PmWiki | Madlands / NotableFigures

Francesca D'Angelo, a mad scientist also known as the Seamstress.

Bodies and reagents are traded with the rest of the post-post-apocalyptic world. It, too, has a ruling class -- warlords and priests and petty kings and generals -- and they all want more life.

The mad scientist provides this. When needed, her pestilent caravan visits, with her as a dignitary, and she operates. She does not like simply preserving the human form rather than letting her creativity run, but it pays the bills. More often, potentates send apprentices, believing that a court doctor with divided loyalties but superhuman skill is better than the vanilla alternative.

The mad scientist is the only one who can make one or two key ingredients of the reanimation serum. She sells the serum to old rulers with an eye dropper for its weight in gold, but uses it by the liter on her own creations.

The mad scientist is technically the only living person in the gated community. Prospective apprentices are ritually killed and resurrected, to ensure their loyalty by dependence; they are taught almost, but not quite all, the mad scientist's secrets.

Sometimes, she plays warlord, sending her mutant armies to this or that hot spot. She never holds territory -- doesn't need to. She just gets concessions from the side she let win.

The Seamstress has her own blue-and-orange morality. She strongly believes in consent, but that's pretty much all she believes in. And she never, ever undoes her work, unless it's not working right. She also has no ethical problems whatsoever doing things like changing someone's dietary preferences or even sexual orientation... as long as they ask and aren't technically under duress in doing so.

Part of it is that she sincerely believes that being dependent on her serum is no big deal (unless she wants it to be) and that everyone would be better off with some "improvements". Part of it is that she's pleasantly insane.

The Seamstress is a little fey when it comes to love; if a woman were to fall in love with a merman, she'd procure a pair of gills and even a new tail, or viceversa, almost for free -- if she finds the couple cute, for example if they make their request by interpretive dance, or in the form of a poem or song. If not, she'd treat it like a business transaction, and put the couple in debt for a few years.

everything the Seamstress does has a "tell": even in the cases of Tess, Eli, Nara, or Mira, where the transformation could have been done invisibly, she leaves a mark -- stitches on Tess's temples, nicely shaped but visible matching scars on Eli and Nara's heads or spines, visible extra brain tissue on Mira's upper back like that of the Uber-Morlock in the 2002 Time Machine movie.

Some people say that it's because of craftmanship pride, some people say that it's a way to show the Seamstress' power and reach, some people say that the Seamstress doesn't think that far ahead usually. In truth, it's a limit to her power, a compulsion, just like the other Madland rulers can't help signing their work. If the Seamstress wished to make a spy, she'd make sure that the "tell" is well hidden, maybe a scar on the buttocks, but careful examination would show it.

At minimum, the marks denote divided loyalties. Having a former apprentice as a personal physician is, for a ruler or a merchant prince, almost a guarantee of immortality... but it also means that the Seamstress is probably being fed a bit of information, at minimum. Of course, there's alwasy the chance that she doesn't care about lightning-trout prices or the Calendar Count's plan to desynchronize the Clock King's heliographs.

A problem is that any "maker's mark" by the Seamstress, her apprentice, her rivals (who tend to be more wizardly in their modus operandi) and the like is sufficient for the New State to classify the subject as a humanoid or animaloid, regardless of origin. This has made espionage very difficult.

Let's go back to the Seamstress. What does she look like? Beautiful in a creepy way; she has visible stitches on her face and body, closing a Glasgow smile and going around her neck (she's been beheaded a few times, each a close call from which she was rescued by her apprentices and subjects); her eyes are often different colors, as she swaps them somewhat frequently; she is tall and slender and pale and hay-blonde and can look in two directions at once -- she split her brain, but can reconnect the two hemispheres at will. The stitches going from her lips to her ears give her a vaguely amused, eerie smile when her face is resting. The overall impression is if Dr. Frankenstein almost, but not quite, perfected his creation; there's something penultimate about her.

At home, she dresses how she wants; sometimes she's naked; sometimes she's wearing the old style laboratory scrubs that are a mad scientist's traditional garb; sometimes she put on a sock, a dress, and a sweater because she feels like it or because she started getting dressed and had an idea halfway through. Then again, sometimes she has a penis (or more than one), or an extra pair of arms, and so on, depending on what she's working on. When in the company of a particularly trusted apprentice, she's been known to go without a body entirely for a few days, putting her head on a lab table or her brain in a jar. That is considered a great sign of trust.

Abroad, she'll generally dress modestly, with her trademark scrubs and usually a poncho over that if she's not actively operating.

She insists that her apprentices put on scrubs and practice proper laboratory hygiene, and prefers that people at least cover their genitals when talking to her, unless told to do otherwise. Lobotomites and cyberzombies are usually covered in overalls, adapted for whatever their job might be.

Are you even an evil overlady if your lair doesn't have a pair of cute axolotl femboys conjoined by the tail and making out with each other most of the time just because they can?

(Important to note here is that the Seamstress isn't evil, she's crazy. This is someone else's creation, a rival perhaps, let's call them Mother Asherah, specializing in growing entirely new bodies for people and then transfering their souls into them. They're also crazy rather than evil, but they've had an archnemesis thing going for a while now and the arrival of the New State wasn't enough of a reason to stop having fun with it)

Asherah and the Seamstress occasionally fight it out, cyber-zombies against chimeras. They take it seriously, but most anyone else doesn't -- people actually show up to spectate the battles. It's anyone's guess whether this, like other archrival relationships, is real or kayfabe; overall it's probably on a spectrum. The two have directly come to blows only once; during that occasion, a surge of wild magic forced them to share a body until they could figure out how to separate equitably.

This sort of ritualized combat isn't uncommon in the Madlands, as it allows rulers to flex their military muscle in public view without giving away secrets or upsetting the status quo.

The main problem with the Seamstress is that she either doesn't understand that being dependent on her serum might be a bad thing, or she's maintained for years a perfect facade of not understanding it. The other problem is that she does things on a whim. For example, one day she found a cat that was missing an eye, and since she couldn't find a matching eye, she plucked out her own, and did without for several week. For another example, another day she was traveling and found a couple of dead farmers, probably killed by a bandit. So she resurrected them. Since there weren't enough healthy organs to do so properly, she made conjoined twins out of them. Unlike other surgical conjoined twins she's made, these did not adjust to their new situation and decided to commit suicide a few months later; the Seamstress figured that at least they got to say goodbye to thair families. Let's look at more stuff she's done on a whim. Most of it will be mostly good, some of it will be just flat out weird, and then there are the 2-3 times when the Seamstress showed her evil side and reminded everyone why she should be held in awe.

The Axe is a famous condottiere. Once a general, he lost his job for summarily executing too many of his soldiers for lack of aggressiveness. These days he either fights alone, which is surprisingly effective, or using mechanical or undead soldiers. He and the Seamstress have a sort of subcontractor agreement.

The Axe, the mercenary, originally simply wanted more strength, speed, and ferocity. The Seamstress obliged, but she made him too ferocious, which led him to start executing his own soldiers for small infractions. The Seamstress asked him if he wanted his ferocity dialed down, but he said no. So, now The Axe buys disposable soldiers from the Seamstress or the Clock King for his lightning-quick campaigns, and shares the spoils with them.

The Axe is a mountain of a man, tall, thick, hirsute, with red skin, jet black hair and sideburns, and red bloodshot eyes. His body holds twice as much blood as normal, and the muscles in his arms and legs act as secondary heart boosting venous flow. He has simple black tattoos in a flowing geometric pattern, and a rectangle on his shaved chin. The Seamstress gave him regenerative abilities and heightened reflexes, but his immense strength is all by his own effort; he uses his regeneration to exercise at a rythm that would destroy lesser men. He's intelligent, even kind, but very quick to fly into a rage. He eats from 5 to 10 kcal a day. Unsurprisingly, his favorite weapon is a battleaxe; while he is often depicted with an oversized double-headed axe, his actual go-to is a polearm axe.

He once was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. To everyone's surprise, he let himself be handcuffed to two guards. To nobody's surprise, he proceeded to escape the jail by dragging the two guards along as if they were cufflinks.

the Axe is a Paul Bunyan type figure, but he's also someone who can be hired to slay a dragon or clear out a camp of bandits. For actual war, the Axe brings along a platoon of undead or clockwork soldiers, usually set up to use ranged weapons to suppress the enemy so that the Axe can close the distance into melee and become a humanoid blender.

Riela, violated by her husband's boss and abandoned by her liege lord, wanted to be an avenging paladin. The Sorceress agreed to help, and gave her nerves of gold, a mesoskeleton, and other improvements. Riela went on a rampage, but then learned that the Seamstress could not, or would not, return her body to normal, so she has to live a regular life while keeping her augmentations under control. However, a few times a year, the Seamstress gives her the name of a very bad man, and that bad man dies messily a few days later.

A figure of the New State's recent past is Riko the Techno Blade, a mighty warrior wielding a plasma sword who billed himself as a "dictator removal specialist" during and immediately after the New State's formation, who would spend his lifespan essentially taking down local administrators who got too big for their britches. In many ways, he was the last of the fanciful figures that are still prevalent in the Madlands. His ballad, "Woe to the People of Order", is still sung to indicate dissent. Ultimately, he succumbed to the great enemy -- time. His body was never found, giving rise to the legend that Technoblade never died, although he'd be very old by now. Even so, his memory makes sure that local mayors and councilmen in the New States never give in to satrapic behavior, because as long as his song is sung, the people will remember.

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