The lady came up 2 places in the last 24 hours, so I thought I'd talk a little about her in my now-defunct game.
She survived the fall into the Abyss by sheer tenacity and a healthy dose of luck. As the Unicorn retrieved the Jewel, Deirdre had the presence of mind to grab the Unicorn, hoping that She would effect a rescue. The Unicorn did so in a backhanded fashion, carrying Deirdre upwards a distance from Brand before knocking her loose. Deirdre landed on a stable island, a place that collected flotsam and jetsam that collided with it. She had nowhere else to go, so she stayed.
At the point the game ended, no one but NPCs had asked how long she was there. It could have been a day. It could have been a millenium. Her armor had picked up a bit of an aged look to the eye of the Elders - but for all the kids knew, it could have looked like that before she fell.
Somehow, some way, Deirdre tamed a denizen of the Abyss to her hand. The giant wolf-like creature eventually carried her out and to a section of the Rim that the Rim Lords rarely frequented. For the first time in 200 of Amber's years, Deirdre was free.
As she moved towards Amber, she stopped to pick up her son Mordred (and before you ask - no, not Corwin's). Whether this son was born before or after she fell, no one had asked (and I hadn't decided. The former is simple, but the latter would have provided a whole new wrinkle to things...). But just as they began preparations to move towards Amber, they were captured by Niall, the rogue House of Chaos, backed by a group of younger generation Amberites whose leaders were intent on carrying out Brand's last idea, the destruction and rewriting of the universe.
Deirdre was highly displeased with this turn of events, to say the least. She never saw the rogue Amberites, but Niall completely pissed her off.
From there it moves into the game story itself. Arwen (the daughter of Julian with far more Psyche than actual sense) was captured and imprisoned with Mordred and Deirdre. Seeing that this Amberite girl didn't recognise her, Deirdre took up the fictional identity of Marissa, a companion of Mordred. (Perfectly sensible, given that she knew nothing of the current climate in Amber.)
And eventually, the three prisoners escaped and returned to Amber.
Here's where it intersects the second of the two things that made me think first of Deirdre. Y'see, I hadn't decided what aspect of Deirdre I planned to present. I'll admit that she was rather disturbingly satisfied when she got her hands on her ax again - but she can be forgiven that, since she was trying to escape with a pair of (mostly) unknown quantities and had a few dozen guards to mow down on the way out.
And maybe she had a touch of vanity, too, since she insisted on going back to her Abyss-island to grab the armor she wore at Patternfall.
As she arrived in Amber, I discovered that the other two PCs were scared to death of her. Understandable - all they had to go on was Corwin's story and whatever impression of her the Elders doled out.
Chet's impressions would have come from Bleys, who tends towards both the terribly honest and the completely circumspect, liberally sprinkled with a habit of telling twisted little stories about his relatives (in the continuation game I'm running for my boyfriend, Bleys recently told a story about Flora. The paraphrase is that Flora went through a phase where she was sending furry woodland creatures as messengers instead of pages. She sent Bleys a rabbit with an invitation to tea. Bleys went to tea and fed the rabbit to the hawks in the mews.).
Dylana's impressions probably came from Gerard initially. Gerard is one of the ones I always imagined would bottle up his feelings and emotions when someone died. So whatever Dylana was told, it was probably good but meagre. Anything else came from cousins and Elders that took a liking to Dy.
And that's when I realized that most of the cousins were wary of her - because they just didn't know what to expect. Her reputation had developed mutant proportions since her apparent death, and she'd become the possibly-incestuous, scary-with-an-ax, frighteningly-machiavellian aunt that no one ever expected to have to meet.
And yet there she was.
It's not that she's this scary Amazon - it's that she's competent with an ax (and, of course, other weapons) at the Elder level and is allowed to use the skills when her sisters are sent to the archers by Benedict and Oberon, who should know the strengths and weaknesses of the girls. It's not that she's able to manipulate anyone and everyone - it's that she's respected for her ability to manipulate by Corwin, who might be biased but was once one of the best at the game. She might not be an equal in her brothers' minds - but she's close enough to make them just a bit nervous.
Not to mention the question of how she would fall out in the Sand vs. Fiona confrontation I'd set up - that was something no one but Deirdre herself knew.
She's precise, my Deirdre. She's got a memory for details. She's got grudges still, and favorites she knew, and favorites she's just met.
She's still learning the dispositions of her nieces and nephews. She's finding the changes in her siblings. She's finding the changes in Amber. Only the Pattern is immutable to Deirdre's eyes as she looks upon her homeland again, and even then Oberon altered it before he died. The Unicorn might be immutable still, but She's not been seen in years.
She's not even the very best of the sisters in martial battle. She's the best of the sisters on the ground. Ask Julian, who's been referee once or twice at matches between Sand and Deirdre. Sand is virtually unseatable and too tough a nut for Deirdre to crack on horseback - but once they hit the ground, the roles reverse and Deirdre's the one too tough to crack.
And all that makes her a scary unknown. Especially in a volatile situation like the one brewing in my game, where the children of Elders were appearing unexpectedly, each with the Pattern under their belts, and a rogue house of Chaos was engaging in kidnapping and other acts of war while Merlin tried to keep on top of the situation and was no help to Amber at all.
So Deirdre continued, and adapted, and tried to find her place and her feet again in a world turned topsy-turvy to her eyes while she sat upon her Abyssal rock. In the continuation I run for my bf, she continues to do so, but fifty years have turned a rocky, sharp descent into a gently rolling plain of learning.
Yes, I imagine Deirdre as a warrior - but not the Scary Amazon Deirdre With Poseable Ax (tm). I've built my image of Amber on niches, and Deirdre's is the sister who is both able and willing to fight with a weapon in any realm, and has picked her weapons of choice with care. The ax for it's utility, words for their ability to cut to the bone, her beauty for it's disarming qualities, and setting a scene to enhance what she chooses to use. Sometimes she might look for a duel, but how can one tell if one is of the desired skill level without testing one's abilities?
Okay, I don't know if this is a clever idea or not... But consider.
What if there's a sort of cost penalty for learning a skill or ability from someone less Real than an Amberite? Say you learn enough Warfare to increase your score by 2. If you learned it from Benedict, it'd cost 2. If you learned it from an Immortal in the Highlander universe, it might cost you 2.5 or 3. If you learned it from someone on the far side of Ygg (but not in the Courts), it might cost 4.
