Introduction
Catherine Incontro
An Witch [
double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble
Appearance
Notable Features
Tall, with sharp, refined bone structure, and a posh New England accent that says she's definitely not from these parts, although enough time under the sun of the wild and weird west, and she has enough freckles to turn her beauty marks into constellations.Scars, usually hidden: a ring of bone-white around her neck (a collar she'll never be able to remove), a through-and-through bullet wound on her left side (law in Colorado just barely missed her kidney).
Also usually hidden is a sigil marked in blue-black ink on the back of her left shoulder; a burning reminder of the debt still owed, it guarantees there are consequences to any attempt to deviate from the terms of her arrangement. Cat knows she has only replaced one type of leash with another, but this one comes with a lot less murder-against-her-will.
Personal Style
Despite having to re-stitch and re-fashion most of her clothing over the years, Cat's style still bears the hallmark of someone used to knowing what a good cut of fabric can do, and she can be a bit of a maverick when it comes to following trends (or setting them). Of course, that could just as well be a cover for the fact that she burns through her wardrobe, and a little creative draping goes a long way.When out and about town, she is almost always wearing some kind of bandana or scarf to conceal the scars around her neck. Her favorite is a dark green stretch of fabric stitched with faded gold thread in honeycomb patterns, sometimes secured with a simple brooch: a snake eating its own tail.
Catherine 'Cat' Incontro
trouble coming in the dead of night
trouble making everything all right
trouble coming in the dead of night
trouble making everything all right
Circumstances
Currently
A woman of her standing was never meant to stand on her own two feet, much less in a rugged and weird place like Never; nevertheless, she has worked hard to support herself these past years, and has only had to write back home for financial support once ... or twice.Cooking, cleaning, teaching, sewing, dressmaking—skills of a wife, mother, and homemaker. These labels are both familiar and unfamiliar to her, but Hecate has made the terms of their arrangement crystal clear to Cat.
So she does what she can to fill in any gaps in her community: stitching seams on tumbleweed-torn dresses; taking over lessons at the school after the last teacher ... well, until Ms. Klein arrived; repairing a friend's stove; and providing (albeit complicated) shelter to any witches who come through these parts.
Her mother's book of shadows taunts her each day, begging to be opened, to be read, for the spells and rituals to be explored—just like her mother would have wanted, just like Hecate demanded from her. Catherine knows the only reason she is alive right now is so that she can fulfill her end of the bargain and be the person (woman, witch, coven leader) she was meant to be.
One reckless misstep, however … one more boundary crossed, another life exploited, and it would all be forfeit—her life and afterlife.
Health & Capabilities
Cat is about as healthy as a 30-something-year-old woman of strong upbringing could be. She brought two fat, healthy babies into the world, and she's survived a few claims to her life in the wild reaches of Kansas and Colorado. Just ignore the scars she keeps hidden away, the way she winces through her right knee on a cold night, and the feral look she gets when she stands a little too close to open flames.Socioeconomics
Catherine grew up in a family considered upper or upper middle class by American standards under the banner of Hart Textiles, est. 1767. With factories and mills in three states, the Hart family dominates the textiles industry throughout New England and beyond, and Cat wanted for nothing growing up ... except perhaps a little (lot) more discipline.As an adult, Cat strives to be resourceful enough to make her own way, doing her damnedest to stubbornly avoid asking her family for even a cent. If she's learned anything in life, it's that everything comes with a cost. So she uses a mix of her fancy private education, her wits, and her witchery to wear whatever dusty silk bonnet she must in order to keep food in her belly and a roof over her head.
Currently, that roof is part of a modest homestead in the hills west of town, allowing her to be near enough to be accessible to clients, but far enough that most … accidents don't tend to extend into town. After the fire that destroyed her previous residence in town, it was not easy finding a landlord willing to work with her, but she's trying to be a little smarter this time.
That is, she hasn't managed to burn it down, yet.
Skills & Talents
- Embroidery- Dressmaking
- Piano
- Marksmanship
Present Relationships
Father, three surviving brothers (Michael, Morton, and Miles), aunts, uncles, countless cousins; spread across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Her brothers she writes to at least once a year. Her father ... well, he writes. She writes back, but the letters end up ashes in her fireplace before she can send them.Beyond her blood, she also has a found family (of sorts) in a canine companion; when she arrived in Never back in '76, she was joined by a large black dog. Although it's hard to say the dog is 'hers' for as independent as she seems at times, Cat does call her by name when it's feeding time: Hecuba.
Identity
Hobbies
Cat thinks the best way to keep herself out of trouble is to not give herself a whole lot of time to get up to it. This doesn't leave her much room for hobbies anymore, at least, not those she'd consider to be as such.If she has any one such indulgence, one thing she is allowed to have for herself now, it is that she has started to play around with making ceramics. Thus far, it has been a wildly frustrating experience, trying to turn clay blobs into a shape that's useful, and for them to remain useful after being fired in the kiln.
She has had to rebuild the kiln more than once when her frustration gets the better of her and any attempt to solve the situation backfires. So far, she has only managed a single pair of plates without cracks. They're flat. She's very proud of them, and she uses them most days. The failures usually become target practice; she would not call that a hobby, but smart maintenance of a skill.
Habits & Routines
Chaos burns in her, but ritual and routine grounds her. Coffee at the same time every morning, tea at the same time every afternoon, and devotion to the old ways at the same time every full moon.Personality
Cat is a woman defined by resilience, resourcefulness, and an undeniable sharpness that runs beneath her surface. Her life has been a constant struggle between the person she was raised to be, and the woman she's been forced to become. Once, she was a daughter of privilege, with an upbringing that promised a life of comfort and ease. But tragedy, both of her own making and at the hands of others, has stripped her of that, leaving her with a fierce independence. She won't rely on anyone, not even her family, because she's learned the hard way that nothing is ever truly guaranteed. Her pride is rooted in her ability to survive, to face adversity and make the best of it, no matter how grim the circumstances.Stubbornness is both her strength and her curse. She can be unyielding to the point of self-destruction, refusing to let go of what she believes is right, even when it costs her everything. Yet, underneath her pride is a woman who aches with guilt and grief, a daughter, a wife, and a mother who lost her family in a series of fires she knows she helped spark. Though she has no desire to atone for every sin—there are too many, and she's beyond that kind of reckoning—she is nevertheless driven by a compulsion to not repeat the mistakes of her past. She holds herself back from recklessness, constantly measuring her actions against the contract forged under the moon and signed in fire.
Background
History
(CW: Death of children, kidnapping, enslavement)1847 - Fire and Funerals
Catherine Elizabeth Hart was born on the 14th of August, 1847, in Taunton, Massachusetts, to Mason Hart, owner of a successful textiles company, and Betsy Hart, née Johnson, a homemaker and direct descendant of one of the witches they could not burn. As the youngest and only daughter of five, her older brothers offered little in the way of familial bonding, far more interested in other adventures, and she was often left to her own devices.Intrepid with a voracious appetite for learning and discovery, she often ran into the woods behind their large manor to collect animals and rocks and observe the wilds at work.
Growing up in the Bridgewater Triangle, she saw all kinds of wild things.
Reaping the benefits of an affluent upbringing, she was eventually sent off to attend an all-girls school in town, and until she was seventeen, her mother discreetly instructed her alongside her brothers on the art of witchcraft, although her predilection for flames resulted in more than one ... accident, including the one that led to her mother's death.
1864 - Fire and Trouble
After her mother's funeral, Cat took her grimoire and ran away with Niccolò Incontro, a young man from her father's company with whom she had been secretly smitten. Their marriage was full of young passion, but leaving Taunton did not leave Cat's troubles behind.Nic took work as a foreman at a factory in Chicago and Cat worked as a shopgirl, but she had too much spirit and he had too much hotheadedness for either of them to be told what to do for very long, and soon enough, Cat was being dismissed from shop after shop while her husband became entangled in a bitter feud with frenemies from work over pride and a few dollars.
When their messes went from little to big, from simple to complicated, Cat took to reading her mother's book again, conspiring from the shadows to maintain the peace (and sometimes just to get the upper hand).
For a while, things seemed to be going well for Cat and Nic, or at the very least, they seemed to be maintaining some semblance of control over their chaos, and they brought two new spitfires into the world. A daughter, Giulia, followed two years after by a son, whom they named Matteo, in honor of Cat's brother, Matthew, who had died the previous year from a house fire.
Even as a mother, Cat couldn't resist using her own mother's book to fix the troubles that followed her. More problems required more creative solutions, and she paid the price ... but she knew it was only a matter of time before it caught up to her. The family curse.
1871 - Fire and Pain
A week before their sixth wedding anniversary, their house in Chicago joined a great conflagration, taking Nic and their two children down with it. It was several days before Cat was found in the wreckage, hugging her mother's book, all that was left of a family kept together by the fire within, torn apart as it escaped. The loss of her mother had broken her, but the loss of Nic and their children had destroyed her. She left the embers of Chicago and wandered restlessly for a while, taking on the odd teaching or sewing job in Missouri, then Kansas.1874 - Fire and Blood
Kansas was a bloodbath. She had stayed too long, she knew she had; she had grown familiar, attached. Had even taken someone new to her bed to chase off Nic's memory. Then an outlaw gang ripped through the territory, terrorizing ranchers before descending upon what could hardly be called a town. Cat saw a dozen of her friends slaughtered, and thought she would be next, but trouble didn't just follow her, it seemed to seek her out—by name.She tried to fight against them, summoned the flames to lick at their horses, at their boots—most of the outlaws laughed, their eyes dead and lifeless. The leader didn't laugh, but he did smile, and it was a smile she wished she had never know.
Emmanuel Castro, he called himself. A demon, she would soon find out, one with an insatiable hunger for wreaking havoc and laying waste to everything in his wake. He had heard rumors of a witch living in the area and wanted one in his crew, especially one as potently destructive as her. He offered Cat a contract for her life in exchange for her service; she had vehemently refused, but he was undeterred. If she would not come willing, he'd have her as a pet, and when the gang moved out of Kansas, he took his little kitty with him on a leash of bespelled rope tied around her neck.
Cat did not do well at being someone's pet. She found ways to escape from the rope and run through the wilderness until she collapsed, only to wake up the next day back at their camp with it secured again around her neck. She bribed and threatened other victims of towns they raged through to help her escape, but no one had any chance against the demon and his gang. Everyone she pled to only ended up dead, sometimes by her forced hand.
Eventually, she turned her thoughts in a different direction: if she could not escape, she would just have to find a way to get rid of the demonic bastard. And so once again, Cat turned to her mother's grimoire, passed down from mother to daughter for generations, a book that told numerous stories of her ancestors' encounters with various entities. Spells to protect against them, rituals to summon them ... Emmanuel and his outlaws somehow seemed immune to her witchfire, and most spells had done little more than annoy them. Some had angered, but they'd still proved useless in the end.
She knew that there was always someone out there, someone stronger, someone more powerful. There had to be someone who knew how to kill a demon.
She also knew the price would not be meager, and she didn't have much to offer.
1875 - Fire and Dogs
It had been her fourth attempt in as many months to get the ritual just right, to call upon the right name, in the right way. The coyote had been draped ceremoniously over the boulder, and its intestines descended down the short bluff overlooking the rutted trails that crisscrossed and wove a series of tales."Oh great Hekate Enodia, Queen of the Night, Goddess of the Crossroads, I stand here at the gates to Heaven, Hell, and Earth, praying that you show me the right path to claim my freedom." Catherine barely felt her hands through the blood that soaked them and the cold that permeated them as she raised the athame and started her invocation. "I call to thee, Protector of Persephone and Mother of Witches, Enter through the Western Gate and deliver me from—"
She caught her breath at the back of her throat, a strangled noise escaping her.
Cat was no longer alone in the mountains in the middle of the night.
A large, doglike creature blinked at her and tilted its head, pointed ears flopping softly. Then it whined at her, a soft, low, hungry sound.
Cat had cursed and tightened her grip on her athame before spinning around to bolt back to her horse, but then the creature was in front of her again. She lunged at it, swinging her blade in a wild arc, but the creature was simply somewhere else again, staring at her and making that curious, unsettling whine.
Catherine played Cat and Mouse with the creature for another hour, coming to the certain decision she was the Mouse in this scenario, but in that time, the creature had not made any aggressive moves. It had whined. It had danced around her. It had whined more.
"Brilliant," she had sighed, pawing a trembling hand over eyes rimmed with a manic-edged weariness, "I appear to have summoned some sort of trickster spirit."
Cat can't clearly recall what happened immediately after that, but she woke up hours later under a copse of cacti just as the sun was coming up over the horizon, with a piece of paper crumpled up in her hand. Smoothing it out, she found a page from a book … to be honest, it looked as though it could have been ripped right out of her own grimoire. Even the writing looked familiar in a way she couldn't quite place. The part that really struck her the most, however, was the contents of that page … the very recipe for disaster she was looking for. Time to start cooking.
1876 - Fire and Oil
Coming soon.1880 - Fire and Clay
Coming soon.Powers & Magic
Powers Use
Cat knows better than most that all magic has a cost, and the magic she had to call upon to deal with her demonic captor had the greatest costs of all, some of which are still paying out, and will remain so for the rest of her life.Carry the weight of your lineage.
Never again use your witchfire for personal gain,
in anger, or sorrow.
Bear witness and act when others cross the same lines.
When the time comes, return the fire to its origin.
Fail these, and what's done will be undone.
Fail these, and the fire will consume what belongs to it.
Due to the terms of her bargain, her witchfire has been greatly muzzled: she is not allowed to it for personal gain, in anger, or sorrow. On the obverse side of this, understands that her innate gifts and her spells and rituals are now more potent when used to the benefit of others, selflessly and without expectation of gratitude or payment. Little things such as keeping a companion's tea warm feel effortless, but any attempt to extend the same courtesy to herself results in burnt tea leaves and a twisting behind her ribs.
Additionally, she has discovered a knack for seeing things in fire, a gift which she attributes to her newfound devotion to the Keeper of the Crossroads, always looking backward, forward, and sideways. She has been experimenting with ways to trigger visions and signs in the smoke, ash, and flame, and thus far, her forays into foresight have resulted only in sensory imprints of varying intensities, sights, smells, sounds, feelings … but only for things that have happened already, or are happening currently (certainly useful …). However, things that are yet to happen are as of yet elusive to her, but Cat is determined—she will do whatever she must if it means she can prevent another fire, or worse.
Plotting
Romance
Intimacy is a complicated stretch of road for Catherine. Her closet holds a series of charred skeletons, the most recent of which is only two years fresh, and she makes no immediate charges down this familiar path. All the same, there's always a fire lingering in the core of someone as passionate as Cat. It's only a matter of time before something new is sparked up.Friends
Please teach this dumb witch how to be friendly without trying to manipulate or otherwise use someone. Selfishly driven to selflessness, she'll do what she must, but it's going to hurt a lot. Maybe for everyone involved.Antagonism
Cat made plenty of enemies back in Chicago; some human, more witch. She also burned a dozen or more settlements and encampments from Kansas to Colorado, and while her actions there were guided by a demon, she knows her hands aren't clean.Even with her deal with Hecate, Cat hasn't really stopped being Cat. She picks, she pokes, she snarks and condescends. It's probably for the best she can't really act on some of her worse judgments without feeling the stinging burn of her promises, but she's a Work in Progress.
Other Plot Requests
A witch is better with friends ...And this particular witch is in search of a protégé — someone who chooses the fire. Someone to whom she can pass on her knowledge, her skills. Cat is still privately mourning the loss of the last one, but ... Hecate insisted.
