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Emilie Stephens-Martin, born September 23 of (depending on the source) 1945, 1951, 1512, or “an inestimable span before the universe took form”, is an artistic ski jumper, experimental physicist specializing in optic matrices, champion snail racer, and the only person known to have outright rejected an invitation to give a TED talk, calling the organization “a venal nest of pretentious snot-twaddles”.

Additionally, she is venerated as a saint by the Makhachkala breakaway sect of the Coptic Church; wanted by the Franklin Mint for questioning in connection with a ring of knock-off collectible cat plates that flooded the market in 2003; convicted in absentia for piracy in Lausanne; and widely regarded as the inspiration for Cartier’s iconic parfum, Le Basier du Dragon.

BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE
Miss Stephens-Martin is believed, by those who hold her to be of earthly origin, to have been born near Bandar Seri Begawan, where she is now adored by the populace as the city’s protextrix and patron. The exact spot where her creche was situated, per local legends, has fallen victim to a construction boom and is now occupied by the Bangunan Alat-Alat Kebesaran Diraja. The semi-annual mass sacrifice of meerkats made by her most devoted followers has, from time to time, interfered with tour groups.

In her teens, she earned her first fortune running a chess club, fronting as a brothel, in Kowloon. This club, the Crooked Rook, has inspired many pornographic films, including ‘Bishop Takes Queen”, “Barely Legal Castling”, “Rank and File High School Hussies”, and “Bc4 Qh4+“. Grand Master István Abonyi developed his eponymous variation on the Budapest Gambit while playing at the Crooked Rook.

In 1968 the club’s cafe received a single Michelin star.

Arguments that Miss Stephens-Martin is an ageless shape-shifter of no distinct origin as she predates the bourgeois concepts of Time and Space, are supported, however scantily, by a 12th century epistolary fragment in the Gothic Romance section of the Vatican Library, which describes, in more than ordinarily hackneyed church Latin, the events of a mid-summer night in 1178 near the Byzantine outpost of Trebizond. The fragment, part of a cache of documents sent to Doge Enrico Dandolo during the Fourth Crusade, describes a long-haired nude woman who simply appeared by the village well at dawn after a new moon. During the night, terrified villagers had claimed the moon was on fire, with “it’s [body] writhing and throbbing like a snake”. The woman slowly faded into a blue mist, leaving behind a cloud that smelled of vetyver and cloves and a small alabaster thimble.

There is also a peculiar diary entry of Samuel Pepys, dated the 11th of February, 1664, that sings the praises of a “comely and bosomous vixen who boasts great ease of double-entry bookkeeping and a battledore serve most curious”. Pepys believed this woman perished in the Great Fire of 1666 and lamented her copiously, as they had enjoyed playing the flageolet together.

Noted conspiracy theorist David Icke insists Miss Stephens-Martin was born in Murmansk in 1512, lovechild of an occult-obsessed cobbler and his housekeeper, who hid the child in the countryside to prevent her father from ruining her nascent fashion sensibilities with bad shoes. However, more serious historians believe Icke has gotten Stephens-Martin confused with Erasmus.

Lyubov Fyodorovna, second daughter of the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, claimed that a Scot calling herself Millie Steven-Saint-Martin made her father’s acquaintance during a gambling spree in Wiesbaden and later visited the family at their dacha in Staraya, serving as the model for Sonya, the doomed prostitute, in Crime and Punishment. However, Lyubov never offered up the lost letters that would have supported this assertion.

MARTIAL ARTS CONTRIBUTIONS
Miss Stephen-Martin founded a martial arts style inspired by a fever dream in which she and acclaimed Dutch self-mutilator Vincent Van Gogh were fighting demonic multi-headed kangaroos in a field of cardamom. She had, after a dockside bender to celebrate the Antzur Eguna, passed out in a spice merchant’s warehouse. Upon waking, she wandered the shore line at dawn and tried to cuddle a stray cat which, she recounted in her autobiography, “did not want to be held”.

Some martial art experts have speculated this experience contributed something to the speed, multiple attacks, and loud purring that characterize her style. She later made modifications to allow for the ballooning pantaloons of the Vatican’s famed Swiss Guard and these techniques have thwarted at least a dozen ecclesiastical assassination attempts, including the 2009 St Swithun’s Attack, believed to have been jointly plotted by the College of Cardinals and the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

Miss Stephens-Martin later adopted the stray cat, which she called ‘Psilocybin’, after her great-great-uncle.

SPORTING LIFE
At the 1977 World Badminton Championships in Malmö, her arcing and infamously high serve landed in the delicately curling auburn ‘fro of her 4’ 3” opponent, Gilbert “Mad Dog” Budgerton, where it became stuck. Her friend, major league pitcher Rollie Fingers, was attending the match and quipped that such a ball would have been a routine fly out to the left fielder. However, it was a shuttlecock, lofted in Gilbert Budgerton’s hair, and badminton is not America’s national pastime.

After a 17 minute delay while the judges consulted the rules, this was ruled legal and Mad Dog had to return the serve from where it lay. While he succeeded, it is thought that the strain to his rotator cuff contributed to his early retirement from the professional circuit. Mad Dog seems to have agreed with this as, having taught himself yacht-building and become a billionaire after the Emir of Qatar ordered “two in every color”, he credited the opportunity for his wealth to Miss Stephens-Martin. Mr. Budgeton founded and continues to chair the Home for Unwed Fathers charity. The cat Psilocybin modeled for the foundation’s official seal.

The shuttlecock involved in this event is on permanent display at the Badminton Museum of Ireland, after a partially soused Louthian fan spirited it into his knapsack during the post-match melee, later donating it to the Museum for the tax deduction.

The serve became known as the Stephens-Martin Special and was popular, if difficult to pull off in competition, until 1983, at the Grand Prix in Istora Senayan, when Barney Ramwell-Lloyd-Llleywelyn-Fitzherbert, later the Viscount Sir Bathewick-Smathers, realized he could make the serve out of play by moving his head across the fault line at the key moment. The serve has since been rarely seen at elite level games, although the Harlem Globe Trotters unsuccessfully tried to incorporate it into their touring show in the early 1990s. Miss Stephens-Martin herself licensed the move to Cirque du Soleil for their projectile-themed show, Keihäs.

CULT MASTERMIND
Little is known of Miss Stephens-Martin’s life in the 1990s, as, aside from co-designing the Versace spring-summer ready-to-wear line in 1992, she spent the decade leading a militant cult in the Libyan dessert.

She had set out to lead an archaeological expedition into the Sahara looking for records of the 10th Century Fatimid Caliphate’s fountain pen design. In this way, she found herself chasing a lead through the souk at dusk. Distracted by the mingled aromas of mint tea, spiced hummus, and rhubarb hookah – the last being a modern import of contestable value - wafting over the night air, she wandered into a small cafe. The conversation meandered, but that night she heard the half-recalled legends of a different sort of tea altogether. This purple-black fragrant brew, made devastating with a soupcon of venom from the Omdurman scorpion, is prepared by women sworn to a lifetime of virginity.

They grow their fingernails to absurd lengths and strengthen them with baths of olive oil and the juice of the Ziziphus lotus. On the new moon, when scorpions are unable to orient themselves, the women cover their talons with delicate filigreed silver caps, track their prey across the cold sands, and weight them down with ritually purified crystalline sands until only a quivering tail is visible. Gripping the tail gently between the middle finger and the thumb, they milk the venom with rapid, flickering movements. The oldest and most practiced women use only their fingernails, relying for protection on ancient Arabic inscriptions drawn on the tender flesh of the inner wrist.

Once collected, the venom is macerated with tea leaves and the fat of a freshly slaughtered baby camel and then mixed with water drawn from a well by the first-born son of an undefeated warrior in an ancient cedar basket, believed to have been fashioned from the first branch to be illumined by the dawn on the last day of creation. The tea is brought to a boil over an over flame in a kettle made from the melted down sword of a vanquished fighter and served in simple clay cups without handles.

Combined with rhythmic drum beats and feminine guile, Miss Stephens-Martin used precisely titrated doses of poison to keep seven legions of perfectly loyal and irredeemably ruthless assassins in her thrall.

While she has stated she left all that behind when she decided to start a family, the scholarly consensus is that she continues to run the cult’s operations from a distance. She also regularly hosts high tea with enemies to iron out differences.

OTHER CULTURAL CONTRIBUTIONS
To many, Miss Stephens-Martin is known for her Manichean approach to fondant, which led to fisticuffs at the 1984 Patisserie Biennial in Gstaad. Gaston Lenôtre himself stepped in to adjudicate, saving the day and the croquembouche. But a flesh wound sustained by a Slovenian confiseur did bring long-simmering issues to the fore and, following a hasty re-writing of the rules, all participants in subsequent years have had to submit their pastry crimpers to inspection before the official opening of the festival.

In 2015, she donated her extensive collection of precious metal and high-art thimbles to the Smithsonian, where they now form the core of the Magical Digitabulism exhibit, a pointed American effort to counteract the global dominance of Germany, home of the famed Fingerhut Museum, as the epicenter of thimblism.

Controversially, she hybridized a flesh-eating ranunculus through cross breeding with Burmese pythons and a partially reconstructed sample of the Spanish Flu, resulting in her lifetime ban from the Windsor Garden Show and extensive consulting work with the Department of Defense. Challenged to defend herself to horticultural purists, she responded, “The ladies of America should raise fewer flowerbeds and more eyebrows”. One of her specimens would later eat the lower left leg and part of the ear of Constance Swedlow, Membership Secretary of the South Des Moines Bud & Petal Society. As Miss Stephens-Martin had the foresight to legally emancipate her plants, multiple civil lawsuits went nowhere. Still, the offending ranunculus, Frosch, was sentenced to community service.

There is a popular story that Miss Stephens-Martin defaced the statue of Karl Marx in Mitte with a Cheez Whiz mustache and a novelty cod piece, receiving the distinctive bayonet scar on her left inner thigh in the ensuing fracas with a cadre of the Red Brigade. Under questioning by a junior KGB officer, she is said to have stated, “It’s all purposeful behavior, bitches”. She offered no other comment until U.S. Marines, alerted by a sympathetic antiquarian bookseller who had witnessed her arrest and phoned the embassy, arrived. Years later, the interrogating officer was drugged, folded into a diplomatic pouch, and trundled back to Moscow, where he was convicted of counter-revolutionary sentiment in a show trial. The morning of his execution, he wrote the same phrase on his cell wall using an ad hoc ink comprised of bird droppings scraped from his window ledge, vodka, and the previous day’s borscht.

There is no agreed upon year for this incident, though it would have had to occur after April 1986, when the sculpture was installed and the Soviets were irradiating Europe and the Middle East with iodine-131; but before October 1987, when Miss Stephens-Martin briefly dedicated herself to the monastic life, taking a vow of silence and joining a community of Sonoran desert-dwelling holy spider farmers. Stasi archives have no record of the altercation and the Kremlin has retroactively re-classified all relevant logs.

FAMILY
Miss Stephens-Martin has two children and an unknown numbers of phantasmagorical emanations. Her daughter, Lucrezia, began breeding Sino-Croation Bagelhounds while still in middle school and was showing on the international circuit by the time she began the 10th grade. When her prized bitch, Trombone, was named Best in Breed at Westminster and she advanced to the finals, it conflicted with midterms. Lucrezia literally phoned in the answers to her economics exam, scoring 94.2%. She resolved to work harder on subjective valuation, if and only if the economics teacher continued to care about it so deeply. Ultimately, Trombone placed second, losing to Flagstaff, a two-year old Pomeranian belonging to the Venetian merchant banker Aurelio Brexiano, primarily based on the relative quality of the two canines’ canines. It later came to light that Flagstaff’s vet had been doping the dog with steroid laced calcium supplements and the grand prize was provisionally stripped and awarded to Trombone, pending appeal.

Miss Stephen-Martin’s other child, Piotr, is a leading light in the artisanal craft ukulele world, having first come to prominence when he adapted a family recipe for hot buttered rum to produce wood lacquers of unusual durability and luster, which are also coveted by master ukuleleists for imparting a deep, sonorous finish to the instrument’s sound. Piotr has also worked with synchronized swimming teams through Europe and South America as a choreographer. His work has been generally well reviewed, often for its deliberately overdone flutter kicks and distinctive Flamenco influence. When the Dutch team performed his original composition Schoppen en Bijten at the 2013 European Finals in Savona, two judges left the reviewing stand in tears and the audience gave a seven-minute standing ovation. Team member Eva Meulblok did technically drown while holding an extended side fishtail, but medics revived her and she stated that her brief time suffering from death was better than the finest high that could be purchased anywhere in Amsterdam.

PUBLIC APPEARANCES
Miss Stephens-Martin is available for a negotiable honorarium and has been known to leave early if the champagne is warm.