Briar

Briar
A.K.A.	Acantha The Echo The Great One
Character Information
Species	Human Vampire
Gender	Female
Behind the Scenes
First seen in	PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror
Copyright	Lupan Evezan

Briar, known in one of her possible futures as Acantha and as the Echo, was a human girl who became a companion to dimensional traveller Century Smith. Shortly after being bitten by an Invisible Vampyre on Sanguivor, she became embroiled in a scheme of Jenny Nowhere which temporarily split her timeline in two.

Description

Physical appearance

Briar was a fairly ordinary human girl. At 19, she looked quite young. As Acantha, she still looked much the same, only paler and with a pair of thin vampire fangs. She took to wearing a complicated, black aristocratic outfit emblasoned with a red lowercase Alpha over a smaller black cloak. After Acantha and the human Briar merged into one being, Briar retained the aristocratic garments but removed the 'alpha', since she rejected the name “Acantha”. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)

Personality

Shortly after she began travelling with Century Smith, Briar remained quite overwhelmed by the revelations he made to her about the nature of reality, and the sheer spectacle of aliens, strange interdimensional locales, and so on. However, she was courageous and resourceful despite her near-constant state of shock. She was deeply kind, always looking for a solution to an issue that would work out for everyone, sometimes at the expense of taking easy ways out that involved needlessly harming enemies. As Acantha, on the other hand, she had become embittered and selfish, jealous of her other self to the point of wishing her destruction for the sheer satisfaction of now being the only real version of Briar, neglecting options that would keep both of them alive. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)

Powers & abilities

As Acantha, Briar gained vampiric abilities, including transforming into a bat at will, an ability which the recomposited Briar retained after she merged with Acantha. She created the Shadow Pathways, which could be used for teleporting, both across universes or on a small scale. Acantha also had the knowledge necessary to engineer a time loop as she fell out of reality towards the Oblivion. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)

Biography

Early life

Briar was born in an isolated village in the middle of a forest. She knew nothing of any reasonably advanced technology, let alone the existence of the Multiverse. She met Century Smith during an incident when she was bitten by an Invisible Vampyre and Sanguivor. Her superstitious fellow villagers mobbed her, but she and Smith ended up running away aboard Smith's Void Ship. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)

Struggling with vampirism

As her transformation into a vampire began, Briar's body began to become invisible, piece by piece, beginning with the area of her forearm around the wound where she'd been bitten. Trying to ignore her condition's immediate effect, she took to wearing long gloves as she and Smith travelled to find some cure. They stopped off at the Adromedi Jungle Observation Tower so that Smith could do some repairs to his ship. They then met a friend of Smith's who was a dimensional scientist at the Interdimensional Tavern, and, after a stop at the Interdimensional Bank so that the scientist could retrieve her “library card” from her vault, to the Interdimensional Library, where they discovered a potential cure: a prick from the fang of someone who'd already been bitten and cured of vampirism. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)

Becoming Acantha

In one possible timeline, Briar, unable to find such a fang, succumbed to vampirism, her mind itself becoming twisted and evil. She destroyed Century Smith's Void Ship bare-handed in her beastly rage, before learning to control her powers so well that she devised an entirely new means of transportation both for herself and any new vampires she created, the Shadow Pathways. Newly equipped with these innate dimension-travelling powers, Acantha returned to her home village and conquered it. She took to wearing intricate, aristocratic black garments adorned with the red letter “alpha” to match her new name, borrowed from a controversial figure in Greek mythography. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)

Timelines at war

However, in another possible timeline, which threatened to overtake Acantha's, Briar managed to cure herself using her own fang from the future, a paradox made possible by the disturbances in the synchronicity of Time in the Void (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror) caused by the disappearance of Lord Thymon. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel) In a development of this possible timeline, Briar, on the way to finding her cure, crossed paths with a version of Jenny Nowhere whose shifting abilities had been damaged, and who had built a machine powered by paradoxes which could restore her multidimensional nature. Revealing her true colours to Briar and Smith, she strapped the former in the machine, but Briar managed to change position at the right time to be hit by the resulting ray instead of Nowhere; the machine itself caused the split in timelines which had made Briar an ideal power source for it. This caused the still-human Briar and Acantha to begin to exist at the same time.

Displeased with this development, Acantha attempted to thrust Briar out of existence, but Briar turned the tables on her and Acantha was cast out towards the Oblivion. However, she managed to alter the timelines as she fell out of existence, leaving behind one of her fangs, her characteristic outfit, and a cult determined to bring her back to physical existence. With the timelines thus altered, creating an effective time loop, Acantha was suspended in a state of semi-nonexistence, not quite reaching Oblivion. On the “second go-around” of History, the Cult, who worshipped Acantha as “the Echo”, acquired the robes at an auction in the Interdimensional Black Market and hired Lainya Vantrik to assassinate the human Briar, allowing Acantha to take over her life once again. However, Vantrik refused to fulfill her contract at the last moment due to her code forbidding her from killing someone as young as Briar. This gave Briar the opportunity to overpower Acantha. However, to break the time loop, instead of trying to remove her evil self from reality, Briar merged with Acantha.

Following this event, Briar was no longer a vampire (partially-transformed or otherwise), but she retained the ability to turn into a bat. With her newly-acquired occult abilities putting a return to her village out of the question, she opted to continue travelling with Smith. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)

An eventful vacation

In December 2021, Prime Universe time, while trying to enjoy a vacation, Briar and Smith became embroiled in the conflict between multiple species and factions of cyborgs competing for the right to be dubbed Supreme Cyborg by Cybele. They ran into them at the Multiversal Waffle House, the Interdimensional Gift Shop and even the “Gnome Place”, which they only visited by accident in the first place. Realising the cyborgs were a threat wherever they went, they tried to beat one group of them to their apparent destination, the Frost King's Realm. Arriving before the cyborgs' ship landed, they borrowed a striberu-pulled sleigh and headed for the village. On the way, they met CS-NA, whom Smith recognised as a Subcinctan robot, the first human CS-NA had ever encountered who understood his Subcinctan Audial Code.

Arriving in the village, they witnessed the arrival of the Mecharons; showing himself to make a stand, Smith was shot by one of their energy weapons, although it proved ill-adapted to human biology, only knocking him back and making him taste gingerbread. Scrambling to hide, Smith and Briar tried to evade capture by the Mecharon squad but were eventually caught, with the Mecharon commander ordering them converted into Mecharons themselves. However, CS-NA managed to force all the Mecharons to go into hibernation mode and retreat to their ships by hacking into their own comms frequencies, saving the two humans. Smith ruled that now that the village was saved and the Mecharons they'd been chasing were defeated, he and Briar could move on with their holiday fun; he offered CS-NA the chance to join them, but CS-NA, being on a wider mission of his own, declined. (PROSE: The Winter Quests)