Nicole Chardenet graduated from Kent State University back when Duran Duran was still considered cool and of course it's purely coincidental if Joyce Bacyrus's unnamed Midwestern university bears any resemblance. She was in the medieval re-creation group The Society for Creative Anachronism, where she learned how to belly dance, flirt outrageously, terrify battle-hardened Vikings and dance around campfires at midnight surrounded by screaming barbarians wearing loincloths and roadkill and very little else. Her writing credits include a technology column with a colleague for a New England alternative newspaper, various freelance pieces, and several SCAdian "filk songs", the less said about which the better. She currently lives in her Den O' Iniquity with Belladonna the Demon Beast in Toronto, where she now terrifies Canadians rather than Vikings.