For the longest time, everyone in the know thought Freddie was a pure mortal, no supernatural talent. That was a bit odd, given the fact that the Runcie’s have always had one minor talent or another running through their bloodline, but everyone just figured that it skipped her. Turns out, it just came later. Well, that isn’t entirely true; she probably always had it but didn’t know it was something other people couldn’t do until later.

Freddie can talk to machines. She was always a talented mechanic, skilled with things that whir and hum and move about—more than anyone else her age—but no one thought it was a supernatural talent. Her father, Ferris, sent her to a trade school in the city, wanted to nurture that talent. After about six months, Freddie came back, told her father there was nothing that school could teach her that the machines weren’t already telling her all the time anyway. That’s when it all made sense and Freddie became the supernatural world’s Machine-Speaker. All the clued in community, and most of the mundane as well, won’t trust their, car, truck, or boat to anyone but her.

Ferris got Joseph Luna to take a look at Freddie, to see what he could tell about her power. What he saw was that she’s a practitioner, but she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She’s got a very specific and low-level magical talent that allows her to speak to the spirits of all things mechanical and even some things electrical and they just…tell her what’s wrong with them.

They tell her other things, too. Someone brings Freddie an old Chevy, she can tell you every person that owned it, what they liked to listen to on the radio while they were driving around, when they sold it, and what condition it was in when they did. She knows the history of machines after she works on them for an hour or two; she says it’s like a conversation when she’s working on an engine or fiddling with gears.

When she came back to town to stay, it seemed only natural that she set up a machine shop for herself. He opened up Runcie’s Gas-n-Autos-n-Boats and she’s been keeping vehicles, generators, and even blenders running for the people of New Orleans since then.