Maggie Smith from the 1969 film, Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
‘Meet’ posts are introductions to characters in the fictional world of Project Drowned Rat. A Meet post isn’t a complete profile and may/will contain undeveloped ideas. There will be follow-up posts to develop the characters further. Details may change, subject to requirements.
“A posh detective with magic eyes that were drawn on by an alien.”
Edith Trundle is portrayed here by a young Maggie Smith. What would happen if an Agatha Christie character encountered Ultimate Evil?
Edith is from from old money in the city of Newport. As a teenager she had a taste for a life of dissolution, deplored publicly by her older relatives and the law, but privately tolerated with an indulgent wink. She soon understood that the phrase ‘double standard’ didn’t even come close to describing societal hypocrisy.
It was assumed that she, like everyone else in her class, would marry appropriately, settle down, and settle into a long respectable life of wealth accumulation and power gathering. But she did two things that upset everything.
First, she came out to her parents as a woman. Edith was born Edward Trundle. That might have been borne by her conservative family. A Trundle with an unorthodox revelation about identity? Sure, why not? This is a modern age, etc, etc. But then–and this was far more shocking–she became a private detective. A Trundle with a job? A Trundle who voluntarily associates with criminals and the police? Unacceptable.
She’s not completely cut off; she still has use of one of the family townhouses, but she no longer has the sort of allowance a Trundle child might have expected. She doesn’t mind; she’s a cheerful muckraker with a small business that turns over a tidy income. She has three full-time employees (all from the lower classes), each of whom will be detailed at a later date.
In a very real sense she still remains cushioned by her privilege. She swans around, retinue in tow, sometimes solving crimes, more often uncovering (or covering up) scandals and squeezing the rich for every penny she can. She’s still inured from the strain of day to day living.
Her idyllic world of crime-solving and graft is upset when the world begins to end. Creatures start smacking open cracks into reality and crawling through, many of them hostile. One of these hostile beings is an entity known as the King of Teeth, who begins to terrorise Newport with insanity and body mutilation (more on that later…) In an early encounter with The King, Edith is blinded.
A less malevolent intruder-creature, one of a race called the Graffini, literally draws her a new set of functional eyes. The new eyes look to the rest of the world like creations of vivid watercolour and ink. These eyes grant her access to–for lack of a better term–magical abilities.
She develops a new notoriety as The Woman with the Illustrated eyes. In times to come, there will be many humans, drawn on and modified by the Graffini; they will become collectively known as the Illustrated. Edith is the first Illustrated human.
She will eventually face down the King of Teeth (to be detailed), saving the city, but ruining her life and killing most of her friends.
This image came from my Pinterest page, where I source most of the images I use to illustrate these articles:
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