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The General

I’m positive this is not actually her favorite song:

Glorious D’Iver b. January 23, 1338. Most people, even her husband, refer to her simply as ‘the General’ or ‘sir.’ She lives in Hyacinth’s boarding house in Room 202, with her daughter, Magnificent D’Iver, and occasionally her husband, Sanaam Sadiq. She is a retired Brigadier General and learned magic-user who saw most of her service during the Prokovian conflict of 1359 to 1371. She is entitled to a pension but has never collected it, due to an insulting error in her military records which states she never achieved a rank above Master Sergeant. She does not often muck in with the household and prefers to remain in her room, teaching her daughter. She is cold, intelligent and murderously stubborn. There is a sense of humor in there somewhere, but it is buried under head-high piles of irony and desiccant powder. She does not make friends easily, nor bestow respect. She has a deep disdain for Hyacinth’s impropriety, Ann’s frivolity, and Milo and Mordecai’s lack of magical ability. Calliope’s naiveté is barely tolerable as a flaw that can be corrected.

Her training, her experience and her inclination are towards command. ‘I wish to speak to your superior,’ is graven upon her brow. The only time she may be found mucking in with the rest of the household is when low visibility makes it impossible for her to fly, or if there is some kind of emergency. Otherwise, she keeps to her room and eats pigeons. She does the newspaper crossword on the kitchen table in the evenings — in pencil, but that is only because it’s impossible to keep pens in Hyacinth’s house.

Like her mother and grandmother before her, and her daughter after her, the General is capable of turning into a bird. In her case, a golden eagle. This was quite useful on the battlefield, for both reconnaissance and fighting. Coupled with a head for tactics and a virtuosic ability to construct and apply magic at a moment’s notice, she made a formidable opponent and killed many. In peacetime, she is still able to problem-solve and alter reality on a whim, but her behavior is much more constrained. She will often cite legal or social mores when refusing to do something which she is clearly capable of, or she will ask Maggie to try it first and learn how. This usually results in chaos that her own competency could have prevented.

The General has many scars on her body, mainly bullet and stab wounds, which have been patched with stonework. They are in jewel tones — faint purple, amber, blue and green. She is also missing a kidney, her appendix and gallbladder, from changing into an eagle when she did not have quite enough excess flesh to spare. She tries to keep enough weight on her to manage ten transformations without eating, which leaves her in stout condition even after two or four.

Description

The General is a hard woman. She is short, about 5’ 2” in shoes with a modest heel, but nonetheless intimidating. Her hips and chest and belly are all well-padded, but this is more of a responsibility thing than a result of hedonism and joie de vivre — as would be obvious after three minutes around her. She needs the excess weight to fuel her physical transformations. She is pale but often pinkish due to exertion, exposure or indignation. Moisturizing is pointless, as is makeup and complicated undergarments. Neatness, however, is a virtue. She keeps her dark brown hair so short that it is never disheveled, and her dresses are always immaculate, though plain and in an unvarying spectrum of dark blues and greens. She orders them in bulk from catalogs for maximal similarity, which makes it easier to account for them when she transforms. She has preserved her military uniform in pristine condition and often wears the greatcoat, which has the insignia of her rank, a gold cherry leaf, embroidered on the collar. The blouse and blazer were irrevocably damaged in an accident and she refuses to replace them with imposters. Grudgingly, she has consented to wear a ring of sending on her left hand, it is made of dark-stained wood. Her eyes are dark brown. She is usually frowning.

As an eagle, she is a bit larger than average, but there is nothing to distinguish her apart from behavior and the uncommonness of large eagles in a metropolitan setting.

In the original concept of the household as two sets of people with each of the four classic temperaments, the General is a melancholic. She is reserved, analytical, and inflexible to the point of denying reality itself. She despises Mordecai, the other melancholic in the house, for his perceived weaknesses, both emotional and intellectual — though they do share a preference for isolation and a preoccupation with fairness. Their arrogance and certainty that they are the smartest person in the room are also similar, but the General’s is based in pure tactical understanding rather than social and emotional navigation. This allows each of them to dismiss the other one as completely stupid. Because she is so inflexible, her apparent stupidity is often greater, requiring multiple explanations to understand something is contrary to the way she believes it should be. Her bull-headedness is not born of ignorance but deliberate denial.

The General’s fondest wish is to be right. Vindication is her drug of choice. Mere justice is not enough, it should conform to her own interpretation of ‘fair.’ Bizarrely, for someone with such a dour personality, she is an idealist. If reality does not line up with the ideal, and she is made to understand that this is so, she will act to correct it. Her devotion to law and politeness will rapidly fall by the wayside if her fellow human beings do not behave appropriately — always in series with ‘keep your voice down’ being the first to go and ‘do not murder’ being the last.

It is possible that the General is a sociopath, incapable of human emotion. It is equally likely that she has been so well-trained to ignore her own emotional response that it never factors into any of her decisions — or at least she always justifies it with logic. The fact that others have emotions is grudgingly allowed for, even if she feels they should not. It is therefore not an instinctive feeling of ‘wrongness’ that prevents her from murdering, but a logical understanding that it is ‘not done,’ coupled with the knowledge of undesirable consequences. ‘Moral’ choices are filtered through a complex decision tree, with exceptions possible but unlikely at every level. Wartime, when killing is de rigueur, makes things much simpler.

The General has difficulty with, among other things, the concept of ‘fun.’ This is particularly frustrating for her daughter and husband, who would like some on occasion. She does display flashes of humor, which seem to be an intellectual exercise. She will also spar with her husband on matters that are patently ridiculous, such as his penchants for gift-giving and legend-making. Organized pointless activity, such as going to the movies or listening to records, is disdained, and does not seem to be enjoyed. A shooting gallery, however, can be justified as practice, as can games of strategy. Such things may be enjoyable, but without some purpose they are not worth doing. ‘Fun’ does not enter into it, or so she would vehemently claim. Notably, she makes time to turn into an eagle and kill pigeons twice a day every day, despite how complicated this makes maintaining her bodyweight. She can call it ‘practice’ as much as she wants.

She does not enjoy music. If required to make a value judgement on some, she would first research it in books and probably draw the conclusion that classical is intellectually superior. Or perhaps the complicated raga and tala of traditional Priyati compositions.

History

Early Life

Young Glorious grew up in a strict and borderline-abusive household during a prolonged (for Marsellia) period of peace which allowed her mother to take total charge of her early education. Her mother was not at all interested in pursuing a marriage with her father, seemingly desiring only an heir out of the brief relationship. Glorious has never met the man. She was an only child.

Her mother’s salary was enough to maintain a modest country estate and a couple servants, but before Glorious entered military school she had very little human contact. Most of her knowledge came from books and drills. Confinement, corporal punishment and denial of food and comfort were frequent consequences for poor behavior. Going away to school meant comparative freedom, but by age fourteen she no longer had any capacity to enjoy it.

Military Career

Academically, she performed quite well, with her only difficulty coming from having to learn how to deal with people who were so much lazier and stupider than her. By age 16, Marsellia’s policy of sticking its nose into other people’s business provided a distant conflict and she was allowed to enlist with special permission from the school. She would vehemently deny that her mother and grandmother’s distinguished careers in any way inflated her own reputation. In truth, her heritage probably had a little to do with how quickly she achieved an officer’s commission, but she continued to push and claw her way up from there at maximal speed. Her promotion to Brigadier General was one of necessity, but there was no doubt whom to give command of the troops in an emergency situation

Marriage

Battles on distant shores meant long supply lines, including ships and trains and various attempts to disrupt them. Likewise, this required someone excellent at magic to disrupt the disruptions. While personally and repeatedly keeping a series of seaports open, she formed what might pass for a friendly relationship with one of the captains. He was reasonably competent.

The primary purpose of the marriage was to produce a child, of course. Preferably a daughter. When this was accomplished, the inconvenient length of the war required that she cede the girl to the Captain and his extended family. His ship and mobility allowed for occasional visits and the distribution of lesson plans.

When the war ended in Marsellia’s surrender, the General gave quite a famous speech at Valvienne which is still being printed in textbooks, and was forcibly retired. An attempt at domesticity on her husband’s island with her daughter and his parents did not go well, although she did succeed in forcing the Marselline Consulate to stop offering happy hour drink specials on a pub sign. An attempt at domesticity on the ship with her husband ended with Magnificent blowing a hole in the hull, underlining their incompatibility with ocean life.

Nevertheless, it did not seem to occur to her to divorce him, or vice-versa. (Secretly, she does not desire her daughter to grow up entirely without a father, or without fun, as she did herself. She has never shared this with either of them.)

Surrounded by Idiots

Sanaam eventually found housing in San Rosille where constant magic use and irascibility was not an issue. The hole in the roof was an issue, as was the quality, or lack thereof, of the other magic-users living there, but ultimately not enough to prevent the General from moving in and attempting to correct things. (Her early efforts at improvement did not go exactly to plan and she now prefers to isolate herself from the stupidity instead of confronting it head-on.) She was incredibly displeased to discover the state of her military records and began an attempt to correct them at once. Despite repeated failures, she refuses to collect her pension at the incorrect rank and lives only off her husband’s salary.

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