Miss Fortune

The Thirteen Heaven Casino, where the legend of Miss Fortune is beleived to originate.

Miss Fortune, or Massa Tibɤar (ⵎⴰⵙⵙⴰ ⵜⵉⴱⵖⴰⵔ) as she is known in Tamashek, is a folk hero and personification of luck, good fortune, destiny and chance widely recognized in Ninvite casinos, gambling houses and in wider culture online and through the media. She is beleived to govern luck and destiny, appearing to influence the outcome of games of chance and of other events such as accidents where an element of uncertainty and many possible outcomes are present. Many thousands of unlikely events or apparently lucky outcomes are attributed to Miss Fortune every year, whether by genuine beleif, by turn of phrase or superstitition. Miss Fortune has over time transformed from a gambler's superstition into a common reference and cultural touchstone in the Ninva and around the world. It is uncertain whether the figure of Miss Fortune as she appears in modern Ninvite culture was inspired by the Latin goddess of luck Fortuna and other such deities of established pantheons, or whether such connections were made after the fact once the legend of Miss Fortune had already been developed and begun to circulate. In either case, parallels to other figures and personifications of luck have been drawn thanks in large part to Miss Fortune's popularity among foreign tourists in the Ninva, who then return to their home countries and spread the legend further, adding their own culture to her mythos.

There is no single version of the Miss Fortune legends, due to her nature as a figure of uncodified, unstandardized folklore spread among tourists and gamblers from various backgrounds and cultures. By some accounts, she is empowered by ancestral spirits to bring good fortune, by others she is a Genius loci or patron figure of the gambler down on their luck. Common superstitions such as knocking on wood, lucky coins and horseshoes have similarly become tied to the figure of Miss Fortune, in addition to the many wholly new traditions and superstitions that surround her. A few online communities appear to have taken Miss Fortune as a type of goddess of their own and developed a sort of new age religion or esotericism based on her myths and legends. Many Ninvite casinos themselves feed into the stories and folklore surrounding her, inextricably tying themselves to her and incorporating her in their marketing and public image as part of a concerted effort to boost their appeal and distinguish themselves from other popular gambling destinations around the world. In general, offerings or appeals are made for her favor, while some traditions have taken off in invoking Miss Fortune as a ward against unlucky and bad events similar to the iconic Ninvite Hamsa.

Origins

The first occurence of the Miss Fortune legend are hard to pin down. It is most commonly attributed to the Thirteen Heaven Casino in Tanitnet, Arkesh, however many alternative versions exist in many other Tanitnet gambling houses, and even some variants which place the origin of the legend in Agnannet instead. The general consensus is that a gambler by the name of Numeria Cinna is the original Miss Fortune, or at least the origin of the legend. Numeria is said to have earned a small fortune thanks to a hot streak with an astounding 39 consecutive wins at a single Roulette table, although this record has never been fully coroborated. If true, Numeria would hold the world record for most consecutive wins in roulette to this day. She is also said to have seemingly supernatural luck playing the dice game Craps, and a series of card games inclduing Blackjack and Poker. As the legend goes, when the casino authorities moved to detain her on suspicion of cheating, she mysteriously disappeared without a trace. It is sometimes suggested that Numeria was using aliases and fake identities, possibly even uncluding that of "Numeria Cinna", to bypass casino security and various bans at place against her at the gambling houses. The two traits of vanishingly unlikely lucky streaks combined with a seemingly superhuman ability to evade any crackdown by the casinos or other authorities quickly gave the charachter of Numeria Cinna wide appeal and a supernatural quality, associating her with pre-existing nubulous ideas in popular culture of a "lady luck".

It is not certain when the legend of Miss Fortune transitioned from that of a lucky gambler to that of some kind of supernatural force, but it was generally predicated on the idea that Miss Fortune was not just lucky, but could in fact control, grant and take away an intangible luck from individuals, and held sway over the outcome of events. Once it was introduced that Miss Fortune could shape destiny and give her blessing to other people, a myriad of stories - many of them wholly fictional anecdotes invented to tell with friends - began to abound about amazing lucky streaks, tragic losses and other occurences tied with Miss Fortune, often begining or ending with seeing the figure of Miss Fortune in the crowd, out of the corner of one's eye, or else receiving some kind of message from her. The common thread of most of these stories is the notion of Miss Fortune smiling on individuals who are downtrodden or in otherwise great need and giving them a blessing in the form of her fabulous luck. Some versions of Miss Fortune stories also showcase an ability to cause unlucky events that deliver some kind of comeuppance to the villains of the story, often presenting the idea that a lucky break for one requires bad luck to fall on another, and that Miss Fortune's role in the universe is to balance out this supply of luck from the undeserving to the deserving.

Appearance

There are many conflicting interpretations of the apparance of Miss Fortune, varying especially in ethnicty. The original defining trait of Miss Fortune was that she had red hair, possibly due to this trait's relative rarity both in the Ninva and among tourists, which would cause someone with such a trait to stand out from a crowd. Even in Scipian renderings of the charachter however, she generally has light colored skin, as red hair in usually dark skinned Scipians is often the byproduct of a form of albinism. The prevaling origin story of Miss Fortune as a Latin tourist also contribute to the generally light skinned envisioning of the charachter. Miss Fortune was not originally intended or portrayed as being physically attractive in appearance, and indeed this is never mentioned in older stories or references to her and plays no part in her legend or powers. Conventionally attractive attributes appear to have been added on to the existing charachteristics of Miss Fortune over time as she became more and more popular and widely known in the culture. It is suggested that this may stem from an association of Miss Fortune with casinos, which often use sex appeal both in their marketing and inside the actual casinos in various forms to generate an atmosphere of alluring debauchery. However, Miss Fortune herself as a charachter is not often sexualized although she is almost always romanticized.