Maritsa
Maritsa, (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"]) formerly Marissa, (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"], The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"]) was a Novice of the Plume Coteries, native to their infinite Library. Alongside fellow Novice Callum, she became a fugitive from her own people to save Coloth. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Origins[[edit] | [edit source]]
Like Callum, Maritsa, as a born member of the Plume Coteries, was "human-ish", that is to say, a posthuman. Though mostly human-like in biology, this involved a few discrepancies, such as the native ability to read any language. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"]) Her name was originally "Marissa", (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"]) but it was retroactively changed by Auteur by one letter in order to protect her from the Interdimensional Copyright Office. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
As a Novice of the Plume Coteries, a teenaged Maritsa got basic training in a number of skills, including "a bit of bookbinding training", a "training course" on people like Auteur who displayed a metafictional awareness of their own fictionality, and the "briefing" that was given even to "very junior Bookkeepers" about not panicking if they found a book on the Library's shelves which seemed to feature them as a fictional character. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Rescuing Coloth[[edit] | [edit source]]
At some point, a teenaged Maritsa and fellow Novice Callum became aware of Coloth, one of the subjects of the Plume Coteries' programme of Time-Ladling dead eyewitnesses to historical events out of time, transferring a biodata-print of their consciousness into a holo-cube, and then interrogating them. Normal procedure would have been to destroy the cube once Coloth's interrogation was done, but Maritsa and Callum felt strongly that this would be wrong, particularly as Coloth had been killed before his time in his original lifetime. Though the realisation that she "ha[d] a heart" caused Maritsa some "distress", the two eventually conspired to "check him out of the restricted section" and then "never gave him back".
Originally, the trio were meant to quickly meet and befriend a dimension-travelling Birdhemoth, (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"]) Rich, (PROSE: Sonnenblumen [+]Loading...["Sonnenblumen (short story)"]) but Auteur interfered with this, retroactively deleting Rich from existence. As a result, Maritsa, Callum and Coloth instead spent over three months as fugitives within the Library itself, camping out in unexplored floors and using Callum's map to find vending machines and bathrooms from which they could salvage food and water. They gradually grew closer in the process, despite their uncertainty about the future. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Auteur and Naimon[[edit] | [edit source]]
Eventually, their camp was found by Master Librarian Naimon. He wounded Callum lightly with a crossbow-bolt, and eventually managed to capture the three. Naimon searched the Novices, and found Callum's map, on which the two had earmarked Floor 899,167,435,042 as their next destination. As this Floor had been incompletely explored by Naimon's ancestor Master Librarian Roland, Naimon decided to use the map to finish the job and reap twice the glory before he brought his captives back to the Plume Coteries. On the way, taking advantage of his overconfidence and self-inflicted poor eyesight, Maritsa and Callum tricked Naimon into walking into an empty elevator shaft, killing him. With Coloth's help, they made their own way down, still intending to take advantage of the "village-sized" bathrooms to wash and restock on water.
After getting there, they discovered that the map was incomplete because Floor 899,167,435,042 was where Roland had confronted Auteur centuries prior; Roland had ended up burning the entire Floor down in an effort to kill Auteur. The blood spilled by Naimon's death allowed Auteur to create a new body for himself. After blithely telling the teenagers about the ways in which he had interfered in their lives according to his sense of what made for a better story, he attempted to complete the ritual Roland had interrupted centuries prior, which was meant to summon the Bookwyrm, a "god-serpent" deeply rooted in the structure of the Library. He succeeded, only for the Bookwyrm to reveal it had no intention of being controlled, and eat Auteur right in front of the baffled teens. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Later activities[[edit] | [edit source]]
During their brief encounter, Auteur admitted that his retconning-out of Rich had been a "rushed job" which probably wouldn't "stick", predicting that the teenagers would find him again sooner or later. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
At a point when she and Coloth were apparently accepted as part of the Bookkeepers' hierarchy, Marissa helped Graelyn Scythes, Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, Lady Aesculapius, and Auteur find The Book of the Enemy when they visited the Library during the first stages of the White Canvas crisis. Notably, from Auteur's perspective, this took place during the war, (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (short story)"]) in contrast to Maritsa's earlier adventures which the Bookwyrm described as a contemporary to the post-War universe. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Physical appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
Maritsa had very pale skin and a thick "swarm" of freckles on her face. She kept her hair in very tight braids even though it "would barely have reached her shoulders even if she'd let it loose". As a Novice Bookkeeper, she wore simple brown robes. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
