Claire Night (1415-) · 5:03am Aug 12th, 2016
Claire Night
Family Name: Night. Personal Name: Claire. Social Class: Lower Gentry.
Profession: Librarian, Researcher and Interrogator, an officer in the Night Watch.
Kind: Unicorn. Sex: Female. Born: YOH 1415
Coat: Very even dark blue when young, now very even blue -- it lightened evenly as she aged.
Mane: When young was jet black, speckled white in middle age, now snow white.
Eyes: The silverish-gray of the Moon.
Cutie Mark: A black star-filled sky with the Moon hanging in it.
Talent: Observation, through any interference whether physical or psychological. Very high general intelligence.
Skills: All Sensory at high levels from Talent; also Conversation, Debate, Deduction, Interrogation, Poetry, Psychology, Research, Writing.
Appearance: In her youth she had a certain calm, cool beauty and poise; she has aged very gracefully but is obviously now a nonagenarian.
Personality: Calm, cool, curious, honest, honorable, logical; loyal to Realm, family and friends. When she acted as an interrogator she would trick her subjects by misdirecting them into revealing more than they should; she was a mistress of the "soft" interrogation techniques. It was a point of pride for her to never directly lie to her subjects, but instead to induce them to lie to themselves.
Motivation: Curiosity, honor, and loyalty.
Relationships: Younger brother Starry Night (1428-) and through him her nephew Night Dancer (1452-) and grand-daughters Moon Dancer (1482-) and Teacup Moon (1484-); first husband Shining Blaze (1416-1479) and her sons Night Light (1438-) and Night Flight (1447-1495); through Night Light her daughter-in-law Twilight Velvet (1440-) and their biological children Shining Armor (1472-) and Twilight Sparkle (1483-) and adoptive child Spike the Dragon (1490-) as grandchildren.
History: Claire interned in the Night Watch as a filly in her late teens, and fell in love with its Library, particularly the Secret Archive. Working in the Palace, she met, fell in love with and married Shining Blaze, the Pegasus Guardspony who was the great romance of her life. She did intelligence analysis work during the Mexicolt War and interrogation work during the Gulf Rebellion. She's long since retired from active Night Watch service, but sometimes stops in at the Archives, where she is a figure of awe to the officers there. From YOH 1500 on she has realized that she will be remembered by history mostly for being Twilight Sparkle's grandmother, which she takes philosophically; the more so because she likes Twilight Sparkle anyway.
Comments: Claire Night is one of the smartest mares you will ever meet, thouogh eclipsed by her brilliant grand-daughter Twilight Sparkle. Unlike Twilight Sparkle she has considerable social skills, and has used them professionally in both intrigue and interrogation on behalf of the Night Watch. She loves books and the secrets she can learn from them. She is extremely honest -- but also extremely tricky -- and she makes it work, mostly because she can easily outwit most other Ponies.
Huh. It feels weird to have Moondancer and Twilight so closely related. Of course, given those two at the time they first knew each other, the conversation probably never turned to family matters.
In any case, Claire sounds like quite the character. I'd love to see one of her interrogations, as long as I wasn't the one being interrogated. And it's not like ponies go into the Night Watch for the notoriety.
4145520
Well, I have them be second cousins. The mother of Claire and Starry Night, their great-grandmother, is their common ancestor. I haven't named her or given her a personality or history yet, except that she would have been born in the late 1370's / early 1380's and probably died before Twilight Sparkle or Moon Dancer were born.
They'd both know about the kinship, but it would be less important to them than the personal friendship. The Canterlot gentry is inter-related a lot anyway -- most of them are at least fourth to sixth cousins with one another.
Claire's meant to be an elegant "soft" interrogator who uses a combination of politeness and misdirection to induce prisoners to tell her more than they mean to. The reason she got into this from library research is that one key to that technique is learning as much as possible about the prisoner beforehand, so that one knows onto what subjects to subtly steer the conversation. Of course, in non-war situations (most of the time) she's primarily been a librarian and researcher.
The general way this sort of technique works is that one first socially isolates and disorients the prisoner, getting her to become lonely and lose track of time; then the interrogator presents herself as a potential friend among the otherwise cold and distant captors. If done right, no actual brutality or force, other than that needed to keep the prisoner escaping, is actually needed. This has obvious appeal to the relatively gentle Equestrian culture, and is very effective given the chumminess of the Ponies in general as a species.
Claire's so good at it that she's wound up making actual friends this way: ones who continued to know her after the ends of the wars.
One of the reasons I created Claire was to show an alternative model for an intelligent character who would be a plausible grandparent for Shining Armor and Twilight Sparkle. Like Shining, she's military. Like Twilight, she's a huge scholar and bibliophile. Unlike Shining, she was in an intelligence staff role; unlike Twilight, she used her intelligence mostly for social skills. They're Not So Different, though -- Shining doesn't mostly do field work any more, and Twilight is developing her social skills as the Princess of Friendship.
Out of war, Claire often interracted with Ponies being held for various reasons by the WCP -- usually warlocks or unfortunate Ponies empowered or possessed in dangerous ways. She generally tried to reform or rehabilitate them; the modern Equestrian standard policy with warlocks is to try to convince them to use their powers for good, if they haven't committed truly unforgivable crimes; and of course most of the unfortunately empowered and possessed were never evil to begin with, and simply need to learn to live safely with their powers or be exorcised of whatever is possessing them.
This was not entirely safe work, as one can imagine. I don't mention it here, because Claire wasn't primarily a mage, but her knowledge of various protective spells is one of the reasons she lived to be an old mare. Also among her friends were many Ponies she had reformed or rehabilitated, in most cases because her help was the difference between being too dangerous to be let loose among other Ponies and being able to have useful careers and happy lives.
Claire did a lot of good in her life.
Sounds like on cool Granny. Moondancer's lucky her plans in the shadowverse got short shoted by Twilight, other wise her own grand aunt might have had to have words with her.
Edit: I wonder what present's she got for her family for Hearth warming... most likely books.
Heh. I was hoping/expecting one for Bubble Burst/Crackle Pop/Derby Hooves.