Charlotte Grote

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Charlotte "Lottie" Grote is a lead character in Bad Machinery, forming one third of the mystery solving girls. She has been best friends with Shauna Wickle from an early age, and met the third member of the trio, Mildred Haversham, when they both entered grammar school. She has been shown to be left handed. Her birthday is in July.

### Early Life

The youngest daughter of Karen Grote, Charlotte has an older sister Sarah. Her father passed away whilst she was still quite young, the exact circumstances of which are still unclear.

### Scary Go Round

First introduced in the Scary Go Round story The Estate as the sister of recurring character Sarah Grote, whilst attending St Mary's RC Primary School with her best friend Shauna. She returned as one of the two lead characters in the final Scary Go Round story, Goodbye.

### Bad Machinery

Lottie was placed in Mr Beckwith's class for her first year at Griswald's Grammar School. There, she soon made friends with Mildred, who shared a love of gossip. It took longer for her two friends Shauna and Mildred to warm up to one another, but eventually they formed a stable trio. She devotes her spare time to solving mysteries, usually with the other two girls and sometimes alongside the three "mystery boys" as well. She's also taken up drama, acting in a lead role in the school production of *Glengarry Glen Ross* (a highly bowdlerized version, since the normal version of this play is full of language unsuited for children).

### Giant Days

Charlotte once accompanied her sister Sarah on a visit to see Sarah's friend Esther DeGroot at university, meeting Esther's various friends and acquaintances there and giving Daisy Wooton the idea of breaking up with her girlfriend (which she actually did).

### Personality

Lottie is known for her impetuousness, being quick to rush into anything that promises adventure without necessarily thinking out fully whether such action is actually a good idea. This can help drive things forward for the mystery girl trio when the other two are mired in "analysis paralysis", but could also get them in trouble and require some bailing out by the more thoughtful people. While not as much of a "conscience" figure as Shauna, she does have a desire to right wrongs by getting to the bottom of situations; however, she may be just a bit too concerned with seeking vengeance for her defeats, and rubbing things in with excessive gloating over her victories, than in actually doing the right thing. She's not as into reading or academic learning as the other two girls, though she does absorb a lot of pop culture (not necessarily getting it quite accurate, however; she thinks the bechamel test is a way to tell if movies are bland and cheesy). She kept copious notes of the mysteries she was involved in solving, but unfortunately many of them were lost when the "Mystery Shed" was torched in "The Case of the Modern Men", and she rashly burned many remaining notes and artifacts herself later, so she might not have any mementos of her adventures now. In the "Hiatus" storyline of 2016, she claimed (in a story that might be a tall tale) to be attempting to rebuild her archives by doing renewed investigation of magical creatures in the Tackleford region.

### Interests

Besides mystery-solving, Lottie is also into the L.A. comedy scene, as seen by posters in her bedroom. Whether that eventually leads to her flying out there to give a standup routine in L.A. (as Billy Joel recounted in "My Life") remains to be seen; her current preference in odd jobs seems more in the direction of babysitting, though Shelley has suggested journalism (which she ended up pursuing by interning at the Tackleford Cormorant and eventually getting set up with a secret headquarters for investigations by Erin Winters when she becomes the new editor). While her interest in sleuthing seems on the decline as she gets older, she still keeps up with *National Solver* magazine. She enjoys investigating mysteries and her goal in life is to become a "mystery queen".

### Friendships and relationships

Lottie makes friends easily. She is in a tight-knit friend trio with Shauna and Mildred (though as with all such friend trios, there are occasional fights that temporarily break them up). She's gossiped and joked about actual and potential romantic relationships of her friends, and she and Mildred once drew satirical cartoons of one another's ideal future boyfriends, but as of now she's avoided any romantic entanglement herself. Shelley Winters is a long-time mentor of hers, who she's known since Shelley was writing the "Dr. Lady Sounds" music review column for Sarah's "zine".

It seemed for a while that Lottie has broken off her friendship with Shauna, in the wake of Shauna fighting on behalf of Blossom Cooper, whom Lottie regards as "an awful person".[1] Lottie claimed (in a possibly made-up story told to Shelley) that the loss of the friendship was a result of giving it up to the Green Man, leader of a pocket dimension of magical beings, in order for him to use the magic of friendship to heal the threatened dimension after the petrified humans formerly being used to stabilize the dimension were freed. However, they have more recently declared their friendship once again.

Lottie has also become good friends with Claire Little ("Little Claire"). She and Claire ended up running the campaign of Desmond Fishman when he ran for parliament, and during this campaign Erin Winters tried to inject a scandal by printing an article in the Tackleford Cormorant claiming that the two girls were born in rival town Wendlefield.

### Super powers

Lottie's signature "J'Accuse!" move appears to be capable of bowling people over from a distance.

She also seems to be capable of launching people into space with a strong yell.

### References

1. ↑ http://scarygoround.com/?date=20150415
2. ↑ http://scarygoround.com/sgr/ar.php?date=20090123
3. ↑ http://scarygoround.com/sgr/ar.php?date=20090608
4. ↑ http://scarygoround.com/?date=20150618
5. ↑ http://scarygoround.com/?date=20110601