Poppy Petticoats

Canon. This entry is written from inside the CharliVerse, so its people and companies are fictional. Behind the scenes says what is real.

Poppy, known since her schooldays as Poppy Petticoats, is a blind witch with red hair. The nickname came from her years at the Academy, where her slip kept slipping and she was greeted with "Petticoat" everywhere she went. The events have been lost to history. The nickname has not. Officially, she is just Poppy.

Poppy stands in the doorway of an old library, smiling, with long, curly red hair half tied up, blue eyes and freckles. She wears a dark green chunky cardigan over a cream blouse, a small pendant, a deep red floral skirt, black tights and brown shoes, with a brown leather satchel full of books on her shoulder. Behind her, bookshelves and a tall Gothic window glow in autumn light. Beside the door, among the ivy, a dark green sign reads: THE LIBRARY. All knowledge has been read. Ask wisely. — Poppy at the door of the Library.

The magic wand

Like every new witch, Poppy looked forward for years to buying her first wand. She chose it from an owl-order catalogue with honest reviews, discreet packaging and a generous returns policy, and it arrived on a Tuesday. Before first use, a wand must be bonded to its owner with a simple activation pattern and the witch's Truth Name, which every witch has and no witch ever tells another living soul: not because it is embarrassing, but because it is hers. The instructions were printed in silver ink on dark parchment.

Everyone tells blind witches to "just ask another witch". Poppy saw that the workaround would turn one inaccessible sentence into an unnecessary surrender of privacy, so she asked the Library instead. Press and hold the centre rune for three seconds. The wand shimmered warmly in her hand. There had never been anything wrong with it.

"Just ask another witch" is not an accessibility strategy. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't.

At Aegis Dynamics

Poppy also turns up, notebook in hand, at Aegis Dynamics, sent for by Big Charli when Jessica Martinez wanted to launch the Tactical Foundation Garments division. Her speciality is Pre-Gravitational Erosion: the cumulative effects of gravity on unsupported soft tissue over several decades. Mostly Tuesdays. Her recommendations: comfortable; doesn't dig in; doesn't ride up; doesn't cost the GDP of a small moon; nice colours. Asked where the military terminology was, she blinked. "It's a bra."

Behind the scenes

Poppy appears in two Blind Ant Pieces by Charlotte Joanne: Poppy Petticoats and the Magic Wand, a fable, and Mostly Tuesdays. In the CharliVerse, people can be anywhere and anywhen, which is how a witch from the Academy ends up in a defence contractor's brand meeting. Her portrait is a generated image; of her look, only the red hair is canon.