(no subject)
[OOC Information]
Name: Sceadu
Age: 25
AIM / E-mail / LiveJournal: sceadugesceaft/dracogriff (at) gmail.com/hitokiri_neko
What characters do you play here already, if any? Axel and Aqua
[IC Information]
Character Name: Granny Weatherwax (Esmerelda Weatherwax, if you want to get technical, but there’s all of one person who will ever call her anything other than ‘Granny’)
Series: Discworld
Gender: Female
Age: ...old
Species: Human
Appearance: As befitting the name she most often goes by, Granny is old. How old, precisely, is something that only she knows (and she’s not telling), but she’s more than old enough for her hair to be quite grey. She also tends to the thin side and isn’t so much tall as the force of her presence makes her her seem taller than she is. Her face is set in a perpetual scowl, and despite her best efforts, her complexion remains almost stubbornly wart-free. Her eyes are blue, and her gaze is more than uncommonly penetrating (more on that later).
Given her choice in the matter, she’ll be found dressed in a plain black dress, a black cloak, and a tall black witch’s hat that’s secured to her bun through the judicious use of hat pins.
Personality: Granny’s personality is, to put it mildly, a force in its own right - it hits with all the power of a Mack truck and is easily sharp enough to cut the wind itself.
In a less euphemistic sort of vein, Granny is very much every stern and serious old aunt you’ve never had, complete with the withering gaze to back it up and a thoroughly no-nonsense outlook on life. She doesn’t so much believe in helping people as much as she believes in getting people to help themselves. Perhaps interestingly, she could also easily fall into the ‘bad witch’ camp; she’s selfish and ambitious and above all proud, with a sharp tongue and a temper to match.
And yet, it’s that same pride that keeps her from going to the bad, as well as her nigh-unshakeable belief in herself. While she could easily take up the bad side (and has as much as said that she’d likely be quite good at it), from an early age she realized she had to be ‘the good one’ to counterbalance her sister. She’s never quite gotten over the resentment either. In short, she is very much the embodiment of ‘Good is not nice’. Granny is not much liked by anyone. She is however, needed and respected and she generally figures that’s good enough for her.
She also has no sense of humor, and has a general distrust of stories.
History: Not much is known about Granny before she became Granny. However, what we do know is as follows: at a young age she managed to find and speak to the Queen of elves, but turned down her offers, that she managed to become a witch by the simple expedient of camping outside the cottage of a senior witch until there wasn’t anything more to be done but take her in, and that somewhere around the age of 16 she fought and defeated the Cunning Man[1]. Also, somewhere along the line he had a brief but ultimately ill-advised romance with one Mustrum Ridcully, but in the end nothing came of it. But this is Granny as she was.
Granny as she is first shows up not in the first book of the Discworld. Nor is she in the second. It isn’t until the third one that she shows up, and almost immediately, things get troublesome. Granny is called in as midwife - an eighth son of an eighth son[2] is to be born, and this can only mean that the child will be a wizard. Unfortunately for everyone involved, not the least of whom is the wizard who as his dying act passed his staff on to the child, the child had the great misfortunate to be born female. Normally, this might not have been a problem, but on the Disc women can’t be wizards. It’s a rule.
In an attempt to put things back on some semblance of a track, Granny attempts to destroy the staff before the magic can truly take, to a rather resounding failure. And so both Granny and the father of the child, now named Eskarina, do their best to simply... put it out of their minds. Things don’t always end up as on suspects, after all.
Unfortunately for them, things still happen just the same: time passes, and sure enough, young Eskarina develops the magic she was born to. In a last ditch attempt to get the girl some proper training, Granny takes her under her wing, hoping that if she can’t be a wizard she can at least be a witch. It... doesn’t quite work as expected. While no one can deny that Esk has the power, it’s all the wrong shapes for witchery, which is just as much not using magic as it is using magic. With no more choices left to her, Granny does the only thing she can think of. She and Esk head off to Ankh-Morpork, home of the Unseen University, the only wizarding school of the Discworld.
The trip, however, is nothing near smooth. As ought to be unsurprising given a particularly curious young girl in a new interesting world, Esk manages to get herself lost in the very first town the pair arrive in. However, by a strange set of circumstances, she manages to find herself heading in the general direction of the UU and is met by Granny in a forest outside of Ankh-Morpork, Granny having taken a somewhat more direct route to where Esk was.
This was hardly the end of their problems. While getting Esk actually inside the UU posed no problems, getting the wizards to actually accept her was quite another matter entirely. In the end, it took not only a full on magical duel between Granny and the Archchancellor but also a task that Esk would have failed had the staff not recognized her as being a wizard, largely by dint of the Archchancellor pronouncing her a wizard, but in the end, everything worked as well as could have been expected. With Esk thus successfully a wizard, Granny once again turned for home.
Thus it is that yet again time passes. And then, the King of Lancre is unjustly murdered. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, except for one thing: the King’s infant son, by some strange happenstance, manages to end up in the hands of Granny and the other members of her coven. Needless to say, the usurper to the throne is somewhat less than pleased at this.
Knowing that it’s best that the neither baby nor the crown remain in Lancre proper, the witches take it on themselves to get him out of the kingdom. How do they do so, you might ask? The answer is simple. They leave the baby with a traveling theater troupe, hiding the crown in amongst the assorted prop crowns the troupe owns when no one is looking. Years pass, and no one really thinks too hard about the increasing madness of the Duke.
Things would likely have continued on in this matter had it not been for two things. First, the land itself awoke, for the ruler is the land and with the Duke on the throne the land wanted for lack of care. Second, in his increasing madness and anti-witchcraft fervor, the Duke actually goes so far as to arrest and imprison one of the witches. Naturally, this doesn’t go over very well at all, with Granny. And yet, it’s not entirely for naught either, as during the ensuing rescue, they come across the ghost of the former king, who asks them to help see that his murderer gets what he rightly deserves.[3] However, there’s a problem in this. The only person who has any sort of right to the throne is still somewhere in the vicinity of 5 years old and while they could wait the 15 or so years it would take for him to grow into maturity by that point the mad Duke would have been quite thoroughly ensconced in the throne.
With nothing else left to them, the witches three take matters into their own hands. Rather than wait 15 years, they simply move the kingdom itself 15 years into the future, a feat of magical prowess that very nearly didn’t work even with all three of them working together on it. From there, the only thing left was the matter of getting the heir to throne to the kingdom properly. But all theaters need funds and so convincing the troupe to come out to Lancre is a relatively easy proposition.
The play that proceeds to unfold is, in grand Shakespearean tradition nothing more or less than than a version of the former king’s death, albeit one with some rather interesting casting changes that involve Death taking over for the actor that would have otherwise played him, among other things. Still, the play works to its intended effect and the guilt of the Duke is properly laid out before the people. There’s just one snag. The King’s son doesn’t want to take his father’s throne. One bit of creative juggling of the truth later, and the Duke’s Fool takes the throne instead, and all ends happily enough.
Of course, the end is only another beginning, and so it should come as no particular surprise that several years later Granny once again found herself being pulled into a story of some importance. This time, over the complex matters of fairy godmothers. You see, in the Discworld there’s always a pair of them: the good one, and the bad one. And so it comes to pass that Magrat, the third and youngest of Granny’s coven, ends up with a godmother’s wand upon the death of one Desiderata Hollow. Her task is ostensibly a simple one: go to Genua and stop Ella Saturday from marrying the prince. Granny and Nanny are, according to the letter accompanying the wand, strictly not allowed to come, which of course means that they come along anyway.
For the most part, the trip to Genua is fairly uneventful, barring a brief point at which Granny is forced to win back the money and broomsticks that Nanny Ogg had the misfortune to lose. However, once they reach the outskirts of Genua itself they come across a castle that was to sleep for a hundred years, which they promptly release from its curse... although not with some slight confusion. For some reason, the inhabitants seem quite certain that they’ve seen Granny before, although she’s adamant that she’s never been there before. Almost suspiciously adamant, in fact...
Still, there’s little time to think about that as almost no sooner then they get away from the castle then they stumble across a young girl dressed in a red cloak. Recognizing the story for what it is, the witches delay the girl long enough to take care of the poor confused wolf at the other end. Wolves, you see, were never meant to think they were people, especially for long periods of time.
Then there was the bit with the falling house and the dwarves, but fortunately Nanny Ogg managed to come through unscathed, and the dwarves were eventually convinced that they didn’t need her red boots after all. But that aside, the reached Genua: a city of stories. A city where everything was neat and clean and orderly... and wrong. Worse still, the godmother they had yet to face was none other than Granny’s elder sister, and as it turns out it’s not easy to stop a story that has a godmother on its side. They certainly had a good go of it, though, and everyone would agree that sending Magrat instead of Ella was a good plan. Without Ella Saturday to kiss the Duc, surely the story wouldn’t end as planned? No one had expected Lily. Or that to a story it doesn’t matter who kisses the prince. What matters is the glittering slipper. One glistening mirrored slipper, smashed across the floor of the palace, courtesy of Granny.
Unfortunately, the thing with slippers is that they come in pairs. Somewhat more fortunately, the slippers hadn’t fit Magrat in the first place, although they fit Nanny with perfect ease. With the story thus at something a logical conclusion, Lily simply... stopped things. Who the slipper had fit didn’t matter, she said, just that it had fit. What people would remember was the ending. That done, she promptly imprisoned the witches - she would, quite naturally, escape, being as she was the “good one”.
Like before, however, they managed to escape[4], this time with the help of the zombie of Ella’s father, the Baron. From the dungeons, they proceeded to return to the dance hall, for one final showdown. The story itself might have been over, but Lily was hardly liked - and people were more than a little surprised to find the Baron returned, Lily among them. The question of who exactly should be the one to take care of Lily, however, wasn’t quite so neat. Both Granny and the voodoo woman who had brought the Baron back had their reasons. The ensuing argument brought voodoo and headology against each, but in the end Granny came out the victor.
And then there was just Lily to deal with. A witch who was just every bit as powerful as Granny naturally, and was using mirrors to increase her powers as well. In the end, however, Granny smashed one of her mirrors. The resulting imbalance sent both of them hurtling into the halfway space between a mirror and a reflection, where the only way to know the way out is to know which reflection is real. For Lily, who had used mirrors all her adult life, the answer was dauntingly impossible. For Granny, the answer was as simple as two words: “This one”. With all the loose ends thus tied up, they finally headed for home.
Sadly, things were no more less settled then they had been before. No sooner did they arrive back in Lancre then several things happen in relatively quick succession. First, Magrat arrives to find a letter from the King that basically amounts to a proposal. Second, an unusual amount of crop circles start to appear in the kingdom. Someone, it turns out, has been dancing around the circle of stones known to the locals as simply the Dancers. The boundaries are weakening and that in turn is opening the way for the Gentry[5] to return, although neither one of the elder witches tells Magrat, for fear she’d get the wrong idea about it all. This in turn causes Magrat to turn all the more into her preparations for becoming the Queen, while the others look into just who has been stupid enough to dance around the Dancers.
Eventually, they manage track the culprits - a group of witches-in-training who somewhat erroneously think that dancing around stone circles what part of what witches do. Neither of the two left to deal with the problem have the ability to undo what has been done, but they do what they can to keep it from getting worse.
Naturally, this only means that the worst will happen. In this case, one of the young witches crosses into the circle of stones, with Granny close on her heels. Elves being elves, they decide that the newly-arrived humans will make great sport and it’s only with no small amount of luck that they even manage to make it to the other side. It’s not quite without casualties, given that the young witch in question ends up elf-shot. But it’s not without benefits either; they manage to bring an elf out across the circle. The elf is left in the castle dungeon, while the poor young girl is left in one of the castle beds in a circle of iron bars.
As a preventative measure it works, for the most part. It works at least long enough for the guests to start arriving for the wedding, which is set for Midsummer. Nonetheless, Granny at least can’t shake the feeling that she’s missed something. She can feel the elf queen, but can’t quite manage to figure out where she is. Nor can she deny the fact that the queen’s pet unicorn has gotten across the circle.
And then all hell breaks loose. The play that was to performed for the wedding gives the elves enough power to finally break through the circle and all hell breaks loose. The elves make off with the king, and the elfshot young witch releases the elf from the dungeon, whereupon it and two of its fellows proceed to chase Magrat into the castle armory. In order to stem the tide, Granny heads up to the Dancers, while Magrat gets in touch with her more bloodthirsty side thanks to spirit of the legendary (if fictional) Queen Ynci, and Nanny goes to speak to the king of the elves. In the end, it’s only Nanny’s attempt that does any good. For all her new-found fervor, Magrat fails when she most needs to succeed, snared by the glamour of the elves. Granny, meanwhile, finds herself once again facing the Queen. Only this time, it seems to be the death of her. Only then does the king of elves show up, and take the queen in hand as together they return to their own land, taking the rest of the elves with them.
And then the only thing remaining is Granny’s funeral. Or well, what would have been her funeral. As it turns out, she’d managed to Borrow a swarm of bees and thus avoid her death at the hand of the elf queen. It does, however, leave her buzzing her words a little, but other than that she’s perfectly fine. Her last action of the book is to deal with the queen’s still-wayward pet. And so, after catching it with a loop of her own hair, she brings it to the local smith to be shod with shoes of silver, before releasing it into the wild, where no more it will return to the queen’s hand.
Unfortunately, the fact that Magrat leaves to take care of her more queenly duties shortly after her marriage causes its own share of problems. Witches, as a general rule, work best in a mother/maiden/trio and the lack of one leaves something of an imbalance. The only problem is the fact that the best sorted person for the position has recently left to pursue a career in Ankh-Morpork’s opera. By one of those odd quirks of luck, Nanny and Granny also have an errand in Ankh-Morpork.
From there, the plot proceeds to follow a storyline that is very much similar to the Phantom of the Opera. The opera house, it seems, is haunted by a ghost who alternately causes mayhem around the opera house or leaves exceedingly polite notes as to what opera the theater should perform next. Granny and Nanny do what they can to get figure out exactly what is going on, but given their rather limited viewpoint, they decide to take it upon themselves to turn to drastic measures.
With the money acquired from their previous errand in Ankh-Morpork, they proceed to acquire all the trappings necessary to make Granny appear as if she were some manner of minor nobility and they proceed to buy their way into Box 8 - the box traditionally given to the ghost. As just about anyone might expect at this point, eventually the ghost arrives, only to have Granny’s “escort” give him a merry chase over and through the opera house and onto the stage proper.
Naturally, since this is theater there proceeds to be a long and convoluted series of events the boils down to the fact that instead of one ghost, there were two. The more malevolent ghost is killed, while the harmless one ends up as a sort of protector of the opera house. In short, the show goes on and everyone leaves happy, even Granny and Nanny, who return home with Agnes after she decides that really, theater isn’t the life for her.
Fortunately for everyone involved, things settle down for a time after that. Just about long enough, in fact, for an heir to the throne to be born. Which in turn means that invitations to the royal christening are sent to everyone in the kingdom. Everyone, that is, except for Granny. Angered by the spurning, she proceeds to quietly pack up her things and move to the gnarly ground[6].
Her absence doesn’t go unnoticed at the christening itself, although of more importance is the fact that somehow the king has managed to invite a family of vampires to the christening. Worse still, the Count and his family want nothing more then to stay and rule Lancre. With fewer and fewer options available to them, the rather hastily assembled coven of Agnes, Magrat and Nanny decide that the only thing to do for it is to go and fetch Granny down from where she’s made her home. Since Magrat refuses to leave her daughter behind, she’s brought along for the ride as well.
As these things go, it’s not a success. They find Granny out Borrowing, and even once she returns, she flat out refuses to return. The vampires have her beat, she explains somewhat reluctantly to Granny. She’s been prying at their minds, trying to find a way in, but to little avail. There’s quite literally no way for her to worm her way in and so with heavy hearts, the not-quite-so-intrepid trio return to the castle in order to make what they can of the vampires.
What they can turns out to be not too much. This is largely due to the fact that the Count has trained his family to be immune to the traditional weaknesses of vampires. And then, when at last everything seems lost, Granny shows up, soaking wet from the storm outside and challenges the vampires. She even manages to get a few good blows in, but to little avail. The vampires win out, and so Granny is promptly bitten, but before there’s an odd sort of... shift to her, like she’s slipped out somewhere.
There’s no time to think about the implications, however. Although Granny makes a game job of resisting the siren call of the bite she’s just received there’s still more than a little bit of danger that she might yield to it in the end, and with the whole show packing up moving to Uberwald there isn’t any time to wait to see what might happen. By the time Granny masters the specter of herself that’s been called up by the vampire’s bite, it’s well into night.
Not, of course, that Granny lets this stop her, and although she is, in her words, ‘not feeling her best’ she and the priest she’d been left with head out into the mountains that separate Lancre from Uberwald. Conveniently, this means she happens to (yet again) arrive at just the nick of time. This time, however, the vampires are not only holding to the traditional weaknesses of vampires but are also craving a good cup of tea. As Granny explains it, she hasn’t been so much vampired as they’ve been Weatherwaxed - she put some of herself into her blood, giving her the angle into their minds that she’d been looking for. And from there, it’s only really a matter of taking care of the stragglers before a thoroughly exhausted ensemble returns to Lancre.
This isn’t the last time Granny crops up in on of the stories of the Discworld. It is, however, the last time she shows up as a major character, although she appears briefly during the story of a young girl who ends up accidentally attracting the romantic attentions of the Wintersmith, a fiasco during which she finds herself given a pure white kitten as a gift, despite her insistence that she’s not a cat person. She later appears as the sort of magical muscle when the Cunning Man again makes his appearance, on the off-chance that the Cunning Man get a foot hold into something he really shouldn’t. Fortunately, this proves to not be the case.
It’s at some point after this that Granny finds herself rather suddenly transported to Chicago.
[1] A sort of demonic spirit of rage, focused solely and primarily against witches. His preferred domain is the subconscious, where he poisons the mind of people against witches.
[2] Eight is a magical number on the Disc, as opposed to seven, as one might expect instead.
[3] If the story is starting to sound a little familiar at this point, it’s entirely on purpose. Pratchett borrows heavily from literary tradition in the witches novels and what better place than Shakespeare?
[4] You’d think people would learn.
[5] The local name for the Fair Folk.
[6] Ground that is sort of magically compressed into smaller areas then it ought to take up.
Supernatural Abilities: Granny is a witch, and is generally considered to be one of the most best ones there is[7]. However, while she is quite undeniably powerful, she’s also old enough to know that knowing when not to use magic can be just as powerful. Yes, she once brought a whole kingdom ahead in time fifteen years[8], and yes, she might be able move a wound forward in time if she wants, but she know well enough that witching isn’t just the flashy bits. Granny’s particular area of magical expertise is in edges, the boundaries between one place and another, be it the boundary between day and night, or the boundary between this world and the next. She is, in as sense, drawn to them, whether she wants to be or not.
She also has a talent for Borrowing, a sort of talent in which she rides along inside the mind of animal. This is not without its hazards; stay in an animal’s mind too long and a witch might lose themselves in the mind of that animal. It also has a habit of leaving the body totally dormant and apparently dead, while returning occasionally leaves witches with the wrong instincts.
In addition, it should be noted that she has a habit of ‘fading into the foreground’. Essentially, she ‘vanishes’ until she’s indistinguishable from the normal bits and pieces of the room. And like all witches, she’s somewhat unhinged in time, which mostly means that she can see the shadows of the future and that she knows - or will when it draws nearer, at any rate.
In Chicago, Granny will find herself with significantly less power to hand, although she’ll likely continue on as she has before, albeit perhaps with more getting things to work on sheer willpower.
[7] Witches don’t have leaders. But Granny is the most highly-regarded of the leaders they don’t have.
[8] Although it should be noted she had some help.
Natural Abilities: The most noticeable of these is Granny’s expertise in the area of headology. As practiced by the witches of the Ramtops[9], headology is a sort of non-magic that relies on the fact that what people believe is real. Thus, if you change how how people see the world, you have - in essence - changed their reality. For example, while Granny could curse people, it’s simply to simply say she has, and let them blame her for the next bit of bad luck they have. In a way, headology could be said to similar to psychiatry, although a trained headologist is much more likely to hand a you bat and stool, instead of trying to convince you that the monsters aren’t there. Either way, it’s left Granny with a very firm understand of how people’s minds work and this has come in handy more than once.
Coming in as a very close second is her stare. Granny has the sort of glare that few mortals can withstand - most wither under its power in a manner of moments. If they don’t, she is quite willing to keep it up until they do, and given it’s canonically cowed a bear into submission as well as caused a log to spontaneously combust out of embarrassment, it’s not something to be sneezed at.
Trolls and dwarves also respect her, or at least are enough afraid of her to give her names of their own. To the trolls she’s known as “Aaoograha Hoa” (‘She Who Must Be Avoided’); to the dwarves she’s “K’ez’rek d’b’duz” (‘Go Around the Other Side of the Mountain’). Needless to say, she was somewhat less then amused to learn this particular news.
Finally, she happens to be excellent at both Cripple Mr. Onion[10] as well as chiropracty, and has now qualms with using the latter on Death, should Death happen to require a chiropractor for whatever reasons. And of course, as a maiden through and through she can if not exactly tame unicorns, at least hold them with nothing more than a single strand of her hair.
[9]Of which Granny is one.
[10]One of the card games unique to the Discworld
Possessions:> Apart from the clothes on her back and more than a few hatpins securing her hat to her bun, Granny has nothing apart from the contents of her pockets and her cat, You, who can almost invariably be found wrapped around her shoulders as if she were a sort of living shawl. She also carries a small card in her pockets that once read “I aten’t dead” but has been since modified to read “I still aten’t dead.” She uses this to prevent unfortunate mistakes while Borrowing.
Name: Sceadu
Age: 25
AIM / E-mail / LiveJournal: sceadugesceaft/dracogriff (at) gmail.com/hitokiri_neko
What characters do you play here already, if any? Axel and Aqua
[IC Information]
Character Name: Granny Weatherwax (Esmerelda Weatherwax, if you want to get technical, but there’s all of one person who will ever call her anything other than ‘Granny’)
Series: Discworld
Gender: Female
Age: ...old
Species: Human
Appearance: As befitting the name she most often goes by, Granny is old. How old, precisely, is something that only she knows (and she’s not telling), but she’s more than old enough for her hair to be quite grey. She also tends to the thin side and isn’t so much tall as the force of her presence makes her her seem taller than she is. Her face is set in a perpetual scowl, and despite her best efforts, her complexion remains almost stubbornly wart-free. Her eyes are blue, and her gaze is more than uncommonly penetrating (more on that later).
Given her choice in the matter, she’ll be found dressed in a plain black dress, a black cloak, and a tall black witch’s hat that’s secured to her bun through the judicious use of hat pins.
Personality: Granny’s personality is, to put it mildly, a force in its own right - it hits with all the power of a Mack truck and is easily sharp enough to cut the wind itself.
In a less euphemistic sort of vein, Granny is very much every stern and serious old aunt you’ve never had, complete with the withering gaze to back it up and a thoroughly no-nonsense outlook on life. She doesn’t so much believe in helping people as much as she believes in getting people to help themselves. Perhaps interestingly, she could also easily fall into the ‘bad witch’ camp; she’s selfish and ambitious and above all proud, with a sharp tongue and a temper to match.
And yet, it’s that same pride that keeps her from going to the bad, as well as her nigh-unshakeable belief in herself. While she could easily take up the bad side (and has as much as said that she’d likely be quite good at it), from an early age she realized she had to be ‘the good one’ to counterbalance her sister. She’s never quite gotten over the resentment either. In short, she is very much the embodiment of ‘Good is not nice’. Granny is not much liked by anyone. She is however, needed and respected and she generally figures that’s good enough for her.
She also has no sense of humor, and has a general distrust of stories.
History: Not much is known about Granny before she became Granny. However, what we do know is as follows: at a young age she managed to find and speak to the Queen of elves, but turned down her offers, that she managed to become a witch by the simple expedient of camping outside the cottage of a senior witch until there wasn’t anything more to be done but take her in, and that somewhere around the age of 16 she fought and defeated the Cunning Man[1]. Also, somewhere along the line he had a brief but ultimately ill-advised romance with one Mustrum Ridcully, but in the end nothing came of it. But this is Granny as she was.
Granny as she is first shows up not in the first book of the Discworld. Nor is she in the second. It isn’t until the third one that she shows up, and almost immediately, things get troublesome. Granny is called in as midwife - an eighth son of an eighth son[2] is to be born, and this can only mean that the child will be a wizard. Unfortunately for everyone involved, not the least of whom is the wizard who as his dying act passed his staff on to the child, the child had the great misfortunate to be born female. Normally, this might not have been a problem, but on the Disc women can’t be wizards. It’s a rule.
In an attempt to put things back on some semblance of a track, Granny attempts to destroy the staff before the magic can truly take, to a rather resounding failure. And so both Granny and the father of the child, now named Eskarina, do their best to simply... put it out of their minds. Things don’t always end up as on suspects, after all.
Unfortunately for them, things still happen just the same: time passes, and sure enough, young Eskarina develops the magic she was born to. In a last ditch attempt to get the girl some proper training, Granny takes her under her wing, hoping that if she can’t be a wizard she can at least be a witch. It... doesn’t quite work as expected. While no one can deny that Esk has the power, it’s all the wrong shapes for witchery, which is just as much not using magic as it is using magic. With no more choices left to her, Granny does the only thing she can think of. She and Esk head off to Ankh-Morpork, home of the Unseen University, the only wizarding school of the Discworld.
The trip, however, is nothing near smooth. As ought to be unsurprising given a particularly curious young girl in a new interesting world, Esk manages to get herself lost in the very first town the pair arrive in. However, by a strange set of circumstances, she manages to find herself heading in the general direction of the UU and is met by Granny in a forest outside of Ankh-Morpork, Granny having taken a somewhat more direct route to where Esk was.
This was hardly the end of their problems. While getting Esk actually inside the UU posed no problems, getting the wizards to actually accept her was quite another matter entirely. In the end, it took not only a full on magical duel between Granny and the Archchancellor but also a task that Esk would have failed had the staff not recognized her as being a wizard, largely by dint of the Archchancellor pronouncing her a wizard, but in the end, everything worked as well as could have been expected. With Esk thus successfully a wizard, Granny once again turned for home.
Thus it is that yet again time passes. And then, the King of Lancre is unjustly murdered. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, except for one thing: the King’s infant son, by some strange happenstance, manages to end up in the hands of Granny and the other members of her coven. Needless to say, the usurper to the throne is somewhat less than pleased at this.
Knowing that it’s best that the neither baby nor the crown remain in Lancre proper, the witches take it on themselves to get him out of the kingdom. How do they do so, you might ask? The answer is simple. They leave the baby with a traveling theater troupe, hiding the crown in amongst the assorted prop crowns the troupe owns when no one is looking. Years pass, and no one really thinks too hard about the increasing madness of the Duke.
Things would likely have continued on in this matter had it not been for two things. First, the land itself awoke, for the ruler is the land and with the Duke on the throne the land wanted for lack of care. Second, in his increasing madness and anti-witchcraft fervor, the Duke actually goes so far as to arrest and imprison one of the witches. Naturally, this doesn’t go over very well at all, with Granny. And yet, it’s not entirely for naught either, as during the ensuing rescue, they come across the ghost of the former king, who asks them to help see that his murderer gets what he rightly deserves.[3] However, there’s a problem in this. The only person who has any sort of right to the throne is still somewhere in the vicinity of 5 years old and while they could wait the 15 or so years it would take for him to grow into maturity by that point the mad Duke would have been quite thoroughly ensconced in the throne.
With nothing else left to them, the witches three take matters into their own hands. Rather than wait 15 years, they simply move the kingdom itself 15 years into the future, a feat of magical prowess that very nearly didn’t work even with all three of them working together on it. From there, the only thing left was the matter of getting the heir to throne to the kingdom properly. But all theaters need funds and so convincing the troupe to come out to Lancre is a relatively easy proposition.
The play that proceeds to unfold is, in grand Shakespearean tradition nothing more or less than than a version of the former king’s death, albeit one with some rather interesting casting changes that involve Death taking over for the actor that would have otherwise played him, among other things. Still, the play works to its intended effect and the guilt of the Duke is properly laid out before the people. There’s just one snag. The King’s son doesn’t want to take his father’s throne. One bit of creative juggling of the truth later, and the Duke’s Fool takes the throne instead, and all ends happily enough.
Of course, the end is only another beginning, and so it should come as no particular surprise that several years later Granny once again found herself being pulled into a story of some importance. This time, over the complex matters of fairy godmothers. You see, in the Discworld there’s always a pair of them: the good one, and the bad one. And so it comes to pass that Magrat, the third and youngest of Granny’s coven, ends up with a godmother’s wand upon the death of one Desiderata Hollow. Her task is ostensibly a simple one: go to Genua and stop Ella Saturday from marrying the prince. Granny and Nanny are, according to the letter accompanying the wand, strictly not allowed to come, which of course means that they come along anyway.
For the most part, the trip to Genua is fairly uneventful, barring a brief point at which Granny is forced to win back the money and broomsticks that Nanny Ogg had the misfortune to lose. However, once they reach the outskirts of Genua itself they come across a castle that was to sleep for a hundred years, which they promptly release from its curse... although not with some slight confusion. For some reason, the inhabitants seem quite certain that they’ve seen Granny before, although she’s adamant that she’s never been there before. Almost suspiciously adamant, in fact...
Still, there’s little time to think about that as almost no sooner then they get away from the castle then they stumble across a young girl dressed in a red cloak. Recognizing the story for what it is, the witches delay the girl long enough to take care of the poor confused wolf at the other end. Wolves, you see, were never meant to think they were people, especially for long periods of time.
Then there was the bit with the falling house and the dwarves, but fortunately Nanny Ogg managed to come through unscathed, and the dwarves were eventually convinced that they didn’t need her red boots after all. But that aside, the reached Genua: a city of stories. A city where everything was neat and clean and orderly... and wrong. Worse still, the godmother they had yet to face was none other than Granny’s elder sister, and as it turns out it’s not easy to stop a story that has a godmother on its side. They certainly had a good go of it, though, and everyone would agree that sending Magrat instead of Ella was a good plan. Without Ella Saturday to kiss the Duc, surely the story wouldn’t end as planned? No one had expected Lily. Or that to a story it doesn’t matter who kisses the prince. What matters is the glittering slipper. One glistening mirrored slipper, smashed across the floor of the palace, courtesy of Granny.
Unfortunately, the thing with slippers is that they come in pairs. Somewhat more fortunately, the slippers hadn’t fit Magrat in the first place, although they fit Nanny with perfect ease. With the story thus at something a logical conclusion, Lily simply... stopped things. Who the slipper had fit didn’t matter, she said, just that it had fit. What people would remember was the ending. That done, she promptly imprisoned the witches - she would, quite naturally, escape, being as she was the “good one”.
Like before, however, they managed to escape[4], this time with the help of the zombie of Ella’s father, the Baron. From the dungeons, they proceeded to return to the dance hall, for one final showdown. The story itself might have been over, but Lily was hardly liked - and people were more than a little surprised to find the Baron returned, Lily among them. The question of who exactly should be the one to take care of Lily, however, wasn’t quite so neat. Both Granny and the voodoo woman who had brought the Baron back had their reasons. The ensuing argument brought voodoo and headology against each, but in the end Granny came out the victor.
And then there was just Lily to deal with. A witch who was just every bit as powerful as Granny naturally, and was using mirrors to increase her powers as well. In the end, however, Granny smashed one of her mirrors. The resulting imbalance sent both of them hurtling into the halfway space between a mirror and a reflection, where the only way to know the way out is to know which reflection is real. For Lily, who had used mirrors all her adult life, the answer was dauntingly impossible. For Granny, the answer was as simple as two words: “This one”. With all the loose ends thus tied up, they finally headed for home.
Sadly, things were no more less settled then they had been before. No sooner did they arrive back in Lancre then several things happen in relatively quick succession. First, Magrat arrives to find a letter from the King that basically amounts to a proposal. Second, an unusual amount of crop circles start to appear in the kingdom. Someone, it turns out, has been dancing around the circle of stones known to the locals as simply the Dancers. The boundaries are weakening and that in turn is opening the way for the Gentry[5] to return, although neither one of the elder witches tells Magrat, for fear she’d get the wrong idea about it all. This in turn causes Magrat to turn all the more into her preparations for becoming the Queen, while the others look into just who has been stupid enough to dance around the Dancers.
Eventually, they manage track the culprits - a group of witches-in-training who somewhat erroneously think that dancing around stone circles what part of what witches do. Neither of the two left to deal with the problem have the ability to undo what has been done, but they do what they can to keep it from getting worse.
Naturally, this only means that the worst will happen. In this case, one of the young witches crosses into the circle of stones, with Granny close on her heels. Elves being elves, they decide that the newly-arrived humans will make great sport and it’s only with no small amount of luck that they even manage to make it to the other side. It’s not quite without casualties, given that the young witch in question ends up elf-shot. But it’s not without benefits either; they manage to bring an elf out across the circle. The elf is left in the castle dungeon, while the poor young girl is left in one of the castle beds in a circle of iron bars.
As a preventative measure it works, for the most part. It works at least long enough for the guests to start arriving for the wedding, which is set for Midsummer. Nonetheless, Granny at least can’t shake the feeling that she’s missed something. She can feel the elf queen, but can’t quite manage to figure out where she is. Nor can she deny the fact that the queen’s pet unicorn has gotten across the circle.
And then all hell breaks loose. The play that was to performed for the wedding gives the elves enough power to finally break through the circle and all hell breaks loose. The elves make off with the king, and the elfshot young witch releases the elf from the dungeon, whereupon it and two of its fellows proceed to chase Magrat into the castle armory. In order to stem the tide, Granny heads up to the Dancers, while Magrat gets in touch with her more bloodthirsty side thanks to spirit of the legendary (if fictional) Queen Ynci, and Nanny goes to speak to the king of the elves. In the end, it’s only Nanny’s attempt that does any good. For all her new-found fervor, Magrat fails when she most needs to succeed, snared by the glamour of the elves. Granny, meanwhile, finds herself once again facing the Queen. Only this time, it seems to be the death of her. Only then does the king of elves show up, and take the queen in hand as together they return to their own land, taking the rest of the elves with them.
And then the only thing remaining is Granny’s funeral. Or well, what would have been her funeral. As it turns out, she’d managed to Borrow a swarm of bees and thus avoid her death at the hand of the elf queen. It does, however, leave her buzzing her words a little, but other than that she’s perfectly fine. Her last action of the book is to deal with the queen’s still-wayward pet. And so, after catching it with a loop of her own hair, she brings it to the local smith to be shod with shoes of silver, before releasing it into the wild, where no more it will return to the queen’s hand.
Unfortunately, the fact that Magrat leaves to take care of her more queenly duties shortly after her marriage causes its own share of problems. Witches, as a general rule, work best in a mother/maiden/trio and the lack of one leaves something of an imbalance. The only problem is the fact that the best sorted person for the position has recently left to pursue a career in Ankh-Morpork’s opera. By one of those odd quirks of luck, Nanny and Granny also have an errand in Ankh-Morpork.
From there, the plot proceeds to follow a storyline that is very much similar to the Phantom of the Opera. The opera house, it seems, is haunted by a ghost who alternately causes mayhem around the opera house or leaves exceedingly polite notes as to what opera the theater should perform next. Granny and Nanny do what they can to get figure out exactly what is going on, but given their rather limited viewpoint, they decide to take it upon themselves to turn to drastic measures.
With the money acquired from their previous errand in Ankh-Morpork, they proceed to acquire all the trappings necessary to make Granny appear as if she were some manner of minor nobility and they proceed to buy their way into Box 8 - the box traditionally given to the ghost. As just about anyone might expect at this point, eventually the ghost arrives, only to have Granny’s “escort” give him a merry chase over and through the opera house and onto the stage proper.
Naturally, since this is theater there proceeds to be a long and convoluted series of events the boils down to the fact that instead of one ghost, there were two. The more malevolent ghost is killed, while the harmless one ends up as a sort of protector of the opera house. In short, the show goes on and everyone leaves happy, even Granny and Nanny, who return home with Agnes after she decides that really, theater isn’t the life for her.
Fortunately for everyone involved, things settle down for a time after that. Just about long enough, in fact, for an heir to the throne to be born. Which in turn means that invitations to the royal christening are sent to everyone in the kingdom. Everyone, that is, except for Granny. Angered by the spurning, she proceeds to quietly pack up her things and move to the gnarly ground[6].
Her absence doesn’t go unnoticed at the christening itself, although of more importance is the fact that somehow the king has managed to invite a family of vampires to the christening. Worse still, the Count and his family want nothing more then to stay and rule Lancre. With fewer and fewer options available to them, the rather hastily assembled coven of Agnes, Magrat and Nanny decide that the only thing to do for it is to go and fetch Granny down from where she’s made her home. Since Magrat refuses to leave her daughter behind, she’s brought along for the ride as well.
As these things go, it’s not a success. They find Granny out Borrowing, and even once she returns, she flat out refuses to return. The vampires have her beat, she explains somewhat reluctantly to Granny. She’s been prying at their minds, trying to find a way in, but to little avail. There’s quite literally no way for her to worm her way in and so with heavy hearts, the not-quite-so-intrepid trio return to the castle in order to make what they can of the vampires.
What they can turns out to be not too much. This is largely due to the fact that the Count has trained his family to be immune to the traditional weaknesses of vampires. And then, when at last everything seems lost, Granny shows up, soaking wet from the storm outside and challenges the vampires. She even manages to get a few good blows in, but to little avail. The vampires win out, and so Granny is promptly bitten, but before there’s an odd sort of... shift to her, like she’s slipped out somewhere.
There’s no time to think about the implications, however. Although Granny makes a game job of resisting the siren call of the bite she’s just received there’s still more than a little bit of danger that she might yield to it in the end, and with the whole show packing up moving to Uberwald there isn’t any time to wait to see what might happen. By the time Granny masters the specter of herself that’s been called up by the vampire’s bite, it’s well into night.
Not, of course, that Granny lets this stop her, and although she is, in her words, ‘not feeling her best’ she and the priest she’d been left with head out into the mountains that separate Lancre from Uberwald. Conveniently, this means she happens to (yet again) arrive at just the nick of time. This time, however, the vampires are not only holding to the traditional weaknesses of vampires but are also craving a good cup of tea. As Granny explains it, she hasn’t been so much vampired as they’ve been Weatherwaxed - she put some of herself into her blood, giving her the angle into their minds that she’d been looking for. And from there, it’s only really a matter of taking care of the stragglers before a thoroughly exhausted ensemble returns to Lancre.
This isn’t the last time Granny crops up in on of the stories of the Discworld. It is, however, the last time she shows up as a major character, although she appears briefly during the story of a young girl who ends up accidentally attracting the romantic attentions of the Wintersmith, a fiasco during which she finds herself given a pure white kitten as a gift, despite her insistence that she’s not a cat person. She later appears as the sort of magical muscle when the Cunning Man again makes his appearance, on the off-chance that the Cunning Man get a foot hold into something he really shouldn’t. Fortunately, this proves to not be the case.
It’s at some point after this that Granny finds herself rather suddenly transported to Chicago.
[1] A sort of demonic spirit of rage, focused solely and primarily against witches. His preferred domain is the subconscious, where he poisons the mind of people against witches.
[2] Eight is a magical number on the Disc, as opposed to seven, as one might expect instead.
[3] If the story is starting to sound a little familiar at this point, it’s entirely on purpose. Pratchett borrows heavily from literary tradition in the witches novels and what better place than Shakespeare?
[4] You’d think people would learn.
[5] The local name for the Fair Folk.
[6] Ground that is sort of magically compressed into smaller areas then it ought to take up.
Supernatural Abilities: Granny is a witch, and is generally considered to be one of the most best ones there is[7]. However, while she is quite undeniably powerful, she’s also old enough to know that knowing when not to use magic can be just as powerful. Yes, she once brought a whole kingdom ahead in time fifteen years[8], and yes, she might be able move a wound forward in time if she wants, but she know well enough that witching isn’t just the flashy bits. Granny’s particular area of magical expertise is in edges, the boundaries between one place and another, be it the boundary between day and night, or the boundary between this world and the next. She is, in as sense, drawn to them, whether she wants to be or not.
She also has a talent for Borrowing, a sort of talent in which she rides along inside the mind of animal. This is not without its hazards; stay in an animal’s mind too long and a witch might lose themselves in the mind of that animal. It also has a habit of leaving the body totally dormant and apparently dead, while returning occasionally leaves witches with the wrong instincts.
In addition, it should be noted that she has a habit of ‘fading into the foreground’. Essentially, she ‘vanishes’ until she’s indistinguishable from the normal bits and pieces of the room. And like all witches, she’s somewhat unhinged in time, which mostly means that she can see the shadows of the future and that she knows - or will when it draws nearer, at any rate.
In Chicago, Granny will find herself with significantly less power to hand, although she’ll likely continue on as she has before, albeit perhaps with more getting things to work on sheer willpower.
[7] Witches don’t have leaders. But Granny is the most highly-regarded of the leaders they don’t have.
[8] Although it should be noted she had some help.
Natural Abilities: The most noticeable of these is Granny’s expertise in the area of headology. As practiced by the witches of the Ramtops[9], headology is a sort of non-magic that relies on the fact that what people believe is real. Thus, if you change how how people see the world, you have - in essence - changed their reality. For example, while Granny could curse people, it’s simply to simply say she has, and let them blame her for the next bit of bad luck they have. In a way, headology could be said to similar to psychiatry, although a trained headologist is much more likely to hand a you bat and stool, instead of trying to convince you that the monsters aren’t there. Either way, it’s left Granny with a very firm understand of how people’s minds work and this has come in handy more than once.
Coming in as a very close second is her stare. Granny has the sort of glare that few mortals can withstand - most wither under its power in a manner of moments. If they don’t, she is quite willing to keep it up until they do, and given it’s canonically cowed a bear into submission as well as caused a log to spontaneously combust out of embarrassment, it’s not something to be sneezed at.
Trolls and dwarves also respect her, or at least are enough afraid of her to give her names of their own. To the trolls she’s known as “Aaoograha Hoa” (‘She Who Must Be Avoided’); to the dwarves she’s “K’ez’rek d’b’duz” (‘Go Around the Other Side of the Mountain’). Needless to say, she was somewhat less then amused to learn this particular news.
Finally, she happens to be excellent at both Cripple Mr. Onion[10] as well as chiropracty, and has now qualms with using the latter on Death, should Death happen to require a chiropractor for whatever reasons. And of course, as a maiden through and through she can if not exactly tame unicorns, at least hold them with nothing more than a single strand of her hair.
[9]Of which Granny is one.
[10]One of the card games unique to the Discworld
Possessions:> Apart from the clothes on her back and more than a few hatpins securing her hat to her bun, Granny has nothing apart from the contents of her pockets and her cat, You, who can almost invariably be found wrapped around her shoulders as if she were a sort of living shawl. She also carries a small card in her pockets that once read “I aten’t dead” but has been since modified to read “I still aten’t dead.” She uses this to prevent unfortunate mistakes while Borrowing.