Roxy Ramone
Roxy Ramone, drawn by Kousei |
Contents |
Hey! Ho! Let's Go!
Dreams of war, dreams of liars
Dreams of dragons fire
And of things that will bite
Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
Off to never never land
The Mask
Roxy Ramone is a young woman in her early twenties. Standing about 5'10" and weighing roughly 140 pounds, she has a strong, yet nimble body, with amazing muscle tone. Her eyes are deep brown and her hair was, originally, black. She has a wide mouth with thick lips and strong teeth. Roxy does not blend into a crowd. She is loud and crude and likes it that way. A classic punk rocker, she dresses in torn jeans and leather jackets and obnoxious t-shirts and spiked collars. Roxy is always wearing boots of some sort, typically old army boots or steel-toed work boots.
Her body is tattooed and pierced in various places. Her more noticeable piercings include her ears, nose, eyebrows and navel. Roxy's most obvious tattoos include a black sunburst pattern around her navel, and dark green, thorny vines twisting their way up her arms from her wrists, which turn at her shoulders to disappear under her shirt and down her back. If her back her bare, the vines would be seen making elaborate spirals across the flesh in a knotwork pattern, symbolizing a Hedge.
The rocker chick's hair is regular dyed in one neon-bright color or another, anything from red or green to purple or pink. Sometimes a combination of colors. It changes irregularly. The hairstyle also shifts often, from spikes to dreadlocks to pigtails. On more extreme occasions, she's been known to sport a mohawk. Her nails are also often painted, typically black.
The Mein
To Changeling eyes, Roxy's true nature as an Ogre is obvious. Her skin is light gray in tone, providing a stark contrast to her neon hair and dark tattoos. Her eyes become jet black, with blood-red irises. Her ears are long and sharply pointed. Her fingernails and toenails are naturally black. And then... there's her teeth. Roxy has a mouth full of vicious fangs, reminiscent of the teeth of a tiger, that she often flashes in disturbingly wide grins. Her tongue is longer than normal, blackish in color and tapered to a point. Roxy is a true Gristlegrinder, a creature of hunger and brutality and rage.
Roxy's Mantle shows itself as a visual shimmering of summer heat around her body, like heat waves coming off of hot sidewalk pavement, and tends to leave a trail of red hot embers in her wake when she moves. The Mantle tends to flare noticeably when Roxy is angry. Obviously, it flares often.
Birth Name: ??? Current Name: Roxanne Ramone Nicknames: Rox, Redlight, Overbearing Cunt. Birthdate: October 20th, 1958 Age: 23 Abduction Date: April, 1977 Return Date: August, 2006 Eyes: Brown (Mask), Blood-red irises in black eyeballs (Mein) Hair: Black, but often dyed a variety of colors. Birthplace: Springfield, Illinois Marital Status: Single Education: High School Graduate Occupation: Motorcycle Mechanic Residence: Chicago, Illinois Seeming: Ogre Kith: Gristlegrinder Court: Summer Title in Crimson: Constable of Calefaction Mantle: 3 (An aura of heat waves around her body, giving off a small trail of embers in her wake) Entitlement: None Motley: Iron Valkyries Scars: Canine-like bite mark on her left shoulder (Briarwolf bite). Knife wound on right forearm (Stabbed by the Gentry known as Hotfoot). Trophies: A necklace made of Ogre tusks and colored beads on a leather thong. The tusks are taken from the privateer leader, Tiny, whom Roxy killed in combat.
I Wanna Be Sedated
Dont ask us to attend cos were not all there
Oh dont pretend cos I dont care
I dont believe illusions cos too much is real
So stop your cheap comment
Cos we know what we feel
Born to boring parents in a boring suburb of boring Springfield, the girl who would one day be known as Roxy Ramone never fit into that mundane society. Her parents wanted her to be as dull as everyone else there. Go to college, get married, have kids. The idea of such normalcy suffocated her, and she could never explain why. She was an unhappy child who constantly acted out in loud, sometimes offensive ways. She remembers shaving the family cat when she was eight. She remembers shoplifting with her friends when she was ten. When she hit her teenage years, she found the then-burgeoning punk rock scene. Back in the 70's, punk was bigger in England than America, but the subculture existed in Springfield. Roxy dove into it with an hungry lust. Her parents hated it, and that was pleasing. They tried to forbid her from listening to the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash. She rebelled with resentment (and some glee) and did what she wanted. She was free.
Free to rock. Free to think for herself. Free to drink, smoke pot, screw around. She learned to play guitar. She got into motorcycles as well. No one told her what to do. Some tried. No one succeeded.
Until one fateful night. The details remain hazy. She was nineteen, out of high school, and on her own in the big city of Chicago. There was a party with friends and strangers in a park after a concert in a local punk club. She got drunk. She got high. She wandered into the trees to whiz. Somehow, she got lost in the undergrowth, which got thicker and thicker. Not to mention thornier. Her skin and clothes were scratched at, and she began to forget what she was supposed to be doing. Irritated, the punk girl kept barreling forward, determined to find her way out, but she could not.
God Save the Queen
Roxy Ramone, drawn by PokketMowse |
Down in the depths of my fiery home
The summons bell will chime
Tempting you and all the earth
to join our sinful kind
There is a job to be done and I'm the one
You people make me do it
Now it is time for your fate and I won't hesitate
to pull you down into this pit
That was when she ran into the hunting party of the Prince of Bloody Hands. The huge, hulking Other merely grinned a grin of fangs and madness, and the girl knew despair like never before. His minions seized her (though not without a fight), and she was taken away to Arcadia. There, in the Prince's cave-like fortress, the girl was brutalized and abused. The Prince found her stubbornness and rebelliousness amusing and so he decided to use her like a fighting dog in bouts with other Fae's slaves. First, however, she needed to be trained and broken to his will. She was stripped naked and thrown into a deep, muddy pit, where she had only stones, bones, and rain for comfort. It was always dark and raining. The pit was always cold and muddy. The girl was starved, only fed enough to keep her alive and active. She was beaten and tortured regularly by her guards. She was insulted and tormented verbally. The guards were allowed to have their way with her sexually.
This nightmare went on for two years.
She broke, of course. No one could stand up under such massive abuse for long. Her humanity was shattered, and in it's place, a monster began to take form. Through all the torture and beatings, she nursed her anger. Her growing rage. It kept her warm at night. Thoughts of vengeance gave her the will to not kill herself. Dreams of murdering her guards gave her reason to smile.
When other slaves were thrown into the pit on occasion, the young slave, steadily transforming into an Ogre, made sure she was the dominant one. She browbeat them into submission, occasionally killing those that would not defer to her in a gruesome fashion with her fists and teeth. She would devour those she killed to feed the constant gnawing in her gut. She was queen of the pit. The scariest thing was, she had started to like what she had become.
And the Prince of Bloody Hands approved, for this was just what he wanted. He had turned the girl into a brutal killer and cannibal. He had his savage gladiator. It was time to put her to work.
They took her from the pit and loaded her into a cage on wheels for transport to the gladiatorial arena. The Prince of Bloody Hands had gone on ahead with his entourage, so it was just the Gristlegrinder girl and her guards traveling through the dark forests of Faerie. She sat in her mobile cage, glaring at her captors, swinging a fist any of them foolish enough to come too close as they rode along.
There was something about that stretch of woodlands that sparked her brutish memory. Slowly, it came back to her. This was where she had been captured by the Prince, where she had arrived from... from... home! She remembered! She came from another place! She had a life before this nightmare!
She wanted it back. Now.
The chain on the cage door was no challenge for her fearsome fangs and massive strength. Suddenly she was loose. A guard died, his throat bitten out, and then she was running. Into the trees, into the briar. Thorns tore at her skin, but she paid it no mind. She was used to pain now. She rather enjoyed it. Sharp stones cut into her bare feet, but she ignored it and kept running. By instinct and with some luck, the young redcap made her way through the darkness and underbrush and into the Hedge. Her guards could be heard in the distance, yelling to each other as they chased her. The Prince would not be forgiving if his new prized fighting dog escaped.
But escape she did. Through a final burst of thorns, she was out. Arcadia and the Hedge were behind her. She was back in the park. Back on Earth. Back in Chicago.
Sheena is a Punk Rocker
Well the kids are all hopped up and ready to go
They're ready to go now
They've got their surfboards
And they're going to the discotheque a go go
But she just couldn't stay
She had to break away
Well New York City really has it all
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Home. She was home. Sort of.
Chicago seemed familiar, but not entirely. She couldn't put her finger on it, but things seemed different. Maybe it was just her faulty memory. She couldn't remember a lot of things. Like her name.
It didn't take too long for other Changelings to find her, wandering around naked near an entrance to the Hedge as she was. She was taken in and taught about how life was for them now. It was an adjustment, but far easier than the past two years. One of the biggest surprises for the young woman was how much time had passed in the real world while she was away. Thanks to the oddities of the flow of time in Arcadia, nearly thirty years had passed on Earth! Going from 1977 to 2006 was a huge culture shock. Everything had changed. Was there even a place for her in this new era of cellphones and global warming and terrorism?
There was no going back to her old life. Whatever her fetch may have done with her life, it would be three decades older than she now. There was no way she could find it and kill it and reclaim her name, even if she could remember it.
Fine. Fuck it. She'd start a new life for herself.
Roxy Ramone was her name now. She found a job as a mechanic at a Harley-Davidson store, which suited her well enough. It was something she could do, and it left her plenty of free time for personal pursuits and Changeling issues. She even found a derelict Harley Sportster she restored herself. She loves to ride it everywhere. The Harley is her baby, and she takes very good care of it. Woe to any fool that scratches her paint job.
Her punk rock lifestyle? Roxy returned to it with gusto. It was one of the few familiar things from her old life she still had. It brought her comfort. She is more punk now than ever before. She took up the guitar and has become pretty good at playing, though she has no intention of going professional. Even a Summer Ogre knows the value of staying out of the spotlight.
A year since her escape, Roxy has settled into her new life as an Ogre of the Summer Court. Summer was a perfect fit for her anger issues and destructive lashing-out. The Court believes they can use Roxy like a weapon, though she needs honing. Roxy, in turn, is thankful to have a place in Changeling society that accepts her as she is, and which gives her direction for her violent urges. Leg-breaker, bodyguard, Loyalist hunter. Whatever the Court might want her to do, she'll enjoy it.
Roxy's rage still burns within her. Her anger issues won't be going away anytime soon. Like any victim of abuse, it turns into a cycle, and the Ogress takes many an opportunity to unleash her violent urges on anyone that deserve it in her eyes... or anyone that just annoys her.
Her years of torture have also given her a liking for pain. Roxy has become something of a masochist, which gives her more reason to throw herself into fights and potential danger. It is also another reason she likes getting tattoos and body piercings. Hopefully the Summer Court can harness her painful urges for the greater good.
Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good!
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Red flash clouds choking out the morning sky
They said it'd never come, we knew it was a lie
All forms of life die now the humans all succumb
Time to kiss your ass goodbye the end has just begun
Roxy's first year of life in Chicago was rather quiet. She had learned about the trials and tribulations of being a Lost, and spent her time most lounging around the Manse smoking, drinking, and annoying people. Her bad temper caused some ruckus on occasion, but nothing terribly disturbing. Adjusting to life as a Changeling -and- to life in 2007 was a challenge for the girl, but she slowly made the transition.
It was not until the arrival of the Directional Courts in Chicago at the turn of the year that Roxy finally began to find herself and her place in Lost society. When the foreign Courts began treading on the territory of Arlene's Gather and attacking it's members, the Ogress' fury found an acceptable target to vent upon. An enemy she could harm with impunity.
Roxy pulled the freehold's Summer Court together, rallying them to defense with a large meeting and a stirring speech. Pater Kuss, the court's leader, recognized the girl's growing involvement and encouraged her by placing her in a position of authority when Arlene's Gather approved the creation of a "war council" to direct the fighting against the Directional invaders. The first several months of 2008 saw Roxy organizing and training the freeholders for war. She also saw plenty of action, including a bloody melee against Verna, the dreaded "snake woman" leader of the Eastern Court of Envy (which ended with no clear victor, unfortunately).
The Gristlegrinder's dedication to her Court and freehold seemed to inspire others, and garnered the girl a lot of respect from her peers. She has not allowed in-fighting and traitors in the freehold to sway her from her goals. She dealt with such problems as necessary and kept marching forward. The Iron Spears would win the day. They had to.
In late April, the war council's general, Quinn Shepard, stepped down, and he and Pater Kuss promoted Roxy to take his place. Although this meant she would have to keep herself off the front lines (something she didn't care for), the redcap girl accepted the position.
Roxy also procured herself a hedge beast companion, a barghest named Black Shuck. The price of the faerie hound's freedom was her fangs. She agreed only on a promise from Shuck that he would aid her in regaining her teeth. The barghest kept his word and showed the redcap a place in the Hedge where she located a rare goblin fruit, which, over a period of a few weeks, regenerated her fangs. She hid the absence of her teeth from everyone else as best she could during this time period. Not only were her fangs regrown, but the fruit had rejuvenated her body in other ways, removing old scars and even making her look slightly younger.
The arrival of the summer season to Chicago brought interesting events to Arlene's Gather. The "Summer Games" opened the Season of Wrath, with Roxy competing in every event. The redcap girl won the Contest of Endurance, where she held up a heavy weight longer than anyone else, the Might of Oak and Air, in which she threw a caber the furthest, and the One Hundred Years of Strength, where she chopped down a tree in the fastest time. Roxy also participated in the Dogs of Summer, a gladiator battle in which a group of Lost (mostly Summers) fought three Briarwolves in a pit. Though badly wounded, Roxy and the other Lost were victorious, and suffered no casualties. The final ceremony capping off the games also crowned Pater Kuss as the Summer King. The old ogre granted Roxy the Court title of Constable of Calefaction with the duty of policing the freehold during summer and the Court the rest of the year.
Roxy proceeded into Summer, leading her Court through it's ritual of Midsummer's Yield, where they reaffirmed their allegiance to their Court's ideals. With the help of Cassandra Grady and Volt, she apprehended the renegade Courtier Jaime Valderrama and brought him to face Pater Kuss, who locked the rebellious Summer into an oath of servitude for the rest of the season.
In August, the Shikar, the royal hunt ritual of the Summer Court, was called upon the Gentry known as Hotfoot, who had been plaguing the Manse for months. It had been the former Keeper of the Tommyknockers. Roxy was part of the force of Iron Spears (along with a few Spring and Winter volunteers) sent to hunt it down and kill it. Black Shuck proved instrumental in tracking the fiend to his hidden underground lair, where the group of heroes confronted Hotfoot in a bloody battle to the death. The Lost triumphed, defeating the Keeper and escaping his collapsing cavern. While many were wounded, the hunting party suffered no lethal casualties.
The Summer Court established their own communal Hollow, Fort Helios, and began construction of the Helios Athletics Club, their mortal commons, with the young Ogress heading up the efforts. Roxy next presided over the court ritual known as the Feast of Strength, held in the Fort, which celebrated competition and unity.
September came, and with the exception of a minor photograph scandal involving Belle, the Summer Court finished out their season with pride. No freeholders had died during their reign, a first in a long time. The Autumn Court took control of Arlene's Gather, and Roxy restricted her duties to the Summer Court for the next three seasons.
For months, the freehold had been battling a force of privateers in the city. Skirmishes, intimidation tactics and dream invasions plagued the freehold from the summer into the autumn. Things finally came to a head when a group of freeholders, mostly Summer courtiers, ambushed the privateers, who were attempting to ambush the freeholders themselves. The forces seemed evenly matched, but the freeholders prevailed, killing most of the privateers involved with the remainder fleeing. Roxy took the privateer leader, an Ogre named Tiny, head on. Alongside Black Shuck and Pristine deWilde, Tiny was the first to die. Roxy harvested his tusks as a trophy of her victory.
Roxy later joined in the hunt for a hedge beast that had rampaged through the Maze. Devon Grey had offered a reward for bringing the creature in. The Calefactor decided to join a group of freeholders who took up the bounty. They tracked the beast through the Hedge and found it was a large boar. They battled and killed the brute, and Grey rewarded them as promised.
Mommy Can I Go Out & Kill Tonight?
The Courts
Spring Court
"This Court has gotten real sad. Where's the parties? Where's the defiance?"
Summer Court
"The Court of Wrath. The Crimson Court. The Iron Spear. My home. They understand me. I understand them. What more do I need?"
Autumn Court
"What Summer does with sword and gun, Autumn does with magic and fear. It ain't exactly my way, but I can respect it. On the other hand, curiosity killed the cat Beast."
Winter Court
"I'm perfectly happy to avoid the notice of Keepers, but these guys wanna avoid -everything-. Stop hidin' under your bed and pick up a shotgun."
Courtless
"Not everybody's got what it takes to dedicate yourself to Wrath, Fear, Desire or Sorrow. Makes it hard to know where these guys stand, though."
The Seemings
Beasts
"Some of 'em can put up a good fight. The rest of 'em are pets."
Darklings
"Am I supposed to be scared?"
Elementals
"Don't understand 'em, but they can sure put on a helluva light show!"
Fairest
"Did these pretty people actually have some use in Arcadia?"
Ogres
"Every fairy tale has it's monsters. That's where I come in."
Wizened
"Go ahead, gimme that attitude one more time, asshole! Yeah, that's what I thought."
The Strangers
Vampires:
"These dead things keep stalking a friend and fellow Courtier. Time to sharpen some wooden stakes."
Werewolves:
"Seen these things in action. Awesome. Fucking awesome."
Mages:
"Harry Potter wannabes, messin' with shit they don't understand and should leave alone. Reminds me of the Autumn Court."
Prometheans:
"Wha?"
Hunters:
"Only makes sense some mortals would pick up weapons and fight back against the vampires and Gentry. Long as they leave me and mine alone, more power to 'em."
Black Dog
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Flames licked round the sacred spire
And the congregation's last line of defence
Was engulfed in fire
As the flaming priest stepped into the firing line
On the business end of a beam of despair
God, he took his own life
During the coming of the
(Black Shuck) Black Shuck
This hulking canine monster goes by the name Black Shuck. To mortal eyes, this hedge beast appears as a large rottweiler/mastiff mix with a pure black coat. At his shoulders, he is about three feet high. Lost see something even more intimidating. Now this powerfully built barghest has mist that roils from his footsteps, and when he becomes agitated, his eyes glow a baleful green.
Black Shuck appears to be Roxy's companion, often accompanying the Ogre and displaying a fierce intelligence. Dog and Redcap share a strange bond that neither has yet explained, which seems to go beyond a simple partnership and seems more like sister and brother.
The barghest has displayed skill at tracking and combat, which is not unexpected, and a ferocious attitude that can rival the Ogre's.
Never Mind the Bollocks Roxy's quote page!
The Filth and the Fury All about Roxy's Stuff!
The Prince of Bloody Hands A page about Roxy's Keeper!
Prince of Bloody Hands Filk Song lyrics written about Roxy!
Return to Notable Chicago Characters
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