WtHQM:Briony
A PC in Welcome to Holy Question Mark, a campaign set in the Amberverse using modified Lords of Gossamer and Shadow rules.
Biography[edit]
Briony Domdaniel ("Bri", pronounced like Bree) is a 17-year-old junior at the Socinian Institute of New York. The Domdaniel name has a longstanding association with the school; the family has been sending its daughters and sons there since its inception. The Domdaniels are Manhattan "old money," having accrued formidable wealth in the ancestral motherland (County Clare) and imported it with them to America in 1802. Briony is the sole current inheritor of that heritage, the beloved, pampered only child of Colin and Lindsey Domdaniel. Though she's clearly quite smart, performing brilliantly in class exams and standardized tests, she's rather a lackluster academic, owing mostly to her tendency to blow off the occasional class or assignment, and it's commonly (and correctly) assumed that she was accepted to the school based on her family's influence and habit of making frequent and significant donations. Nonetheless, her GPA is never allowed to dip scandalously low; she blithely skates through her coursework thanks to a combination of her aristocratic name, natural charm, and native intelligence.
Everyone at Holy Question Mark knows Briony. She's an intuitively social creature, breezing effortlessly into the good graces of most everyone she meets, and she is rarely encountered outside the company of a sizable segment of her vast nebula of friends. She simply seems to have a "presence" about her, an intensely sunny aura that puts people instinctively at ease, and it's clear that she is well accustomed to being the center of attention. Although she's managed to avoid much of the disdainful haughtiness one might expect from a cosseted blue-blooded princess, she is known to react with petulance or indignation when she perceives that her Queen Bee standing has been slighted, or that she has not been afforded the attention or deference due her.
One may be left with the distinct impression that Briony takes it somewhat for granted that she'll be picked captain of the cheerleading squad next year, after Liz Pardew's matriculation. Until then, however, she's filled her extracurricular roster with activities she considers basically to be variations on the theme of "hanging out with her friends": yearbook committee, Homecoming committee, school newspaper. The only one she takes seriously enough to have accepted any responsibility for, though, is the editorship of the Book of Questions, the Institute's quarterly student creative writing publication, which since she was a freshman has always included at least one of her own poetical submissions. Many of these works have actually been pretty good, and increasingly so as she gets older, and this year the Bo?'s faculty advisor has encouraged her to explore her poetic voice, in the hopes that it might concomitantly spark her interest in her Literature classes.
As to the monstrous troubles of the wider world, Briony remains blissfully dismissive. Violence is a thing that happens to other people. (People without money, mostly.)
Advanced Spirituality[edit]
Within the confines of Rev. Foley's Advanced Spirituality class, Briony is known to be what she refers to as a "psychic," able to read the auras of people and objects, and a "witch," an aptitude for and style of sorcery which she claims to be her ancestral birthright, the result of being descended from the Tuatha Dé Danann. Whether she's truly borne of ancient faeries is of course not readily provable, but Briony clearly believes her family's lore with unquestioning blind faith. She's commonly held to be the shining star of the class, with consistently stellar marks from Rev. Foley serving to prop up the balance of her GPA.
Briony’s spell-hanging repository is a pendant, a large irregularly-faceted vibrantly green garnet in a gold setting (it looks very much like the necklace pictured at the bottom of this page, but it’s one large stone rather than a field of small ones). It was a gift from her grandmother and a treasured family heirloom, said to date back to the beginning of the Domdaniels’ association with the Good Folk, and for reasons either forgotten or unknown in the first place, its name is the Dreaming Eye. She is absolutely never without it on her person; it stays with her through showers, swimming pools, and metal detectors, and is the subject of a long-lasting stabilizing sorcery, renewed as necessary, which ensures that the stone won’t inadvertently come loose from its setting or the chain slip from her neck.
