Mrs. Schaff

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   <default>Mrs. Schaff</default>
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   <label>First Appearance</label>

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Mrs Schaff is an Aware living in Kennet with a lot of cats.

Personality

She is stern and distrustful not having much liking for people.<ref name=":2" />

Relationships

All of her relationships have seemingly been usurped by her Connections to her innumerable cats.<ref name=":0"/>

Grandfather shoveled her driveway, clearing the snow off it for her.<ref>“I see your driveway could use a shoveling,” Grandfather said. - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref>

She was aware that someone had been watching her from the trees.<ref>“Can you tell whoever or whatever it is that’s been in the trees and sneaking around the property to stop bothering my cats?”- Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref>

Appearance

She's an elderly women with white hair with a single streak of black in it and tied into a bun. She is pretty but doesn't wear makeup.<ref name=":2">Mrs. Schaff, now wearing a coat over her housecoat, and a bright yellow scarf, stepped outside.

She was maybe sixty, hair tied back into a messy bun, white hair with a shock of black that hadn’t changed with age yet, running to the back. Pretty, but no makeup, with a look about her like she could be a schoolmarm in some movie, ready to smack kids knuckles with a ruler. A natural glare and distrustful look.

Maybe Lucy came off that way to others. Or a way she might’ve ended up if she’d never had Avery and Verona, or if she’d never had practice. If instead of being bulletproof, she’d stopped caring a bit.

And- Lucy saw past the woman to the house. In the gloom, house lit only by the light coming in from the windows, she could see the reflection of various eyes of cats. Yeah. In the recipe it’d take to create this woman from elements of herself and people she knew, she’d have to add in a love for cats that surpassed Verona’s. If that was possible. - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref>

Abilities

She's an Aware that owns a large number of cats,<ref name=":0"/> never turning away those that show up at her door.<ref name=":4"/> Her cats can help her sense if someone doesn't fit in and as an Aware she can notice things most innocents ignore.<ref name=":5"/> Recently her Awareness has gotten stronger, originally having one or two felines with special qualities, the number has grown to double digits.<ref>“Things have changed. She’s gotten stronger. And if you give her this deal, she’ll be stronger still.”
[...]
“Yeah. How many special cats or cat-like Others are here? It hasn’t always been this way?”

“There’d be one or two, before. And a few cat that had special talents or skills. Like being very good at dealing with bad little goblins, or sensing and fending off ghosts. Now? Five to twelve.”- Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref>

Her cats are dangerous to weaker Others such as small goblins<ref name=":0"/> or fragmentary Echoes.

Some others, such as Graymalkin Strangelings use her house as a training ground so that they can learn to act like cats.<ref>“This is a training ground. Not-cats like me and Blankshanks over there, sometimes we need a refresher on how a cat’s meant to act. It’s a resource. The right cats, the right things, useful.” - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref> While creatures like Goblins would see her home as obstacle course.<ref>“He’s mentioned the cat lady,” Lucy interrupted. “Bit of a surprise obstacle for any goblins up to mischief.”

“Or a target, if they want to do something silly,” Verona added. - Excerpt from Wild Abandon 18.5</ref>

Sometimes her cats find items with a hint of magic about them.<ref>Blankshanks leaped onto the coffee table a few steps from Lucy, depositing a hair comb there. A moment later, the cat that had had the letter opener leaped onto the coffee table, putting down a mangled mousetrap.

“…those,” Lucy finished.

“Odds and ends? I don’t know where some of them come from.”

Lucy used her Sight. She could see the staining, spreading like watercolor where the items rested on the table.

“You could bring those. Random things cats like. If they have instincts that let them sense trouble… they might have instincts that let them find those things.”- Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref>

List of known cats

Timberwolf - a wild and aggressive cat.<ref name=":1"/>
Blankshanks - Graymalkin Strangeling<ref name=":1">As she stepped through the door, a cat threw itself at her, all four claws out, aiming for her face. She deflected it, it hit the wall, dropped, leaped less than a half second after touching the ground, and came at her again. Horseman caught it out of the air.

The cat screeched and yowled, clawing madly at his jacket sleeve, failing to find purchase in the heavy material. It tried to twist to bite his hand, but he had index finger at one corner of its chin and middle finger at the other, gripping its neck. Big freaking cat, too.

“Oh, that’s Timberwolf,” Mrs. Schaff said. “She’s protective. Wild soul.”
[...]
“Castleberry. A goblin-ish thing. Looks like roadkill. Violent. She coddles it.”

And these two cats were Fairy-ish things. - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref> that attempted to pick Lucy's pocket.<ref>Another cat, white and very pretty, had roused from the couch, and stretched between Lucy and the couch, front paws on the former, back paws on the latter, making it hard for Lucy to move away. It nuzzled her side.

She snatched her hand down, stopping it before it could finish picking her pocket and take her wallet.

“Drat,” the cat said, in a quiet, masculine voice, pulling away.
[...]
“Are you aiming to use that resource?” Blankshanks the pickpocket cat asked. “Steal it? Drain it?” - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref>
Spades - Graymalkin Strangeling<ref name=":1"/> threatened Lucy with a letter opener.
Castleberry - a violent cat with a hint of goblin to it.<ref name=":1"/>
An unnamed undead cat - it's capable of turning other cats into undead like itself, it doesn't need to eat or execrate just naps perpetually in a sunbeam.<ref>“There’s another upstairs. Died, went unclaimed, spirit found its way back to the body. Undead now. Could get messy in the wrong circumstance.”

“Messy how?”

“If it bit another cat, there’d be two undead cats. If it bit a human, it would be two undead cats and an undead human.”

“Ghoul? Zombie? That sounds like a problem.”

“One or the other or both. Only reason things haven’t gotten worse is it’s doing what it did while it was alive. Lies in a sunbeam all day. Only difference is it doesn’t eat, drink, make waste, doesn’t have to move. But it stinks and we have to work to keep others from trying to share the sunbeam. All it would take is a reflex bite.”- Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref>
Unidentified Goblin killer.<ref name=":3"/>
10 other strange cats
innumerable other normal cats

Chronology

Before the Story

Noticed the death of the Carmine Beast.<ref name=":5"/>

Avery and Snowdrop ran into her at the library in passing.<ref name=":0">[Avery] had hesitated to step outside because of the woman stooped over at the doorway, which was stupid. But the woman had something going on. Avery saw a silhouette streaked with handprints, translucent and foggy where those handprints didn’t exist, connections spilling out from the cracks as film reels or belts with sections cut out to suggest scenes. Footprints made her recent travels across the library obvious – from front door to table to bathroom to kids section to table. Residual crimson touched some handprints and connections.

All normal.

But there were a lot of small pawprints with way more traces of crimson on them near her hands, chest, stomach, and lap.

An Other? No. Avery didn’t get that vibe.

Aware? It didn’t seem anywhere near as extreme as Kevin, Ted, Rae, or Clementine had been. [...]
This wasn’t as animated, but there was something, still.
[...]
She smelled like the Wolf, one step removed. An old person smell, a sweat smell, bad breath, an animal smell. Cat, not wolf.
[...]
Verdict?” Avery asked.

“She’s nothing like what Toadswallow told us about, with the Aware. Attractive thing for goblins.”

“Got it, I think,” Avery said. “One of those slightly Aware people that mess up goblins and things? Like the kid who wakes up every time a goblin tries to pull something?”

“Not dangerous to something like Cherrypop or the new goblin,” Snowdrop said. “It’s the big ones who have to watch out.”

“Cats?” Avery asked. “Like some Aware cat lady?”

“Only a few cat smells. Really docile ones too.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m picturing Cherrypop breaking into her house and coming face to face with fifty especially evil murder cats.”

“She could handle it.” - Excerpt from Shaking Hands 9.8</ref>

Summer Squabbles

Tatty and her gang raided her house in an attempt to get the collar of a cat that they believed had killed a goblin.<ref name=":3">“He’s not with us,” Tatty said. “Gotta go. We’re raiding this cat lady’s house, she’s got so many cats. It’s awful! But one of their cats, it’s a goblin killer. You can see it in its eyes. Too much green. Three goblins, we think.”
[...]
“If we get the tag off the collar of the goblin killer cat, we can take it to the Warrens and we’ll be heroes! So brave, they’ll say!”- Excerpt from Dash to Pieces 11.12</ref> While it was successful Peckersnot was nearly unmanned.

Noticed the Carmine Contest.<ref name=":5"/>

Winter season

Mrs. Schaff was out and about when the nightmare market got started,<ref>“No sign of anyone from St. Victor’s. This has to be super obvious to them, right? Just about everyone Aware has showed up. Cat lady included. Anyone with any kind of Sight has to be awake and wondering what’s going on.” - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.6</ref> though she doesn't retain much memory of it.

She accidentally wandered into Lost Kennet, which served as an impetus for the local community to reach out to her.<ref name=":5">But now they had a first lost sheep. Someone out of it enough that they’d entered Kennet found without bouncing off or anything too weird.
[...]
“She talked to me after that. Lots of weirdness. Lately, the cats will react, I’ll see someone walking down the street. Someone I don’t think I’m meant to see.”

“Yep. If they’re who I think they are, I wouldn’t go out of my way to talk to them.”

“Animals sense things. A booming, eerie howl this spring, my cats watching out the window- I go to look, the moon’s bleeding. Meanness in the air this summer. A bleeding moon again this fall. Now a waking daydream into a jumbled version of Kennet, and strangers I shouldn’t talk to?” - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref>

Lucy contacted her to persuade her to sell cats and the items her cats found at the Kennet Market.<ref name=":4">“We’re running a side market, we’re not broadcasting it, but it’s odds and ends.”

“A flea market?”

“More accurate than some guesses you could make. But what we’d want is maybe special cats who could use a home, potentially… if you’re open to that?”

“They find me more than I find them. I won’t ever turn one away, but if one had a better home to go to, I’d welcome it.” - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref> Lucy also offered to pay Chloe the ghoul to help Mrs. Schaff get her house clean.<ref>And honestly, I know someone who does housecleaning, she’s looking to earn. If you helped us by working with us, we could subsidize her coming in.”- Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.15</ref> The deal seems to have been accepted.

References