people, they are also the same person. Milo is not Ann; Milo is a weak person who hides and is scared of everything and wants only to be left alone and to not hurt anymore. And Milo is Ann, a strong person full of smiles and hugs and love who wants to protect everyone and have all the attention forever. Milo is only able to reconcile his fear and his desire by splitting himself in two. He is capable of everything Ann is, it is only the fear that stops him.

For Milo’s views on women, examine Ann. He adores all things female, so much so that he thinks women are invincible. He identifies as a straight male who happens to love pretty things, having lived a desperately gray and unhappy childhood. Donated ladies’ clothing which he washed in the laundry was his only contact with color and softness and any kind of security. Pink things and taffeta are especially nice.

Milo makes no value judgments when it comes to music. It it’s happy, he likes it. This goes for all forms of entertainment, only happy things are any fun. Any hint of conflict or unpleasantness ruins the experience. Thus, he doesn’t consume much besides happy music. Movies and novels are just too stressful. He is devoted to Petula Clark, but he won’t listen to her sad stuff. Baroque pop and bubblegum make up most of the selections on his favorite radio station. Calliope has made a somewhat-successful attempt to introduce punk, alternative and other emotions into his life, but left to his own devices, he still selects things that sound happy.

History

Fifteen Years in Hell

Milo grew up in a workhouse, which he left at age fifteen, during the Siege of San Rosille. This is all he and Ann are willing to tell people about his past.

Milo was a shy child who liked drawing with crayons, math, magic, machines and pretty dresses. He was capable of speech and human interaction, though awkward and nervous about it. He did not like standing up straight and speaking loudly and giving oral responses in school. This did not sit well with the nuns who ran the workhouse. They tried to correct his behavior by hitting his hands with a switch, and various other punishments, which only made him more nervous about giving answers in school.

At the age of ten, Milo decided to stop talking altogether — out of spite rather than fear, at first. This touched off a battle of wills with the sisters, resulting in countless smacked hands, hours spent standing in corners, and every comfort they could think of being revoked. At long last, noting Milo’s pathological hatred of attention, Sister Mary Francis used magic to hard-stick the back of his head to the wall, at the front of the classroom where he had to look at everyone staring at him. This broke him handily, but he was unable to scream or cry or beg for it to stop, being too scared. Later that night, in a desperate attempt to cope, he employed his crayons. He drew eyes all over the floor and the wall and colored over them in black. For this apparent vandalism, they took his crayons away from him, and he no longer had any way of communicating the pain he was feeling or asking for help.

Since there was no apparent change in his behavior, the punishments continued until they broke him physically as well as mentally and he was sent to the infirmary. In the infirmary, his mental condition only deteriorated. Since crying and screaming and talking were impossible, he self-harmed. Drugs and restraints, including a straitjacket, were necessary to stop him from doing that, leaving him in a nightmare existence almost completely divorced from reality.

After he has no idea how long, Milo found a pencil on the infirmary floor. He began to draw on his chart, the nearest paper available. Because that kept him peacefully occupied, the nurses allowed it. Either because his behavior improved or because he drew over all the bad words about him on the chart (Milo favors the chart theory), they finally let him out of the infirmary.

Milo found peace in insanity. Everyone left him alone. He could have pencils and paper and draw. Employing his knowledge of magic, he was also able to get machines to play with. He fixed a few broken ones, and then all he had to do was break something to get them to give it to him to fix. Left to his own devices, Milo chose a daily schedule of drawing, math, magic, machines and isolation. What little social ability he had, he lost.

With no desire to do anything but draw and play with machines, no socialization, and no knowledge of current events, Milo was ejected into the middle of a warzone at fifteen (a year early due to the lack of supplies) and left to fend for himself.

Freedom and Danger

Milo had no way of knowing if constant chaos and death and destruction was in any way out of the ordinary and no desire to ask people about it, so he made do as best he could, sleeping in cardboard boxes and abandoned buildings, stealing what he needed and learning by almost getting himself killed. Repeatedly.

He might have gone on stealing and hiding and trying to get by that way if the boy with the broom hadn’t offered him a sandwich. This boy was a starcatcher, one of many who went over the walls of the city at night on improvised flying objects in search of supplies. Milo was suspicious, but repeated sandwiches without pain formed the basis of a relationship, his first in years. Without Milo’s knowledge or consent, this relationship turned physical. Milo had no context for this at the time and no inkling that it might be in any way wrong. There is no way of knowing the boy’s intent, whether he was some kind of predator or just a scared, lonely kid who didn’t know any better. Milo gave neither assent nor objection and was mainly interested in the sandwiches. As those continued, he did not have any problem with being kissed or petted. He did manage to put together that it was a trade — human interaction for sandwiches, and he applied this concept to getting food and other things he needed, even after the boy with the broom disappeared and never came back.

With clothing taken from dead people, Milo traded for his first dress in a starcatchers’ market. It had red, green and blue flowers, a pattern which he now considers incredibly tacky, but he was after color rather than style.

Ann

Giddy with satisfaction and his first inking of sexuality, Milo informed his reflection in the dress (silently, of course) that he was not Milo, that he was a pretty, happy person who was better than Milo, and that he could have all the dresses he wanted. When the clothing/color-related high died down, he realized he might have something there. He could either have all the dresses he wanted, or he could try to have something more. Milo spent the remainder of the Siege of San Rosille holed up in an abandoned department store with a lot of mirrors, trying to drive himself insane. He was wildly successful.

Ann required much careful nurturing and support, which Milo gladly and unconditionally supplied. She needed all the colors and all the dresses, so she could have her own things, and he gave them to her. He told her she was perfect and everyone was going to love her.

By the end of the siege, they were two.

With her dress and her ability to speak and engage socially with people, Ann found employment as an unlicensed prostitute.

A Respectable Job and a Real Home

Prostitution and doss houses were miles above life at the workhouse, and Ann was capable of holding up under the resulting abuse, but she had an innate desire to make things better for Milo, and she made the suggestion that maybe they might be happier with something more. Of course, if Ann was not happy being a prostitute then Milo was willing to do whatever she wanted, but when what she wanted was for him to get a job — possibly something with machines and magic, like he liked –— Ann and Milo had the first major disagreement of their relationship. Their friendship survived, Ann won out, and Milo eventually found himself with a factory job. Milo grew accustomed to this new normal, but Ann pressed him further. She wanted them to have a home too.

After Milo lost the resulting frantic argument, he began searching for a home for himself and Ann. He had to do it himself, because it was not likely a respectable housing situation would put up with him if they knew about Ann. His bizarre behavior and difficulty with communication proved a handicap, but Hyacinth had dealt with weirder.

So, Milo had a home. A little while later, after Hyacinth stumbled across Ann sitting on a park bench and had the situation explained, Ann had a home too.

With support, understanding, a safe place and a closet for dresses, Milo and Ann could be themselves. They further differentiated, Ann got a respectable job of her own, and Milo was better able to embrace the things he liked — as well as a limited amount of social interaction.

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