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basic
Name: Conway Frey
Nickname: Con.
Age: Twenty-six.
Birthday: 14 July 1982. Vive la revolution!
Hometown: ...What's one of them?

occupational
Locale: New York, Manhattan.
Profession: Mortician, at Conway Funeral Homes in Manhattan. Con loathes that most of the women she sees are so Botoxed, embalming fluid isn't needed. She also does wedding make-up on the side although dislikes bridesmaids wiggling. Corpses don't do that shit.
Email: Frey@conwayfunerals.com

fairy-tale
Fairy-Tale Character: Young Fairy.
Fairy-Tale: Sleeping Beauty.
Abilities: While the Young Fairy possessed magical ability (although limited in capability in comparison to the Old Fairy) and this has managed to pass itself on to Con, it doesn't let her actually use it for herself. Spells for her are not-okay. Spells for everyone else, or to tweak the world around her, are apparently fine. She's distinctly unimpressed by this. Shit blows up when she tries it for herself; like her very own bad karma-train.
Status: Being the Young Fairy is not something worthy of telling the world, or keeping a secret. It simply is. If you know, then you know and if you don't, it's unimportant. There are plenty of things to not-know about her besides that one. It doesn't occur to Con to tell people most of the time; she's more concerned about keeping the side-effects of the whole deal under wraps. On the other hand, there are a ton of things more important to think about.

personality
First Impression: Christ on a cracker, she for real?
The Girl:First thing you’ve got to realise about Con is that she got gipped. Of all the fairy-tales in the world, you’re relegated to a bit part and deus ex machina, so that a pretty pretty princess can get married instead of offed for no. good. reason. to a guy she’s never met, a hundred years after her time? Second of all, that whole ‘see a potential problem, fix it’ thing that the Fairy had down, has been happening for three hundred years. It won’t stop even if Con wishes it would. While Con loathes feeling obligated (and it is obligation, either the guilt is horrible, or it happens BY ACCIDENT) to help, she’s reconciled to her Tale. She is the Fairy, has been for so long now that the idea of being anything else is wrong, like having an extremely smelly dog. Might be completely foul and unsociable, but it’s your damn dog, and the idea of anyone else having it, or getting a shiny, Crufts-winning poodle is just wrong. On the other hand, whenever she’s particularly conscious of the effects of being the Fairy, she’ll battle. Just for stubborn purposes.

Stubborn. A word that suits Con well, as despite being absolutely shoddy at making decisions and sticking to them, or sticking to anything in particular, she is stubborn and will defend any decision made right up until the moment she changes her mind, and then will quite happily swear blindly that she was right all along. Stubborn is what made her set out to be deliberately un fairy-like (what little she knew of fairies being limited to cheery old ladies in blue sparkly clothes) and ‘struggle’ also suits Con, because much of her is a contradiction in terms, just because.

She hates limits and expectations, of any kind being placed upon her. That whole ‘magic only for good’ thing; a total and utter crock. No free-will there, just being able to conjure up pretty endings for people’s too-good-to-be-true stories. Perhaps being told she had no choice in reincarnation existing as a rebellious!teen!(C) had some effect, but a little of Con is rebellious whatever happens; correcting people’s assumptions as and when she sees them. She quite enjoys chaos running riot, seeing the fallout of a non-predicted-pattern but - and here comes Con’s very own contradiction, not when it is unlimited. That whole freedom, unrestriction thing only applies to her. Bad stuff - or good, either, cannot be allowed to run riot forever. Balance in everything, zen, insert psychobabble here about the world being a place of equilibrium, whatever. Con is not down with that shit unless she knows that someone - especially her - can put a stop to it if necessary. For the large part, she can. Magical powers for the win, and all that jazz, but while Con gives every impression of wanting the rules to be lifted, and anarchy for all, if the rules weren’t there to rebel against, she’d be very unhappy. Deep down, she recognises this - this is no angst-puppy 101; Con understands the way the world works, why it works, and wouldn’t want it any other way. Anarchy with a fall-back plan.

Again with the limits, Con is totally anti-decision making. Why should you have to make one choice? Why not lots of choices? Why not infinite probability, the world in a hat, 42? She loathes being constrained to one answer, one moment and thus changes her mind as frequently (and predictably) as the dawn; one viewpoint is not enough, for anyone. You need a multitude to understand the world, and years to get the present from its past.

She’s got an odd view on life. Perhaps from playing devil’s advocate all her life, Con can argue. Perhaps it’s because being limited in anything; knowledge, power, information, has taught Con to use what she does have to alter the idea that she only has one choice, one outlook. As such, her viewpoint is skewed, and it’s generally toward the positive. Cheery, but odd, generally, if you’re going to moan about a bad date, or eating bad squid, don’t do it around Con, because she’ll point out the exact upside to your experience. Or something about it, anyway.

Upsides. They seem to happen around Con a lot. Whether by accident, or design. Accidentally, those she’s interested in, takes a shot at being involved in watching their lives pan out, somehow get a ‘helping hand’. Little things, upsides. Twists in the way things could have happened, to the better way they did. Con hates this. It’s like invasion; ‘stealing’ her mojo, and as such she’s usually pretty careful to try and keep her distance. (fails. Miserably) Helping people is something she wants to do - Fairy and Con. Confairy. Irrevocably mixed up, she likes making a difference. She just wants to do it her way, expectations at the door, no meddling from the peanut gallery. She’s no one’s fairy godmother, wishes on command, kthnx, and often Con’s ‘help’ is just as skewed as her life-perspective. It gets you there in the end, your good luck just takes the scenic route. Helping people is a thing, and Con most likes to help the people least likely to ask for it. The people who hate the idea of being helped. Because, Con reasons, everyone needs it. Some people ask. Those who don’t aren’t going to get it, so why unbalance the ‘verse that way?

Girl’s a little obsessed with death. Everyone has an obsession, hers doesn’t lead to kinky illegal acts, so why not let it be? Being told death was a great adventure was probably her undoing, along with the need to rescue-people-from-it. Con is irrationally scared of death; it haunts her in a desperate sort of way; the need to change it, alter it, make-it-not-happen is so strong that she has set out to prove it wrong. Make it a good thing, not a bad. Gotten to the point where her enjoyment overrides the basic fear, and she can probably list at least sixteen ways to die pleasurably, along with rites, rituals and other fun times. Worst ever death, for Con? For anyone? Dying in your sleep. Oh, the irony. Go out with a fucking bang, do the nasty, choke yourself, get cannibalised by natives, just don’t fall asleep and never-wake-up. Waking up has to happen, eventually, and Con will try and avoid the death =‘sleeping’ part as much as possible.

Yeah, sleep she’s not too good with. Insomniac, awake too much, thinking too much, she’s not grumpy. At least, she strives not to be; Con is cheerful, in a ‘buck up, sunshine’ sort of way, although the sarcasm force, it is strong in this one. She’ll tease, and pry, and annoy whoever, choosing the right tactic to generally wiggle into someone’s space. Perky does not mean ‘wow the sun, it shines, HOW BEAUTIFUL’ way, although yes, there is always an upside, and a happy ending.

Happy endings. For all your cynicism in Doc Martins and a pink frilly dress, your twenty-something fairy with four failed starts at a college degree and a fine line in injection of embalming fluid, Con remains someone who truthfully believes in the happy endings, just. Different ones. Different idea of what ‘happy’ means. There is always some reason for everything, of that she’s certain, although perfectly happy with the idea of going out and choosing it yourself.
The Tale:Okay, the basic 'I'm a fairy' shit, she's over. It's no longer a big deal, she's absorbed it. The fall-out from that, she's really not happy about. The magic stuff is still twisted, but the important part is that Con cannot let things go unnoticed. She will wade in and DO something, because every part of her commands it, to stop something irrevocably bad happening. And also, she's shit-scared of falling-asleep meaning death. No way she's letting any friend die that way. Even if she has to poison them to stop it.
Likes: Death, choices, vintage clothes, poisons, slasher movies, old music, Audrey Hepburn, flowers,
Dislikes:

background
Parents:
Sibling(s): Julian Frey, her half-brother and incidentally, the Bad Fairy.
Pet(s):
History: Conway Frey was born moments after flight BA 562 touched down in Delhi at 5.30 am local time. Luckily, there had been a doctor on the plane (what business class flight does not come with someone who has passed the requisite pre-medical requirements to spend their lives wishing for intravenous caffeine and more hours in a day) and she was born perfectly healthy, if in somewhat undignified style. On the other hand, one of the passengers later confessed to their therapist safely ensconced on a couch back in New York (where each minute cost precisely twelve dollars) that seeing that baby born had given them a new outlook on life. “It really is a miracle,” they enthused, as their therapist’s face dropped abruptly (he’d so far paid for her fortnight annual stay in the Hamptons and her kid’s orthondistry requirements) as she watched her cash cow walk away completely freed from his burden. Conway had, without knowing it at precisely two minutes and forty three seconds of age, if one counted from the moment her head had entered the world, done it for the first time. Helping people. It was a thing. And completely incidental.

It was not the event her mother, Delia had quite envisaged. Granted, for India it was almost an advertisement; the latest in the line of American Foreign Service employees was so anxious to give birth in India, she couldn’t wait to get off the plane. The recovery hospital experienced a surge in popularity post-reportage that one Delia Frey (nee Conway) had been taken there for post-birth recovery, from middle-class Indians who emulated the Jackie-O style-queen thing Delia had going.

Con’s early life wasn’t usual. When you are three, and introduced to the Dalai Lama, nothing can ever be normal again. On the one hand, it was an excellent preparation for a life filled with all things strange and wonderful. On the other, it was a pain in the proverbial protuberance. Her father, Malachi Frey, had been her mother’s professor at university. In the way of painful romances, despite being married and having a child, he had fallen in love and Delia, with all the world-weary cynicism of a nineteen year old from New York, headed headlong into a relationship that detonated Frey’s previous marriage. While Delia very much liked being read poetry, fed strawberries and insanely expensive cheeses unaffordable on a meagre student budget, she very much disliked being cast as ‘the Other Woman’ in any relationship aftermath, amicable or otherwise and dissolved their little affaire in preference for taking a placement in the Foreign Service. Unfortunately, while Japan was very interesting, the men paled in comparison to a slightly shaggy and unkempt-looking professor who had an unfortunate line in sweaters.

Still, Delia was as good at her job as she was madly in love with her husband and as such, loath to give it up for such mediocrities and boring considerations as ‘settling down’. She continued taking placements - pointing out to Malachi that to refuse them would almost certainly mean being handed a stack of paperwork and told to leave - and intended rather firmly, to ‘make it fit’. It didn’t, but Malachi, now he had moved into a grey and white wooden house in Connecticut that they had made their own, together with Delia’s collection of decorated pine-cones, was quite affable about the whole thing. That was, until Conway was born en route to a diplomatic meeting which had been supposed to happen three months before, and was only intended to wrap up and hand over to the next emissary. Instead, Con’s first few years were spent with an Aayah and playing in a large, deliciously cool house on the outskirts of Mumbai, and then back to Connecticut for high days and holidays.

In Con’s third year, Delia’s placement shifted, and her father decided that she should at least, make an acquaintance if not a longstanding relationship with her grandparents, and whisked her back home to America. Having been there long enough to acquire an affinity for grandparents, Oreo cookies, Sesame Street and enough Osh Kosh overalls to clothe a small army of mini-diplomatic-toddlers, it was then on to Europe. A year in Italy, and then two in America. Eighteen months in Switzerland; Con’s first real acquaintance with schooling and just how horribly difficult it was and promptly stopped speaking. After a mute child, particularly one who astutely refuses to talk to dinner-guests led to a return to America and private tutoring as both her parents struggled to understand why Con found school so confusing, while Con struggled to literally understand, her head clouded as it was with English, Italian, Swiss-German and French. Having finally sorted out the muddle, it was decided that she would fly out with her father to visit her mother in Germany and her mother would ‘try to contain herself to a few months at a stretch’. It worked for two years, and then Delia was offered England.

Oh to be in England, now that April’s there. England acquired a sort of blissful Paradisian status in the mind of the littlest Frey. Not only did they speak an actual language that didn’t hiss or growl at you, but her father had achieved that wonder of wonders, a visiting fellowship and was established at a notable university for the duration. No longer were Con’s days to be a confusion of plane rides bouncing back and forth between her parents for runs between stretches of boredom at home where none of the local children knew her particularly well, and just as she’d begun to establish herself and her knowledge of schoolyard rules, she’d be on a flight and in a diplomatic car. Her mother finally decided, after the joy of having a house that stayed as messy as any house with a child in it, and actual family plans that extended to months, rather than weeks, to give it up. Pack in the Foreign Service, they would stay out the duration of her father’s fellowship, and then home to America and civilian life.

The week of February 18, 1996, three people in Con’s life died. Her great-great uncle Max who she’d never met and didn’t really care about, her guinea pig Mitzi, who she did, and her mother, in an IRA bombing attack on a London bus. While she was recovered from the incident, and taken to St Thomas’ Hospital, she later died. Con was inconsolable, and she and Malachi left England almost immediately. Delia was buried at home in Connecticut, and both Malachi and Con got down to the strange new process of re-making a family without a mother in the centre of it.

Her father took her onto his lap as he’d done when she was less gangly and sprawly of limb, and cuddled her close, and reminded her of their favourite story-book; ‘to die would be an awfully big adventure’. It worked surprisingly well. There were high school, and pizza nights and far too much complicated geometry and boys and if Con was perhaps a touch death-obsessed for a fifteen year old girl, she fitted in with all the other death-obsessed teenagers, although their obsessions ran to black eyeliner and emo music, and hers ran to collecting ways to poison people.

Of course, one cannot spend a great deal of one’s time reading books without running across the veritable smidge of a fairy-tale remnant. Even in modern books. Con’s taste didn’t even run to modern books (in fact, the older the better) and as such, at age sixteen while her hair was a shade of pink that the cheerleading squad frowned on, and her taste in footwear was limited to Doc Martins, a disconcertingly grouchy man showed up and shoved a leather book at her with almost indecent haste (well, she WAS a sixteen year old girl with a fine line in teen sarcasm and an eye for a perv) and explained this concept of fairy-tale-dom.

Which sucked. Because when Con Frey tried to experiment with this magic voodoo she had, things started to go wrong. Possibly exploding, if she was within the vicinity of anything that could manage it. (Chemistry classes were certainly out for the majority of her junior year; Con singed her eyebrows off for the second time and dropped the class). Any time she attempted to use the talent she was assured she had as a perk of being a minor character with a fine line in narcolepsy for her own purposes, it backfired. About the only time it did work was when Con did something for someone else. Call it the ‘good fairy’ clause. Call it shit-rotten luck. Con called it about ten things in five different languages, but it was what it was.

Her way of coping was to become as un-fairy like as possible for a good two years, while developing her own sense of identity that relied a great deal upon moth-eaten clothing grandly called ‘vintage’ by those peddling them, and listening to realms of music that made her father shove his fingers in his ears, and to take up kick-boxing. Whether it was the music, or the holes in her cardigans, or the fact that she could kick someone in the head, Con didn’t really acquire boyfriends in a way her father was grateful for. This meant no ties to the US beyond her father and thus the appeal of Oxford University in England, for which he was not.

Having entered the hallowed halls in the good faith that she would study Greek, Latin and Classics, Oxford was not the least impressed by one Conway Frey when she changed her mind (and her degree) to Philosophy half-way through the affair. And then again, when she switched to Art History, Oxford sent a lot of rather irritated post, and while Con assured them that this time she meant it, she promptly changed her mind and her subject to settle on Oriental Studies, citing plaintively an interest in a culture she’d last seen when a babe in arms. Oxford and she parted terms in a very bad grace, and Con returned to America, and the somewhat indulgent bosom of her family, as she decided to go into business with Great Uncle Algie, who always had openings.

Granted, Great Uncle Algie always had openings because he dealt with dead people, and eventually the smell got to people. Having experimented both in pickling, and taxidermy herself, Con was unphased and soon quite a dab hand at embalming and making-up the dead. So good was she in fact, that she picked up quite a few weekend jobs doing make-up for bridal parties; although it was decidedly less easy to apply eyeliner when your client could wriggle.

When Great Uncle Algie died, himself thrilled to pieces that a family member had stepped up and shown interest in a business decidedly ‘creepy’, within the year Con was quite comfortably settled with an inherited brownstone apartment, an inherited business and quite a nice line in dead people. Uncle Algie got the best coffin they had; all polished oak and imitation satin. Yes, it wasn’t entirely usual to be set up with all you needed for life at the age of twenty-four, but occasionally, things worked out that way. Even for the creepy girl a little too interested in embalming the neighbour’s cat that fought too loud at night.

Con flitted in and out of the Tale scene at will, unwilling to be tied down or bound to it in any real way but unable to stay away for any real length of time or distance. Her ‘helping people’ thing extended to the Tales themselves, altering circumstance, maybe tossing a couple of extra chances a good Tale’s way, before leaving them to look after themselves. The only Tale she spent a significant amount of time with doesn’t know she’s a Tale at all, or tries his best to pretend not to.

Her half-brother. Con pried an element of family history out of her father, and researched the ‘brother’ she’d heard about more thoroughly, when she was thirteen, and promptly turned up on his doorstep. He refused to open the door. Undeterred, Con bribed another kid to let her into their apartment, and then to try and climb around from window-to-window. He let her in. Since then, Con has been horribly, ridiculously in awe with her older brother; awe in the best sense, aka, teasing him, plaguing him, bringing food and attempting to steal a part of that idea of sibling affection for herself, without even asking him if he wants her around. That, Con would say, quite unruffled, is unimportant.

appearance
Height: Five foot two.
Weight: Why bother with such an idiotic concern?
Hair: In summer, the sun takes her hair from mouse to blonde-ish, in winter the lack of sun (and increase in funerals) turns it darker brown. It's entirely natural, however.
Eyes: Green. Impish.
Dress style: It's usually a mish-mash of style rather than any particular one. She'll wear a floaty, vintage tea-dress with Doc Martins painted pink one day, wellingtons and a swim-suit with cut-offs another. While she can dress normally, people seeing her either like what she's wearing, or they don't. It causes a reaction.
Manner of Speech: Rattle-pace quick and usually about twenty different ideas crammed into about five seconds.

romantic
Status: Single. Terminally.
Orientation: Straight!
Turn-Ons: the odd, the dangerous, sarcasm, cyncism (because what's a healthy dose of opposite if not fun?) a sense of adventure, the truly original.
Turn-Offs: the boring, the dull, the pessimistic (unless you can be convinced)

ooc
Portrayed By: Rachel McAdams
Player: Lis!
Disclaimer: I did not write Sleeping Beauty. I do not own Rachel McAdams, despite her incredible shinyness. I do, on the other hand, own Conway Frey and her character, and I will eat your face if you steal her.

friends locked.
fairlytales