Candi Cartouche
Name: Candi Cartouche (Teodora “Totya” Bogomileva Bakunina / Hotepsekhemwut “the two powers are at peace”) Concept: Club girl adept trying to find her magick after an ancient ghost from another world healed her psychological damage
Obsession: If ma’at is the way of all things, then isfret is also part of ma’at. How can Set be made to serve Horus? How can the emptiness of essence immanentize the fundamental spiritual nature of Image? Noble: Saving women at rock-bottom without judgment. Rage: Hubris. Powerful people thinking their power makes them greater than the gods. Fear (Helplessness): Drowning, in either water or booze.
Abilities
Connect 45% / Struggle 35% Knowledge 25% / Lie 55% (was Knowledge 20% / Lie 60% before the Joining) Fitness 40% / Dodge 40% Notice 55% / Secrecy 25% (was Notice 45% / Secrecy 35%) Status 55% / Pursuit 25%
Identities
I’m an ancient architect 15% Of course I can build traps, plan and solve labyrinths and other architectural tricks like false doors, remember brief events and particular pieces of information like names and places from my First Life, and understand the spirit worlds Feature: Can roll to allow flip-flops for a roll that supports artistic endeavours (Unique) Feature: Resists shock to Unnatural Feature: Substitutes for Secrecy
I’m eye candy 40% Of course I can look good in those clothes, create a distraction, go to the front of the line, and get Instagram followers. Feature: Cooperative Feature: Resists shock to Self Feature: Substitutes for Status
Had “I am what you want 30%” before the Joining, but that was part of her weak khu and so it went away in the Joining
I’m a sakhmu mummy 30% Of course I can survive as a spirit after death, return from the underworld in 70 days, heal faster, avoid being compelled or influenced to go against the natural order, create amulets and effigies, make art of various types, get noticed, be remembered, garner inspiration from the spiritual worlds, counterspell isfret magics, drive away malign supernatural influences, and share my life force with those around me. Feature: Evaluates Unnatural Feature: Medical Feature: Substitutes for Notice
I’m a secret nerd 30% Of course I can pretend I don’t know things that I do, discuss the semiotics present in Samue Delaney’s fantasy and science fiction novels, remember things without checking any references, hide knowledge in inane conversation, confuse my friends with existentialist philosophizing, think more abstractly than is useful, debate the immanence versus transcendence of divinity without coming to a conclusion. Feature: Evaluates Isolation Feature: Substitutes for Knowledge Feature: Tactical
I’m a vestimancer 35% (was 60% before the Joining) [Obsession] Feature: Casts rituals Feature: Uses gutter magic
Imbalance 52% [Negative Identity] Feature: Evaluates Negative Identity Feature: Specific information: powerful emotion or weaknesses, flaws, illness, and impending death depending on form
Through the Looking Glass 25% Feature: Detecting if something is native or not to this reality (Unique) Feature: Evaluates Negative Identity Feature: Substitutes for Secrecy
First Life (Signified)
Hotepsekhemwut served Ma’at when she lived, carefully constructing buildings and cities to ease the flow of magic through the Two Kingdoms according to the will of Ra himself on earth, the Pharaoh Pepi II. Then Pepi died and his wife Nitocris seized power, flouting the wisdom of the priestly classes and conspiring with an ancient pharaoh she wrenched from Duat to seize the flow of sekhem for her own purposes. Hotepsekhemwut threw every bit of her skills at sacred geography and trap-laden architecture in the direction of bringing this hubristic queen to divine justice and banishing her pet mummy back to Osiris’s lands.
This all ended when Nitocris invited her and others to a banquet in the royal palace. Hotepsekhemwut could find no way to avoid the invitation, nor could she think of an excuse to leave once she noticed the cunningly-hidden duct in the direction of the river. Water filled her lungs and she awoke in Anubis’s chamber, gifted by Ma’at for her service with not having to see how Khaibitu-na-Khonsu lost control of his magicks and tore Egypt ~ and the timeline ~ apart.
By the time that Hotepsekhemwut had built her afterlife in Amenti enough to consider the realities of the Quicklands once more, her beloved home had been looted. Many of the buildings she had agonizingly perfected over months of planning and supervising builders had been torn into or, worse, blown up in the search for mistaken knowledge or titillating treasures. Like many mournful khu, her khu buckled down to seeing this as an opportunity to fuse the vitality of these young and marauding civilizations with the glory and wisdom of her own. Ironically, Queen Nitocris’s philosophical heirs proved to be a great ally to her in this work, as their studies and magicks kept the last wisps of Egypt alive.
Then came the Dja-akh, the ghost storm, whose howling winds and battering sands blasted the great city of the dead into a buried ruin and tore from Hotepsekhemwut the comfort of being one of many. Her ka and her ba, her sahu and her khaibit, were last seen as clouds of shreds before the Dja-akh reduced them to just more sand. Hotepsekhemwut was now only khu.
Second Life (the Looking Glass)
Trigger Event
Teodora “Totya” Bogomileva Bakunina grew up a rather normal young girl in Bulgaria. She loved her parents and ran wild when she was allowed to and, until puberty came to steal the calm which had characterized her young life, come in to help her parents when they called. Then came adolescence, and individuating rebellion. She began to fight with her parents and, during one fight early on, found herself with a picture of the three of them. Angrily, she scratched out their faces and their bodies, until a stranger would be unable to tell that they had ever been in the snapshot upon looking at it.
The next day, she didn’t recognize her parents for a moment when they came to wake her for school. When she returned home, she had to blink away an image of them as indistinct shapes of whiteness. They fought again that weekend and she once again scratched them out of a photo. This time she forgot them for a whole half-hour in the morning before realizing who they were. This continued.
Within a month, she only remembered that she had parents for an hour a day. Somehow, they managed to fight at the end of 45 minutes of everyone crying and hugging and apologizing, and Totya, knowingly now, finished off the job. No longer were there any photos of her parents available to her ~ every physical copy had been scratched out, and everything digital deleted. Teodora had freed herself, though there was a cost. A haunting feeling that she had lost something but she can’t remember what torments the back of her mind, somehow resisting connecting with her memory of the erasure to give her a clear view of what she’s missing.
The Rest of Her Life
Totya grew up obsessed with the relationship between signifier and signified, and a longing to find that place of utter meaninglessness. This simultaneously brought her to university as a semiotics student, buried in the sometimes impenetrable Continental philosophers, and to teh clubs where she fell into existence as simple flesh with the help of alcohol and drugs and many willing partners. She became fascinated by the ways in which her increasingly scandalous outfits seemed to urge those around her to negate them. She fell into the orbit of a club-bum who excitedly engaged her slurring descriptions of this curiosity.
He broke her again, and taught her the real primacy of the image, and then was promptly shot by some Americans in fancy suits who wanted something he’d hidden away. Totya never found out what, as she ran to build her own sleazy little occult queendom in a tucked away corner of the Bulgarian nightlife. She was the darling of the scene, an intrusion of the ancient divine goddesses into the trashy lives of those around her, all by virtue of claiming the power of the empty image.
Third Life (Through the Looking Glass)
The Joining
The khu that was all that remained of Hotepsekhemwut heard her cries of pain at the death of the rest of her soul disappear behind her as the Dja-akh through her out of the world she knew. A dizzying distant view of all the kingdoms of the dead ~ not just Amenti, but Stygia and Enoch and all the rest ~ getting buried disappeared in an oof as she slammed into a hardness like a stone wall that nonetheless seemed to have no effect on her momentum.
She came to her wraithly senses in Neter-khertet near a woman dying the slow death of exposure as she sat in a cold Bulgarian winter dressed in just a few straps of plastic, her body fatally fooled into thinking it was warm by the vasodilation of an epic night. Totya was transitioning across the Shroud but seemed to have a weak, brittle khu that would do nothing to protect her until she was ready to know she was dead. Hotepsekhemwut covered her from the cold horrors of the Neter-khertet night and spoke to her. At first, the slurring neo-ghost resisted, insisting she was about to achieve . . . well, whatever it was she wanted to achieve. She couldn’t explain it very well. It wasn’t until Horepsekhemwut spoke of her experience of divine that the Bulgarian woman seemed to pay any real attention.
The two agreed to become one in a moment of agony.
The Hajj
It took 69 days for Hotepsekhemwut, drawn by an irresistible inner urging, to drag Totya’s body to the Land of Faith. She pulled herself off of the Venetian ferry in Alexandria to find and quite quickly (and also literally) bumped into a woman who spoke to her in her ancient language. Obviously surprised, the woman told Hotepsekhemwut that she was part of a group called the Eset-a and that they weren’t expecting her. But it was a great sign, she said ~ an omen that their work was nearing its grand finish, the reunification of Osiris! The woman brought the new mummy to the catacombs near Pompey’s Pillar and used a strange device to summon more of her kind. The Eset-a performed what they called the Spell of Life and both Totya and Hotepsekhemwut found themselves at the Pillars of the West. They travelled through the labyrinth beneath to Anubis’s chamber, where Utu-nesert was the Judge of the Dead who championed their cause. Two became one in a moment of ecstasy rather than agony, and they awoke again surrounded by Eset-a in the catacombs.
And Now
The Eset-a seem to have little time to help a new Amenti understand what is going on, so focused are they on their nearly completed quest. Nonetheless, what few memories of Hotepsekhemwut’s have been able to find a counterpart in Totya’s mind don’t seem to match up, a pile of small details that portend grander divergences.
She’s taken the name Candi Cartouche (@candicartouche) for herself, and near jumped at the chance to get away from the cult that ensured her resurrection when they mentioned that they had had Osiris’s head with a face of the ram until another like Candi had absconded with it. This other mummy had left some evidence that they were headed to New York, and maybe to Knossos thereafter, so the Eset-a paid Candi’s way.
