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”. She also had “the Dwarven smiths of Abelard III” create a set of bone armour made of pure silver, to wear on formal occasions, but had never gotten a chance to wear it until her meeting with Wendy VII. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
In 2019, when she was temporarily taken over by the Great Ghost, the Queen remarked: “My third possession in fifty years. I have got to invest in a couple of sturdy warding amulets”. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Tracker and Darius
In 2019, Tracker-764 and Darius's Void Ship crashed in the Interdimensional Black Market by mistake. They purchased a ship-repairing robot and a new engine to fix the damage, but before they could leave, they were spotted as outsiders by a Wraith and chased all the way to the Queen's underground throne room. The Queen initially made a play to kill the intruders herself using a dagger, but when the dagger bounced off the shorter, robed figure and she realised he was a Clockwork Cherub, she decided to put them up for auction instead. However, Tracker managed to signal for the ship-building robot, CS-NA, to pretend to buy them, and they managed to escape in the repaired Void Ship, though not without some commotion as the Queen realised what they were doing and sent more Wraiths after them. (PROSE: Misadventures in the Interdimensional Black Market)
Halloween 2019
On Halloween 2019, the Queen was just about to retire after a long day which she had partially whiled away whittling herself a new bone spear when the Interdimensional Black Market was attacked by the Great Ghost's legion. Though she tried to fight back, she was overwhelmed and the Great Ghost himself decided to take her body over as his new vessel. In her body, the Great Ghost, now also able to command her own wraiths, led his followers to the Workshop of Madame Tarsa and to the Prime Universe, where they all found vessels to possess. Wanting to summon more spirits, the Great Ghost then returned to the Cupid Homeworld to abduct Frankenstein-818, bringing him to an abandoned theatre in the Prime Universe where he forced him to build a Reverse Spirit Realm Gateway. However, the ghosts were followed by a possé of Cupids accompanied by Madame Tarsa. After a chaotic fight at the heart of which Tarsa dueled the possessed Queen, Igor-1612 managed to shove her into the Reverse Spirit Realm Gateway, which transformed her into a clockwork toy due to a setting Frankenstein had built into it almost despite himself. Tarsa then used her magic top hat to separate the Queen from the ghost, and restore the latter to her full, organic form, albeit “rather disgruntled”. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Around this time, the Crew decided to authorise regular missions to the Black Market. This meant that the Queen of the Black Market, now a probable future enemy, was logged by Bibliophile-962 in the Book of Evil, where he described the Black Market itself as “a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and also a great place to buy collectable keychains”. (PROSE: The Book of Evil)
Later, after he became stranded in the mountains of Manik and attempted to mail invitations to all his greatest foes, Darius considered sending one to the Queen, but had no idea what her address was. (PROSE: The Frost King's Treasure)
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)
Visit to the Prime Universe
A spear-wielding woman whom Pythagoras-858 recognised as the Queen was among the groups who bid for the venom of the Wyrm of Loki when the Prime Universe's Sigyn decided to auction it off. Like the other bidders, she dissipated like smoke, sent back to her dimension, after Tero Trollgarsson rendered the auction moot by drinking all the venom, leading Sigyn to interrupt the spell she was using to summon them all. (PROSE: The Winter Quests)
