Alias: The Woman Who Speaks in Riddles
Origin: London, 1980
Age When Taken: 20
Current Age: 65 (Appears early 40s)
Before Captivity:
Alfie was a struggling stage actress known for her expressive eyes and habit of improvising dialogue that no one else could follow. Living hand-to-mouth in a damp Camden bedsit, she accepted an invitation to a cast party she couldn’t quite remember agreeing to. She stepped behind a velvet curtain in an unfamiliar theatre and did not return for a year.
In Faylinn:
She wandered the Hall of Echoing Tongues—a masked, eternal masquerade where speech itself was a form of currency and theatre. Guests traded in rhyme, truth, and layered metaphor. She survived by learning the art of meaning-without-saying, becoming fluent in paradox and trickster riddles. The longer she stayed, the more language came apart in her mouth. She returned after “just one waltz too long,” trailing the echo of a rhyme no one else heard.
After Return:
She reappeared on the floor of an abandoned music hall, barefoot and laughing. Her speech lilted with odd cadence—first Shakespearean, then nursery rhyme, then nonsense. Her memories were a patchwork of theatre metaphors and whispered commentary from unseen audiences. She wrote her first book the following winter—The Bird That Knew Too Much—and hasn’t stopped since. Her stories are adored by children but leave adults uneasy.
She now lives in a cottage outside Oxfordshire filled with masks she swears “watch politely.” FDG monitors her books for embedded pattern anomalies.
Scars:
Refuses to attend public readings—claims “the masks might clap”
Sometimes cannot speak in prose; only rhyme or riddles
Dreams of masked audiences watching her from the dark
Fails certain baseline linguistics tests, despite perfect fluency
Faylinn Defence Group 