Warhead On Legs

Day 28: Adele
Oh right, Adele! Now let's watch me try to re-create a character from a novel I wrote last year? Last Nanowrimo, yes, and explain her to you all.

Adele last-name-unremembered is a park ranger who works just outside of New Amsterdam and stumbles across a ritual site one day when out walking her section of the grounds. Now in this world rituals are permitted on federal and even most state parks, as long as you get a permit, don't damage any artifacts or sites, and follow the constraints of the law (no murder, no animal sacrifice apart from the permitted animals, etc) as well as the actions and so on described in the permit form. This ritual site was way too hinky for her to believe anyone had signed off on a permit for it, and in an area not typically requested for rituals. So she got suspicious, and she started digging. This led her to a much bigger case, which led her to some secrets about the nature of New Amsterdam that very, very few people thus far knew.

Adele is one of my favorite characters, albeit one with not much to talk about because she's only in the main story of one anthology. She's in the upper years of middle aged (late forties or so? early fifties), slightly overweight or at least a size or two larger than beauty standards would have, something more around beauty standards of thirty forty years ago. Her blonde hair is tending towards stringy these days, and she's long since given up trying to inject some glamour into her daily routine when she deals with sweaty people, long walks and getting sweaty herself, and the occasional animal when she has to help out wildlife and/or animal control. But she also has had many years under her belt at her job, she's good at it, she enjoys it, she could tell you obscure facts about her park for hours, and she has a good relationship with most of the regulars both campers and ritualists. She was all set to continue at this job several years after she was eligible for retirement, because she loves it. She loves hiking, she loves staying in shape by staying active at her work. If she gave it up she'd have to join a gym. (This is only slightly facetious.) The events of the story... probably won't change that. She doesn't expect to have to deal with that kind of thing very often. But it does bring up some questions, and she comes out of it thinking a little harder about what she takes for granted about her life and life in general in the area.

Day 24: Malachy.
I'm not sure what to say about Malachy, mostly because everything about him changed at least twice over the course of the book I was writing. I know he's a demon, and that he's at odds with his family because he's fallen in love with the mortal world and one mortal in particular. Whether his family means a good chunk of demonkind or just a small demon family ruling a particular section of Los Angeles I haven't figured out yet. He helps Sybilla with her powers and her life, fixing things with his own powers. What he doesn't tell her for a long time is that this is because she summoned him in a moment of panic, desperation, and need. He's bound to her in a way, but rather than manifesting and making her fight for everything he watched her for a little while after he saved her and her sisters from the monster incursion, and then he found himself falling in love with her.

I'm reasonably sure he's going to end up with a couple of brothers, neither of whom are fond of the humans. Most demons see the humans as inferior at best, food or amusement at worst, so his falling in love with one is a bit like a human falling in love with a cow or a horse, it's ridiculous and a sign of a deviancy or sickness in the mind. I haven't also decided if there are creatures other than the typical angels and demons in this world, though I did write some sprites and so on into the book. It's all very jumbled, originally it was intended to be the Kardashians as the Winchesters, and it still is, but that also means I have to figure out the magical hierarchy and structure and what's in this world and what isn't.

Still. Malachy. He's a good guy, a good kid, really, for all that he's a demon and probably older than all three sisters put together.



Day 25: Nerd Girls
Ah, the Nerd Girls! Nerd Girls is the East Coast version of the Kardashian Demon Hunters, and generally my fuck off response to people who denigrate and devalue teenage girl fiction, whether featuring or aimed at. The Nerd Girls themselves are a band of five girls who formed friendships based around their various nerdy interests and their school careers.

Starting off I guess with the first one who appears in my notes, Amber! Amber is the one who's preyed upon by an incubus, and this event and her friends finding out about it is what kicks off the events of the first book. She's deep into biology and chemistry, she wants to be a mad scientist when she grows up, or that's what she tells everyone. She's a third generation immigrant, well, children of immigrants, with a white American mutt Catholic father (she herself is more Lily-Holly Catholic even if her father's family would prefer otherwise) and her mother is mixed Chinese-Hawaiian. She herself is very connected with her mother's mother (Chinese) who fled to Hawai'i from an abusive husband, and found a good man and remarried a half-native. This gives Amber a whole lot of interesting family history that she sometimes talks about or listens to, and a large mixed bag of personal reflexes and family rituals. It also gives her an interesting albeit very protective and firm support structure against what happens to her.

She is, or was before the attack, a gregarious and energetic girl, often the recipient of a gag order when watching TV shows like Fringe or X-Files because she'll go off into tirades about how the science is bad and real science could be so much cooler if they'll only use it. She sometimes talks about how she could totally kill people/make zombies/destroy the world over dinner, all the scientific trivia she's accumulated, and during the ebola outbreak she was all "oh this isn't anything to worry about, we should really be worried about this other horrible thing." She's coming back to that more slowly now, though it remains to be seen whether she'll regain her old spirit.

There's Zillah, commonly known as Zi or Zee. She's a metalhead and has several fake IDs, just old enough to be a young college student, just enough to get her into the local clubs to see concerts. Not pushing it too hard. She has these friends and she has a whole other group of friends, almost all of them older, who view her as sort of a baby sister even as they teach her how to do all kinds of minorly illegal things oops. Her parents aren't too worried though they do warn her not to get caught, but that's only because they think the worst thing she's doing is smoking weed and drinking one or two beers at a party illegally, not learning how to boost cars and fake IDs.

There's Frankie, too. Frankie's a bit weird even by the Nerd Girls' standards. She's a knitter, always has a ball of yarn and some knitting needles and if she's not knitting she's sewing up ends or something else. She's very quiet, wears baggy clothing and long skirts and most people think that's because she's ashamed or afraid of her own body. Sometimes she thinks that too, but she's also more comfortable with her limbs covered, and that's just how she feels. It's also partly solidarity with Rebecca, who is at least trying to be a conservative Jewish girl. She's also a literature and some kinds of music nerd, classical and folk and filk. She's a theatre nerd, which dovetails neatly with some of the other girls' nerdery and she and Zillah have a whole bunch of discussions, often, about the merits and flaws of folk rock like Tempest and Coyote Run.

A lot of her quirks of behavior, not that her friends know it at the start of the novel, are because she and her entire family is magically active. She uses her knitting as a focus for her magical powers, which aren't extensive because she doesn't push herself much. With her family in hiding, so to speak, from people who look for magic workers like herself, it's easier to stay under the radar if she only uses her powers for finding lost objects or untangling cords for tech. This will of course change once they find the incubus in their school and realize the stakes are going up, but it'll change slower than for another of her friends.

Libby, short for Liberty, is a huge anime and cosplay nerd. She builds her own costumes every year for the one convention she and Rebecca can go to, putting some effort both into the costume itself and also into concealing pockets for weapons or tools which Rebecca then makes her take out again. She's also a spy nerd because of that, studying everything from various Revolutionary Wars and their spies to Cold War spy technology. What Amber does with science movies, she does with spy movies and shows. She's also very familiar with historical spy biographies, and sometimes does cosplay from those eras as well, not that anyone recognizes it. When Agent Carter came out, however, she did put together a full Carter outfit, getting only minor flack for being a black girl cosplaying a white woman. This comes up with relative frequency in her cosplay, as does Rebecca's not quite accurate costuming, so they're used to fighting for their space in an already seen as eccentric field.

She's also a computer nerd, some programming, some hardware. She shares the hardware aspect with her best friend Rebecca. In the future this might lead to her being sort of a technomage, as she is the one who discovers the magic inherent in the world and pushes to using it. She's got quite a temper and also quite a protective streak, and apparently her deceased grandmother isn't quite so deceased, turning out to be a ghost mentor in her life once she figures out what she's looking at. It also pushes her to do some unwise things, resulting in some self injury/illness, so there's that.

And finally there's Rebecca, a conservadox Jewish girl who is nonetheless a cosplay nerd, incorporating the requirements of her faith into her costumes with dare-you-to-say-something aplomb. She helps run theatre tech, will in her senior year be running theatre tech for at least one of the shows in her school, and geeks out with Zillah and Libby about the engineering crossovers between their various habits and interests. She's the reserve and restraint on Libby, too, talking her down from wild ideas and responses to problems in their life, and often playing the other side in the arguments her friends get up to about what they should do about things, or about the world in general. Her mother isn't sure about her pursuits, worries that they may unfit her for marriage and doesn't want to see her ruin her chances, etc. On the other hand her mother is also very enthusiastic about her daughter going to college and becoming a competent woman in her chosen field, so that differs some from other conservadox families. (Some, not entirely.) Rebecca has several siblings as well, whom she helps and tutors as she can. She's definitely the mothering influence of the group.

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.

Day 18: Dorothy
So, about a million (fifteen or so) years ago I wrote a story about a desert warlord with zombie-raisers working for him and the lady gunslinger who faced him down, and it was conceived out of a NyQuil dream if I remember right. Well, some years later, I don't know how I managed to come up with this one, but some years later I decided they should get kind of married and have a child. Kitten, the lady gunslinger in question although that's not actually her real name, died shortly after when the girl was very young. She didn't use her real name by that point because she was trying to get away from someone, so Victor, the warlord, always called her by the name he'd mockingly picked up for her, since she was tiny and he thought she thought she was fierce. (She actually was, but he didn't find that out until she'd shot a bunch of people.)

(I have very weird dreams what can I say.)

Anyway, so, Dorothy was obviously that girl. And without getting too much, again, into spoilers, she was raised by Victor and a couple of older women he'd employed to look after her while the town sort of continued to die around them. It's easy enough to be a warlord, but all the threats and domineering behavior can't pull water out of the ground if it's not there. The town did stabilize shortly after Kitten's death into a much smaller town, with him still at the head and no one questioning how he'd lived this long, but it was never the same. Dorothy was raised as more of a headman's daughter of a village than the daughter of a warlord of a thriving if semi-lawless town, and Victor settled. The one indulgence he kept was more Kitten's type than his own, a library which he encouraged Dorothy to read and build and learn from.

After a while, though, what Kitten was running from caught up with Dorothy, not quite realizing that she wasn't her mother because of how much she resembled her and the few traits she picked up from her father were at least rough traits he and Kitten had in common (blonde hair for one thing, though different shades and textures) and it proceeded to demolish everything around her in the hopes she would be convinced to come back to a place she didn't know, for reasons she had never learned and didn't understand.

This, of course, ends badly. Particularly when she learns why her father was so long-lived and what kind of a legacy her mother left her, and finds people like her who explain to her at least some of what she's going through, the general part of it, and how to deal with it.

alexseanchai posted, so I might as well join on the bandwagon since memeing seems to be helping my writing right now. When you see this, post three lines from three WIPs you have.

--
White Lightning: She resisted for less than a minute, and just as he was about to let her go her pushing turned to tugging so he hugged her some more. Arguing wouldn't help, the point wasn't that he was never there, the point was that right now she felt that way. Which meant he needed to be there.

Now kiss you bastards.)
--

--
Working title: County Witches: "...Which means, though, the important part you guys are both missing? This means the ghosts are still out there. Wandering around, maybe they found a job somewhere else."

And then there was that part. "Why would a ghost need a job?"
--

--
Sandborn: "We were supposed to go to carnival today," she muttered.

He ruffled her hair. "I know, darlin. An' I'm sorry about that, but I can't control the wind. And I can't control the desert. It does what it wants in its own time, we just gotta live with that."
--


With luck, Sandborn and White Lightning will be out later this year, and you can read the full works. White Lightning is an anthology that includes the short story County Witches or whatever its final title ends up being.

Day 14: Darren! I even have an icon.

Poor Darren. Darren just can't catch a break sometimes.

Darren was born out of a crush on Adam Copeland in Haven. I admit it freely and without guilt. I liked the look of this guy so I needed to create a character so I would keep him around in mind for a while, and I ended up throwing him into Black Ice. Darren's a Hellhound around seventy five years old, which puts him about middle aged for his kind. He's also got a couple of kids, three kids, that he doesn't know if they're dead or alive any longer. He was married to a lady Hound, they got divorced eventually and amicably, he went to work and live in the city (New Amsterdam to be specific but for the most part it's always the city) and she stayed out in the suburbs where their children had been born. However, one day he came home and found her house covered in blood and with a body on the ground, and no family. So he left, he didn't investigate for fear of bringing back the murderers to his family, and he tried not to look back.

Eventually he did build a pack for himself in the city, found a new girlfriend named Anna, much more aggressive and logical, logistical than his ex-wife, more suited to who he had become. They run many of the local Hellhounds together, tough but fair parents, and under their leadership the Hellhounds have also been branching out into making friends and being allies with other groups as well. If nothing else, it's good self defense against the encroachment of the faction of humans who want the earth to be for them, despite the fact that the only other species that originated outside of the earth is the fae. As far as Darren sees it though, they're all vulnerable to abuse and prejudice and the violence that brings, they can stick together and watch each other's backs or they can all die alone.

Day 12: Sybilla, Steph, and Sophie
This novel, oh boy. For one thing it's called Maybe She's Born With It (Maybe It's Malachy) and I really need to come up with a string of novel titles like that because this begs for more adventures. For another thing, this started because of that Netflix fuckup a while back when the Kardashians show was smashed up with the show summary for Supernatural, and everyone started talking about gender swapping it or just outright making the Kardashian sisters the itinerant demon hunters. So I did! Not directly, I took the concept and ran with it to a place of my own devising.

Sophie, Sybilla, and Stephanie. Collectively they're sisters who are in the public spotlight because of their parents a bit, because of a sex tape, because of a few bad decisions by Sophie including taking the rap for a DUI, and when they realized that the bad publicity got them general publicity for their various endeavors (a fashion blog, a makeup tips youtube channel), they attempted to parlay this into success, with some work and some luck. First they secured contracts with mid-list manufacturers who gave them product to review and publicity for both of them, then they started making money, then they kept going. Currently they're not minature giraffe, diamond-studded everything rich, but they're definitely comfortably off.

The demon hunting part comes when they're heading out to a wine tasting and it turns into sort of an abbatoir/hunting ground, punctuated briefly by not the Winchesters coming to rescue them at the end, after they may or may not have already rescued themselves. (they did. Sort of.) Eventually weird things keep happening to them, and they start researching and find out what of this is real and what they need to know to cast magic and survive among demons and monsters and magicians and so on.

Sybilla is the oldest, the one who has to take care of all of them, steeped in the makeup industry and also the least involved in magic, at least to begin with. As far as the press knows she's the responsible one, and generally that's even true. On the other hand she was also the one who summoned her demon lover, so there's that.

Stephanie is the youngest, she's the most impulsive and most impetuous because of that, she's also the most outspoken at times. And sometimes she can have the most common sense, usually being closest to her middle sister because Sybilla has had to be their mother when their mother was off doing other things. She makes a fair number of bad decisions in the history of the story and in the story itself, but she's also the driving force behind a lot of good decisions the three of them make, and may be reckless with herself because she thinks that's what she has to be to play her role.

And Sophie is the narrator, she's definitely the most cautious of the three in the way where she's careful when she doesn't have to be, and she's also in some ways one of the least self aware. She trips into the relationship with her boyfriend, who, the poor guy is the most mundane ever (and a total geek) but he's very good for her. And she is also one of the first to push to learn the magic that they end up needing to survive, and to not quite master it but dig her fingers deep into the more powerful aspects of it.

There's a lot I haven't done with these girls because the first draft meandered all over the place, and there was a lot of getting to know their characters without doing much with them? But I'm definitely looking forward to getting back to them.

Day 10: Glaucon
We can thank viridian for Glaucon, for the initial impetus to write him down, and now he's grown into something ridiculous and kind of reassuring in his permanence. Rather like Nameless. He started as a character for fanRP for an Angel character, but there's really nothing about him that's specific to Angel except the name of the demon he was attached to, so it's entirely possible I'll end up writing an original novel for him and just changing his name around. There may be plans in the works for this already. I can say no more.

Glaucon was born in poverty, a street kid who was protected by kind people just enough to survive to where he could fend for himself. At one point he was taken in by a blind young woman who also had a bunch of street kids helping her and all of them taking care of each other, he was younger than her but one of the older kids. This did not, however, last. I forget why, but by the time he was an adult he was on his own, most likely a mercenary who built his way up to warlord and had acquired a number of magical powers and attributes. Through learning and studying he had at one point or another changed his nature to where he was sort of acquired demon, certainly no longer pure human. He had once been imprisoned by another warlord when he was a young man, and with a vulture-like demon, and not only did he managed to escape he also managed to kill and eat the vulture demon in likely both a physical and certainly a metaphysical/magical sense. This gave him a somewhat bird-like appearance with feathers in his hair and sharp, angular features. Once he became a warlord in his own right he took a beautiful young human woman for a bride. Unfortunately while she tolerated him and perhaps even kind of liked him she died? killed herself? while he was on campaign elsewhere.

Shortly after this his alliance or simply his land came up in line for Illyria's people's conquest. He lost, of course. He was barely held together by a few strings of muscle when she found him on the battlefield, but was still able to glare at Illyria when she took note of the battlefield with enough vicious energy that she was intrigued. She healed or just about resurrected him, brought him to work in her service. He rose quickly through the ranks there, too, and for her healing of him and her treatment of him after, she won his undying devotion.

So much so that when she was killed/defeated, he was broken. He wandered, picked a direction and went walking, until he ended up at the far reaches of the dimensional realm in a monastary on a mountain, tended by monks who expected only to care for him in his last days. He was found by Illyria there, now in her Fred-ish form, and taken to the human-Earth world with her as her only remaining true servant. They learned a new way of loving each other then, and what happened after that is most of the fanfic/RP and a matter of messy speculation. There may or may not have been a daughter, though. That was fun.

Glaucon is fairly laconic and reserved, at least now he is. Back then he would have had more of a sense of humor, been more relaxed in her service althogh he was always quiet and serious a great deal of the time. He is fiercely devoted to Illyria and/or whoever he places his trust and devotion in; although he doesn't express his passions much or often, they run very, very deep. He's a superb fighter, both because for many years it was his main method of survival and because he is very aware of his body, having made many modifications to it. He enjoys reading, he enjoys devouring knowledge of any kind. He also enjoys arts like the theatre, or music, or occasionally dancing, although he's getting used to modern forms of the same.

Day 5: Hannah

Hannah's an odd character I'm not sure how to describe, mostly because I'm not sure who she was before the entire rest of her squad was killed. Starting with that, she was a mecha pilot in a world, again, of my own devising (I hardly ever write fanfiction anymore, I don't think I've written fanfiction in years, for no immediate reason) and she was the protagonist in a story I wrote for a BigBang Mixup event. Back when I was writing such things. I don't remember how long ago that was, but it was a fairly long time ago. Okay, tomorrow, I promise, a character I've written more recently than "years ago."

At any rate. Hannah was the sole survivor of an ambush that destroyed her team of mecha pilots, and as a result she isn't entirely functional. This is partly the ambush and partly the fault of the way the military handled her case after bringing her home for debrief, which is to say that they didn't know what to do with someone whose essential function within the army (navy? I think mecha would be army for these purposes) is to drive a very specialized piece of equipment, but for whom they have no positions like that available and she needs considerable grief and trauma counseling before they can retrain her for anything else. Fortunately for them all she went and shot a man in the torso and a more sensitive area before they had to figure out what to do with her, and as of her present she is on trial for attempted murder. She has a number of defenses, not the least of which is temporary insanity however inaccurate and detrimental that might be, but also the fact that the guy she shot wasn't a very nice man, and the scandal of that is just now starting to come to light as well. Certainly enough to taint the jury pool. Assuming this world has jury pools, I hadn't gotten that far.

She's of average or slightly above average logic-intelligence, book intelligence she's probably above average due to the amount of studying and schooling she had to have to become a mecha pilot. Emotional intelligence is up and down. She's not at all in tune with herself and wasn't before the ambush, she's restless, unhappy with herself and isn't sure what she would do without the mecha, which contributes to her post-ambush confusion. There's no real cause to this, it's simply how she is. She joined the interplanetary army because of a lack of any other clear direction, because they would give her orders and point her at something and she envied and wanted that kind of structure in her life. Now that she doesn't have it, she's not sure what she'll do. On the other hand if she goes to jail at least she'll have it again.

Day 3: Simon "Spike" Kyne
Hm. This one required more edits, given that I've decided to smash this in with the rest of the Blasted Lands.

Spike was originally Simon, junior, named for his father whom he is rapidly growing up to resemble. He is the younger by two minutes.

His weather powers are less active than Chloe’s, but his weather predictions are more accurate and he is able to sense the most minute changes in the wind, the temperature, the rainfall, everything. There may be other powers manifest, but he hasn't discovered them yet, although he has an uncanny knack for dowsing. (He's unwilling to admit that this is a part of his magic.) He also has more physical manifestations than she does, color-swirling eyes and black feathery wings that spring out from his shoulders when he shifts his form. The rest of his form is more human, although his eyes go solid dark blue.

Spike has lived with most of this for all his life, except the shape shifting. Perhaps it was easier for him to accept his differences because his powers are more passive, or maybe it was just a difference in temperament. He is much more easy-going than Chloe, more patient, more willing to forgive or make allowances in the effort to make friends than she is. He is also much less afraid of what might be or what might have been.

However, Spike is also a great deal more apathetic than Chloe. Rather than seek out a solution to a problem he is more likely to wait it out or ignore it and hope it goes away. He is also more passive aggressive, taking the martyred position instead of forcing a concentration, and very good at the directed guilt trip.

Spike guilted his sister for a year about their father leaving, an act which caused a subtle but deep rift between them for two years after. Eventually they mended their differences, but it was a hard time for both of them, and made him all the more inclined to cling to her and protect her, as if to make up for what he put her through out of his own anger. He has always loved his father, looking up to him, and felt a little out of place in a household with two strong women. He idolized the shopkeeper, Carlton, after a while, out of a need for some kind of strong male role model. He does not, however, consider his mother or his sister unwomanly, and has defended their behavior and their actions to many in the town on several occasions.

Spike, like his sister, is a hard worker. He is looked on with some favor in the towns because he is willing to get his hands dirty to help them, and freely offers up his forecasts in order to help with planting and the harvest. He does not object to their whispering behind his back, although it does hurt him when he is depressed, vulnerable, or when he stops to think about it. He will take the pseudo-acceptance if he can get it; although he does see the difference he doesn’t remark on it to anyone but his twin.

Spike tries to be an everyman, family sort of person, which leads to arguments about whether or not he is trying to be normal. He isn’t, although he is glad he doesn’t have the more active or aggressive powers. But he isn’t bothered by the fact that he’s different either, except in that it makes people treat him oddly or badly. It’s simply a part of himself that he feels he has to learn to live with, the way tall people have to learn to live with their height. This matter-of-fact and relatively calm attitude puzzles Chloe but comes as a relief to their mother, who finds the her children to be a tempest in a teapot at the best of times.