Madeline Shriver, née Buck

[IamLEAM1983]

Name: Madeline Shriver
Age: 47 years old
Gender: female
Species: human

Strengths: Maddie's strength primarily lies in the gumption she's inherited from Eliphas, in that she's a rather ordinary woman who's only striking characteristic is her sheer force of will. Being the kind of person who has no problem ordering others around so goals are met, this means she has a certain ability at pushing people this way or that in a way that's just short of being blunt.

Her objectives for Buck Mansion being clearly set and frankly a godsend for the property's overall value, she tends to be able to garner support from most of everyone she meets. Felicia and Martin, on the other hand, need only be assuaged with the promise of a fat paycheck to agree to follow along.

Looking at her slightly Eurasian features, one might wonder if those curious slants in her cheekbones and the way they frame her eyes aren't indicative of some kind of slumbering lupine heritage... If Samoset's curse has skipped ahead to her or Selena, no outright signs of that had surfaced thus far.
Weaknesses: even the fairly terrifying force of her Type A collaborating with Eliphas' doesn't change the fact that if she's able to move city policies in the family's favor or to get cops and Shieldies moved to the mansion on call, she's still very much a mortal woman.

Like any human, and very much like any other mundane, her only strengths lie in her personality and skillset. Beyond that, one errant pair of fangs, a few bullets, a solid infection or exposure to the Black Speech would all be enough to do her in.

Appearance: being a sort of dark-haired Kara Unger, her standout features have always been her brown-gold eyes. They're underlined by her cheekbones in a way that feels borderline Oriental, while the pallor of her face is further accentuated by the raven-dark sheet of hair she effortlessly styles in one way or another. Having a rather unconventional and angular beauty, she doesn't really compliment it with a ton of makeup. A little blush, a slight contrast with a conservative amount of lipstick and clean, reasonably professional clothes are all she needs.

If anything, meeting her in the confines of Buck Mansion suggests she's always been meant to come here, to her roots. She seems to effortlessly fit with the dark wood cofferings and staid Victorian wallpapers, tinting them with a fairly restrained take on modern-day liveliness. Weekdays see her in a power suit and pricey pumps, with her hair usually simply brushed back or held back in a ponytail. Weeknights and weekends add anything from flowing dresses complimenting her obliviously Gothic slant to loose pajama pants and halter tops, when honestly letting her hair down with a finger of Scotch and a good book becomes a prime concern.

Just about the only eldritch element in her would involve the way the house seems to go out of its way to frame her properly, the way she feels placed there by design despite her and Serena having arrived fairly recently. It's not the kind of thing someone who isn't a designer or an interior decorator would notice, but it's there. There's a kind of tension in the air when she's about, to the point where one might wonder if she isn't an undiscovered arcane potential...

Behaviour: driven, dedicated, bold and calculative. All these things characterize miss Shriver, née Buck. If anything, she distinctly feels like Eliphas, if the old wolf had maintained some kind of sensitivity training and developed the female gender's sometimes staggeringly easy ability to turn light, cheerful comments into pointed observations or insults. Eli might be the Patriarch, but she certainly has taken her rightful place at his side, providing her own input and take on the various trials and tribulations that shake not only the family, but the city itself. In her most serious moments, she absolutely seems to live up to the family name, in how coming down the central stairs in the most absent-minded of ways still ends up being filled with a certain gravitas. As she always has something to organize or think about – and as this involves consolidating the clan's flagging properties – that sense of portentous millings-about feels justified.

In essence, she's become rather useful as a kind of “Eliphas Lite”, the smiling, graceful and slightly bitchy envoy the family sends to quell union disputes or various confrontations with the mobsters that inevitably have seized control of Silverbrook's docks. The fishing business can't survive strictly off of Mertown's access to the Atlantic, as their docks are rather small and all occupied by the Mac Loch. Considering, someone needs to step up to Weasel Biggs, Sarvin and the like, and remind them who set the very first stones of this goddamned city.

Failing that, Eliphas himself drags his Grand Caravan out for a talk. Failing that...

Well, there's a reason some of the rodent's boys pack modified hollow-point rounds filled with silver nitrate droplets.

Goals: Madeline Shriver isn't just a good wedding planner; she's the wedding planner, according to marriage-related publications across most of the States whose names start with “New”. If one substracts the fairly gloomy sight of the populous family graveyard and considers the fact that the mansion doesn't have a dearth of windows – even if its occupants are so moody as to keep a lot of drapes and blinds drawn at all times – the place is revealed to be prime rib for anyone looking for something of a glamorous and old-fashioned place to tie the knot. The main drawing room is the only location Maddie intends to adapt to this purpose, as she suspects the two old fogeys in residence wouldn't appreciate the idea of having spot lighting, complex entertainment centers and a never-ending supply of stale cake cluttering the place...

So, if she's to live in there with her sister, brother-in-law and daughter, the place needs to be salubrious and safe. For now, her biggest goal involves the sedate modernization of the mansion, largely as far as electrical outlets and unneeded drains on power are considered. A family with this many skeletons in its closet is likely to add a few hidden staircases and blocked-off rooms, so you might as well say the hunt is on. It helps that some nooks and crannies remain unknown to even the werewolf and lich, so she certainly finds some incentive to knock around and explore.

After all, nobody exactly knows what Nikolaas Buck did to deserve his entire bloodline to be cursed to such a degree. There's the obvious driving-out of the natives, but there had to be something else, right?

All she's hoping is that this doesn't involve the mansion grounds being set on an old Indian burial site.

History: born in 1978 to James and Frances Buck, Madeline was part of the first generation of the family to be born away from Rhode Island and to live most of her life well away from the core of the family curse. Having never known opulence before, her parents' ordinary struggle to keep paying the bills didn't surprise or shock her. As far as she knew, everyone lived exactly like this.

In 1996, however, her ordinary life in upstate New York was upended when a drunk driver T-boned her parents' car. Her mother survived the impact, but the several tumbles the car took had caused some severe brain hemorrhages. Perhaps by virtue of being away from Buck Mansion, the family curse was so kind as to leave her with a neurovegetative mother who survived a few years before Madeline herself gained majority and subsequently demanded that her mother be pulled off of life support.

College and university were both fairly uneventful for her, with the only signature dramatic event to further shake her involving her being made the victim of a date rape, shortly after graduation in Economics. The year was 2007, and she'd give birth to Selena nine months later.

Her sister Felicia, however, seemed to have inherited of their mother's strawberry blonde good looks – and of her intellectual quotient to boot... Her life story seemed to limit itself to retail job after retail job, until Fate landed Martin Charney in her lap. The poor sod was already indebted to such a degree as to make even a member of the Fae balk, and lived on a fast-track of smooth lies, quick grabs for petty cash and just as quick dashes out of whatever hick town he'd landed in to avoid people getting wise to his strategy. He was good-looking enough, witty enough, and it seemed to please the outrageously red-lipped antithesis to Madeline.

Out of that relation came Lydia, a sweet girl Madeline felt she needed to protect from her parents' fairly illustrious displays of financial and general idiocy. The Bucks' clannish tendencies weren't that far behind, and she moved Heaven and Earth in trying to keep them close. The best way to do that was to make Felicia an investment partner in her wedding planning business that was still in the process of taking shape.

That honestly turned out to be both one of Madeline's best and worst decisions to date. She gained from it due to the fact that gainful employment as a salesperson kept Felicia busy. Lydia, being only one year younger than Selena, tended to work in the background when school and homework weren't concerns. Clients seemed to love the little pre-teen duet charged with giving the guests coffee or tea or soda, in exchange for some allowance money. The little duet became a pair of fully-formed teenagers, so the salesman rep started to enter their overall capabilities.

Then, 2023 saw the arrival of a letter in the Shrivers' mailbox. Written by Eliphas, it was a long and fairly Victorian missive filled to the brim with the evidence of their relation and of the pressing need for all Bucks to stick together as a cohesive unit. It would present an appearance of familial bonds and lessen Madeline's fairly mercenary leanings, while allowing the clan's fortune and backbone to at least rest a little easier by leaning on the latest matriarch's obvious personal efforts. In return, Eli was prepared to give her ownership of the manor house, complete with notarized papers – provided she agreed for him and Zebediah to stay.

It took some time for the little group to decide. That is, it took some time for the thoughtful members of the group to decide. Felicia and Martin more or less sprang at the chance of living the high life and of cracking open the family legends to see just how much money could be made out of it. Madeline was decidedly more conservative about this offer. By that point, Eliphas Buck had devolved into something of a legend, even if the Vienna Accords had ostensibly proven to the entire world that cursed werewolves were very much a thing. As far as Zebediah went, all she knew was that he'd turned into some sort of sports mascot for a city that was now more known for its Clank and Biotech job sectors than for its curses and angry Wampanoag shamen.

In the end, between paying a mortgage on her condo until her sixties or being able to clear off her debts in one fell swoop to concentrate on her projects and business, she chose the more sensible option...

Arriving in Hope was a bit of a shock for everyone, as a lot of the places they'd been to hadn't exactly been hotbeds of arcane and supernatural activity. Still, Eliphas and Zebediah made everyone as comfortable as they possibly could (which means not much), and made sure to extend the basics of hospitality (meaning, not really).

Time passed, as it is wont to do, allowing Eliphas and Madeline to bond as financial and ideological partners, and for Zebediah to rediscover something like welcomed social skills amid the bereaved posturing he'd been observing in the darker corners of the house for the last few years. He became “somewhat fond” of Selena (although this means he likes her a lot – he just won't admit it) and saw about poking and prodding at her receptivity to arcane theory, just in case there happened to be a kindred spirit hidden somewhere underneath all those despicable postmodern affectations. That would give the gothling a bit of a genuine mystique that would perhaps come in handy for some genuine spell-making, but that still largely served as a way to scare off posers and give herself some measure of presence in the crowd.

Now, at least, the curtains and drapes are drawn back a lot more often, and sunlight no longer feels like an eldritch unknown quantity that makes the two old guys wince or turn away. Still, the house being fairly massive and the numerous fireplaces being an absolute chore to clean, the East wing has been more or less condemned. Only the central and Western segments of the mansion are now powered, heated and cleaned with any sort of regularity, and Madeline has managed to break through the old cur's tough exterior enough to get him to accept some hired help to get out of bed or take a bath.

The money's coming in, although not in the torrents Felicia was expecting, and living closer to the family roots isn't turning out so bad as she thought it would be. Being at the core of the family curse, however, Madeline keeps her fingers crossed for no further calamities to touch her and her own. That notion makes Eliphas scoff. By coming nearer, the newer generation has traded a set of mundane woes for something of an altogether different nature...