Part 57/87 of my Female Rogues of Gotham City series
Immediately before Poison Ivy arrived on the scene, three women were the top Public Enemies in the tristate area, so revered for their beauty and glamor that for a while, life-sized portraits of them hung in the Gotham City Art Gallery. They were all three “witches” of various religions who preyed on the rich, arriving at galas and openings to charm and frighten the guests out of any valuables they might have and kill or maim them if they resisted. Of course, these days these ladies have fallen out of fashion and are thought of more as white-dwarf starlets than actual stars in the criminal firmament, but there are still some who remember them fondly, and they still get together from time to time for nights on the town.
Terese Sheldon—Dragonfly—had her specialty was in the spells and charms of Wicca, of which she had been a faithful follower all of her life, thanks in no small part to her priestess mother, who started her own coven in Gotham just inside the city limits where they had the space to roam freely and perform their rites without being spotted or ridiculed by passersby. All of the members of her coven came from the slums of Gotham where they could either not hold down a job or were cheated out of their homes by greedy landowners, and soon they became increasingly angry and bitter toward the world at large that had wronged them; her initial plan was the become a Robin Hood figure who would rob the rich and bring back money for her friends, but she soon discovered how exhilarating it was to cause the oblivious rich the same suffering, and bloodlust overtook her, culminating in her biggest scheme to entrance all of the Kane family’s guests to throw themselves dancing off of the bay bridge. In retirement, Dragonfly has become a professional escort, where she can still cause the rich leeches of Gotham some pain.
Fabienne Pascal—Silken Spider—was an immigrant from Haiti where her mother had also been a priestess, in this case a vodou bokor who could communicate with malevolent spirits in the shapes of animals; on her mother’s request, she trained to become a proper priestess so she might escape the darker and potentially more harmful aspects, but more and more she found herself growing curious about that taste of danger. When the two of them arrived in Gotham in hopes of finding a home less prone to natural disasters, they were almost instantly pegged as “freaks” and endlessly bullied and profiled, and when the once-powerful bokor was killed in a riot, her daughter committed her first crime by killing her mother’s murderer in cold blood and keeping his wedding ring as a talisman for her future spree of summoning spirits to terrify the ignorant powerful class of Gotham with the help of her new rogue companions. When she was forced into retirement and her anger and bitterness had drained with age, Silken Spider became a seamstress and designer, unable to find a community where she could publically practice her religion and having to wait impatiently for the city to treat its underprivileged citizens better; if any poor young children come into her shop seeking a few minutes’ refuge from injustice, she’ll provide them with a cup of tea and a few small fetishes sewn into their clothes for protection.
Cynthia LaBeau—Tiger Moth—didn’t go into crime out of vengeance for injustices committed against her or her loved ones, but simply for the fun of it and to see if the stupid masses were really as frightened of magic as they pretended not to be, conning and seducing her way into various black-tie events and then calling upon Hera, Aphrodite, and Persephone to wreak havoc upon every woman present. As a modern pagan who prayed to and honored the Pan-Hellenic goddesses and firmly believed she had their favor thanks to her loyal service and performance, the former Southern belle liked to think that she was a cut above most of the dullards in Gotham and took every pleasure in flaunting it; even among her troop of fellow mages, she fancied herself the most powerful and the most natural choice for leader, which led to a fair amount of arguing among them. In her own retirement from crime, Tiger Moth tried her hand at an acting career, but only ended up in a handful of commercials before washing out of the film industry, realizing she couldn’t just coast on her beauty and confidence.
