Lucida Baldelli

A natural adventurer and Beulah Garland's onetime protégé, Lucida Baldelli fled an abusive home in Bardstow, one of the major cities of The Corran Empire. Well, she fled a smoldering crater that was once an abusive home. A smoldering crater that was once four city blocks containing an abusive home, among other things... like City Hall.

Natural Abilities

Lucida never knew where her magical aptitude came from. No one ever came asking for a favour, no one ever introduced themselves. Neither did she have any formal training to refine her incredible natural talent. Instead, after first manifesting her powers in the most public imaginable way and quite understandably and literally running for the hills, she hid away in the megalopolis of Correhal and did what she could to try to coax her powers back to the surface as a survival skill. It came out, a bit at a time, as a wisp of poison gas, a slick of acid across a constable's face, the rotting of a wooden wall on the outside of a credit union.
Before long she was running the apathetic streets as a displaced nine-year-old, and Lucida noted the correlation between her powers and a wellspring of defiance that she had long suppressed. She grew in strength as she continued to challenge authority, to disobey laws, to choke off her conscience and flip off the better angels of her nature.
By the time she turned twelve, she was the boss of a small but notable street gang. She was primarily a thief by trade, but her more unnerving powers were now in daily use. She began to hear whispers when no one was around: whispers encouraging her, deriding her underlings, praising her strength and the weakness of those that would oppose her.
After Baldelli was led away long enough for Corran authorities to raid her headquarters and arrest her compatriots, she resolved without hesitation to recover them. She broke into the local constabulary with no shortage of fanfare. In the prison block, however, rather than finding her crew in cells, she was instead confronted by mage-killers and elite infantry. Worked up into a frenzy, she warped and crippled every living being in that entire quarter of the city, snapping bones and rending flesh, killing all of her enemies... as well as her friends locked up in the oubliette below. Devastated at having lost her second home as she'd lost her first, she stowed away on what was obviously a pirate ship and resolved to get out wherever they made landfall.

Joining the Crew

Beulah Garland had the wisdom at this point in the Mercy's voyage to treat Lucida like a stray cat. She left her food and water daily and waited for her to approach at her own speed, which of course she did. Beulah mostly made small talk, making clear that she was welcome and that no one meant her ill until she finally began to discuss something of her past, months into what Lucida did not realize was an trans-continental trip to Come-by-Chance.
Lucida declined the invitation to join Gavinus Garland and Beulah at home for Homecoming. She had no interest in spending the winter holed up in a shack on a rock by the water. Lucida joined Gavinus and Beulah at home for Homecoming. She spent the winter holed up in a shack on a rock by the water. She learned something of controlling magical energy. She learned how to ice fish. She gained a favourite quilt that came back to the Mercy with her. Gavinus and Beulah shared a few glances between themselves as they washed up after the girl they cared for as she went upstairs to sleep. This is nice, they silently agreed.
Lucida stayed with the Mercy for the last two years of its voyage, as the crew's secret weapon. With the exception of one brief adventure where she overspent herself raising skeleton after skeleton in support of an outnumbered crew and was found speaking in tongues and burning her lips with searing breath (dealt with handily by Marina Sitwell once some key reagents were obtained), she grew in power and in self-control.
By the time of the Garland wedding, Lucida was a self-possessed young woman with Beulah's natural bent towards leadership, Gavinus' business sense and her own powers, horrifying enough to rule a crew through fear whenever respect might fail. Offering her farewells to the couple at their wedding, Lucida returned to the sea with a skeleton crew of dockies on a beat-up sloop she renamed the Gutterpunk in honour of her long-lost gang.

Cherry turned to scowl. She wasn’t going to endure another lecture blaming her for the magical ricochets the rest of them had been firing off for months. Enough already.
“Not that you’re possessed or anything, of course,” she continued, facing the flames as Cherry’s features softened. “Did I ever tell you about Lucida Sitwell? Just a little sparkplug of a girl, reminded me of myself. Must have joined the crew when I was twenty-six, twenty-seven? And she was sixteen, if her lies were to be believed.”
Beulah grinned and her eyes began to dance in the flickering amber. “A thief, damnable good one. Joined up for landside work. Still never seen anyone half so quick with a pick-rake, though Fanny’s maybe in her class.”
Damn right, thought the hushed interloper.
“Same thing was happening then as happens to us now. Not so much fire, mind you, but poison, grease, these wretched fields of… sick that the Dandelions would run through and just get withered down to the bone, like they hadn’t eaten in a month. Terrible stuff, but always looking out for us, never getting in our way. Took us a while and a little chat with an old friend at Anthur-Ro to confirm it. She was a sorceress.”
Cherry was all ears. It didn’t matter what she was talking about, Cherry could listen to Beulah spin a yarn for hours.
“The aether of the world just passed through her like… light through a prism. Most of the time there’s nothing there and you’d think she was just a piece of beach glass, and then…” Beulah fanned her fingers and frequencies of light knit between them like a web.
“Was it a demon?” Cherry asked, unsure if she wanted the answer.
“Never did know,” Beulah whispered back, looking down at her boots. “Never did matter. In time she got a better handle of it. Not perfect, mind you, but she could slick up some stairs behind us or set a flight of locusts into a room full of guards on our way out of the slammer. Sometimes she’d still get surprised. Sometimes very surprised.” Her note here was cold, almost mournful.
“But anyway,” Aunt Beulah went on, “all I’m going to say is that it’s possible something similar is happening to you. Not saying it is. But you should think on it.”
“Where is she now?” asked Cherry.
“Couldn’t say for sure,” said Beulah, heart soaring anew at the memory of her protégé answering her from the deck of her rickety little sloop as it pushed off from the Greyshore docks. Where are we going to meet again, maid?
Beulah had a faraway look. “… Anywhere.”