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Madame Tarsa, also known as the Toymaker, the Interdimensional Toymaker, the Magnificent Madame Tarsa, or simply Tarsa, was a powerful, immortal interdimensional toymaker. She resided in a pocket dimension of her own. Tarsa was once married to one incarnation of Jenny Everywhere.
Description
Physical appearances
Madame Tarsa appeared as a woman with pink skin and short, curly, purple hair. She usually wore a kind of jester's outfit, with a red, green and orange jester's hat and a colourful outfit akin to a toy soldier's. She could change her size at wil, but her default one in her Workshop was gigantic compared to the default human size Pythagoras-858 was used to. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
Personality
Madame Tarsa was a very active individual, usually seen “milling about in an endless whirlwind of magic, colours, and shapeshifting”. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker) She loved games, and, though she ruthlessly played to win, was a graceful loser if her opponents managed to get the better of her. (PROSE: The Toymaker's Labyrinth)
Powers and abilities
Tarsa was a creative and skillful toymaker. Most of her creations, though inventive works of craftsmanship in their own right, were also enchanted to one extent or another, with many even being sentient; she possessed the Power of Creation. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
She was also capable of shape- and size-shifting, and of teleporting at will across dimensions (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker, The Toymaker's Labyrinth) using her magical cane. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker) She could even create duplicates of herself, all animated by the same consciousness, to multitask better. She could be wounded, but was capable of regenerating maimed body parts within a few minutes. (PROSE: The Toymaker's Labyrinth) She was unharmed by a Wellsian Heat Ray, (PROSE: The Frost King's Treasure) and when a ghost tried to possess her, it simply dissolved upon making contact with her skin. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
She once demonstrated the ability to create a dimensional portal with a wave of her hands, even without her cane, though she did not know where it led. (PROSE: The Frost King's Treasure)
Biography
Creating the Toybox
One of the first living toys Tarsa created was a teddy bear who later took on the name Millicent, and whom she treated as a daughter. After building a magical Toybox to house her increasing number of living toy creations, Tarsa positioned Millicent there, giving her a number of books containing some of her secrets, so that she could help lead the Toybox's denizens in an emergency. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
Marriage to Jenny
“Millions of years” before her encounters with the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, Tarsa was married to an incarnation of Jenny Everywhere. It was a very happy union, and only came to an end with the death of this particular incarnation of Jenny; although Tarsa remained friends with all other incarnations of Jenny she met, the spark of the couple had been lost, with Tarsa considering that her wife had died, all the same, even if others carried her memories. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
Dealings with the Frost King
At an unknown point prior to her first dealings with the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, Madame Tarsa began to be involved with the Frost King, another cosmic being with a tendency for getting into tighter situations than her. She once rescued him after he was trapped by a wraith-wyvern. On another occasion, after the King accidentally destroyed the village of the Miniature Mahoganies during a game of Cosmic Foosball, the Council called Tarsa in to rectify the subsequent crisis. (PROSE: The Winter Quests)
Early contacts with the Cupids
Madame Tarsa owned a stall on the Interdimensional Black Market, Madame Tarsa's Marvelous Dolls and Automatons. Because Tarsa herself was too busy, it was instead manned entirely by her creations, including a marionette wearing a jester's outfit who acted as the vendor and a mechanical pig who collected the money from the sales. Darius and Tracker-764 encountered this stall when they visited the Black Market on their way to the Cupid Homeworld, with Darius reluctantly buying a cursed ventriloquist's dummy with the capacity to steal people's voices from them, which was then traded to the ship-parts seller for CS-NA and a new engine for Tracker-764's Void Ship. (PROSE: Misadventures in the Interdimensional Black Market)
The Clockwork Cherubs first encountered Madame Tarsa in earnest by accident when Pessimist's Fog Ship transported Pessimist-242 and Larrikin-1029 to a random dimension which turned out to be the Workshop of Madame Tarsa. (PROSE: The Toymaker's Labyrinth) They climbed onto her work-table where they first exchanged a few words with the marionette Tarsa was working on before Tarsa herself made her presence known. Shrinking down to scale, she tried to analyse the Cupids, fascinated with their mechanisms and intent on creating a line of Toy Cupids. Larrikin tried to fight back, damaging the marionette in the process and driving an irate Tarsa to toss the Cupids, as well as the Fog Ship, which she stripped of its dimensional warp drive and shrunk even further, into her Toybox. She then set about creating a prototype Toy Cupid and distilling Love Potion.
After a while, she switched on the Mechanical Fortune Teller and called on its abilities to check on the Cupids' progress. She was displeased to hear that they had made it out of Wild West Town and sent the Clay Thing, one of her more dangerous creations, to fight them. They defeated it with the Fog Ship's help, much to Tarsa's dismay, and finally made their way to the Doom Room, the final hall before the official exit of the labyrinth within the Toybox. After they defeated the giant chess pieces and the Mechanical Skeleton, Tarsa decided to make herself the third and final trial, challenging the Cupids and Fog Ship to a swordfight. The Fog Ship managed to shoot out one of her eyes, however, and the trio made their escape through the exit in the time it took for Tarsa to regrow her eye and catch up to them. There, they destroyed her research on duplicating Cupid technology. Accepting her defeat, Tarsa restored the Fog Ship and sent them on their way. Before leaving, Larrikin suggested that she create plushies based on Lord Thymon as a replacement for the Cupid-based toy line. (PROSE: The Toymaker's Labyrinth)
They turned out to be a hit, with an unknown party within the Cupid Homeworld somehow ordering large numbers of them and getting them conveyed to the Homeworld without the Department of Postal Services' involvement. The mystery got an article in Issue 1034 of The Cupid Courier, where Philatel-426 speculated that Thymon himself was the one purchasing and summoning them. Thymon, however, could not be reached for comment by the Cupid journalists, as he was working on his own stamp collection, and there was an alternative theory, with Dandy-432 speculating that Larrikin was the one ordering them to ensure that his suggestion became a success, having made it a point of pride. Larrikin could not be reached for comment either because he ran from the journalists when they approached him, refusing to “confess” to anything. (PROSE: Conspiracy-1263 Publicly Accuses the Gang of the Green Gorillas)
Further interactions with the Cupids
On Halloween 2019, Tarsa was working late on one of her projects, a wooden pumpkin which wouldn't spoil, and could reset itself at will after being carved, so that it could be reused the year after, when the Great Ghost's legion arrived in her Workshop of Madame Tarsa aboard a stolen Fog Ship. She tossed them into her Toybox, only for them to bust out having possessed all her marionettes. They escaped to the Prime Universe, but Tarsa followed them, intent on getting them back. At their chosen headquarters, an abandoned theatre, she found a detachment of Copper-Colored Cupids who helped foil the spirits' plan to summon more of themselves using the Reverse Spirit Realm Gateway they'd forced Frankenstein-818 to build while Tarsa, after transforming the embodied ghosts into various harmless objects using her experimental Conjuring Gloves for the Magically Inept, challenged the Great Ghost (in the body of the Queen of the Black Market) to a swordfight.
In the end, after being banished back to the Spirit Realm by the One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway, the spirits tried to return through the Reverse Gateway, only for a setting Frankenstein had programmed in subconsciously to turn them all into clockwork toy versions of ghosts. Tarsa greedily scooped them up, intent on adding a few improvements to them and then using her as the year's line of Halloween products in place of the wooden pumpkin which she didn't think she'd finish in time after this diversion. She also used an experimental top hat and wand she was developing alongside her Conjuring Gloves to separate the Queen from the Great Ghost, sending the latter to parts unknown. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
In December 2019, Tarsa consulted her Mechanical Fortune Teller, who informed her that she would soon receive an invitation to participate in a quest for the Frost King's treasure. Though the Fortune Teller was unable to tell her whether she'd succeed in her quest, she decided to go along with it, and teleported to the dimensional coordinates embedded in the invitation. Near the peak of the mountain, she met up with other treasure-seekers who'd received similar invitations, including Dandy-432 and Pessimist-242 of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids as well as a contingent of the Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles. The Wellsians took her by surprise and managed to take her cane from her, preventing her from teleporting, but she answered by materialising a sword in each of her hands, and a brawl soon ensued, during which Tarsa incurred and survived a blast from a Heat Ray, but the Crocodiles' Metafictional Macaw pecking her “several times”.
Eventually, the bickering treasure-seekers all made their way to the basin at the top of the mountain, where they discovered that the invitations had been sent by Darius, formerly of the Drove of the Database-Compiling Dromedaries, who'd been stranded here with a pocket-sized dimensional transporter, and had decided to put it to use to lure everyone he had a grudge on to his location so that he could get his revenge on them. His quarrel with Tarsa was, of course, his encounter with her voice-stealing ventriloquist's dummy at the Interdimensional Black Market. However, in his unhinged state, Darius had not accounted for his foes' superior numbers and his lack of weaponry, being easily overpowered by the group. After they tied him up, Tarsa “conjued a dimensional portal with a wave of her hand” and tossed him through. The day had a happy ending, however, as Dandy coincidentally discovered that the Frost King's treasure really did exist. Pessimist, in a rare show of altruism, delivered a moving speech which convinced them to refrain from fighting again, and to simply share the massive treasure. Tarsa picked “a small figure of an unknown animal, which could move through complex internal mechanisms”, planning to recreate it and use it as a template for what would hopefully become “next year’s most popular toy across the Multiverse”. (PROSE: The Frost King's Treasure)
After the Rifts Crisis
By the time of the end of the Rifts Crisis, the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids were familiar with Tarsa, but they were ambivalent towards her because she kept sending them Lord Thymon plushies. However, she proved instrumental to putting an end to the Rifts Crisis. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!)
Frozen
After Pythagoras-858 placed an order with Tarsa on behalf of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids for enough Christmas presents to satisfy the whole Cupid Homeworld, he travelled to her Workshop only to discover her frozen in place inside a huge cube of ice. It eventually transpired that she had been magically frozen by Sebastian Steer in order for him to steal the puppet clown she was working on, hoping to study it and learn her techniques. Juliet-178, Arganthone-056 and Jenny Everywhere travelled the Multiverse looking for a way to bring Tarsa back to life, eventually finding the toy mallet she'd hidden for the purpose inside the Star Atop the Tree in the Christmas Toyland of her Toybox. After they succeeded in freeing Tarsa, she was confronted with the Clown, whose animation Steer had clumsily completed; he wished to treat her as his mother, not just his creator, and she accepted him as such, with him helping her catch up on the time lost while she was frozen when it came to fulfilling the many orders of toys she'd received for Christmas. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
A family Christmas
In December 2021, she was showing Joybuzzer the ropes of how to prepare Christmas orders when CS-NA teleported into the Workshop, on his quest to learn more about Christmas. She allowed him to hang around as a silent observer. Shortly after, her and her son's work was once again interrupted, this time by the Frost King (by then functionally family to them, with Joybuzzer referring to him as “Uncle Frost”). The King suggested that they go out and look for a Christmas tree as a family; though displeased by the King barging into the Workshop uninvited using his magic, she eventually gave in, and the three of them, plus CS-NA, transported themselves to another universe where they found a suitable tree. After chopping it down and preparing it for transport, the three got into a playful magic-aided snowball fight, which Tarsa and Joybuzzer won. They then returned to the Workshop to decorate the tree using ornaments crafted by Joybuzzer. These experiences taught CS-NA about the importance of family spirit to a successful Christmas party. He subsequently invited Tarsa and her family to the party he organised in the Homeworld, where, after handing out presents, the three snuck off to have a friendly sparring match with the Mechanical Sphinx. (PROSE: The Winter Quests)