Sweet Betty
"Sweet" Betty Lockwood
Pronouns she/her Race Human (once a mountain bluebird) Profession Wandering singer-songwriter Hometown Lockwood Status Alive
“Sweet” Betty Lockwood is a wandering singer-songwriter who was, in her first life, a mountain bluebird.
Description
Physical Appearance
Tall and willowy, draped in flowing pale blue the colour of her lost feathers. Her voice comes out sweet and soft, almost like birdsong.
Personality
An irrepressible free spirit who longed to fly from her earliest memory. Even as a bird she met the world’s hardships with delight and went to sleep each night excited for the next day. Her songs run happy and melancholic by turns, but are always gentle and reminiscent of the bird she once was.
Biography
Betty was born somewhere outside Lockwood - at least she thinks so - a mountain bluebird who embraced freedom the moment she left the nest, despite scarce food, ruined nests, and predators everywhere. One day a fox nearly caught her as she picked seeds from the ground; she was inches from death when a kind man and his little son came upon the scene, the boy screaming at the fox until it fled. They took her home to Lockwood, where the man, his daughter, and his son made her their beloved companion. She understood almost none of their words - only “food,” “water,” and “Betty” - but learned that being held in their laps by the hearth on a cold winter day mattered more than any of them.
Then raiders came, and the family burned, screaming. Betty fought - driving her little beak into an attacker’s eye, tasting blood and gore - before she was caught, crushed, and flung from a window to die. On her last breath she felt a warm embrace and heard a voice name her the bravest little mountain bluebird they’d ever seen. She does not know who spoke. But she woke on the streets of Lockwood in a human body, and could speak at last - understand, finally, everything the world had always been saying.
She grieves that she never got to thank her family in words. She lingered in Lockwood for a while, performing and lamenting all she’d lost, and found her voice struck a chord with people. So she picked up a lute and began to travel, later trading it for a guitar she found in Arcadia. A decade on, she still wanders, singing.
Relationships
- The Lockwood family - the man and his two children who saved her from the fox and raised her, lost to the raiders’ fire.
Character Information
Notable Items
A guitar she acquired in Arcadia, which replaced the lute she first set out with.