Alpeana

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   <default>Alpeana</default>
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Alpeana, sometimes shortened to Alpy, is a being native to Kennet known as a Mare.<ref name=":0">Alpeana
Type according to Matthew: Mare
Appearance: Filthy hair, totally black eyes, ragged clothes.
Appearance with Sight: Same?
Awakening: Thread → Gave oil, took molasses → Thread
Friends with Faerie Girl
Climbs a lot. Sticks to shadows
Shy?
Avery: gets the feeling ‘Alpy’ might not give up much information because she seems secretive.
Verona: Says Alpeana smiled at her & Avery after the molasses. (relevance?)
- excerpt from Notes on Others </ref>

Personality

As befits her species, she seems to have a habit of sitting on people's chests, making it hard for them to breathe.<ref name=":2" /><ref name=":4" />

Relationships

She's seemingly friends with Maricica.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1">The woman with the wings hadn’t actually unfurled her wings. She’d hopped down from the branch with them still wrapped around her. She smiled in a way that suggested she had secrets as she glanced at Lucy, even as she wandered on her own. The teenager with hair like the matted, moldy black stuff in a gutter stuck to the trees and stuck fairly close to the woman with the wings, crawling across branches and staying mostly hidden.
[...]
The girl with the filthy hair moved like a spider did, her movements too quick and jerky, her body low to the ground.
[...]
Charles and the Others were there, in their arrangements, and she assumed friends stuck by friends. John with one of the goblins and the giant. The filthy-haired girl with the faerie with wings.
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.2 </ref>

Like all the Others of Kennet, she's sworn not to harm Lucy Ellingson, Verona Hayward and Avery Kelly and to give them power.<ref name=":2">Alpeana’s mouth yawned open, and black fluid oozed out, multi-layered, thick with debris that could have been anything, but with

shapes like rotted leaves turned black by a winter spent under the

snow, or the stringy guck pulled out of drains.
Her hair turned liquid, doing something similar, just in much

greater quantities.  Drainstuff, rot, mold, mixed with liquid as thick

and black as oil, refusing to flow straight down so much as it stuck to itself.
“I had a bad night. I’m not in the mood for this,” Lucy said. As the stuff reached down from the ceiling and toward her head, she grabbed

a spare pillow and held it up in the way.  “You’re not allowed to hurt

me, by the deals made.”
The stuff touched her sheets, just over her chest. Heavy, soaking in and pressing down.
It touched her pillow, that she held up as a shield and barrier to keep it away from her face. Strings, rivulets, and clumps oozed down around the edges, sides, and more of it piled on top, making the pillow difficult to hold up, even with both hands.
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.6 </ref><ref>“Provisions, of course,” Miss said, taking it in stride. “We pledge you safety. We will do you no willful harm to body or mind, and we will

do what we can to give you a long and full life, and avoid barring you

from such. Agreed?”
“Yes,” Lucy and Avery said, in near unison. Verona was a bit late.
“If enemies from without would stand against you, we pledge our intent to stand with you, those of us here available as bodyguards, soldiers, distractions, or counsel. You three shall not be alone against any threat. Agreed?”
“Yes,” Lucy, Verona, and Avery said. In sync this time.
“We pledge to give you our power and our knowledge without reservation, provided that power is taken in goodwill and without undue harm, or taken with the will of the majority here. Agreed?”
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.2 </ref> Avery seems to find her cute.<ref name=":3">“Alpeana showed up in my room in the middle of the night. She said she stopped by to see you two, too. So you know, like… I assume your houses are locked up, but she’s showing up while you’re asleep. Let that sit with you for a second.”
“Was she nice?” Avery asked.
“She was… Scottish, I think? Didn’t expect that. I think she said she spared me from an especially bad dream.”
“Aww.”
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.6 </ref>

She's delivered messages for Miss.<ref name=":4">A white shape pressed into the curtain of black stuff that draped down from the pillow’s edges. It took Lucy a second to realize it was a face, poking through, with eyes as dark as anything.
“Ye’re due a nightmare, lassie,” the Mare said, her voice young, but thick with a Scottish burr.
“No thanks,” Lucy answered. The stream from above had eased up. The

curtain of dark liquid had pooled around her, soaking into her sheets

and pillow, but now that what was coming from above wasn’t so thick, she

could see that what had piled up on her stomach and chest was the rough
silhouette of a person.  Alpeana’s face lifted up to find a home

roughly where the head should be.
“Yeh,” Alpeana said. “Tha’s wha’ I thought. I’ll spare ye that.”
“Okay.”
“Can’t go and say ye won’ have a bad dream now, but it won’ be a fancy Mare dream like ye might be havin’ if ye were’n protected. I’m suppose ta pass on a message.”
“Pass it,” Lucy said. In her efforts to keep from freaking out, she was holding her head so rigid that her chin was rising by fractions. Her breath came in small intervals, with the weight on her chest.
“Miss wants ta talk. Get an update on yer findin’s and all tha’.”
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.6 </ref>

Appearance

She appears to be a teenage girl.<ref name=":1" /><ref name=":5">There was a slender woman sitting on a branch, and what looked like maybe they were wings, draped around her like a blanket. A teenage girl

with eyes black from corner to corner, hair matted with filth. - excerpt from Lost for Words 1.1</ref> She has solid black eyes.<ref name=":5" /><ref name=":0" />  Her hair is incredibly filthy,<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> long and dark.<ref name=":6">The time on the clock changed to gibberish, then flickered.

She could hear it. Scrabbling and thumping, elsewhere in the house, rapid, almost like a lunch table worth of hands drumming at a table in anticipation of pizza.
[...]
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump.
A face appeared at her doorway. Pale, framed by long, dark hair. Alpeana, peering in from the upper corner of the door, face at a diagonal. The face rotated two-hundred and seventy degrees.
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.6 </ref> Her face is pale.<ref name=":6" /><ref name=":4" />

She speaks in a Scottish accent.<ref name=":4" /><ref name=":3" /> She wears ragged clothes.<ref name=":0" />

Abilities

Her approach can mess with electronics.<ref name=":6" />

She can crawl rapidly on ceilings and walls like a spider.<ref>Alpeana lunged, crawling across the ceiling with rapid movements. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump- Crawling across the ceiling to a point directly over Lucy’s bed in about a third of the time it would take Lucy to walk from her doorway to

her bedside table.

She hung there, suspended, fingers straining, curved backwards as fingertips seemed to dig into the ceiling itself. Her head twisted, rotating, like she was trying to get a better view.
- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.6 </ref><ref name=":7">Alpeana leaned forward, darkness pressing in close to Lucy’s head.
Then she scampered up the wall, then to the ceiling. As she pulled away, the rags and dark strands of her hair pulled up the stains and dark gloop that she had left behind her, leaving the bed and everything pristine.
“Alpeana,” Lucy called up.
The girl, already at the door to the bedroom, turned around, then sat

down, positioned upside-down, bare legs and dirty toenails visible.

- excerpt from Lost for Words 1.6 </ref> She seems to be impossibly flexible, able to rotate her head at any angle.<ref name=":6" />

She can generate streams of black filth from her mouth and from her hair<ref name=":2" /> which she can seemingly move through or transform into a copy of her.<ref name=":4" /> This matter seems to be a part of her and can be reabsorbed, without leaving a mark on her surroundings.<ref name=":7" />

Her species are apparently responsible for delivering nightmares to people, although she notes that even if she chooses to let someone be, they may still have a lesser bad dream - it just won't be as "fancy".<ref name=":4" />

She has some kind of method of getting inside locked houses.<ref name=":3" />

Trivia

A mare is a mythical creature said to sit on people's chests and give them nightmares, the origin of the word "nightmare". In real life they're thought to be inspired by sleep paralysis hallucinations.<ref>Wikipedia - Mare (folklore)</ref>

References