Mercy Washington

Face-up artist(s):

Chthonic Song

Modifications artist(s):

Iplehouse

Date of acquisition:

October 18, 2019

Provenance:

Purchased secondhand on DOA

Reason for choice:

Ashanti is a grail sculpt!

Best Points:

Her face!

Worst Points:

The old single-jointed body doesn’t have the motion range for more natural poses. Also, Iplehouse Posing Problems™.

Eyes:

Iplehouse

Wig:

AnnieE Designs

Favourite colours:

Hunter green, navy blue

Fashion style(s):

1950’s influence, vintage and thrift store finds

Key fashion accessory:

Hair bandana

Character age:

23

Character gender:

Cis girl

Offsite roleplay:

This doll's character is not available for offsite roleplay.

Salome Mercedes Washington loved the strange old woman that lived in her childhood home. She was creased and crinkled, and walked with a hunched back, with papery skin and a shawl over her shoulders. Her eyes twinkled with such kindness that made Mercedes think she must be a Grandma, and so little Mercy called her as such. The woman never made a sound, and did the exact same thing every day: she would sit by the window for a while, then went to the kitchen, then down to the cellar, then outside to the unused clothesline (Mercy’s mother had furnished the house with a brand-new washer and dryer when they moved in). It never bothered young Mercy that the woman’s routine never changed - it was easier to remember that way. So it went, until one day when she was four, Mercy realized that her parents could not see the old woman.

When Mercy started school in her crisp new uniform, she began to realize none of her classmates could see the man she called the Janitor, either. He was a youngish man with dark skin like hers, and he roamed the old, old halls of the private school she attended. He carried a mop, but there was something wrong with his left arm - most of it was missing.

Years later, when Mercy was older, she heard the tale of Joshua Freedman, a janitor for the school in the 1970’s. His arm had been crushed by a fallen block of lockers in the basement, and had been found dead by the day shift the following morning.

By the time Mercy graduated high school, she was acutely aware that she saw people and things that other people could not. She had been treated for schizophrenia (to no avail), gone to therapy (she did not suffer from any other ailments besides anxiety, because seeing dead people is a rather stressful ordeal), and by the time she went to college, she knew how to smile for her parents and tell them that no, she hadn’t seen anything strange for years. She was perfectly fine, and perfectly happy.

Mercy, however, had read xxxHolic (don’t judge) and knew the routine of pretending not to see the ghosts, the weird astral big squid things that sometimes floated around, or the strange images and feelings that she got from other people. That’s not to say all those things were bad - she met a boy at Berklee who looked like an angel when you glanced at him the right way. He had wings and two heads: one a woman’s, and one a man’s, and a shining symbol over his forehead that looked like lots of different shapes inside other different shapes. He was kind and friendly, and most importantly, in her classical guitar class.

The boy was called Gabriel, and despite his angelic motifs, he insisted he was something different: an avatar, to be precise. In his meaning of the word, an avatar was someone who acted like a core concept of a human archetype, like the classic characters of a storybook. People who acted like warriors, kings, rebels, fools, healers, or a host of other roles could develop tiny little ways to nudge reality into cooperating with them. Gabe’s path was called the Rebis, and he explained it as being in harmony with opposites. It also made him close to magick, which operated on that very same harmony of opposites. Mercy clung to Gabe as a friend that finally understood her sight as something real.

The two were inseparable through college, and formed a modest musical duet as the founding members of Lulla-Bye.