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Born in 1923, Olivia Lane Cranston never knew her mother, who died giving birth to her. Her father and her older brother Lee raised her as best they could, supported by their small dockside air cargo business. Olivia grew up a bit of a tomboy until her father remarried when she was thirteen. Rather than her resent her stepmother Margo, Olivia loved her a great deal, and while she never outgrew wearing trousers and helping her father to fix his plane (and learning to fly!), she also learned how to use lipstick and wear heels and draw nylon lines down her legs.
When America went to war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lee was one of the first local boys to sign up. Her father had no choice but to let her take over Lee's role as pilot while he was off fighting the Nazis. Olivia loved to fly, something of a daredevil who enjoyed taking risks. When her father was tempted to cancel a flight due to bad weather and risk an important contract (hard times, they needed the money!) Liv proceeded to take off without his permission.
She may never recall how she flew into the Hedge, or if somehow the Brackish King chose to emerge from it to take her. But the severe weather brought her plane down, coupled somehow with the magic of the aquatic Keeper. When he remade Olivia, he turned into a selkie; transforming her fully into a seal or a hybrid of woman and pinniped at his will. Time passed in Arcadia as it does, with Olivia (she barely remembered her own name) aging slowly. Almost 70 years had passed, with Olivia Cranston having been believed to be lost at sea.
Over time the Brackish King began to trust her to scout further and further out toward the Hedge. For many years she came as close to the Thorns as she dared, but fear always held her from committing to escape. When the world's foundations began to shake, she was further tempted to try and swim back to her world, but still she waited; torn between the world that was familiar and a world she could barely remember.
It took time. Her longing for familiar things, for the faces of a brother and a father and a (step) mother she could hardly remember, and to remember what it was like not just to be part of the earth, but the earth and the sky as well, became more than she could bear.
Olivia made her escape in mid-January of 2015, not realizing that so how much time had passed, nor understanding how much the world had changed. But she triumphed in one small but important thing - when she crawled into the land of mortals, she was certain of at least one thing: her name.
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