Niamh's Questionnaire

I currently live in Coober Pedy Australia, I like the isolation and I moved here with my birth mother about ten years ago. I could have stayed in Wales to be closer to my other mother while she taught at Cambridge, but I'd rather be here for when she visits. She never left after the last visit, more on that later.

Typical for Coober Pedy, my home is entirely underground and well insulated from above. Also, every expansion since we moved in has at least partially paid for itself in opals. I keep it tidy on a hobbit hole scale, smoothing out the walls and such then painting over them. I do livestreams from a room decorated with various fictional items and themes, and containing Owlexandra's perch. Sometimes she streams storytelling, but the audience believes she's either a puppet or advanced cgi.

Also I have a big reference and fiction library, and an underground pool on a lower level, peaceful in the extreme.

While I'm waiting to fully inherent one mom's estate, I'm avoiding draining away the other's. Other than inheritance, I make some money entertaining others, writing and acting primarily, aside from the aforementioned livestreams. The rest I make doing scholarly stuff, the most profitable being translations. I need to avoid telling people that I already know some untranslatable texts like the Voynich Manuscript.

While I could definitely stay home reading and streaming, I don't really want to, so I spend a good chunk of my money on traveling and then save a chunk of that by streaming overseas and writing it off as business expenses. I've started producing small scale films in my area as practice to be a director and producer, my favorite one made use of the prop ship that's a permanent feature in Coober Pedy.

Anyhow, it won't be long until I own my mother's stock in major companies like Disney and Amazon, instead of just getting the dividends, as well as all the other businesses and investments she owned at least part of.

Thanks to various aspects of my background, not just because one of my moms was trans, I know bigotry from a lot of angles, and I think the most insidious comes from religion. Too many people don't even understand that they're being horrible and think they're just following what they think their religion says to do. Sometimes religion even says outright to be awful, especially with parenting guidelines, and the followers assume they're good people.

From all of that to obvious and open hatred over things that aren't their business and hurt no-one, I want it all gone. On the large scale, without it there would be less ways for the power hungry to mislead the masses.

It's not effective to simply end individual bigots, and large scale changes aren't easy either, so while I tackle those when they arise, my main effort is in teaching compassion and understanding through my entertainment projects. Get people to realize why they don't need to hate, and help them learn how to behave instead.

I have no intention of dying for this, though I might be a martyr if I did. I do expect bigots to try and kill me for it eventually, and if they succeed I mean for there to be an ever increasing number to carry on after me.

Some of the most defining things are really about my trans mom Cassandra, and the deal she made with the Moon. Whether it was actually the goddess Arianrhod or a fae or something else, it's why and how I exist at all.

I think just accounting for personal events, the biggest is when I was studying non-English books in what's now my library, and realized stuff made sense beyond just similar vocabulary across related languages. Then when I focused on movies in other languages, I could make an effort to concentrate and understand every word. It's getting easier, but I only recently realized what my eyes do when I do it. Owlexandra, formerly my 'now dead' mom Cassandra noticed it. With the goddess, fae, etc changing her like that, I'm sure I'll find out I can do more, and expect my eyes may do it for those abilities as well, or at least some of them. For now, I'm diving into every old book my parents had on magic, alchemy, and the occult. If magic is something I can learn, I intend to learn it.

The one I'm closest to, she's an owl now. A cis female owl after living into her 50s as a trans woman. Thanks to the same variety of weird shit that changed her, I share her memories up to age 13, and have my own for those years as well. It was weird when I realized we were kind of the same person but not really. Anyhow, as Owlexandra she's the only person I can trust about the weird shit in the world.

Then there's my other mom, my birth mother. I'm not ready to talk about her. They met in the UK, she died in Australia, and that's all I want to say on that.

A third person? I'm a little stumped on who to name since most of the people in my daily life aren't that close. So, while I don't see her as often as others, I'd say my closest friend is another Australian streamer named Kai. She's Maori and her off-screen job is in folklore and linguistics, focusing on Maori. In Maori kai means food and her mother is a chef, it's basically a family in-joke.