| Origin: | Abnormal Trespasser |
| Nature: | Lost |
| Boundary: | Meandering river |
| Size: | Sinuous |
| Nature Feature: | Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) |
◆ Growth Points ◆
22 GP
◆
❝
[Humming.]
Rhodes is a wayward ghost who runs along the North American tundra in search of the lost and missing. She guides the living back to safety, and commits the stories of those who cannot return to memory– acting as an oral historian among ghosts.
In her previous life, she was a search-and-rescue operative based out of occupied Koyukon and Iñupiat land (what is currently northern Alaska.)
◆ Personality ◆
Rhodes is a storied esk. To most, she’s a quiet loner with a strange, restless energy. She’s often found tracking the lost and missing across the North American tundra. Compulsed and duty-driven, Rhodes seeks out missing individuals much as she did in her previous life, as a search-and-rescue operative.
But guiding them home is only half of her story.
While her heart lies in the arctic North, Rhodes is driven by a restless spirit, and is sometimes called to the far reaches of the Earth by inexplicable urges to wander. She is drawn to those who have so thoroughly lost themselves that they cannot be restored. They may be lonely ghosts, forgotten spirits, or sometimes even other esk. She offers these beings quiet companionship, and collects stories from them out of a solemn sense of duty.
Those that she is permitted to retell, she spreads widely and with purpose. In this capacity, Rhodes acts as an oral historian among ghosts. She is particularly sensitive to the forgotten, the silenced, and the dispossessed– she chronicles their triumphs and losses, and relays their message to anyone who will listen.
And listening to Rhodes is very easy. She’s become something of a rising star for her spectacular “performances” and artful narration. Rhodes has a powerful presence as a storyteller, and speaks with a rhythm and grace that brings the world around her to life. Dancing images and flickering memories accompany her recollections, viewed seemingly from her own eyes.
Lasting is the memory of Rhodes’ performances, but fleeting is the ghost behind them. She never lingers after the story is told. For this reason, much is known about her work and precious little about Rhodes herself. She actively avoids such inquiry, and does not seek lasting companionship in her travels. Some consider her past too full of wounds to retell. Others speculate that she is searching for something that she’s lost. And others yet see Rhodes run with such urgency that they can’t help but think there’s something she’s trying to leave behind…
◆ Past Life ◆
❝
My whole world capsized overnight.
Rhodes was a search-and-rescue operative based in the arctic North, who nurtured an amateur music hobby on the side. Moved by her experiences in the field, she began to use music as an outlet to express the grief of her line of work. At first, nobody knew about the hobby; she performed in her bedroom to an audience of one. But as friends and family began to recognize her talent, Rhodes realized she might be able to use music as a tool to spread awareness, and to lift others on her SAR team up– many of them unpaid volunteers and underpaid staff.
Rhodes began performing at bars and community functions to local acclaim. Her music was embraced for its rawness and honesty, equal parts morbid and cathartic. Its simple production meant that Rhodes rarely wrote a song that couldn’t be performed with an acoustic guitar, a husky voice, and a heavy heart.
Folks in town knew she had something special. But they never imagined her becoming what she did.
Rhodes performed to a waning crowd at a local bar, one quiet Thursday night. It was like all those that came before, and– in her mind– all those that would come after. All the same, except for a stranger ambling at the edge of the audience. Like Rhodes, they were an entertainer. But unlike Rhodes, they performed to wild acclaim online… And her work touched them in a way that very few things had. Moved by her music, but too shy to approach the woman herself, this stranger recorded a snippet of Rhodes’ performance and promoted her without her knowledge.
Rhodes became a household name overnight.
It’s difficult to say for sure what the musician felt during this time. She was a notoriously private artist, and rarely talked about her work publicly. To some, it came as no surprise when Rhodes went missing. To many, the anguish of losing her voice was too cruel to bear. Others yet consider her an activist and provocateur, stolen from the world before she could even speak.
But all the world knows this: She never wanted her music to become commercially successful.
◆ Enchantment ◆
Memory of Water
The magic of Rhodes’ stories is not her own, unbeknownst to most. Her talent as a storyteller is real, but the ghostly memories that animate her stories are created by her invisible friend, ES. Instead, Rhodes’ powers are so volatile that she actively suppresses them.
She is haunted by visions of her previous life, a story she has made every effort to forget. These memories manifest in bodies of water as dancing images of her past, portraits of the hollow-eyed musician who lost herself to the tundra. Ethereal wake-lines sometimes trail off her body when the enchantment is active, serving as a frame for her memories. Strong episodes can even cause them to follow her onto land.
Rhodes is terrified of these episodes, and never speaks of them to anyone. She is content for others to assume she has control over her powers. Not because it makes her look good, but because there are some things better left buried in the past.
◆ Relationships ◆
ES
❝
Hey… Hey! This thing’s on, right? Can you hear me?
◥
Affectionately dubbed “the ghost that lives in my walkie-talkie,” ES is the nickname Rhodes has given to the spirit that talks to her through her handheld transceiver. They act as a guide and confidante for Rhodes, helping her make sense of the world, and serving as her source of 100% fresh, wild-caught salmon jokes.
ES themself is a kindred spirit and fellow musician. Sensitive and soft-spoken, but scathingly funny, they bring out a gentle humor in Rhodes that would otherwise never appear. The two have become close in their travels, and with good reason– as far as Rhodes knows, ES is bound to the transceiver she found them in. She’s their whole world, and she takes this responsibility very seriously.
ES isn’t entirely helpless, though. They have some control over the busted electronics that the two encounter out in the tundra, and often manipulate them to help Rhodes out. ES is also blessed with a keen eye and photographic memory, which allows them to play back ghostly recordings of everything they’ve ever seen and heard. (Incidentally, they’re responsible for Rhodes’ stage magic.)
ES is especially drawn to television screens and tablets, where they can project images of themself (albeit distorted ones.) This power is unstable, however, and proves to be destructive over time. Their only reliable point of contact is Rhodes’ transceiver.
Rhodes is well aware that there is more to ES than meets the eye. There’s an unsettling familiarity to their bond, but Rhodes is torn between chasing her curiosity and running away from it. ES has witnessed her disastrous encounters with the ghosts of her past, and knows that she holds intense pain over her previous life. She is not yet ready to know how that story ended, or how they became like this.
ES respects this. For now, they have all the time in the world to run.
The Ghost
Sometimes the ghosts of the past are defanged. Hidden in pretty metaphors, songs, hymnals, and the bright white spaces between the fine print. Here they can be controlled. Here, from the ivory tower of hindsight, sense and reason can be exercised over the narrative. Continuity declared. History written in red ink, as if to say “There was no other way.”
Most are not.
Nobody knows what ghost haunts Rhodes, but there is nothing abstract about the urgency with which she runs from it.
Aevre and the Arctic Circle
Rhodes has a complicated relationship with Aevre, her creator and the woman who unmade her.
Meetings between the two are short, professional, and incredibly awkward. Aevre doesn’t work with Rhodes nearly as often as she does with other members of the Arctic Circle. Instead, the Wanderer trusts her to look after her haunt with very little oversight. This comes as a surprise to her polar associates, many of which know Rhodes– Not as the famed storyteller, but as Aevre’s mistake.
Nothing can be said for sure about the circumstances of Rhodes’ transformation. She refuses to talk about it, and shirks all contact with the Circle. But the mark that Aevre left on her is unmistakable; Rhodes holds deep wounds from this event, which she cannot hide.
The Circle can only speculate on what transpired between the two. What they do know is this: Aevre could not fix it.
Other Esk
Despite Rhodes’ renown as a storyteller, she is frustratingly obtuse to most esk– if she can be found at all. She does not seek companionship, and usually slips away when it finds her.
A few ghosts pique her interest, though. Rhodes is drawn to anyone with a good story… And if she can be considered a good storyteller, well, she makes an even better audience.
Rhodes can often be found around the Earth-bones left behind by fallen esk. She feels an especially strong sense of duty to them, and will tell the story of such a place to any who will listen.
Spirits and Other Beings
Rhodes is a kindred spirit with the forgotten and dispossessed. She seeks out lost souls with the same tenacity she did in life. She cannot restore them, but she feels driven to lend an ear to the unheard, and to safeguard their stories from a forgetful world. Many of her tales are inherited from these ghosts, spread with their blessings in hopes of calling attention to their plights and triumphs.
Despite her best efforts, Rhodes often finds herself tangled up in their affairs. She figures that if she can lend a helping hand, then she doesn’t mind being sent away to chase the four winds– Not if it helps a fellow spirit feel remembered. Rhodes might not make true friends, but her bonds with the world’s ghosts may very well be the next best thing.
The Living
Rhodes is a one-woman search-and-rescue patrol. Most of her days are spent running the contiguous North American tundra, keeping a close eye on hikers, field workers, hunters, and anyone else who looks a bit turned around.
Rhodes does not perform transformations, so she guides the lost home whenever possible. She typically hums to lead missing individuals back to safety, and may leave behind the bodies of her two salmon companions to sate the hungry.
She is particularly relentless when she finds those who have become so lost that they have no hope of being found. Rhodes can spend whole months tracking a single person, and then patiently walking the miles back home. She feels that her peers are too quick to disengage, too quick to transform the missing. Unfortunately, this makes her no stranger to failure. She is rarely the warm and loving woman she wants to be for those who will never come back, but she carries each loss with her from beyond the grave.
Rhodes’ relationship with the natural world is more opaque. She has not developed any supernatural ability to communicate with animals, plants, bodies of water, or other beings. Still, there are times when she can be found alone among the trees. With the Earth’s eyes as her sole witness, Rhodes can be caught doing some incredibly silly things. She seems to take simple joy in rolling around in the snow and swimming through white rapids with the seasonal salmon runs. She has a grand sense of natural wonder and curiosity for her surroundings, and finds her esk shape uniquely suited to exploring it– even if it means scratching at the permafrost like a little fox to dig up something interesting.
She dislikes acting this way around others, but is unflappable when caught.
Note: This list is always expanding! If you have used Rhodes as a character in your stories, just let me know and I can add a little blurb.
◆ Notes ◆
- Rhodes’ two morphs only appear in certain circumstances, and she almost never manifests with all of her familiars, enchantments, and accessories:
- Rhodes’ salmon familiars only manifest as live fish in bodies of water where salmon are normally found. When she’s traveling on land, they may hang from her search-and-rescue vest as if freshly caught. More commonly, they won’t manifest at all.
- She sometimes leaves her salmon behind for the lost to eat, and may offer them to other ghosts as a token of good will. When eaten, they taste sweet, and sate the living for a long time.
- The forms that Rhodes and her salmon take always match the seasons. They never manifest “spawning” coloration outside of the appropriate times and places where salmon are known to spawn. This means that Rhodes is almost always in her “default” coloration when traveling abroad.
- Rhodes generally manifests with her transceiver and search-and-rescue vest. Her transceiver is particularly significant to her, as it’s the only reliable way to communicate with ES. How they’re depicted is open to interpretation.
- Rhodes’ fur is sleek like a seal or otter, interspersed with the smooth scales of a salmon. She smells faintly of a fast-flowing creek on the cusp of autumn, or the sea.
- Her speaking voice is curt and dispassionate, but she has a beautiful and emotive singing voice.
- Rhodes has a subtle presence as an esk. It is difficult to find her unless she makes herself known. Sometimes, she’s given away by the distant sound of humming; she has a habit of singing under her breath when she thinks she’s alone.
◆ Use ◆
Rhodes can be freely used as a character in your own stories. She is likely to be a fleeting presence, a stranger bearing only a song and a story– though she can be many other things, too.
Rhodes cannot be used as a creator esk at this time.
I won’t save you