Jaguar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kittydesade) wrote2015-10-22 09:41 pm
kittydesade) wrote2015-10-22 09:41 pm
Entry tags:
OC October: Day 21 & 22: Sophie, Val, Nicky, and Beauty Kincaid
Day 21: Sophie again, Val, and Nicky
This story, oh god. This whole story is a study in hell that people make for themselves and each other. Let's see if I can remember bits and pieces. Some of which I will undoubtedly discard because I first drafted this almost ten years ago? Over ten years ago? And I've gotten some better since then.
All right, we'll start with Sophie I guess, since that's the first one on the list. Sophie has a pretty unremarkable contented life, enough so that the details blur and come to think of it, she was kind of a bland character outside of her relationship with Val. One of the first things I'm going to have to change when I rewrite this. (That's definitely a when, not an if.) One thing I do remember is that she was very young when she met Val, and she was defensive of him and protective. She brought him over so he could partake of her loving family, she had a younger sister who also adored her, and Val for that matter. She ended up in a job that she enjoyed, not doing too badly for herself when the whole thing went down.
Val grew up in a not so much abusive as neglectful household, and also too poor to get proper attention for his schizophrenia (with borderline personality disorder? I got as far as schizophrenia at least) which manifested when he was a teenager. With Sophie's support he was able to control it as long as he was in school and near their family, getting medications at a clinic and getting emotional support from her and her family, though there wasn't much in the way of talk therapy, which would have involved him trusting a stranger with everything that bothered him. After school though he had maybe one, one and a half years of higher education and then he left. Disappeared, scrounged for food and a living. The hallucinations came back while he was off his medication, nightmare visions of decay and rot and everything else. This part I'm fuzzy on but somehow he managed to turn back into a respectable person who was probably a businessman and ran for public office. This is where things started to go sideways. He didn't just run, he engineered sympathetic events, including the death of Sophie's sister when the polls weren't going his way. And the longer the stress of the campaign wore on him, the more his mental state degraded.
Nicky! Oh Nicky. Nicky was the third of their little group, coming about six months to a year after Sophie and Val met each other. Nicky was kind, he was gentle, he was equal parts naive and perceptive depending on the day and the alignment of the planets, and who the hell knows what else. Nicky knew better than Sophie what Val was capable of, or at least was more able to face it. And eventually Nicky was the one that called him out on it, which directly led to, well, bad shit happening because not only could Val not stand getting told no you can't have what you think you need, but also Val blamed Nicky for him not ending up with Sophie. Their friendly little trio died a slow, publically invisible but privately excruciating death.
--
Day 22: Beauty Kincaid
Oh, Beauty! Beauty Kincaid, okay, sure, we'll do her now. I love Beauty Kincaid. I wrote the story of her and her five brothers making a sort of mercenary wandering life for themselves and then getting mowed down by zombies. At least, most of them did. All of her brothers died that day, or day and night roughly, I think it was. Beauty was injured, but moved on.
She developed a gunslinger reputation for herself, but more than that she developed an uncanny ability to sense necromancers. Not that she could ever do necromancy herself, but she knew when things weren't right, and she knew when the undead was crawling behind her. More than that, they could sense her too, in a strange way. She never found out why, but she did get caught one time in a town and almost killed, managing to escape with her life and a man named Jacob Fell in tow.
Beauty was named because she was the youngest child and finally the girl in a handful of boys, she isn't in any particular way striking. Her model was Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead, though mostly that's in the blond hair and the shape of the face and the permanent unsmilingness. After Beauty's entire family was killed in two batches she doesn't have much reason to smile. She's terse, not very polite, but not cussing everyone out either and not aggressive. She's quiet and polite to people she has no reason to be aggressive with, for the most part. Sometimes she's just wandering from place to place, looking for the next meal or the next bed. Sometimes she's following traces of necromancers, trying to find one who can explain to her what happened. Was she always this way? Was she the one who doomed her family, both times? Or was this something that had happened to her, that changed her, because of how her family had died? Or something else altogether? But her desire to have those answers changes, depending on her mood and how things have been going, considering how impressively bad those answers could be. When she's not dealing with that she's moving from place to place, making brief and distant friends. What exactly is going to happen with Jacob Fell I'm not sure, I haven't gotten that far, but I know she's not interested in a relationship with him. I'm not sure she's interested in relationships at all, she doesn't feel like she is.
This story, oh god. This whole story is a study in hell that people make for themselves and each other. Let's see if I can remember bits and pieces. Some of which I will undoubtedly discard because I first drafted this almost ten years ago? Over ten years ago? And I've gotten some better since then.
All right, we'll start with Sophie I guess, since that's the first one on the list. Sophie has a pretty unremarkable contented life, enough so that the details blur and come to think of it, she was kind of a bland character outside of her relationship with Val. One of the first things I'm going to have to change when I rewrite this. (That's definitely a when, not an if.) One thing I do remember is that she was very young when she met Val, and she was defensive of him and protective. She brought him over so he could partake of her loving family, she had a younger sister who also adored her, and Val for that matter. She ended up in a job that she enjoyed, not doing too badly for herself when the whole thing went down.
Val grew up in a not so much abusive as neglectful household, and also too poor to get proper attention for his schizophrenia (with borderline personality disorder? I got as far as schizophrenia at least) which manifested when he was a teenager. With Sophie's support he was able to control it as long as he was in school and near their family, getting medications at a clinic and getting emotional support from her and her family, though there wasn't much in the way of talk therapy, which would have involved him trusting a stranger with everything that bothered him. After school though he had maybe one, one and a half years of higher education and then he left. Disappeared, scrounged for food and a living. The hallucinations came back while he was off his medication, nightmare visions of decay and rot and everything else. This part I'm fuzzy on but somehow he managed to turn back into a respectable person who was probably a businessman and ran for public office. This is where things started to go sideways. He didn't just run, he engineered sympathetic events, including the death of Sophie's sister when the polls weren't going his way. And the longer the stress of the campaign wore on him, the more his mental state degraded.
Nicky! Oh Nicky. Nicky was the third of their little group, coming about six months to a year after Sophie and Val met each other. Nicky was kind, he was gentle, he was equal parts naive and perceptive depending on the day and the alignment of the planets, and who the hell knows what else. Nicky knew better than Sophie what Val was capable of, or at least was more able to face it. And eventually Nicky was the one that called him out on it, which directly led to, well, bad shit happening because not only could Val not stand getting told no you can't have what you think you need, but also Val blamed Nicky for him not ending up with Sophie. Their friendly little trio died a slow, publically invisible but privately excruciating death.
--
Day 22: Beauty Kincaid
Oh, Beauty! Beauty Kincaid, okay, sure, we'll do her now. I love Beauty Kincaid. I wrote the story of her and her five brothers making a sort of mercenary wandering life for themselves and then getting mowed down by zombies. At least, most of them did. All of her brothers died that day, or day and night roughly, I think it was. Beauty was injured, but moved on.
She developed a gunslinger reputation for herself, but more than that she developed an uncanny ability to sense necromancers. Not that she could ever do necromancy herself, but she knew when things weren't right, and she knew when the undead was crawling behind her. More than that, they could sense her too, in a strange way. She never found out why, but she did get caught one time in a town and almost killed, managing to escape with her life and a man named Jacob Fell in tow.
Beauty was named because she was the youngest child and finally the girl in a handful of boys, she isn't in any particular way striking. Her model was Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead, though mostly that's in the blond hair and the shape of the face and the permanent unsmilingness. After Beauty's entire family was killed in two batches she doesn't have much reason to smile. She's terse, not very polite, but not cussing everyone out either and not aggressive. She's quiet and polite to people she has no reason to be aggressive with, for the most part. Sometimes she's just wandering from place to place, looking for the next meal or the next bed. Sometimes she's following traces of necromancers, trying to find one who can explain to her what happened. Was she always this way? Was she the one who doomed her family, both times? Or was this something that had happened to her, that changed her, because of how her family had died? Or something else altogether? But her desire to have those answers changes, depending on her mood and how things have been going, considering how impressively bad those answers could be. When she's not dealing with that she's moving from place to place, making brief and distant friends. What exactly is going to happen with Jacob Fell I'm not sure, I haven't gotten that far, but I know she's not interested in a relationship with him. I'm not sure she's interested in relationships at all, she doesn't feel like she is.