Marie Durocher

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Marie Durocher is a prominent Practitioner in Ontario and a founding teacher of the BHI.

Personality

A very intense woman. Her confident and intimidating aura evokes images of wild predatory animals.<ref>More like a wild animal than a person, in many ways.  Here, in a bar, late at night, the group of them gathered, her slightly inebriated, tired self was akin to a tiger stretched out in a sunbeam.  The claws so easily protruded as she stretched. </ref> Even when relaxed she is quietly intimidating, but an angry Durocher strikes fear into the hearts of men.<ref>Raymond because Alexander could let word slip that he knew and had exploited it because of Ray.  Minor, but it was something, and a furious Durocher was something to behold.</ref> She is deeply passionate about researching and dealing with large and scary Others<ref>Durocher was physically exhausted but mentally, she tended to come away from encounters with the scariest and largest Others energized, wanting more.  Just a week or two off of her latest hunt, she was willing and wanting to track down this Blue Heron Throne god, while Alexander did the legwork to bring them all together.  She would sleep only with the help of drugs, drink, and more physical exhaustion, and she would wake interested and alert, wanting to research.</ref> but shows disinterest for social pleasantries, politics and those she considers lesser than her. When dealing with friends and equals, however, she shows a more sociable and playful side, and is loyal to her close friends. Durocher respects strength.

Relationships

Durocher is a permanent teacher at the Blue Heron Institute.<ref name=":0">>SAY “She’s fine. Engaged to Ulysse, who’s with Amine. They’re under Durocher.”
Ray: Yes, yes. I know them. Fine.
[...]
>SAY “Afghanistan, apparently. There’s a reason the Devouring Song is so tenacious.”
Ray: Then bring Durocher.
>SAY “Durocher scares me. The weakest practice I’ve seen her use made car alarms go off two blocks away.”
Ray: We’ll need her kind of strength for this.
>SAY “We?”
Ray: All hands on deck. Let’s do this right. That means bringing Durocher and her pre-human divinities. Talk to Alexander while you’re at it. The school is a resource we maintain for just this reason. We’ll use it.
>SAY “They’ll want a piece of the pie.”
Ray: A small piece of something this big is enough. I’m cutting this

lesson short and logging off.  Call Durocher and the other school 

staff.
- Bonus Material: SunnyDay Logs</ref> She has at least two apprentices, Amine and Ulysse.<ref>Amine was with Ulysse. They were Durocher’s apprentices - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.z</ref><ref name=":0" /> She's also worked with Brie to help her manage the Hungry Choir.<ref>Brie Callie is a friend of Zed, who many of you know is the fourth apprentice to Raymond Sunshine.  Brie played a pivotal role in handling the Devouring Song, a problem that has plagued our area for some time, and spent the last few weeks here with us, working with Mrs. Durocher, and we’re happy to have her. - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.5</ref>

She seems to intimidate most of the Practitioners involved in the Blue Heron Institute,<ref name=":1">Mrs. Durocher seemed to scare the pants off of people.  With those dark eyes with chewed up meaty things swimming in them, she scared Verona a bit. - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.5</ref> including Zed.<ref>Out on a Limb bonus - SunnyDay Logs</ref>

At one point Charles was briefly in love with her.<ref>“Durocher was… she wasn’t anything exceedingly remarkable in the looks department, but she was so driven and excited by what she did that I think they all took turns falling in love with her.  I did, even.  But being beside her means having your feet held to the fire.  The fire in this case is monsters most practitioners won’t get within miles of.  She’s teaching?”- Excerpt from Back Away 5.5</ref>

Appearance

Unusually tall for a woman, thin, and wears her hair in uneven bangs. She wears a necklace of what seem to be Thunderstones.<ref>Ms. Durocher was of a height with Ray, but seemed taller because the height was in defiance of so much else about her appearance, and it was unusual in a woman.  She was underweight, with a smile that couldn’t help but seem insecure or uneven, and her bangs that didn’t fit with her relatively fine, thin hair, draping across her forehead in an uneven curtain.  She wore a black top with a red jacket, and a rather blocky necklace of fossils and glassy stones framed the divide between jacket and top, somehow picking up both the black and the red.  Her skirt came to calf length. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.z</ref>

Abilities and Art

"Durocher scares me. The weakest practice I've seen her use made car alarms go off two blocks away"<ref>[3.9 Spoilers] SunnyDay Logs </ref> ~ Zed

Durocher is among the top experts in the entire world when it comes to her field of Practice, to such an extent that her death or forswearing would have severe global ramifications due to the colossal threats she has bound. She specializes in Primevals<ref name=":0" /> and Greater Powers,<ref name=":2">“Years ago, there was something on the horizon that clouded my Sight. It recurred as an image. A teenage boy dressed as a king, sitting in a chair with water running over him, repeating the same nonsense phrases over and over again. If I gutted a bird and pulled out its entrails for a simple fortune telling, I could find papers in the guts, with the phrases on it. It was… obnoxious. I traveled from Toronto to Winnipeg, met with other Practitioners who had run into the same problem, some of your parents, as a matter of fact. A company that managed and experimented with server architecture had rented out three floors of its building to a startup and had unwittingly played host to a group of technomancers trying to get users to engage with rituals they’d programmed. They abandoned their work, killed by Witch Hunters or run off by Others, and their work was deleted. As Raymond Sunshine would be sure to tell you, however, deleted does not mean gone. Just as you can pull something out of your trash bin on your desktop, their work was still there, gradually taking form, reaching out into the rest of the servers in the building until it could become a small god. After that, it started expanding out, until it was interfering with my Sight. [...] It had taken over the building and the running of the company that managed the servers. Within was a world of its own that would take a month to cross. I went to deal with it, and ran into someone else who was doing the same. A young lady who would be best described as being very interested in the most vast and uncontrolled parts of conventional practice,” He indicated Mrs. Durocher. “She had already contacted a colleague of hers from a previous errand, a man who was just then achieving notoriety for his first practitioner-facing website.” He indicated Raymond Sunshine. [...] Together with Mr. Bristow and Mr. Musser, we annihilated the god, shared out its power, and we drank together that night. For Mr. Sunshine, Mrs. Durocher, and myself, it sparked a close friendship that has lasted ever since. One of the things I hold most important about that experience was the epiphany I had, during that night of conversation and light drinks. It wasn’t the power that I was happiest with -and I was as power hungry as they come- but the moments I had been with other practitioners and felt purpose and felt like we were all better for those deals. Better informed, and we all know having the right information makes us strong. Dealing with other practitioners makes us safer, better equipped, stronger, and more capable of covering our weaknesses. That epiphany would eventually lead to us starting the Blue Heron Institute alongside Mr. Bristow, Mr. Musser, and others. We named it after one of the faces the god in the machine had worn.” - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.5</ref> and is styled as "Supplicant of the Cascus Wilds" by Alexander. Her practices tend to be very potent and cause widespread damage, to such an extent that she tends to notify Lords as a courtesy when working close to their domains. She can, with some damage to herself, summon a Primeval scavenger in combat,<ref>“Durocher,” Ray said.

The thin, tall woman stepped forward. She put her hand out, but stopped short of crossing the barrier they’d erected when drawing the circle.

She began making noises, guttural, growling, each one something Zed could imagine would be painful to make, disjointed. Her eyes opened wider, and she spoke that guttural, painful language with a violence that made spit fleck and froth at the corners of her mouth, the sounds coming faster and faster.
[...]
Ms. Durocher screamed, and it was as violent and raw a sound as everything else she’d strung together. Zed heard the glass case of his music player at his hip cracking.

Something halfway across the field detonated. Two of the more ramshackle buildings  on either side of the field tumbled to the ground.

A fissure, with plumes of dust spreading skyward. In the midst of it was something that defied easy classification. It looked like a particularly ghastly tree that could be mistaken for a massive wild animal in the wrong light, but it moved. Like how a crocodile could be mistaken for a log, or a mangy dog with matted fur could look like fungus was growing on it. Animal, but no one animal in particular. If it was just predator, it was a bit of everything that made every predator in existence special, from face shape to frame to the patterns that ran along it. If it was just scavenger, it was everything from the face of a hyena to the flayed head of a vulture to something insect, all blended together- and that would be only the head. The dust hid most of it.

When it unfolded, moved, and attacked, it did so with joints moving the wrong way, it rose up until it looked like it had reached its full height, then surged, shifting, in a way that suggested only one part of a greater whole had emerged, like the hand with a whole arm following. A tongue that looked like it had been dragged through dirt until it was scabbed and raw reached out and dragged forty or so children into a fanged hole in its center.

It screamed, in that same language Ms. Durocher had spoken, and she leaned forward, eyes closed, fingernails digging into the skin of her throat and collarbone, a rictus grin on her face. Amine supported her to keep her standing. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.z</ref> and commands enough influence to have a god attend one of her classes and demonstrate healing magic.

A manifestation of her Sight causes her eyes to become black pits that evoke dread and seem to contain some dark reality.<ref>“I’ve brought you three of your freshmen,” Zed told her.

She looked down at them, and her eyes disappeared, receding into her head and leaving a darkness that was somehow as vast as the whole clearing they were in, but incapable of reaching beyond the boundaries of her eye sockets.  The feeling that hit Avery as she saw it was like being at the last milestone of the Forest Ribbon Trail again. She backed up a step, and Snowdrop hissed.

“If you’ll excuse me, Electra?” Mrs. Durocher asked.

“I’ll get Ulysse settled.”

Ms. Durocher nodded. Then she turned her vast, empty eyes to the three of them again.  Avery resisted moving back a second time. - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4</ref><ref name=":1" />

She has a Familiar she calls En, but he spends much of his time away, doing such things as engaging very ancient beasts in battle<ref>“Lovely to see.  I have a familiar, but he spends a lot of time away.  His teeth have been at the throat of something old for three years, I think.”

“I… that’s sad,” Avery said.  Then she reconsidered.  “No offense intended.”

“He’s made for it. Through a connection to me, En gets a taste at life at the same time he’s fulfilling his bloodlust, and through a connection to him, I have a way of keeping tabs on that particular project, even when I can’t be there.  I can feel his teeth in scale and fur as we stand here speaking. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have loved to experiment with something like a soul companion, but you only get one, don’t you?” - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.4</ref>

History

In her youth, she tracked down a Nex Machina along with Rad Ray Sunshine. Meeting Alexander Belanger and some other Practitioners investigating the same thing, they joined forces to defeat the god and claim its power. The power claimed and the friendships forged in that battle would eventually give rise to the Blue Heron Institute, named after the defeated god.<ref name=":2" />

Trivia

• It is unknown if she is actually married or if the "Mrs." is a title of respect given her teaching position, and general intimidation. Sometimes, "Ms." is used instead of "Mrs.", which may only reflect the protagonists' lack of knowledge about titles.
• Durocher is an attested French name that literally means dweller in the crags.

References

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