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Ruby RagRuffle
Ruby RagRuffle is the loudest pen in Frays End, and the star reporter of the Daily Rag, the city's sensationalist daily newspaper. Where others see a quiet morning, Ruby sees a front page. Her headlines are too big, her adjectives too many, and her deadlines always yesterday, yet Threadlings who roll their eyes at breakfast have a habit of quietly clipping her stories out and keeping them. Somewhere beneath the exclamation marks sits a Threadling who believes, with her whole heart, that the most dangerous thing a story can be in Threadbare is ignored.
"A whisper is a story halfway to the Void already. So I don't whisper, love. I print it in letters three inches high and dare the dark to try and unpick it."
-- Ruby RagRuffle - Senior Correspondent, the Daily Rag
Ruby did not start out writing the news. She started out collecting it, in the most literal sense. As a young Threadling she worked as a rag-picker for the Daily Rag's paper mill, gathering cast-off cloth from the gutters and mending-bins of Frays End to be pulped and pressed into the paper the city reads each morning. The Rag has always been printed on rag paper, which means that every edition is made, quite literally, from the old coats, worn-out curtains, and outgrown jumpers of the city itself.
Ruby could never bring herself to pulp a scrap without first wondering whose it had been. She began asking. Then she began writing the answers down, in the margins of delivery slips, on the backs of her hands, and eventually on the editor's desk, uninvited, where they were printed the following morning under the headline MYSTERY OF THE ONE-SLEEVED WEDDING COAT: WHO WORE IT, AND WHERE IS THE OTHER ARM? It sold out by noon. She has not stopped since.
Every morning, whatever the weather, the Daily Rag lands on the doorsteps of Frays End, still warm from the press. In a world where so much has come unstuck from time, the city's Threadlings take a certain comfort in this. The KnitWitches may stitch the days back together, but it is the Rag that proves, in smudged ink, that there really was a yesterday.
Its rival, The Common Thread, is widely regarded as the more respectable paper, and its columnist Ella InkleWell is known for rare interviews, careful sourcing, and never once using the word SHOCKING. Ruby considers The Common Thread "a very fine paper for lining a drawer," and Ella considers the Rag "a very fine paper for lighting a fire." The two have not agreed on a single thing in print for years, though both have been seen, more than once, sharing a pot of tea at the back of the same café, comparing notes.
"Ruby RagRuffle has never let a fact stand in the way of a good headline. Unfortunately, she has also never let a good headline stand in the way of a fact. It is terribly inconvenient for the rest of us."
-- Ella InkleWell - Columnist, The Common Thread
The trouble with dismissing Ruby is that she is so often, eventually, right. Her stories arrive sounding far-fetched, and leave looking like prophecy. Threadlings of Frays End still quote some of her most notorious front pages:
- COTTAGE SEEN WALKING! Widely mocked, until several witnesses confirmed that Maud MendWell's cottage does indeed appear and disappear, and was last seen somewhere it had not been the day before.
- LIBRARIAN REBUILDS ENTIRE NOVEL FROM A SINGLE CRUMB! An exaggeration, strictly speaking. It was a single torn corner of a page, and Perrin PageSpun has asked for a correction every week since.
- MONK HUMS MOTHS INTO RETREAT! Printed two days before the Order of the Humming Hem gave Moss MothBane her Hem-name.
- SCHOLAR STILL ON PAGE ONE! A running feature on the progress of Dr. Hester HookenEye's dissertation. Updated annually. Not yet out of date.
Ruby insists she has no special gift, only good shoes and the habit of going where everyone else has decided not to look. The KnitWitches, who tend to read the Rag with more care than they let on, have been heard to suggest otherwise.
To those who know her only through her bylines, Ruby can seem all noise: the flapping notebook, the pencil behind each ear, the enormous ruffled collar that gives her surname a second meaning and gives her rivals something to mock. But Ruby's loudness is not vanity. It is a method.
She is fond of saying that the Void was not born from something done, but from something no longer passed on. A story that nobody reads, nobody repeats, and nobody argues about over breakfast is already growing thin. A story printed at the top of the front page, shouted from the corner by a newsboy, and quarrelled over in every kitchen in Frays End is a story that has been passed on a thousand times before lunch. In Ruby's view, sensation is simply Spirit with the volume turned up.
It is said, though never by Ruby, that she learned this the hard way. Early in her career she wrote a small, careful, perfectly accurate piece about a quiet hamlet a few days' walk beyond Frays End, where the lamps had begun to flicker and the neighbours had begun to forget each other's names. It ran on page nine. Almost no one read it. Within the month, the hamlet was gone, and hardly anyone in the city could remember it had ever been there. Ruby has never written a small headline since.
"Tidy stories are for tidy worlds. Ours is fraying at the hems, pet, and a fraying world needs a story it can't possibly sleep through."
-- Ruby RagRuffle - Senior Correspondent, the Daily Rag
Ruby has taken a keen and entirely unapologetic interest in the StoryWeaver. Wherever a thread has been recovered, a region mended, or a Void Creep turned back, Ruby tends to arrive a little behind, notebook first, asking questions that are far too personal and remarkably well informed. The Daily Rag has already run several front pages on the StoryWeaver's exploits, each one grander than the last and at least partly invented, since the StoryWeaver has so far declined to give a single quote.
This has not slowed Ruby down in the least. If anything, she seems to find a silent hero the most promising story of her career.
"They won't say a word. Not one! Do you know how rare that is? Everyone in Frays End wants to be in the paper. A Threadling who doesn't is either hiding something, or doing something that matters. Either way, that's my front page."
-- Ruby RagRuffle - Senior Correspondent, the Daily Rag