bestatmystery

Alas, it's a comic canon, so no gifs. But I do have pics!

Meet Charlotte "Lottie" Grote.

Never meet your heroes

She's your average high energy, outgoing fourteen year old, from the British town of Tackleford, where she lives with her mother and occasionally her college-aged older sister, and their fluffy little black dog Pepper, and has adventures solving mysteries with her best friends. You know, classic mysteries, like "What have the boys been up to this summer?", "Is Mum's new boyfriend really suspicious or do I just hate change?" or "Why does the fastest girl on the swim team keep trying to drown my best friend in the lake?" (Answers: "Looking for mysteries in the dumbest of places."; "Yes, but mostly because he fancies himself a crime-fighter."; and "Because she's a selkie who bonded with a boy at before they were both in double digits and she isn't handling him looking at other girls well.")

You see, Lottie is from Bad Machinery, which is a series of self-contained adventures in the universe of the web-comic Scary-Go-Round. It's the sort of universe where chemistry accidents can blow holes in the space-time continuum. Where demonic bears attack local townspeople and folks are confused because they're "miles from devil bear country!" Where things like this happen:

Giant hope-eating walnut

Those rainbows are the hopes and dreams of the residents of Tackleford

So when Lottie and her friends got started solving mysteries at a young age, they had plenty to choose from.

Lottie will be coming to Fandom after the events of "The Case of the Modern Men", the last of the Bad Machinery adventures, but before the Bobbins plotline with the devil bears, and definitely well before the "Space is the Place" comic she and her bestie Shauna are currently starring in on the Scary-Go-Round website (though this will not stop me from continuing to madly make icons of her from that material). She thinks she's off to spend the summer in France on a return exchange, after hosting her friend Mimi in Tackleford during "The Case of the Modern Men". It will take rather a bit to convince her that Fandom isn't France. Please pardon her randomly speaking in really terrible French at your characters.

You see, Lottie is . . . not like everyone else. Lottie is a little bit -- odd (even for Tackleford). She has well earned her nickname of "potty Lottie" from her schoolmates back home. She's the sort of girl who announced her first period to her friends with a pamphlet:

Tasin you are a woman now

She gets revenge on the mean French girl who put gum in Mimi's hair by dancing around her and shouting. She's afraid of the machinations of the "fat banshee", which she blames on her family's tendency towards curviness. She wears a cape to school for the entire back half of "The Case of the Modern Men" because she's in mourning for her childhood spent solving mysteries around town. She's a complete and total goofball, who probably has ADHD,

Attention span of a moth in a lightbulb factory

Attention span of a moth in a lightbulb factory

with moments of Sherlockian genius that lend themselves well to, say, solving a murder mystery while snowed in at a writer's retreat in Wales (in the side book "Murder, She Writes"). Or working out before anyone else that the elderly substitute teacher is really the same person as the eleven year old boy with his head stuck in the sixties that she and her friends have seen the old man harassing around town.

So watch out, Dipper Pines. You're going to have some competition in the weird mysteries front. You know, just as soon as Lottie realizes that she can solve mysteries and still be a cool teenager wearing a leather jacket and loitering around scaring the olds.

Mystery is my boyfriend!