Garglespike
Miss Garglespike was an S-Rank vampire with an unparalleled talent for acumancy — magic performed using pins. She was active in the Horsehead Nebula during and after the Ghost Wars.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Miss Garglespike was active in the Horsehead Nebula during the "Ghost Wars", a bloodthirsty Change War which opposed the Malakh Imperium to other residents of the Nebula. In one development of the Wars, the President Kodachrome, a Lord President Emeritus of the Homeworld, "poked his head" in the Wars and was beheaded by Garglespike, who kept his cat pin as a trophy. Though time was rewritten thirty-two days later, such that the President had now been able to escape, injured but alive, back to his Homeworld, Garglespike paradoxically retained the trophy.
Garglespike had a grudge against the vampire king, Zadok the Gory. She hatched a plan to assassinate him. Coming to Hoppiq Minor with a clique of lesser vampires including Antrenor, she took over a small village's pub and worked out an arrangement with the village magistrate to be allowed to non-lethally drain young locals of blood to be served in the pub as a form of community service. Officially, it was a business venture, with Garglespike making the "donors" drink various exotic alcohols to give their blood specific flavours, and selling the result to the other vampires. However, unbeknownst to her own underlings, she actually kept the donors around after hours and made them drink holy water (to which she was, herself, immune) before draining them again. She kept the tainted blood in a secret stash in the nearby woods in stasis fields. Her ultimate aim was to present the results as a gift to Zadok.
After two or three months, she was tracked down by a Hull-decorated Caxtarid vampire-hunter, but managed to kill him and strip him of his weapons after a duel. A little later, the Corsair arrived on Hoppiq Minor, his timeship drawn off-course by the temporal maelstrom of the Wars. Suspecting the pub setup from the start but not realising it was part of the lead-up to the historically-attested death of Zadok, he ended up busting Garglespike's operation with the help of the local young man Venn. After slaying her followers, which left Garglespike nonplussed as she'd always meant to dispose of them to cover her tracks, the Corsair and Venn ended up destroying her months-worth of stashed tainted blood. This precipitated an all-out duel during which Garglespike used many of her pins, and lost one to the Corsair, who ultimately managed to impale her against a tree with his trellwand and a holy charm taken from th corpse of the Caxtarid. The Corsair knew that Garglespike would ultimately survive and escape, but that the only way for her to do so was to claw down the tree itself, giving him and Venn time to escape to where he'd anchored his timeship. (PROSE: The Bloodletters)
Eventually, she settled on a city somewhere in the Nebula, Sardicktown, (PROSE: Honeymoon Horrors) in the 44th century. (TV: A Christmas Carol) There, she operated Miss Garglespike's World of Pins, one of the attractions pointed out in one tourist flyer for Sardicktown. Hers was allegedly "the largest collection of antique and decorative pins in the Horsehead Nebula". Notably, Sardicktown was also home to Dr Henry Fizzog's Museum of the Macabre which exhibited the mummified remains of Zadok the Gory. (PROSE: Honeymoon Horrors)
Physical appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
Garglespike appeared as an unremarkable humanoid woman, "neither attractive nor unattractive", with "a hint of weight about her chin" and worry lines on her face. Her hair was long, wavy, and greying at the temples. Her most striking aspect, however, was her jacket, covered in jingling, metallic pins. Some of them were trophies from the people she had killed, but many were acumantic tools, which she could pluck from her jacket and enlarge into weapons. One of the more noticeable pins was a Mickey Mouse pin, though it was unclear which kind of pin it was. (PROSE: The Bloodletters)
