#winnie schott

CRESCENT ART GALLERY

Established in: 1981 Neighborhood: Goldfinch Owner(s): Alma and Donald Robbins Employee(s): Harlow Green (Curator), John Bernstein (Curator & Manager), Winnie Schott (Exhibit Designer)

THE STORY

[ image: a winnie schott comic, titled 'How To Change Your Legal Gender Marker 4 Free!'. the title has a little smiley face with one big swirly eye on it next to it. winnie acts out the two step process below.

step one is to apply white-out to whatever you're fixing on your identification card. step two is to use sharpie to fix whatever you wanna fix.

darci mason III was the granddaughter of the original darci, a model and artist who started a line of dress-up dolls for children. darci as a brand blew up almost immediately, extremely popular and coveted, though the masons made sure it stayed in the family, unwilling to sell out and ensuring there were heirs to take on the task.

that is, until darci III was caught in a train accident, injuring her spine and rendering her unable to continue her overseeing of the company. in the panic afterward, unsure of what to do without a set heir or anybody to trust with the company, she was bought out by a very convincing lex luthor, who offered her an interesting proposition: she could continue her family's work if she moved to metropolis and worked as the head of design and head model, and lexcorp would completely fund and facilitate her 'recovery'.

said 'recovery' was something similar to metallo's own 'recovery', an experimental replacement of her entire spine with lexcorp's technology. a miracle, at first. she was grateful for it, and was grateful that she could continue to work on her family's life's project, even if it seemed just a tad bit cheaper now. she even began enjoying modeling her doll's designs, and agreed that a modeling and real-life clothing design link to the dolls would make darci dolls even more popular. it all seemed to be going uphill...

until she overheard something about 'the darci project'. she had thought they were talking about their very first runway show later that month, but listening on, she learned that her spine was a form of metallo parasite, a metal that slowly grew to absorb and replace the bone connected to it until the entire skeleton was made of it. the metal would then grow to replace everything else, slowly turning everything except the brain into a robotic shell. they were testing it on her because she would be in the company, under little duress, and they could regularly check on her status without causing too much suspicion.

she was horrified. it had been half a year since her spine surgery, and she had been to at least a dozen check-ups since then, all of them saying she was doing just great. she realized she didn't have anywhere to turn, she had no proof, and she wasn't allowed to leave the city to find a non-lexcorp-associated hospital, knowing that disappearing now would cause them to get suspicious. she had to think hard about what she would do next...

[ at the same time this was all happening, a certain toy-based villain in metropolis was ecstatic. after all, winnie schott was a very big fan of darci dolls, to the point that he considered her one of the only people he could trust in his entire life. he had been excitedly sending e-mails to the darci website and letters to the darci magazines, hoping to get responses to his design ideas or maybe an invitation to the darci runway show that spring. (not getting an invitation wouldn't have stopped him from going, of course, but it would be sooo cool if darci wanted him to go!!!) he got a few responses, but they were typical 'wow, what a lovely design! im so glad darci inspired you so much!' and 'look forward to our coverage of the s/s darci fashion show!' responses, nothing personal or particularly inviting. it was annoying, but he kept trying, hoping that maybe he'd get through eventually. ]

darci overheard some of the magazine and website editors talking about how they kept getting spammed with handwritten letters and e-mails from some freak named 'winslow schott', and how they were supposed to just throw them out now because lex was tired of humoring the idiot. she did some research, realizing that this winslow schott was a dangerous supervillain known as the toyman, and after reading some of the e-mails for the magazine, that he was 'very, very, very happy that darci dolls had come to metropolis, even if it was technically owned by lex 'why dont people love me anymore' luthor'.

so she came to a conclusion: she was going to use this 'toyman' to get back at lex luthor, even if she felt a little bad to be playing with the emotions of someone who seemed to genuinely love and care about darci, the doll.

[ image: winnie schott back when he was 13, during the period he was adopted by a pageant mom. he’s wearing just the worst outfit, with a big glittery purple sweater with puffy sleeves, huge bangles, a puffy pink and deep pink pinstriped skirt with a very visible white puff holding up the skirt, and light purple tights and little pink pumps. he’s got like, too much makeup, and isn’t allowed to wear his glasses, which makes him pretty much blind. he says ‘I can’t see’, and his current mom says, ‘stop complaining, winona, you look better without them! now go win mommy a trophy!’. ]

[ image: winne schott wearing a vaguely modified darci outfit based off of barbie's 1964 diving suit. he's wearing a green swimsuit under a bright orange hooded sweatshirt, with a green goggle/snorkle set sitting on top of his head and big green flipper-shoes. he has a light green water tank on his back, attached to a pump-gun with a smiley face on it. he is pretty happy about this whole set-up. ]

description under cut

here's a different variation on toyman... i'm calling him winnie, for now. here's some Facts (link)

when he was about eleven, he burned down his house after his parents abandoned him without warning. he took his toys with him and nothing else after accidentally causing a fire in the kitchen, watching in the front yard until someone called the cops. he was taken into the foster system after it became clear his family had split. unfortunately, none of the families interested in adopting him wanted to keep him for more than a few weeks, at most six months, as he was so distant and generally creepy because of behaviors he developed due to the abuse he went through with his biological parents.

he doesn't have a great big plan or anything, he just likes causing trouble for 'the man', mostly lex luthor at this point. he likes using his centipede vehicles to climb all over the lexcorp building, but he has also tried good old arson to set the building on fire once.

he hates superman because he's, well, a supervillain and keeps getting stopped by him, but also because he thinks superman sorta represents a 'scary father figure' for metropolis, and that it's his own job to get rid of that figure. he also hates that superman protects lex, like, why??? why do that, he sucks and is bald. let winnie destroy this selfish beacon of conditional philanthropy.

he's a transgender gay guy. he hasn't medically transitioned, and isn't planning on it.

he collects darci dolls because he considers her the only one from his childhood that hasn't abandoned him. he also collects pairbears, which were themed teddy bear toys that were made to hold hands with each other, but were taken out of production because the magnet mechanism in their hands were too strong and pinched kids when they tried to make pairbears hold hands.

'sure schott toys' isn't an actual thing in winnie's earth, more a joke company he came up with for his evil toy-mecha things.