Helen Powers

Appearance

Mask

Helen is a very thin, even fragile, 65 year old woman. The fact that she stands at just over 5 feet only adds to that impression. And yet she exudes emotional and intellectual strength. This is partly due to her posture, the way she carries herself, which is both regal and absolutely open. Her eyes are a piercing, discerning blue that manage to remain eminently kind. It is her voice, however, that evidences this inner strength, it is clear and steady. When she speaks, it is as if she is testing every word, and enjoying the process of doing so. Her grey hair is kept short and neat. Her appearance is also tidy, though she tends to wear clothing that is oversized, seeming to swallow her tiny frame.

Mien

Helen’s mien is somehow thinner and shorter than her mask. Her skin is very thin, even translucent, and under it her veins are clearly visible, so dark blue that they appear purple, even black. Her eyes are shining jet pools, her ears are pointed, and her fingers are unevenly stained black by what appears to be ink. Nonetheless, Helen does not present as threatening to onlookers, even if her appearance can inspire pity. Her true voice is even purer and clearer than that of her mask.

Mantle

When Helen speaks, refreshing breezes seem to play across the skin and tussle the hair of those within earshot.

History

Helen will tell you herself that, before she was taken, she'd been a "silly rich girl" (her words). Her name wasn't Helen then, but that doesn't matter anymore. The only daughter of San Francisco business mogul Peter Powers, she was possessed early on by that boredom which only afflicts those whose every desire is met. It was a situation that inspired in her the need for inconsequential rebellions, one of which was her insistence that she live alone and attend a local school (UCSF). Of course, her father did not approve and of course he supported her anyway (she was his only daughter and he'd lost his wife, Helen's mother, years before). Nominally, she was studying literature, though this spoiled and carefree heiress was simply enjoying life in the Bay Area as only a child of the rich could, even as she styled herself a “rebel.”

It was 1972 and she'd been at UCSF for three years when she was taken. Helen had entered an antiquarian bookstore one summer evening and while standing on an old footstool, reaching for some dusty tome perched on top of a looming bookshelf, she’d slipped and fallen. Indeed, she fell through the books themselves; fell into a hell that lasted for three hundred and sixty four years (she knows the duration because her keepers never let her forget). It started with a whirlwind of paper, slicing into her skin, her soul, her mind, in complete darkness. The sound of those pages rustling in the inky dark was deafening, but that was nothing compared to the searing pain of those millions of cuts. Finally, and thankfully, she passed out. This was the last time she was permitted to lose consciousness during her captivity.

When she woke, Helen was in a vast, windowless library. Its aisles were wide and maze-like, crazily winding through impossibly tall bookshelves, stuffed with bizarre manuscripts and reams of paper. Here and there piles of books had been set on fire to provide a flickering, hellish light. She was surrounded by tall, skeletally thin figures draped in black robes. When they moved, they rustled as if stuffed with paper. Their voices were like dead leaves on the wind. She was somehow paralyzed, though fully conscious, which allowed her to feel the entirety of the coming operation. They hooked her up to a strange pump via a series of tubes tipped with needles and removed her blood, which was replaced with an ink-like fluid. This was a process that her keepers repeated every few days, when she’d “run dry.”

She quickly learned her task: Helen was a scribe, a scribe that used her own inky blood to copy bizarre texts, texts she could barely make out, let alone understand. Every mistake, every misspelled “word,” every smudged line, resulted in a new torture, though perfect work also resulted in even worse treatment. There was no day and there was no night, yet she always knew how long she’d spent in The Library due to the highly complex timepiece that recorded the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years that she’d spent there. Helen was required to carry this horrible reminder with her wherever she went as she travelled hundreds of miles through those stacks. She never saw the same area twice, nor did she see anyone else but her captors.

It had been two hundred and two years when something changed. Helen didn’t know what, but suddenly her keepers stopped demanding that she copy books. Instead, they commanded her to write them. This was not a relief, but in fact a deepening of her torment, for they wanted her to write poetry, but poetry unlike anything the human mind had ever conceived. They trained her to be their inhuman bard, twisting her thoughts and her words by forcing her to study their maddening texts, those she had already been copying and now somehow “understood.” It did not matter if her work was bound and shelved or burned, she always suffered afterward. This could’ve gone on forever, if she hadn’t found the word, the word that burned. It was one of their horrifying sounds, a sound that scraped the vocal chords, and she tested it over and over again, until she coughed up her own inky blood. And with that word, that one burning word, perfectly pronounced, she burned a hole in The Library, and through a whirlwind of slicing, burning pages, she fell.

When Helen fell back out of the bookshelf she was no longer a twenty-one year old "silly rich girl," she was now a fifty-seven year old woman seasoned by hundreds of years of torture. The Changelings of San Francisco found her, Helen does not remember how. That first year back on earth is largely lost to her, in a way that she now wishes her time in The Library would be. But, by the end of that year, 2008, she was able to discover that her father had died a few years before her return. She was also able to discover that another woman was living in her place. Her fetch had taken up right where Helen had left off, using her old name, living a life of frivolous luxury in her place for as long as the real Helen had been gone, and now existed as a wealthy recluse who had little contact with the outside world. In fact, her fetch was so accustomed to paying for what she desired, and so keen to be left alone, that when Helen confronted her, the Helen-thing simply suggested a financial arrangement. As long as Helen did not try to reclaim her life, she would be supported in any way she liked, discretely and without further condition. Helen agreed. After all, she was no longer the girl she had been and couldn't take the place of this "woman" if she wanted to. She took Helen as her new name (though she kept Powers) and did not look back.

Helen stayed in San Francisco for the next eight years, learning to be a person (or something approaching a person) again. She learned that one must love whatever life one has, and that for her, to love that meager shredded thing called life was to love it using words—even if they were words shaped by the Others. She became a well-known local poet in the Bay area, a strange old woman seemingly from nowhere, whose otherworldly verse made for completely incomprehensible, even inhuman, and yet undeniably beautiful books. Helen became something her keepers could never understand: someone who brings pleasure into the world using the echoes of their monstrous cadences, their perverse word-tones, and she couldn’t be happier about it. Now, at the age of sixty-five, she has finally decided to leave San Francisco, which could never be her home again and has come to Sacramento to truly start a new life.