Editing Avery Darling (section)

== Life as a Mortal ==
Elaine Coventry was a troubled teen growing up financially privileged and emotionally impoverished in turn-of-the-century London. The scion of a wealthy bourgeois family, the only offspring of a marriage of convenience was a true psychic, plagued from childhood by a low-level telepathy which was essentially a form of preternaturally effective cold reading. 

Constantly confronted with and frustrated by the hypocrisy so prevalent in English upper class society, she developed a rebellious streak and often clashed with her very traditional parents, being thrown out of one boarding school after another and finally leaving home at an early age for good, consigned to damnatio memoriae. 

Elaine survived by attaching herself to rich donors who were into the occult and milking them for money. Realizing that the wealthy and entitled men who were her primary targets were all too eager to exploit her for other purposes, and knowing she would never be accepted in the powerful circles she really wanted access to, she used her talents of cross-dressing which she’d acquired as an absentee student stealing away for a night on the town. Thus, Allan Grey was born, an act perfected over time: a roguish cad, a Cockney street mystic come up from some East End gutter, exotic enough to be enticing, simple enough so as not be a threat. 

Though she was a real psychic, she used her preternatural abilities combined with a rigorous training in sleight of hand by a card sharp of her acquaintance for charlatanry, pretending to be a medium able to communicate with spirits. At the time sécances were all the rage, somewhere between a harmless, ubiquitous pastime game for some and a true obsession for many  - given how many small children and young mothers in all strata of society perished at a young age it was a macabre but lucrative business for con artists. Graduating from achieving rapid fame with astounding parlor tricks to becoming a spiritual aide to members of the Golden Dawn, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Ordo Templi Orientis, Thelema etc. she soon had excellent connections and lived in great luxury. 

Life was an endless party, and a constant performance, for the mask must never, ever fall - neither the pretense of being a man, nor the truth about how she swindled the best and the brightest of society. Over time the many layers of lies led to a gradual loss of personal identity. The actress disappeared into her role. Allan - with his carefully cultivated mannerisms and fabricated backstory - was soon far more real than her.

The combination of terrible strain and loads of money drove her into abusing absinthe and laudanum, later adding cocaine as a morning pick-me up to be able to function at all. She had many admirers over the years, an endless parade of men and women who fell for her because they mistook attentiveness for empathy. She couldn’t trust anyone with her secrets and she became bitter and cynical over the slightest intimations of deceit. Thus, there was no intimacy for her, neither physically nor emotionally. Over time she grew jaded and distant, a user and abuser who only judged the worth of people according to how much they might be useful to her. In the end, she couldn’t even be bothered to mind the state of his own soul or body.

All of this changed with Penelope Newton, a poor waitress who worked at one of the clubs where high-ranking members of some of the fraternal orders Allan belonged to gathered after hours. She had witnessed Elaine’s performances first hand and believed in the gifts of the fraud whole-hearted. She turned to her because her teenage daughter Cassandra had vanished. The police wouldn’t help her for some reason and her employer wouldn’t take her seriously, believing that the young, pretty woman had run off with a lover or taken to a life of crime. 

Elaine wanted to turn her down but the moment she shook her hand to shoo her away, her gift was triggered like it had never been before because Penelope was a low-level empath herself. Feeling Penelope’s pain and despair cut through the fog of Elaine’s inebriation, apathy and disgust. What’s more, she received the grieving mother’s constant nightmare vision of young Cassie, begging for her life, dying a thousand different deaths, one more horrifying than the others. 

Overwhelmed by the surge of forced empathy, finding Cassie henceforth became Elaine’s obsession. She dreamt of her every night and had constant visions of her mother’s pain. She had to find her no matter what the cost! But it wasn’t just that. What she couldn’t even admit to herself was that, having a purpose, doing something for a good purpose, seeking truth instead of lies, she hadn’t felt this awake, this alive in years. She followed the only clue she had, a page torn from the young woman’s diary, speaking of a pleasant exchange with the owner of the club where her mother worked. Deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole the con artist turned detective went. She pursued the most obscure leads passionately, driven to save Cassie. 

In the end she found Cassie, though it was only the poor girl’s ritually mutilated corpse, floating in the Thames. She hadn’t made it in time. Allan told Penelope a lot of merciful lies, giving her exactly the sort of vision of a better life that she knew the grieving mother could be happy with. But Elaine had some business to attend to, for on Cassandra’s corpse she had found a symbol she knew all too well from some of the dignitaries that were members of some of the fraternal organizations she was frequenting. Driven over the edge by finding her new purpose in life dead and all her hopes for doing something good and worthwhile for once dashed, she decided to seek vengeance and to pull down the murderous house of cards behind the club.

But trouble loomed for the dogged detective. Although as Allan Elaine was the enfant terrible of the occult circles, her character’s outré habits had always been tolerated because she had never asked questions of the powerful and complied with their demands in regard to her performance - she had been ‘one of the guys’, so perfectly adapted to an complicit in a culture of privilege, violation and silence that she had been invisible. All of that changed when she began to investigate. The great old men of the brotherhoods did not like their favored pets asking questions all of sudden.