Distinctive Appearance
Besides looking like a black and white photo, with some grey pigments instead of haemoglobin and melanin, of course her fingers show the distinctive mark of the werewolf (index finger and middle finger of the same length).
Her hair is silvery, as are her irises. Her eyebrows are gun-metal and of course meet in the middle, and fan out at the sides almost merging into the hair at her temples. Her eyelashes are also gun-metal, and are long and thick. She has a noticeable and uniform fine silvery down over her entire body from neck down, thinning, but present, on the palms of the hands and absent only due to wear on the soles of her feet. Not enough to be furry, it would, if darker or coarser in texture be noticeably hairy; a common add-on to the Clan phenotype, to improve the retention of warm air close to the skin — a useful feature on icy worlds.
But see Castles in the Sky for more detail.
Thoughts from c.2000
I stopped writing about the time I abandoned the fragment going by the title Driftmind in the early '80s', as I got into cosy domesticity, and RPGs took up more of my hobby time. After exhausting the immediate charms of D&D, and the high fantasy genre in general, we thought about trying super-heroes as a genre. Given that the state of the art then was Superhero:2044, and Villains and Vigilantes, we opted to free-form, meaning I could bring in a version of the Nancy-as-Phoenix called Silverwolf. Imagine the original Jean Grey Phoenix, but with the appropriate shift of colour-scheme, and a wolf-mask instead of the bird outline.
Nancy also made an appearance as a PC in an all-weekend gaming session for high powered favourite characters run by Phil Masters back in about '83. As a mostly-GM, rarely player, I had no really suitable characters of my own, so handed Phil a copy of Moving Day, and he produced a set of Champions stats
Another guest appearance followed some years later in what started as Phil's UK based Champions campaign (which provided the basis for some of Kingdom of Champions), but became a community project where everyone tried GMing at some point. When martial arts super-heroine Pushover needed a make-over, she received a healthy pension from a mysterious Wolf Foundation, and changed her name from Carolyn Wilson to Christine Wolf (and her nom d'heroique to Masque). And yes, there's also a reference to Christine Spar, a.k.a. Grendel's grand-daughter in there, too.
At this point Nancy's motivations were that, having managed to get back to a critical point in the past, to make sure that things turn out better. In '98 I wrote the following tiny fragment to start another episode, set c.2003, nearly 15 years after Pushover's retirement from the superhero business:
Cold wind and rain lashed the streets as Carolyn left the conference centre to return to her hotel, tired after a day of frustrating meetings. What point, she wondered, was there in trying to make any sense of a development policy for the third world at a time like this, when the whole world had suddenly become an underdeveloped country, at least according to the enigmatic Woman from the Future?
It was hard to think that it was only a few days since the announcement that had cut across all broadcast channels and spammed every newsgroup and mailbox, that the future was flawed, and that things would have to turn out differently this time, followed by a torrent of sightings, enigmas and hysteria. There were large structures in orbit, confused reports of halts or interruptions of fighting in the Balkans and in Africa, and all sorts of religious outbreaks, and continued random broadcasts of various technical data.
in which her motivation is to make sure that the Singularity happens before significant migrations into space, so there aren't folk such as herself left behind. She has become a one-woman Peace Authority (as per Vinge's The Peace War) ; before I encountered Jenny Sparks and her Authority beginning to tread a similar path to a finer world.
I'm developing this into a new story called Castles in the Sky, available as a work in progress locally.
Meanwhile, back at the future
While preparing this page, it became obvious that Nancy had become one of the ways I externalized growing up and leaving home. Almost twenty five years on, I know I'm different; so what would happen to Nancy?
I have this image of her, maybe fifty years later. She is sitting at a table, alone, after a meal, a nearly empty glass of red wine to hand. She looks slightly older, a little softening of fat over the sinews and muscle, and is lazily content. The night sky arches above outside a great dome. She is content, and looks back at her youthful folly and exuberance with faint amusement. She has never gone home.
© Steve Gilham 2000