Apocryphal Family Tree: The Rough Draft

Lenny Concludes Their Likely Deity Relatives

After all the research I compiled, I'd hoped that I'd have better results to report. I was hoping to have a handful of beings for Water and a handful of beings for Death. What I have is a baby database that anyone who knows SQL (which is currently only me j our family that I know of) can search through the hundreds of entries. Winnie wants a status update and since I'm not done with building something she can use, I'm going to pick my favorites and present them.
I've been stuck on Kianda and Mami Wata for water deities. I know I need to add some European water supernaturals, so I added the Sirens since even though they didn't have much to do with Winnie's want for revenge, I knew she was expecting to see them on the list and I don't have a good enough reason to keep them off nor do I feel like inciting an argument. For Death I chose the Grim Reaper and Santa Muerte. I also chose Inanna, Persephone, and the Phoenix for resurrecting entities. Winnie hadn't given them any thoughts, but that is much closer to what she does than what Charon or any psychopomps do. She doesn't shepherd the dead anywhere. Her argument is that the powers coming from two different pantheons would alter how it comes through her. I think that is some old school magical thinking. But then again, a brown eyed parent and a blue eyed parent can have a child with hazel eyes. And also we're talking magic and not in the science hasn't caught up to it way but in that science will always be baffled by a human born of humans that can die and then after time to heal will resurrect.
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The presentation was less than stellar. It was more argument and less here are my findings. Winnie was upset that I didn't have more to go on with my guesses and I only have the family tree information I could remember from my brief time at the homestead and the random bits of everything around Winnie's house. She'd apparently forgotten to bust out Nor's family tree, which is considerably fuller. Girl loves her an internet search and a tumble in the microfiche. She even had the branches from Elijah and all of them down to what looks like the most recent families. Which is amazing. I can see what she mad. I'd be mad too if someone showed up after years of backbreaking research only to have it all handed over to someone else to finish because they were destined to do it. Although I honestly don't think I'm destined to do anything. By that I mean I don't believe in destiny. We make choices, those choices have consequences. Consequences always sound bad but they're not, they are neutral. You decide to stop exercising and stretching, you're going to be less limber and less able to run for the bus. You decide to jump down from a castle window in a ruin, you'll have a broken ankle and it'll ache whenever it's cold. You'll need special socks. Join the Wild Hunt, decide to start exercising again and you'll be using your new strength to keep the community safe. Side tracked again. There are consequences to the actions you take. That's not destiny. Believing in destiny is like believing there is only one person for each other person. Statistically unlikely.
With this flood of new information to process, I'm more or less back at the drawing board. I know I should reach out to Nor for help because this is so clearly her jam but I also have a feeling that no one wants her involved in what will eventually be a fatal position. But she'll also give me all the dirt. It will likely cost me something but probably nothing I will miss. Plus most of my misspent youth was on the fae because no one in my life thought it'd be a good idea to have me focus on African supernatural beings. I'll treat Nor like the fae: promises are binding contracts and fuck that up to your own peril. The only downside is that Nor, unlike the fae, can lie. I'd say I'll stick to questions where I can find the answers out but then what is the point in asking her in the first place?
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Phone call with Nor lasted less than five minutes because why the fuck would I call instead of text? I know this makes me sound like I'm from an older generation but I hate texting. It's almost like tweeting. And I'm not good at distilling my stories down to a short enough burst that a tweet or a text will do. After we hung up almost immediately my phone buzzed. And kept buzzing. Every few minutes bzzz. All this info that she wanted to tell someone but couldn't because everyone loves Winnie except for the sacrificial lamb she takes from every generation and she can't trust Winnie to keep stories that don't cast her as a doting matriarch around. Every generation breaks the rules to make life fairer then turns around and tells the next generation that breaking the rules that time was necessary but it's not now so be peaceful and nonviolent. Civil disobedience is a thing of the past.
I texted Nor back that I'm all ears and she said let me guess you've hit a wall. Her response to my maybe was why don't you come over? I'd completely forgotten about the magic key that would take me anywhere and the magic doorways that could specifically take me to the homestead or my parents basement. I didn't know how to work the magic doorway or where the one on this side was located, so I went with the key.
I pictured the front door of the homestead since I could solidly picture it in my mind. I walked out of my bedroom onto the homestead front lawn. Well, yard. There is no traditional grass anywhere on the homestead, just fallow or wild fields or well tended gardens. I texted Nor that I'm on the front porch come get me and a few minutes later she appeared in her swishy skirt, bangled glory.
We drank beer and sat on the swing and talked. Actually caught up. It's like Nor remembered we were friends once and I did too. The best part of the night was the dirt I got on Winnie. How she got the homestead. It involves murdering the younger heterosexual Washington to prevent heirs, teaming up with the vigilante group Wild Hunt to bully the older gayer Washington, and a white lawyer that owed Winnie for that one time (saving his life at the river after the Washington brothers beat the shit out of both of them) and also had no love for the white Washington clan.
Also that Winnie is allergic to bees because at one point she and Ellie were playing in a grove of trees and Winnie knocked a hive over and got stung maybe a couple dozen times before she was able to jump in the river. She's likely been allergic ever since but it only came up in the a few decades ago when she got stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock and died. Now Winnie carries an epi-pen if she isn't playing on using that death.
Also also Winnie is trying to be canonized. Before she'd gotten a better handle on how magic works she thought that if she were a Catholic saint she'd be move powerful because power is based on who believes in you and she still definitely does want that but she also thinks that figuring out our own family tree will help with that objective. Anyway, Winnie wants to be the patron saint of slavery. It would mean paradoxically that both the enslaved and the slavers would have her as a saint but she'd already started working on it in the early 1900s. Slavery had shifted but never left the United States and Winnie used the 13th amendment, the one that guarantees people freedom based on the color of their skin but then silently slips in something that just means instead you'll be judged to be criminal and then enslaving you is okay, to help propel her ambition forward without leaving home. All prisons are terrible but Angola is a special breed of it. Winnie was bummed that being an incorrupt corpse had fallen out of favor for canonizing. Although it's probably for the best considering what happened to most incorrupt corpses once they were deemed to be so. Winnie had never been embalmed. She had been buried a few times but it was on purpose and she had a few friends that would specifically come get her. It once took her nearly a decade to recover from an explosion that happened to close to her. Truthfully Winnie had become reckless with her body. If she died incomplete, she'd be made while in the house of her enemy which is apparently death because that's where she was made whole. Her body would regress in age and she'd be back to that 17 year old who nearly drowned. Winnie was usually submerged in a tub because those who tended to her corpse while it was a corpse said she healed faster in the water. I'd roll my eyes but it makes sense that water which has in the past helped her to survive would also help her to thrive. Also water as a literary tool is powerful. It's almost as if we baptize Winnie onto her new life, over and over again. Almost because we don't actually fully submerge her at all. No one is sure that it wouldn't somehow stall the process of she's recuperating from a death but she's not breathing because she's got water in her lungs. I think though I will try it when my time comes to tend to Winnie's dead body.
As the night dragged on and the next day technically showed up in the dark without any kind of announcement, Nor dropped the bomb that made Lenny excited about going home and also a little scared because she'd never embraced her death sense. Her mother had actively discouraged that and her being a vegetarian. Lenny became a vegetarian in college for a few years and still mostly sticks to a vegetarian diet, but she never explored her ability to communicate with and see the dead. Nor said that she suspected that Winnie's former apprentices were at Winnie's place. They weren't here because the other deathies would have seen them. That knocked the memory of seeing Isadora, the apprentice when I was a kid, at her own funeral and pointing it out to her mom. They'd moved a week later.