Maddie

**Maddie** is part of Juniper Smith's *Dungeons & Dragons* group. She would only ever show up to the games accompanying her brother, who would tolerate her as long as she stayed in the background. She played the character Raven, a studious scholar who dabbled on magic as an outgrowth of her obsession with books. Maddie was effectively raised by the internet, which might have contributed to her awkward, socially disconnected nature. She briefly dated Juniper, which she ended up regretting.

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> “Was that weird?” she asked.
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> “Sorry,” she said.
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> “Maybe I’ll just shut up now?” she asked.
>
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> “You were typing and then you stopped typing,” she said.
>
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> “Press Enter,” she said.
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> “Please press Enter?” she asked.
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>
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> -Maddie, Chapter 121: "Maddie"
>

## Appearance

Maddie has shoulder-length dark black hair, with bangs cut to just above her eyes, and a pale complexion. She's shorter than Juniper by a fair bit, and has large breasts.

## Biography

As Raven, Maddie once cast a ghost sound spell to distract some guards so her brother's character could kill them, ignoring Tiff's advice to let them live. The Great Train Robbery

Maddie started getting the wrong kind of attention when she hit puberty and her body developed. After Arthur's death, Maddie and Juniper started chatting, first through a wiki's forum system and later through instant messaging. Juniper theorizes she just wanted someone to talk to, same as him. A few weeks into their conversations, Maddie started flirting with him, and they eventually started dating. It was an awkward, painful relationship, eventually leading up to Juniper being dumped. Maddie (Chapter)

## References

1. ↑ Nope. I don’t think there’s any way to justify it without sounding like a creep. She was just barely fifteen and I was a few months from eighteen, and age difference aside, there was a pretty big difference in emotional maturity, so I couldn’t even hide behind her being old for her age. To make it all worse, she was Craig’s little sister.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 121: "Maddie (Chapter)"
2. ↑ She was Craig’s shadow, as much as he would let her be, which meant that I’d known her about as long as I’d known him. On the rare occasions that I would go over to their house, she would bring chips or drinks for us while we played videogames or watched TV, and then stay there, sometimes adding to whatever conversation was going on, but usually being quiet. Craig’s attitude toward her seemed to be that he would tolerate her so long as she stayed in the background, and I didn’t ever see a lot of pushback from her on that. Craig only spoke of her in annoyance, but for the most part, he didn’t speak of her at all.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 121: "Maddie (Chapter)"
3. ↑ I was fine with playing this game for as long as Raven was. It was uncomfortable, talking to Maddie like this, but she was so vastly different from Maddie that it wasn’t fazing me as much as it might have. She was close to the character of Raven, a studious scholar who dabbled in magic as an outgrowth of her obsession with books, but Raven had been played by Maddie, and the character suffered from an actor who wasn’t up to snuff, as much as I might have tried to help her out.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 122: "Raven (Chapter)"
4. ↑  As far as I could gather, Maddie spent most of her free time online, which meant that she was at least partly raised by the internet, and not the best parts of the internet either. To my knowledge, she never fell in with the kind of people who were on the lookout for impressionable pre-pubescent girls, but she did find a lot of those incestuous websites that have built up their own obsessive mythologies, rituals, and words of power. There were times when she was talking when she would drop in some random bit of deep lore from one of those places, or use a turn of phrase that no one around her was at all familiar with. Sometimes we asked her to explain, but mostly we ignored her, in part because her explanations made it clear she expected us to have read some obscure creepypasta or watched five seasons of a show someone had given a glowing recommendation to.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 121: "Maddie (Chapter)"
5. ↑  Being together was weird and awkward. We’d talked more naturally online than we had in person. Online, I’d understood the cadence of her typing, but when she was next to me she was like a totally different person, and we didn’t really mesh together. Despite that, I was determined that I was going to make it work somehow, because if Maddie liked me, and I was her boyfriend, then I wasn’t going to bow out at the first sign of trouble. In some ways it seemed like that would be the worst possible thing, because I’d prove that I was just as much of a heel as I suspected myself of being. If I was going to be her boyfriend, then I wanted to do it right, not just fuck it up like I’d fucked up everything else.

As it turned out, dumping her wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.

Instead, she dumped me, after about a week.

The thing was, she said, that we were better as friends, and she didn’t want me to take it too hard, but she just wasn’t feeling it. I sat in stunned silence as she dumped me, and then she kept asking me to say something, and I just sat there, not knowing what the hell I’d done with my life that I’d gotten to this point.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 121: "Maddie (Chapter)"
6. ↑ a teenage girl with dark black hair standing in front of the door. It was Raven, Uther’s archivist
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 120: "Deceptions"
7. ↑ She was dressed in black from head to toe, a concealing outfit that went so far as to keep her neck covered. Her hair was the same way Maddie had usually worn hers, bangs cut to just above her eyes, with the rest of her hair falling down to her shoulders.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 122: "Raven (Chapter)"
8. ↑ Raven had a pale complexion, which went paler on seeing that. (Maddie had spent most of her time in a dark room with blackout curtains, typing away on her computer. The whiteness was another thing they shared in common.)
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 122: "Raven (Chapter)"
9. ↑ Raven’s legs were shorter than mine by a fair bit, but she was putting on enough speed that I had to hurry to keep pace with her. Her voice was level, but she seemed pissed off.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 129: "Schemata"
10. ↑ She hit puberty at 13, and transformed from an awkward, gangly little girl to a slightly taller and still very awkward girl with big boobs, which mostly changed things for her in a negative way, since it meant that she started getting the wrong kind of attention.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 121: "Maddie (Chapter)"