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String Theory: The Foresight of Diviner Danielle Obrove; Or, Bolt of Inspiration; Or, Thrilling Yarn; Or, Pythy Remarks; Or, Destiny’s Child; Or, The Whorl’d Navel
Hey there! Ever wish you could hold your future literally in the palm of your hand?

Want your particular causal line read with total certainty, without any fear of alternate futures muddying things up?

Wanna know that your undoing will not be ironically by your own hand, thanks to a drastic measure taken to avoid said undoing?

Well, stop by Danielle Obrove’s Discount Oracle to see exactly what the future holds for you!

Considering she grew up to become a master of divination, it is perhaps appropriate that most of Danielle Obrove’s family has prophecy surrounding them. Her parents, ever the forward-thinkers, desired some knowledge of the multitudes of offspring that they would inevitably produce, to hopefully budget accordingly and prepare for possible traumatic life events. To that end, the Obroves consulted a soothsayer named Madame Gehstock to reveal the minutia of their future reproductive history. Gehstock had many optimistic portents to grant them, not least of which was that the Obrove’s first litter would be an incredibly gifted set of septuplets, heroes and leaders one and all. The prediction promised that their seventh child would become the greatest among them. Danielle’s parents would have of course been unable to guess that the final part of their seer’s prediction was steeped in gross personal bias. By ‘The greatest of all,’ Madame Gehstock merely meant that the seventh kit in the bunch, Danielle, would be fated to become a seer as well. The lady augurer had only really agreed to predict the Obrove family’s future, technically tens of individual prophecies (And therefore a lot of extra work for the price they had agreed upon), because she happened to be getting an apprentice out of the deal.

While Danielle’s siblings went to far-off lands to learn knight’s code, powerful magic, and political rhetoric, she was stuck living with her parents to hone her divination under the guidance of Madame Gehstock. The aged medium used a unique and highly effective form of fortune telling. With a wave of her hand, the woman was able to tug free a ‘strand’ of reality, the structured stuff of creation. The strands manifest as a sort of technicolor wool roving, which could then be run through a specialised spinning wheel to condense their substance into a yarn aligned with the preordained course of an individual’s life. The contents of this yarn could be interpreted by oracles such as Madame Gehstock. What the old woman dabbled in was the manufacture of spools of tangible precognition, and after her training Danielle would be able to do the same. By the time she was eleven years old, Danielle had been presented with her own spinning wheel so that she could practice her divination at home.

Danielle didn’t mind that, among the seven eldest Obrove children, she was the one with the least “extravagant” fortune. In fact, she loved her work. She loved tugging upon the raw stuff of the universe, of reading the patterns of the yarn in both its processed and unprocessed state. The art Danielle was to master by fate’s mandate wasn’t the problem. The problem lay in the fact that her parent’s house was becoming crowded. Thanks to Gehstock’s predictions, Danielle’s parents were armed with the knowledge of how best to raise each of their children. Without fear of their progeny’s future, they set right to work...proliferating. Soon enough, Danielle could hardly take a step in her home without running into a little sibling. Something had to change. It was time to move out.

At the age of 19, Danielle’s training was complete and she was ready to begin fortune telling on her own. The question was, where could she work? Home was entirely unfeasible, flooded with brothers and sisters as it was. A city seemed most attractive to Danielle. There were plenty of people in need of a diviner in the busy capital of the country of Ulex. While the land was in the middle of an ongoing era of peace, the day-to-day hustle and bustle could still produce its worries. The citizen’s lives were very uncertain from one day to the next, even without the shadow of war bearing down on them, and a seer of Danielle’s caliber could help quell those uncertainties.

Not just seeking a change of scenery, Danielle made the move to Ulex so she could also prove her art’s supremacy, and to steer the people of Ulex away from false prophets. You see, Danielle’s world was orbited by a ring of massive crystal shards, said by some to be the shattered body of a god. Bits of the crystals would periodically break off and crash into the planet’s surface, and the capital of Ulex was built on the site of one of the largest recorded impacts. Danielle chose to set up shop in the capital because she had heard rumors of charlatans claiming to be able to divine the future within the facets of these stones. There was no denying the utility of the crystals; they could be honed to incredibly sharp edges, used as foci for spellcasting, hollowed out and used as homes, and even converted into a source of fuel. However, broken body of a god or not, Danielle doubted the predictions glimpsed in the stones’ lattice could compare to the absolute truth her skills fostered. Danielle would make the future clearer than any crystal ever could.

Danielle Obrove eventually settled on a small apartment near the center of the city. Word quickly spread of a new fortune teller in town, of how her predictions seemed to be uncannily accurate compared to the norm. Danielle Obrove is now 21 years old, happily maintaining her own cosy oracle in the capital city, granting news of things to come to any and all who seek it... For a price, of course.

The Red (Or Yellow or Pink or Orange or Blue) String of Fate; Or, Fleece-Wrought Future; Or, Additional Information
The “wool” that Danielle pulls from thin air is in fact pure geometric order as put in place by the gods. It’s a segment of the raw, unifying substance of the cosmos. All the operations of the universe, everything that dwells within it, and everything that was, is, and shall be are encompassed and bound by the soothsayer’s ubiquitous, intangible thread.

Despite appearances, Danielle Obrove isn’t actually unravelling the fabric of creation when she performs a fortune telling. The fibers remain connected to the universal whole in a continuous complicated loop, it’s merely that the section of wool used is invisible until exposed by Danielle’s abilities. Danielle’s augury reveals the strands to those with unaided sight, while also transmuting them so that they are able to interact with physical objects such as her spinning wheel.

Danielle Obrove’s spinning wheel doesn’t operate as one might expect. Normally, the wool is twisted tighter and simultaneously wound around the bobbin. Danielle’s spinning wheel instead “sheds” the yarn from the roving; it is sieved out of the unprocessed fiber and then fit onto the bobbin. That is to say, the details specific to the future of the person seeking a prediction are isolated from the quintessential fabric of space-time to be read by Danielle once the wheel’s done spinning. It’s...really weird, but there’s no arguing with the results.

Because Danielle Obrove’s predictions are 100% accurate, she is in some ways unpopular with a certain subset of the capital’s layfolk. There are those who go to the city’s crystal augurers simply to hear what they want to hear, whether it’s the undeniable universal truth or not. Many people do value Danielle’s methods though, particularly city officials or wandering heroes needing advice. Danielle’s fate didn’t carry the same grandeur as her older siblings, but it did lead her to assisting others like them. She gets to hear many stories of heated legislative debate, monsters slain, or new magical formulae derived, and she’s fine with that. She can experience their past glories in their tales and witness their future triumphs in the strands.

After a reading, the yarn Danielle works on her spinning wheel can be further processed into nearly-indestructible garments. As time passes and the predicted events grow nearer, the yarn begins to dull in coloration and its magical enchantments fade. Danielle doesn’t knit the yarn into clothing herself, so clients have to seek someone to do it for them. The shawl Danielle wears is made of the exhausted threads pertaining to her older siblings’ futures. Since each of the destinies predicted by Madame Gehstock has come to pass, the shawl has no special properties beside sentimental value.

Danielle’s technique focuses in on the exact fated path of a specific instance of the person she is serving. The yarn states facts exactly as they will be for a person, any vagueness in the interpreted prophecy is on the part of the diviner. Danielle generally tries to relate things back verbatim (unless of course the prophecy says she isn’t going to). A few particulars to keep in mind:

• The yarn accounts for branching destinies. There is no fighting the fate Danielle Obrove portends, because attempting to fight fate, and how successful one will be in endeavoring to do so, is covered in the prediction.


• The yarn accounts for alternate timelines. As far as the thread is concerned, those are the destinies of different people, altogether different ”you’s.” Only one possibility is accounted for, and that is your possibility. The threads only ‘fray’ if that is the request being made of them.


• The yarn accounts for last-second interference by close allies, mentors, or powerful entities. If there is to be some sort of ex machina, then it shows up in the prediction, obviously.

Danielle Obrove makes it a point to never divine her own future, though she finds it amusing to look ahead at the paths of her alternate selves. Because there are infinite outcomes, there’s little chance she can determine her own fate by process of elimination. She also enjoys looking at those more outlandish derivatives, such as those cases where she was born a boy, or a snake, or a dragon or something.

Danielle Obrove can’t tell any fortunes without her spinning wheel--she doesn’t possess any clairvoyant powers herself--but she can call on the unbreakable raw wool of the universe whenever she needs it. Danielle can affix either end of the thread to a point in space and then adjust its length and tension as needed. The power is useful in cases where Danielle finds herself atop a mountain that needs rappelling, needs to lasso some cattle, or when she needs to construct a trap for enemies of the state. Just in case. The diviner does have an adventurous spirit, after all. It’s more likely, however, that she’ll just use the strands to construct for herself a glowing rainbow hammock.

Danielle Obrove is capable of no magic other than the creation of her strands. This is true of most people on Danielle’s world, in fact--no magician from her home planet of Gorse can cast very powerful spells without first storing magical energy in shards of the ever-present crystals. This is no issue for Danielle, because her power doesn’t rely as much on magical energy so much as divine mandate. Her mentor’s prediction said Danielle would be able to utilize the strands, and therefore she can.

Because her training with Madame Gehstock was focused on fortune telling, Danielle never got a chance to learn any other magic. She holds the crystals in such disdain for their use in “false” fortune telling that she doesn’t necessarily want to learn.

While Danielle is capable of little magic other than her work with the strands, members of her order are traditionally trained in archery. Tradition states that an heirloom bow is to be passed down from master to student. When using the bow, a seer is to string it with the strands, because it’s believed that firing an arrow from a taut line of universal law allows it to always fly true. Danielle wouldn’t really know this, as Madame Gehstock spent less than a day training her in how to use the bow. Now it sits in the corner of Danielle’s home, gathering dust, though the seer would like to learn to use it with greater skill.

People from Gorse are unique not only in their inhibited magical ability, but also in their capacity of warding off evil. Demons and undead spirits give Gorse, and by extension its inhabitants, a wide berth. The reason for this is unknown, but some scholars theorize it’s the same factor that prevents Gorsians from casting magic on their own.

The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
The soothsayer Danielle Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of the Kudzu City stationed news reporter, Daniel Obrove. She is not his former life, his blood relative, or a close acquaintance. She's the Obrove if Obrove were a yarn-spinning fortune teller, while the journalist is Obrove in the form of a completely mundane journalist in a far-from-mundane city of powered individuals and intrigue.

And yes, Danielle has looked into a couple of the reporter’s futures. The forecast is incredibly foreboding for someone so innocuous...

The other fates that Obroves could potentially follow can be found on their alt list, here.

There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...

STAY TUNED!