Playing With Matches

Dauphine Deveroux, Small Medium At Large

When Dauphine Deveroux was born, lady Fortuna spun her wheel upwards, signaling her life was to be blessed with plentiful fortune and longevity.

Unfortunately for Dauphine, lady Fortuna was drunk on overripe kombucha that day, promptly forgetting that she ever spun her wheel in the first place, throwing said wheel at Bacchus for catcalling her, and getting said wheel lost on some ditch in Athens after getting swept by Trashius, Roman god of cleaning and sanitation.

Bad luck, as fate would have it, is necessary for everyday life to move in a normal and comprehensive manner. People are born, live, and then die - such is the cycle of life. But when you have an excess of fortune, something as simple as death becomes a Sisyphean task. Dauphine learned that lesson at a young age.

She was the daughter of a French paper mill owner, and some said she was personally involved in the invention of the first paper plane. Such wealth did her for life, never having to worry about a penny in her bank account. Surrounded by luxuries, pretenders, and all the love she could have, Dauphine decided to travel the world and see its wonders.

She was fifteen years old when a car ran over her in the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Instead of bleeding out on the cold ground as any God-fearing human would, she only got into a mild 7 months coma.

When she woke up, she became...odd. She suddenly claimed she could see the spirits of the departed, and that spirits demanded things of her. Mostly to enact furious revenge.

Nobody had come back from the dead before her, not counting that one zombie Lazarus and that Jesus guy who are apparently too cool to return our calls to get them to comment on some basic undead facts. It is thanks to her that we know that heaven, as it turns out, smells like Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Her doctors, being 1915, decided she was hysterical and hosed her down until her crazies went away.

Word got out that there was this small woman that could speak to ghosts, and the world's weirdest Riverdance of spirits began to knock at her door.

Of course, ghosts can't knock on doors, so they would rudely come into her home and interrupt her with their nonsense requests. Anywhere from Gengis Khan wanting one last round of pillaging and destruction, to Archduke Franz Ferdinand demanding she punched Gavrilo Princip in the throat. They came every day, all day, without stopping.

No matter how much they poked, probed, swabbed, placed in an insane asylum, hosed down again, or injected with cocaine - because, again, this was 1915, and cocaine was a panacea for anything from Hangman's bunions to demons in your blood - she was still pestered by the ghosts.

In an act of desperation, she grabbed one of her father's pistols and placed it against her forehead. But when she pulled the trigger, she could only hear the clicking of the barrel. No bullet came out. She tried again, and again, and again, with different guns, to no avail.

She tried to get hit by a car, only for said car to be hit by another car, sparing her. She took a dive into a lake with rocks in her pocket, only for the lake to dry up beneath her. Similar attempts produced similar results, from jumping out of windows to be rescued by a mattress truck, to diving into a fire that got immediately blown by a typhoon.

She tried to kill herself countless times, and every time, she was saved by an incredible stroke of luck. Lady Fortuna had forsaken her with a cursed amount of good luck.

Pestered by ghosts, and unable to die, she did the only thing that could get her to end both her problems: try to appease the ghosts, or die trying. Preferably both..

Turns out, most ghosts are dicks. They want wild, difficult, and illegal things. Kill a rival, launder some money, put some shrimp on the rims of someone's car so they won't know where the stink came from, she did it all. And as Lady Fortuna was still hungover, she never came around to change her fate. Dauphine Deveroux was an immortal, one-woman army. Nobody could stop her. And most importantly, nobody ever got to kill her.