Boom-Boom Crash

The Mask

Boom-Boom Crash's Mask is a woman who looks somewhere in her late thirties and has clearly decided that's fine with her. Curly red hair that does whatever it wants — and has clearly won every argument about this — frames a pale, freckled face with light eyes that move a little too fast, cataloguing everything in the room before the conversation's even started. She's not tall. She dresses practically: worn jeans, layered tops, boots with good grip, and at least one pocket that has something in it she's not going to explain right now.

She carries herself like someone who has stopped apologizing for taking up space. Her smile is warm and a little sharp at the same time — the kind that makes you feel like she already knows the punchline and is genuinely curious whether you'll catch it.

She smells faintly of something chemical. She says it's her hand lotion. It is not her hand lotion.

The Mien

She's small, but everything about her face is one size too large for it: eyes, ears, mouth, all of it crowded onto a narrow chin.

Her skin is a flat, chalky white with a faint blue underlay, the color of something kept under glass. High on each cheek there's a hectic flush like she's just come away from standing too close to an open flame, and it never fades. Her hair is orange — not auburn, not ginger, but the specific saturated orange of calcium salts in a flame test, wire-coarse and boiling out from her head in coils that never lie flat and always look a little singed at the ends.

The ears are the giveaway. Long, upswept, thin enough at the edges that light comes through them pink, and set at an angle that makes her look permanently about to hear something she shouldn't. The left one has a notch out of it.

Her eyes are copper-green, the green of the flame test, lash-dark and too wide, with the pupils blown out like she's been in the dark or has just seen something extremely good happen to a beaker. When she grins — and she grins constantly — there are too many teeth in it, and the canines come down past the line of the rest, and the delight on her face is completely indistinguishable from a threat. People who meet her mien for the first time usually laugh, and then stop laughing about a second later.

Mantle

The heat arrives before she does. A room she's been sitting in for ten minutes runs a few degrees warm in a way nobody can source — the thermostat's fine, the radiator's cold, and yet everyone's pushed their sleeves up. In Anchorage in February this is more obvious than she'd like: snow coming down on her shoulders goes with a faint hiss, and in the cold air over her head there's a shimmer, the mirage-wobble above blacktop in August, just enough to make the wall behind her ripple.

The smell is the strongest part, and it's hers alone. Struck match. Phosphorus and the hot-penny tang of a burner catching. Under it, the specific smell of a working lab — hot borosilicate, the dry scorch of an element coil, a whisper of something sulfurous that people register as wrong before they register it as a smell at all.

Crumpet, Boomie's BFF

Crumpet is a small flame hedgebeast that Boomie got at the market. Crumpet loves adventures and fire and seems to know something about the strange scrap of fabric she found and what secrets it might hold. She's beyond taken with her new friend and is keeping her hair up so Crumpet doesn't singe it, until such time as she can device a better way for Crumpet to hang out with her.

The Lost Title

While at Market, Boomie asked if there was a Lost and Found box, and while she did find a very delight collection of lost shoes, the real treasure came from another hob who offered her a scrap with some embroidery on it. The deal was made and now Boomie holds a shred of a former Title, and Crumpet had some thoughts on where they should go looking. 

I need someone who can make something:

• Boom-Boom is available for hire in the loosest possible sense — she'll build, repair, jury-rig, or creatively dismantle things for people she trusts or finds interesting. But she has opinions about how and why, and if she thinks a job is going wrong she will tell you. Loudly. 

You remind me of someone I used to be:

• Boom-Boom has a soft spot — carefully hidden under approximately forty layers of brass and smoke — for people who are performing calm they don't feel. She recognizes it. She was it for decades. Characters who are suppressing something, playing a role that doesn't fit, or holding themselves together with both hands may find her unexpectedly perceptive, or unexpectedly invasive, depending on how they feel about being seen.

Something from before:

• Her Fetch lived a quiet, small life in the years she was gone — no scientific career, no waves made, no one particularly remarkable. But Boom-Boom's pre-Durance life wasn't quiet, and the people and places from her 1960s STEM career didn't all disappear. Old colleagues, old enemies, old work — some of it might surface in ways that need handling. And some of what she was building, back before she was taken, she never finished. Whether that's literal or metaphorical is still being determined.