Mama Grace

Grace is in excellent physical condition, especially considering her age. Though she does have an arthritic knee and hip from falls as a teenager, a lifetime around horses has kept her active, supple, and lean.

Grace leans to the thinner side with smaller curves due to her athletic lifestyle

A quite striking woman, especially in her youth, Grace has strong features with a hint of softness. Her eyes are rimmed in crow's feet from many hours under open sky. Her mouth gives over easily to laugh lines, although she also has frown wrinkles from deep thought and worrying about young people and the trouble they can get into.

Almost never seen without denim and cowboy boots, Grace prefers practical clothing that is suited for her active lifestyle.

Grace was born the oldest of eight children, whose parents were alcoholics. While not actively abusive, they were neglectful, and eventually, Grace and her siblings were removed from their home of origin. She lost touch with most of her siblings in foster care, but had rediscovered her youngest brother Andrew a few years before The Great Migration. He, however, died five years prior to the apocalypse in a motor vehicle accident.   As a teenager, Grace was angry and frequently acted out. She had a reputation for getting into fights at school and sitting in detention. She was arrested at 14 for vandalism, and had started drinking heavily herself.   She was sent to a facility for troubled youth that was located on a horse ranch, and this was a turning point for the young teen. She fell in love with the horses, and did her best to be on her best behaviour in order to have the privilege of riding and working with them.   Grace also flourished under the love and support of her foster parents, Anna and Devlin McBride, and completely turned her life around in a couple of short years. When Grace was 16 years old, the McBrides legally adopted her. The McBride family were involved with their local Trinity United Church, and Grace got involved too, especially in the choir. Later on, she became involved in some of the New Age community that was widespread in California, and it was then that she first came in contact with the Voidborn Prophecies , although she paid little heed to them at the time.   As a young woman, Grace experimented with romantic and sexual relationships with men and women. She married young, as is not uncommon for troubled teenagers with her background, but the marriage ended seven years later in divorce. This was possibly driven in part by two miscarriages, which seemed to drive a rift between Grace and her husband. She described him as "not abusive, but he was definitely emotionally unavailable."   Grace treated the McBrides as her parents for the rest of their lives, but they were an older couple, and Grace was only 40 the year they passed. She inherited the Graceful G Ranch from them. Her struggle with fertility, and her unsuccessful marriage, combined with the fact that she was now pushing middle age, led her to make the decision that she would follow in the footsteps of her parents, and care for children who needed someone to care for them.   Grace applied to become a foster parent, and in the meantime, got a student loan and put herself through the necessary courses to become a child psychologist and a certified theraputic riding instructor. The Graceful G Ranch soon took in a number of children and teens from similarly troubled backgrounds. The ranch was perceived as being a safe space for queer youth, so she tended to get a lot of teens on the rainbow spectrum.   When the future Prinx Tempest arrived in the 1337 Speak Reality, they stumbled on Grace by circumstance. Tempest claims this was because they'd cast a Literomantic enchantment to bring them to a place where they would be safe. Fortunately, Grace was not entirely unacquainted with Literomancers, since her neighbours were the Kwake family, and Buddha Kwake was a technomancer. Although it was rare, visitors from other universes were not unknown in their universe, especially because of the widespread accessibility of Alientech, and she assumed that "Eli," as they were known at the time, must be one such traveler, especially since they seemed to be at least partially comprised of elemental fire.   Though Grace would never admit it until years afterwards, Eli presented quite a challenge for her. They seemed almost feral, unaware of social graces and basic customs, although their education was stellar, well beyond what would be typical for their apparent age. And their barely-controlled fire powers represented a genuine danger that Grace was wise enough to be cognizant of. Yet, she couldn't bring herself to turn Eli away. She sensed that this terrified youth needed someone to care for them and show them what love could be. Although Buddha was himself barely an adult at the time, he was the only 'mancer of any kind she knew well, so she relied on him to help her figure out how to deal with those overwhelming powers and bring them under control.   Over time, she was able to earn Eli's trust. As more of their story leaked out, some outright explained, much more gleaned from between the lines, Grace began to equate Eli with the Voidborn Prophecies she barely remembered from her youth. She came to the realization that Eli was almost certainly The Fire Who Speaks of Trauma.   Grace's own religious beliefs were loosely New Age-Christian, and she would have described herself as "spiritual, not religious," but after extensive research, it seemed to her that the situation was just too exact to be coincidental, with some significant details that rang the bell of "truth" in her mind. She determined to quietly begin to set things in motion to try to find a way to escape the 1337 Speak Reality, and at that point, connected to the "Deadworlder Movement" through online communities. She avoided the more "out there" people in the community, which are a given in any apocalyptic belief system, and instead, worked more with "prepper" types who were hedging their bets. Because she came across as grounded and practical, and because she wasn't selling anything, she quickly became a leading voice in the Movement.   However, when Eli returned from the Tomeverse for the first time after a long period of disappearance, Grace became increasingly alarmed. This was more than "too exact to be coincidence". The very existence of another reality, and The Void, gave far more substance to the Voidborn Prophecies. She began to make active efforts to recruit to the cause, and since she had the privilege of being in a situation in which she didn't need to worry about making a living, she devoted herself full time to the effort, giving over her ranch to the purpose.   Grace was aided in this cause by Lt. Skyla Greyson, her grown-up foster daughter and Tempest's sibling, who had joined the Armed Forces, and who began to recruit from people she was connected to. Some of the research of the Space Force also bore up the conclusions of the Deadworlders. They registered strange gravitational fluctuations which military astrophysicists eventually determined were distant stars simply winking out of existence. Occasionally, they even registered localized time skips as clusters of the distant universe stopped working according to expected gravitational patterns. These unsettling phenomena, which were kept from the public by military order to avoid "undue alarm," convinced a significant fraction of the Space Force of the truth of the situation, enough that they were able to hijack military satellites that monitored the Coachella Valley, in preparation for the event.   Child welfare authorities began to look on the Graceful G Ranch with some concern, but Grace did not fit the profile of a charismatic cult leader. While she was well liked, she deflected any attempts to treat her as anything more than one of the council among the leadership. Further, when questioned, the children in her care stated firmly that they had never felt so safe and had no desire to be moved. There were no signs of anything the authorities could take issue with, especially because Grace kept the children entirely separate from the activities of the Deadworlders. They continued to go to school and showed no signs of neglect.   The authorities soon concluded that she was slightly batty, perhaps, but benign, and the Deadworld Movement was a growing movement that was becoming more mainstream. It may have helped that after the limited nuclear exchange in the 1337 Speak Reality during the Cold War, apocalyptic beliefs and prepper communities were much more common than they had been in the Tomeverse, and this had been true for nearly a century.   Grace had faith in Tempest, so when Tempest promised they would have a plan, she believed them. And Tempest delivered when they showed up with a letter from their sister Queen Sable Aradia, and a copy of Queen Sable's 1337 Speak Address. She cashed out her savings and began putting the machinery she had carefully amassed over the past few years in motion.   The Bunny Queen won her over completely by deciding that once the members of Operation GTFO had been brought over, the only "unscheduled" refugees they would be taking would be children, with no consideration made to background, ability, or any other arbitrary social standard. At that point, she decided to put her complete trust in the Lapin Crown, and on the day of The Great Migration, she successfully helped to guide her people to safety, along with all of her family — save Tempest.   In the aftermath, Grace and the Mother of Bunnies became good friends, united by their grief and the family ties between them. Grace brought the 21 1337 Speak orphans she had adopted, including the foster children she had been raising at the time, and her adult foster children, to the Graceful L Ranch in Penticton, on the southern edge of Okanagan City. With the help of her Owsla Security Squad protectors, assigned to her by Queen Sable as a member of the royal family, she is building herself and her children a new life in a new reality. They visit The Warren for extended periods during Spring Break and the summer holidays, and for every official holiday, and during wartimes in November, they stay for their safety.

Grace graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. She had some college education, but left early when she ran out of money from her scholarship and was required to get a full time job. She later studied for a Bachelor's Degree in Child Psychology, and certification in Therapeutic Riding Instruction.

Prior to inheriting the Graceful L Ranch, Grace's employment was somewhat chaotic. She tended to pick up what work she could, with preference given to anything that allowed her to work with horses or other animals. Over the years, she was a ranch hand, an animal rescue worker, a farm hand, a gas station attendant, and a supermarket clerk. She also volunteered with several independent living initiatives and soup kitchens.

While famous for her work with Operation GTFO, Grace's many children would say her greatest accomplishment was raising them into decent people from their difficult beginnings.