[Introduction] You can't hide from your demons/Feel 'em all lurkin' around
"It'll be nice for a change, having someone to talk to who still breathes."
For a man not above acting as dogsbody to a coterie of ghouls in female form, the Bailiff was a good man for a chat, something she rarely did with a human, much less one who didn't stare at her pale complexion or pull away at her strange talk of angels and demons and things that people long ago cut away with Ockham's two-edged razor. His talk is guarded, cards kept close to his vest, but she understands: he, too, is accustomed to having folk side-eye him and the things he guards.
At Macon, he stops the Monte Carlo, their ways parting, though she has a feeling this will not be their last parting. His polite "Be seein' you, Miss Dancy," might be more than a mere pleasantry, but an unwitting prophecy. Who knows what the mad ladies of Stephans Ward might be capable of enacting on their matriarch?
Shouldering the duffel bag, she ups the umbrella and starts on her way up I-16, pausing every time she hears a car passing by, to put her thumb up as a hopeful beacon. Here, close to the city, the cars and trucks come thick and fast, none stopping or slowing for a pale girl with an umbrella and a duffle over her skinny shoulder.
She hikes along, slowly, the heat of the day making the world around her shimmer. Hearing the rumble of a Peterbilt hauling logs -- creosote from the smell -- she turns again to flag down the driver, but the truck blows past her in a haze stinking of diesel, hot metal, exhaust and creosote oil.
As it passes, she realizes something has happened. The semi-urban road is no more. The heat-blistered black top is a smooth path of greyish-tan dust, the color of a dying pair of tennis shoes. The trees have changed from live oak and pines wooly with kudzu to deciduous oaks and maples. The air is a shade cooler: summery, but with a different note to it, the kind of heat that checks in for a season but checks out for the rest of the year.
"What just happened?" she murmurs. Has the angel arrived and caught her up, carrying her quickly to where she needs to be. Was the Bailiff's friendly banter about angels carrying her like one did with the servant who fed Daniel in the lion's den more than a gently rough jest?
No sense standing here gawping: she shifts the sliding strap of the duffle and turns, following the dusty track up to a house that wouldn't look too out of place in Savannah. She passes a pond where a tall young man stands, trousers rolled to the knees, raking the gravel bottom: for a moment, she glimpses the dark wings furled about his shoulders, then they pass as he straightens up, leaning on his rake handle. Without further incident, she climbs the porch stairs and raps on the door...
Name: Dancy Flammarion
Fandom: Alabaster
Media: Short stories/novel/graphic novel
Typist: matrixrefugee
Other relevant info: Title and cut text taken from Little Big Town's "Bones" (from the "True Blood" soundtrack, but it fits this gal a little too-*too*). She'll be arriving just after the events of "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" (which is chronologically the last story in the short story collection) and before the events of "Alabaster: Wolves". She'll be a bit discombobulated on arriving, but she should adjust quickly. given her *very* high tolerance to weird.
Special thanks goes to Google Maps for proving me an idea of what her itinerary might look like.
The first commenter acts as a welcoming committee. All following interactions are deemed later in the day, when the character is settled.