basics

grace alexandria note

high-society faux-spiritualist opera singer holding seances for the early 1900s rich and powerful

birth name grace-of-god eliza nottingham

age 31

gender femme (she/her)

sexuality friend of sappho

occupation opera singer, medium

everyone more pretentious than me is an insufferable poseur and everyone less pretentious than me is a clueless philistine *

touchstones

- hermann gottlieb (pacific rim)
- tender sky (friends at the table)
- sophie devereaux (leverage)
- mina 'margery' crandon

inspired partially by stories about female spiritualists in the late 19th/early 20th century being allowed to speak more freely when claiming the words were actually from the ghost of a dead man, & stories (that i can't find the source of now — might've been spook by mary roach?) about singers channeling spirits to record a ghost singing (with the invention of the phonograph still pretty recent at the time).

grace holds her fake seances mostly as a scheme to further her own singing career, since she wasn't getting anywhere on her own and, like, you gotta have a gimmick.

relationships

penny absolutely ~> weird love-hate situationship that grace chooses not to think too deeply about. thinks penny is sort of gross and uncouth but also kind of hot, but also stop tracking gravedirt into my parlor miss absolutely, i'm trying to get ready for this seance, they're paying me a hundred dollars in 1900s money to conjure the ghost of ben franklin, have you no manners at all, etc. penny is super aware of the scam grace is running, and grace is aware of penny's scam, so there's a sort of mutually assured destruction situation going on there.

*
picrews