Appearance

Mentality

Personal history

Charming was once a college boy at the turn of the millennium who was lured away from a college party by a dangerously seductive Huntsman - The Leading Lady - and taken to The Spoilt Princess of Winsome to be her next "Prince Charming" doll. She kept him in the Realm of Winsome and toyed with him. When he was brought to The Realm where the giant Princess lived, he was as a doll - plastic and immovable by his own will. Only when the Princess was absent was he given any sense of freedom. The stories she played out with him and her other "dollies" were always twisted versions of faerie tales and bedtime stories that echoed through the Realm at the beginning of its 'night' cycle.

One day the Princess' "dolly" tried to escape. She ran into the darkness at the edge of the Realm of Winsome and collapsed, her life sapped from her body. The Princess just picked up the "naughty dolly" and continued to play with the young woman's unmoving plastic corpse until the body broke. Then she gave her "Prince Charming" a predatory look...

Charming was brought to the Thorns, granted a Fae Mount and Mask and sent into the world. He thought he was being set free. He went and found a party and started living it up, seducing a beautiful woman into going back to her place. But he wasn't free. He was actually sent to find a beautiful woman and lead her back to the Princess' Huntsmen, as the Leading Lady had done to him. The two got jumped and kidnapped by the Huntsman and dragged back through the Hedge to Faerie. The Thorns ripped the woman's self away, and tore Charming's Mask from him.

The new "dolly" never adapted well. She broke and ran like the last one. As she crossed the barrier between light and darkness she too was killed, and her corpse turned to a plastic dolly that the Princess continued to play with. Then Charming was set loose again, and the cycle began again. Charming resisted at first, and the Princess' tortures broke his body. He thought it was over. It wasn't. He felt the embrace of emminent death in icy waters, and was lifted out healed. Then the Princess sent him out again, promising more if he didn't come back with a new dolly. Charming hated himself, but he went out and lured in women he thought might survive. None did. Then Charming escaped.

Nothing was as it seemed in Winsome. The Princess was no giant, but they were small. The sun was a lamp, the moon a nightlight, and the stars merely glow-in-the-dark stickers. But that's not all they were, just how they appeared. And Charming studied them all dilligently. Every night-cycle as he regained his freedom and the evil Spoilt Princess "went to bed" he would examine the stars and attempt to decipher their hidden meanings. In their strange randomness he observed cycles and rotations, constellations relating to the stories the Princess made him play out. He understood, barely, the Contract that the Princess had with Stars.

The Changeling's plan was daring and deceptive - He'd go out to fetch a new dolly, getting one early and ditching her near the pick up spot, ride his mount through the portal to the Hedge and break the Token containing his Fae Mount, setting it free to roam. Then he'd hide his steps and wait, and when the Fae and Huntsmen had gone looking for him, he snuck back into Winsome! There he stole the Secret of Stars, discovered a hint of another lost Regalia, and managed to escape before the Keeper came back! Guided by the Polestar to a place of safety, he headed Straight on 'til Morning and escaped his Durance.

After exiting the Hedge in Chicago he quickly found others like him. The Chicagoland Changelings were welcoming and he found his true freedom in the Court of Spring, a place where he was able to take charge of his life and live it to the fullest. But still, something was missing. As bad as his Durance was, as terrible as the things he was made to do were, there was a structure to it. There were rules that were finite, with consequences that did not change. The consequences were deadly if you stepped too far out of line, but they never changed. Charming wanted the structure of knowing the rules, of having finite rules and consequences. This is why he established the Storybrokers, an inheritor to the Very Fine Printers.

Personality

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