Punky Polacki

"Trees know everything. Rocks are liars."

- Punky Polacki

Plumly ‘Punky’ Polacki is the next Polacky the Plunderer, a pirate present in ‘The Gnome King of Oz’, the twenty-first in the series of Oz books created by L. Frank Baum and his successors. A Neutral who -- quite honestly -- has too many issues and eccentricities to weigh in meaningfully on the Destiny Debate, Punky is an absolute loon who only wants some friends… and to drown in a vault full of money. Ultimately kind of a lonely soul, her greed isn’t necessarily rabid or off-putting, she simply likes gold, and wants people to like her. Hailing from an obscure (and notably insane) corner of Oz and entirely exuberant, it’s unclear which parts of her positively absurd personality stem from her nationality, which from her upbringing, or which might have accidentally been inflicted on her by a rare condition that was exacerbated by her time at sea.

Personality
Punky is nuts. Absolutely nuts. She’s optimistic and constantly trying to connect with people, but she never stops doing… anything. She never stops talking. Humming. Singing. Referencing. Dancing. Moving. Twitching. Swaying. She’s doing multiple voices like she’s rehearsing a play. She -- in true not-well-adjusted-rich-girl fashion -- is always footing the bill because she can afford it and she wants you to like her. She’s buying you things. She’s buying herself things. She’s running off. She’s saying you should throw a party together. She’s gone again. She’s cracking jokes at a mile a minute and calling you ‘bro’ and ‘dude’ and ‘best friend’.

Why is she like this? Hard to say. It could be that she came from a positively crackpot Ozzian clan and she’s just… like that. That was her upbringing.

It could also perhaps be the simple fact that she wasn’t raised in a particularly healthy way. Her father was a notorious pirate that was doting but also believed she should work to accomplish her goals, and that little paradox made it hard to make friends or figure out exactly what the farg you’re supposed to actually be doing.

It could be that directly before coming to Ever After, she deemed it a good idea to set out on an expedition of the Ozzian High Seas (as well as beyond) on a ship that was crewed exclusively by automatons and a single, peculiarly irritating djinn that had been stripped of most of their power.

Whatever it may be, it had one trac of an effect on her. Ultimately an endlessly lonely romantic, her oddball exuberance has alienated her from many of those she would attempt to befriend or woo, but that doesn’t keep her from trying.

And she’ll try anything, socially or otherwise. She’s constantly expanding her interests and her pastimes to the point that even she can’t keep track of them. Granted, she sucks at most of her would-be hobbies more often than not, only really being capable of robbery, skulduggery, and high adventure rather than, y’know, sports. Or knitting. She writes really good prose when she can, though!

Appearance
Punky is built like a scarecrow. Thin, whippy, agile, standing at an average height. She has frizzy, jet black hair and a lot of it, though sometimes she’ll force it into braids (or several braids into a ponytail), intertwined with waxed fuses that ignite to give her an eerie, hellish look, though this is usually undermined by her not-so-frightening personality.

She has a pale scar that has split the right side of her bottom lip and trails down to her chin. She keeps her fingernails painted black. Her face is round, her eyes big, giving her a very expressive countenance.

How the Story Goes
Patch is the country of the Quilties, a land of seamtresses and quiltmakers; it lies in the Quadling quadrant of Oz. Its people have a serious problem. Their queen, Cross Patch the Sixth, has gone to pieces—literally; small pieces too. To find her successor, the land's Chief Scrapper and Prime Piercer unwind the Spool of Succession, and follow where the golden thread leads. It leads, in this instance, to the Emerald City, where it selects Scraps, the Patchwork Girl of Oz (first introduced in her eponymously titled novel, the seventh Oz book by L. Frank Baum) to be the new queen. The two Quilties, used to resistance from Queens-to-be (“it's not that good a job”), kidnap Scraps. Meanwhile, Peter Brown, a boy from Philadelphia, is transported by a balloon bird to the Runaway Island, where Ruggedo, the wicked Gnome King has been exiled for five years. A seaquake reveals the sunken pirate ship of Polacky the Plunderer—which contains the magic chest of Soob the Sorcerer. The chest holds several magic treasures, including a magic cloak that is supposed to render the wearer invisible and teleport him anywhere he chooses. But the cloak is torn and does not work. The ship, however, derelict as it is, allows Peter and Ruggedo to drift to the Land of Ev. Promising to make Peter a general in his army, Ruggedo returns to the Gnome Kingdom and forces the current king, Kaliko, to abdicate in his favor. Ruggedo's plan is to have the cloak mended, then use it to fly to the Emerald City and recover his magic belt, with all its power — but he learns that the tricky repair job can only be done properly by the expert tailors in Patch. With Peter, he makes his way to Patch, where he offers Peter as a slave in return for the repair of the cloak. The Patch ministers accept this offer and the cloak is repaired. Peter meets Scraps and makes other new friends, including Grumpy the Bear and Ozwold the Ostrich. Together they escape from Patch and set out for the Emerald City in order to warn Ozma about Ruggedo's plans. Meanwhile, using the power of the repaired cloak, Ruggedo becomes invisible and teleports to the Emerald City, where he causes some mischief before Peter arrives. Still invisible, Ruggedo steals the magic belt. He is about to use its powers to teleport Ozma and her friends to the bottom of the ocean, but Peter overcomes him by throwing a "silence stone", one of the treasures he had taken from the sunken pirate ship, at Ruggedo's head, which robs Ruggedo of the power of speech. Since the magic belt only responds to spoken commands, this renders Ruggedo harmless, and the Wizard of Oz makes him visible again. Ozma makes Peter a Prince of Oz, but the boy chooses to return to Philadelphia; he can't let down his team.

How does Punky come into it?
Polacky the Plunderer was absolutely notorious in his day. He was, arguably, Oz’s Blackbeard in reputation and Bartholomew Roberts in success. Theatrical, brutal, and far-reaching, Polacky’s adventurous and ill-gotten gains range from watches stolen off travellers to potent, unknowable artifacts of bygone eras, civilizations, gods.

That was his myth anyway. While the plundering parts were all real and the theatrics and brutality certainly true, the real Captain Polacky was a little different, at least in private.

Allegedly, he wasn’t above just… bribing his foes, sometimes. He was certainly rich enough. If he didn’t feel like engaging a given adversary in combat, he’d just chuck enough cash their way to get them to leave him alone. The idea that he was some kind of heartless bastard who loved to execute his own crewman should they cross him was also exaggerated. One such rumor tells of Polacky's reaction to a crewman caught stealing treasure: he elected to fake the man's death and give him enough money to escape and live comfortably. That is to say, he wasn’t without sympathy, kindness. For all his apparent bloodthirst and thunderous extravagance, he claimed his motivation to be a pirate was not loot, but loyalty to his men and his desire to keep them alive.

Unfortunately for Polacky, he was to experience a fallout in popularity. When the above crewmember was found alive and well on an Ozzian island-town, Polacky's crew realized the truth. After hanging the man, they mutinied, readying to kill their captain for his perceived betrayal. Polacky vowed not to fight, at least not initially, valuing his crew too highly, but when the moment came and the crew rose up in the middle of the night, he returned to the ruthlessness usually reserved for his enemies and defended himself, killing his entire crew single-handedly without suffering more than minor injuries. However, in the course of the battle, his ship was dealt a major blow from a powder explosion and began to sink, treasure and all, and as such, Polacky salvaged what he could and escaped on a life-boat.

Despite much of his wealth and artifacts being lost to the seas (before being resurfaced due to the seaquake mentioned in the original tale), it marked Polacky’s retirement into opulence.

It was a rambling, heavy-laden legend and one of Oz’s most forgotten, if most unique, pieces of history, so it was only natural that he should pass this along to his successor. However, Polacky, being traveller, had many a wife. Whether it was the odd prostitute at port or someone he cared about, he was rumored to have married no less than fourteen separate women in all of Oz and fathered something like 40 children, legitimate or otherwise. Despite his rampant polygamy, he was fiercely loyal to his wives and wouldn’t tolerate anyone disrespecting them or his children. Punky claims to be the eldest daughter of Polacky’s “favorite wife, hands down”, and like most of the prominent Polacky children (with confirmation that they are, in fact, Polacky’s spawn), her father visited frequently and taught her what he could before using a portion of his nearly limitless wealth to ensure that -- at the very least -- she had a fully-outfitted ship she could use to carry out his legacy.

According to Punky herself, she’s sunk “at least ten fraud kids” that were tarnishing the family name and title.

Family
(To be updated)

Friends
(To be updated; Punky will seriously be friends with you under the flimsiest of pretenses. She’ll buy you things, too, so it’s a good investment.)

Pet
(Something Ozzian. I’m considering Flying Monkey. We’ll see.)

Romance
(To be updated; she’s probably bi ayyyyy, she’s lonely, someone please love her.)

Enemies
(To be updated; Punky just wants to be your buddy. Unless you genuinely hurt her. Then you’re in for it. You’ll be ignored and pouted at… or cleaved to pieces.)

Outfits
Punky’s favorite outfit is a flat-brim baseball cap turned backwards, a white tank top, a yellow Hawaiin-style shirt, board shorts, fingerless gloves and sandals. Not necessarily super piratey, save for the cutlass she has strapped to her hips. She also carries cat-eye style sunglasses with her constantly.

Miscellaneous

 * She plays bandafidelle, an Ozzian stringed instrument. Lovely voice, too.
 * Apparently, the engine packed into her ship is capable of jumping her to other realities. This is where she picked up most of her colorful swear words, including, but not limited to: gip, farg, trac, bracket, div, doint, and ply.

Quotes
(TBD)

Trivia

 * She was partially inspired by Stargirl, of Jerry Spinelli’s novel of the same name, and Gary Goodspeed, of the TBS animated series ‘Final Space’.
 * Her exotic cursing is lifted from Yahtzee Croshaw’s ‘Will Save the Galaxy for Food’ and Michael Rubens ‘The Sheriff of Yrnameer’ implying she’s visited alternate/ future version of outer space during her travels.
 * Her quote is a reference to Error Message Jane, a 'glitchy' automaton from the podcast Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars