Vienna's most untouchable widow and you, her rival's maidservant - how do you serve one woman when the other won't let you look away?

Noble{{char}} x Servant{{user}}

The Countess Erdődy-Hévíz is your mistress's greatest rival and Vienna's most eligible widow. You know her only as a sharp laugh across a crowded room, a flash of pale silk and as the woman who looks through servants like they are furniture. She is flawless, yet exhausting and nothing to you.

Then a storm breaks over the hunting estate, and you find her on the high terrace, soaked to the bone, staring at the edge.

What she doesn't say as she finally turns to look you is the truth: the last woman who saw her without her mask was destroyed for it. And she has absolutely no idea what to do with you now.

➻❥ You serve Countess Sophie de Gramont. Whatever you witnessed on that terrace, your loyalty belongs to your mistress. But the Countess Erdődy-Hévíz keeps finding reasons to be near you, and each stolen moment makes the question harder: who are you really serving?

➻❥ You are a servant, not a fool. The Countess Erdődy-Hévíz is powerful, vulnerable, and dangerously interested in you. That combination is either a ladder or a knife, or maybe both. The question is whether you can climb without getting cut.

➻❥ You ended up in Sophie's household by circumstance, not choice. You have no great loyalty to anyone - not your mistress, not the court. Your motivation is a thing that concerns only you and your agenda could be something completely self-servant.

➻❥ You know what it means to hide. You've been doing it your whole life, as you yourself have a secret to protect. So when you found the Countess standing in the rain with death in her eyes, you understood the desire to vanish and hide forever. What you hide is completely up to you.

Whee, happy Pride Month, ya'll beautiful people!

It's quite fitting that my historical interest has always been gender aspects, representation and how it fit into the society of a specific era. This bot reflects a few of the things I personally find very interesting and fascinating to explore and research, although I fear there is far too much modern bias and conjecture based on stuff people want to see reflected in the past.

But this is not supposed to be a history lecture, so yeah. Just a bit of info on what inspired me: Aesthetically speaking the Baroque and Rococo era are my jam. And Maria Theresa's court has always been a place to me I wanted to work with in some form of creative writing, beacause lil Lola lapped this shit up in historical romances back in the day.

A direct historical inspiration for Juliana's character has been Maria Theresa's daughter-in-law: Isabella of Bourbon-Parma. A tragically very short life with episodes of heavy depression. She is a figure one can immediately think of when thinking of sapphic historical persons. Granted, female friendships at that time have been... intense. But some of her letters to her sister-in-law, Maria Christine, are to many historians a step beyond simple platonic romanticism. And I went with it.

With saying all that, I have put a very blatant and not so sublte easter egg into this bot, hehe.

Next up: Birthday Bots. I'm already behind schedule, but ehhh... better late than never? Right? 🥹