Gosling McGee

"I can’t even remember the last time I felt truly warm."

- Gosling McGee

Service ‘Gosling’ McGee is the piano-playing, exorcism-performing, gun-slinging, always-complaining Yukonian cowgirl Ever After High didn’t ask for and didn’t need. Coming from a slightly tenuous romantic union, Gosling is destined to fill the roles of both Sam and The Man from the Creeks (from the Canadian folktales ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ and ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’, respectively). A hard rebel whose complete and utter indignancy, love of other people, and hunger for reform would almost make her a social anarchist, she’s an odd duck, a cool hand, and has clearly been in the weirder circles of the Great White North for much longer than what would normally be healthy.

Personality
You could probably find Gosling in a Bob Dylan or Tom Waits song, maybe in a Dostoyevsky or a Shakespeare. She’s neither good nor bad, she’s just muddy. Dirty. She’s Gosling.

She tries hard to radiate a sort of ‘talk low, talk slow, don’t talk to much’ badass vibe, but is way too thin-skinned and excitable to ever have that come across. She’s the farthest thing from a John Wayne, a Blondie, or Django; try as she might to be the mysterious, dashingly dangerous gunslinger, she’s a little too loud, a little too angry, and a little too weird to be confined to one label. Her patented approach of ‘shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more and then once everything’s been blown to hell you can try to ask a question or two’ bleeds into nearly every aspect of herself and makes her confrontational, for better or worse. Not in a hostile or bully-centric way so much as a ‘deals with problems quickly and unhealthily’ one.

She believes the world is not only beautiful but broken. It is gorgeous and alluring but also genuinely frightening and bizarre, and as such she’s easy to take offense and always game to settle it directly under the flimsiest of pretenses; life is strange and short, there’s no time for injustice or disrespect. She is a rebel not because of her own particular thoughts on destiny, but rather her burning need for the world to throw out tradition and reshape itself in a more positive and constructive way.

Pastimes
Shooting : Because of the varying versions of the Dan McGrew tale’s ending, Gosling has no guarantee that she will live through the duel; it’s literally up to her own draw speed to determine if she’s shot dead on the spot. As such, she practices speed and accuracy with her pistol for as long as she can get away with each day. There are rumblings of a paintball standoff/ quick-draw contest between Gosling and Lincoln LaConte.

Cooking : Gosling is every part a cowboy when it comes to cooking. Whether it be an especially dense/ ingredient heavy stew she cooks in one pot and refers to as ‘sofky’, or simply grilling up bacon and barbecue beans, her cuisine is simple but hardy. The single most ridiculous dish she cooks is called ‘The Wage-Slave Special’, which is traditional Canadian poutine (fries, Quebec-style gravy, cheese curds) mixed with double-smoked bacon, fried Eggo waffle bits, maple syrup, crushed ketchup chips, prime ground beef, pickle slices, and Kraft Dinner macaroni. “It’s a goddamn monstrosity. You can only have it once every month or so, otherwise, your arteries will seal up tighter than dick’s hatband.”

 Music : Gosling specializes in magnificently haunting piano music, but she isn’t bad with a guitar either. Her voice is flutey, smooth, and lends itself well to the obscure ballads she plays. She’s recently been attempting to start a band, with little success.

Mysticism : Gosling’s upbringing in the more damned geographic and social circles of Canada has bred slightly uncomfortably with her spiritual side, and has further been mutated by her thoughts towards her destiny. Incapable of knowing when to quit, she has studied endless amounts of the strange, the supernatural, the mystic, and the macabre in an attempt to quantify -- or romanticize, depending on your perspective -- the world around her. She’s gotten quite good at exorcisms and performs them whenever she can, though her process for doing so is decidedly strange. It involves a hand-mirror, a mason jar, a candle, a small Moleskine notebook, a glass of iced tea, and a bundle of sage. Watching her perform one is even stranger, and that’s without mentioning that whatever incantations she’s performing seems to be a combination of bastardized English, French, Latin, and Inuit words.
 * ’Prose n Goz Otherworldly Services’; Communications, Summonings, and Exterminations of entities Beyond Belief: Because her roommate, Proserpina ‘Prosey’ Faustus is also similarly invested in quantifying her destiny (and subverting it), they quickly found that they specialized in different parts of the supernatural, and as such could make a little money as a team. Though they claim to be capable of just generally dealing with the eerie and demonic in a general sense, their most tried and true service consists of Prosey acting as a medium/ helping their clients speak to the dead, and then Gosling is there as backup to flush out any unsavory spirits, should the need arise. This business is, of course, under the table, as if the faculty caught wind that two students were making money off other students by dabbling in forces beyond their control, they’d be shut down in an instant. However, business is booming, and the faculty hasn’t caught them… yet.

Appearance
Gosling has a very particular aura. She tends to hold one’s gaze, almost inexplicably, despite looking 2.56 seconds from death at any given moment. Her face is forever smeared with a little bit of dirt, but God knows where it comes from. Some theorize she puts it on each morning like makeup or war-paint. She’s pale and cute but looks like she has one foot in the grave, her gaze hard and a little wild, almost like a feral dog. She’s almost a little weak-looking, definitely looks soft, which serves to further accentuate her half-hipster, half-crackhead, all-revolutionary firecracker personality. She has reddish-brown hair, eyes of a vibrant, near-gold hazel, and nimble hands.

How the Story Goes
In ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’, a man and his friend -- the Sam McGee of the title -- are prospecting in Yukon around Christmas when Sam’s mood begins to foul and he claims to see visions of his death in the cold. He predicts that he will die the next day, and as such, begs his friend to not give him a freezing grave. His last wish is to be cremated, and true to his prediction, he dies the next afternoon. His friend, true to his promise, travels with his corpse as he continues his journey, and swears he can hear his friend speaking to him beyond the grave. The friend then finds the wreckage of an old ship stuck in the ice of a nearby lake, and uses the boiler of the ship as a makeshift crematorium. After a little while he elects to return and gather the potential remains, only to find Sam returned to life, grinning, and claiming it to be the first time he’d been warm since leaving home. Sam instructs his friend to shut the door, lest he let in the cold, and the fate of both are left up to interpretation.

In ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’, a drifter and fortune-hunter -- The Man from the Creeks -- arrives at a popular saloon, only to find the notorious outlaw and gambler Dangerous Dan McGrew and his moll engaged in a card game at the back of the bar. After buying drinks for the house with a full sack of gold, the Man plays a haunting song on the piano but stops as he hears Dan making increasingly rash bets. He confronts and insults Dan before the two of them draw, with Dan being killed soundly in most versions. In some, the Man from the Creeks is killed and Dan escapes before the authorities arrive. Regardless of the outcome of the duel, Dan’s girlfriend -- Lou -- kisses the Man from the Creeks and slips away to steal his poke of gold before vanishing.

How does Gosling come into it?
Gosling is unfortunate in that the previous Sam McGee and the previous Man from the Creeks are her parents, and as such she has both destinies. Every single holiday season has been the mark of her impending death, and every Christmas just an additional step towards a cold end out on the Nothern frontier. As such, when she was younger, she demanded to vacation someplace warm, but this backfired as now she also associates excess heat with her destiny and death; she’s Pavlov’d herself for the worse and made herself yet more terrified. The cold release of death and the searing heat of the furnace are now blended into disgustingly morbid anticipation, and as such she’s obsessed with regulating her own temperature any chance she gets. She’s resigned to her fate, as she can’t be a badass drifter gunslinger without first going through the trials of Sam McGee, but that doesn’t make it any more horrifying. She barely understands the awful Northern magic that will return her to life, and she’s not entirely sure she wants to.

Family
Gosling is on good terms with her family, siblings and parents alike, but is also decidedly isolated from them, for better or worse. It might be the physical distance, it may be the fact that Gosling didn’t quite turn out like either of her parents, it may be any number of things. The phone calls are brief and to the point but not hostile or uncomfortable, the text messages kind, peppered with photos of recent events. It’s just...an average little relationship. In her youth, she had very real beef with how her parents were raising her, but recently she’s been trying to mellow out and accept the way she is more readily. Sure, they kind of screwed her up, but it’s better to take it easy and continue to look to the future, abide the possibilities.

Friends
Proserpina Faustus: Gosling is on excellent terms with her roommate and considers her one of her closest and dearest friends. They both have similar decorating taste, similar appreciation/ morbid fascination with the macabre and the high strange, and they both have similar senses of humor. Gosling is the one with decidedly too much energy and not enough good ideas, but that’s balanced out by Proserpina’s more methodical, classy vibe and her endless forethought. It’s this match made in heaven that facilitated the successful ‘otherworldly consulting business’ the duo now runs covertly (see above).

Pet
Gosling owns a grey, one-eared tabby cat, full name King Schultz, and her horse -- Cheetah, a dun -- resides in the stables.

Romance
TBD

Enemies
TBD

Outfits
Gosling believes in having many layers of clothing so she can actively add or remove pieces depending on the temperature of any given situation. When, as she puts it, she’s fully ‘loaded for bear’, her outfit consists of the following, in order from outermost-to-innermost:


 * A green plaid jacket with white sheepskin lining and metal buttons. Waterproofed, obviously.
 * A brownish-red knit vest.
 * A green-blue long sleeve plaid shirt.
 * An off-white, three-button henley shirt.

She also wears black boots and brown corduroy pants with leather riding inserts, and a light-brown knit scarf if it’s particularly chilly. Her hat is her pride and joy, being a wide brown hat with a bent-up brim and Montana/ Military-style 4 dent crown. Laced through the brim are pieces of leather that culminate in small knots (similar to an Australian ‘cork hat’), a bit like pom-poms. These are intended to ward off the flies, mosquitoes, and buzzing things when the weather is warmer. Think a cross between RJ’s hat in ‘The Thing’ and OB’s hat in ‘The Hateful Eight’. She’s prepared for every possible weather and even keeps fur gloves stuffed into the back of her belt in the dead heat of summer. Such is the life of a Canadian expatriate; the belief that the elements could turn on you on any moment is a spectre that haunts Gosling, even all these miles away.

For more formal, Destiny-centric, or niche events and situations, Gosling will wear her belts, which give her more pockets, pouches, and even a sheathe for a bowie knife. Her sidearm of choice (she is -- after all -- the effectual ‘shooter’ in the Shooting of Dan McGrew) is a Cartridge-converted Remington 1858 Sheriff’s Model. The grips are odd in that the left-side grip is white and features a beautiful carving of a female mule deer, while the other side is black and features a rougher carving of a spider.

Trivia

 * Religiously/ Philosophically she identifies as Dudeist, a strain of reformed Taoism (or Daoism).

Behind the Scenes

 * Gosling’s name is a reference to U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn from the Charles Portis novel ‘True Grit’, as well as a reference to Canadian actor Ryan Gosling.
 * Her cat, King Schultz, is named for Christoph Waltz’ character in Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’, but is actually a girl. Her horse being called Cheetah is a reference to the real-life horse belonging to actor Jamie Foxx, who portrayed Django Freeman in the same film.

Quotes

 * WIP

Gallery
WIP