Queen of the Black Market
The Queen of the Black Market was a mysterious interdimensional crime lady and the operator of the Interdimensional Black Market. She was over 520 years old and had placed her birth name under a Curse of Silence, keeping her very name a secret.
Description
Physical appearance
The Queen was humanoid but not quite human; she had four fingers on each hand, slanted eyes, no visible nose, and skin that wasn't quite the right shade of pink for a human being. Though the Queen kept her species a secret, it was known that she fed primarily on blood and was not, unlike human beings, descended from any ocean-dwelling creatures. She painted her sharp fingernails black.
She was most famous for being dressed from head to toe in armour that appeared to be made of savvily-arranged bones and skulls (although in actuality, they were rarely actual bones, being instead hand-crafted replicas). (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
Personality
The Queen of the Black Market was morally ambiguous; although having no qualms about the dark nature of her business, she had limits to what she would condone, and indeed liked to justify her Black Market by highlighting that it reduced the chaotic nature of the interdimensional underground's activities. She could be helpful to specific individuals even without any gain in mind, as she demonstrated upon first meeting Wendy Severn. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
Powers and abilities
The Queen of the Black Market had some skill at swordfighting, but mostly relied on her obedient Wraiths to protect her from physical threats. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker) In addition to having complete control of her Wraiths, she also used them to preserve her own youth, draining their lifeforce to maintain her own life; if she was ever killed, she had arranged for her soul to stay inside her body, which would then be revived and regenerated by the energy drained from any nearby Wraiths. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
Biography
Early life
Long before meeting Wendy, the Queen took over the Interdimensional Black Market from its previous owner. She kept his skull and it ended up kickstarting her lifelong habit of hand-crafted bone armour made of various materials (the skull being the only real bone in the lot, although she kept this fact a secret from most). She began to run the Black Market with the help of Wraiths magically enslaved to her will. At some point, she had a Void Limousine crafted especially for her by “the finest engineer of the Order of the Automata”. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
Meeting Wendy
The Queen eventually decided to take a vacation without her Wraiths to ‘get away from it all’, and thus, decided to come to Hilbert's by herself to meet a minor conman who owed her money, Sylvester Shoebill. In the lobby, she bumped into Wendy Severn, a young woman from Earth who had ended up at the Hotel by mistake and had never even heard of parallel worlds before that day. She decided to take Wendy under her wing, paying for her hotel room and inviting her over to dinner that same night. The two got along quite well and even began to flirt.
Halfway through the dinner, however, with Sylvester Shoebill having offered the Queen the Crystal of Thrash as payment for his debt, the Queen collapsed, poisoned. It later transpired that the Wellsian Forga sog-Forgos was to blame, having poisoned her to get the Crystal for his people. Panicking, Wendy ended up seeking the help of another guest at the Hotel, Pythagoras-858 of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids. Wendy ended up letting herself be romanticised by the Clockwork Cherub so that she could use a magical “Kiss of True Love” ritual to bring the Queen back to life, being that, without any Wraiths near her, her normal regenerative process wasn't kicking in.
Thankful, the Queen gave Wendy her Void Limousine so that she could travel through the Multiverse on her own. The two agreed to stay away from each other for a while to give Wendy time for her artificially-induced feelings to settle; they fixed their next meeting for a month hence, and parted ways, with the Queen returning to the Interdimensional Black Market using her emergency teleport bracelet. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
Attack of the Clowns
In December 2020, the Interdimensional Black Market was abruptly attacked by a magical clown (who had been created by Madame Tarsa and had rebelled against her) who wielded Madame Tarsa's cane and used it to create an army of duplicate of himself. He began fighting the Queen, with his duplicates proving a match for her Wraiths. The fight lasted for some time until the stalemate was broken by the appearance of Pythagoras-858 and Sherlock Holmes, with the latter managing to get behind the lead Clown and trip him, letting the Queen win. However, the Clown teleported away before anyone could find out where he came from, what he wanted, and where he was going.
The Queen invited Pythagoras and Sherlock to share a meal with her. They briefly discussed what the Queen knew of Madame Tarsa beyond their agreement for the selling of Tarsa's wares at the Black Market, which turned out to be “very little”, before they were attacked by Skollops ag-Warka, a Wellsian who had taken control of the Queen's Wraiths and demanded an Artefact of Power in ransom (in order to take it back to Radluhac ag-Wampyr as an Allac-Ur present). Wendy VII intervened, undercutting Skollops's threat; however, the Wellsian pivoted to offering a bargain, getting the Whistle of the Witch Varganax in exchange for the others finding out where the Clown had gone. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
April Fools' Day
On April Fools' Day 2021, the Faction of the Fooling Fish, who had recently acquired inter-dimensional travel, forged a letter from the Queen which they distributed to all the merchants in the Interdimensional Black Market, claiming that the old location's secrecy had been blown and that they were all to instantly relocate their business to the coordinates of the Interdimensional Tavern. Meanwhile, the Queen was left alone in her palace with her Wraiths. A Fish visited her and tried to start a charade of having important business with her, but she at least bought no part of it and threw the visitor out. Eventually, the trickery was discovered and the merchants returned. (PROSE: Multiversal Mischief)
An auction gone wrong
The Queen of he Black Market routinely served as mistress of ceremonies for auctions held at the Interdimensional Black Market for items of particular interest. During one such auction, she presented first “a vertical, oblong blob of vegetation that was apparently some form of couch”, and then a set of mysterious deep black aristocratic garments adorned with a red Alpha, which had been “plucked from the depths of time as it drifted towards the Eternal Oblivion”. This was the outfit of Acantha. Sentis and Rubus, two vampires belonging to the Cult of Acantha, crashed the auction, making use of their bat forms and of the Shadow Pathways to steal the clothing from out of her hands and return it to their home base in the 819th Universe in preparation for the resurrection of Acantha. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)
Behind the scenes
Notes and references
- ↑ First appearance in directly Jenny-related media; actual debut was in 2019's [https://thecrewofthecoppercoloredcupids.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/misadventures-in-the-interdimensional-black-market/ Misadventures in the Interdimensional Black Market.
