kittydesade: (Default)
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.
kittydesade: (daft faerie bastard)
Day 26: Nameless
Trying to figure out how I got this far without mentioning this asshole. All right, then, Nameless. He about whom my current Nanonovel will be.

Nameless is sort of my answer, well, half of my answer to naming magic in a lot of fairy tale worlds. The other half is around here somewhere. He was raised by a mute, so he never learned language until he was older, which is also my answer to why he only really knows three language despite being a little over a thousand years old. It's hard to learn a second language after a certain age, still harder to learn any language, even if you're a fae. He eventually made it off the island where he was born (Ireland) and into England, and eventually from England to France, and by that time he had enough language and social skills that he was able to make his way around the world as needed, although he didn't very much start banking property and storing wealth for a rainy day till the last couple hundred years.

When he was between three and four hundred years old he met another immortal, not that he knew it at the time. An equally irascible werewolf? immortal creature of some kind who, like him, is alone in the world. They spend a while circling around each other, shadowing each other out of curiosity and irritation before they agree to travel together on the basis that two men traveling together can watch each other's backs and at least have the illusion of purpose, and so are less suspicious than men traveling alone. This leads to some amusing disguises as they pretend to be on pilgrimage, pretend to be traders (and sometimes act as one), etc. The Black Death was what really cemented their friendship about twenty or so years after they met, mostly because they ended up having to fish each other out of mass graves after they nearly died from it.

Other events Nameless has been around for include the Beast of Gevaudan, wandering up and down along the Silk Road, the French Revolution, the American Civil War (poor bastards, they fled one only to get caught in the other), the Spanish Flu, the American Westward Expansion and the American sexual revolution. As it were.

By the time the novel begins he's very set in his ways and he likes his life. He wanders, finds a traveling job or a steady job and a place to rent in some country, puts down roots for a year or two, gets up again, moves around. After long enough in the outside world he gets restless and goes back to New Zealand again, to their farm, and settles down for ten, fifteen years. Sometimes his friend is with him, sometimes he's not. They maintain a large swath of land, hiring groundskeepers on a five year contract to herd sheep and generally tend to the property except for the house. That one, they maintain on their own, mothball, sometimes "sneak" onto the property to make sure nothing's busted, broken, or caved in. The novel takes place during one of the quiet times in New Zealand, interrupted by his father. They don't get along.

-

Day 27: Cherry and her Whitehound
So, Cherry showed up in the first Black Ice book, actually if I remember right the first Black Ice story. She's friends with the Black Ice narrator, if reluctantly, and they help each other on various cases especially considering the District Attorney's office has reason to hire a private investigator now and again. She's also friends with people who, in one way or another, connect to all three books. In White Lightning she's connected to Julien because she's also fae, and there are few enough of them in the city that for the most part they all know each other, even though she keeps a low profile.

Cherry also has a Whitehound, sometimes called a Deathhound, as a protector. It masquerades as sort of a white-ish when not rolling in the mud coyote-dog-wolf mutt, except to people who can see under the illusion which isn't very thorough, more of a suggestion. Magically active people of all species can see under it if they focus. The Whitehound took up with her when she started settling into the human world, in New Amsterdam, for reasons that have yet to be revealed to me. Or that I have yet to pry up out of my subconscious, depending on how you see it. It hasn't come up in a story I'm actually prepping for publication, we'll put it that way, so I'm leaving that gun in Chekhov's armory for the time being.

Cherry's a bit of an introvert for a fae, preferring to spend time in her house blasting her music and doing whatever she wants while being mocked by the Whitehound to going out with friends, though she does make time once or twice a week to go out with co-workers at the ADA's office and sometimes to go to the Embassy and attend a function or just keep in contact with the people there. She does also go to concerts, not often, but she enjoys live music, and she has had the occasional girlfriend. Most of her girlfriends are also private investigators, cops, or other forms of ass-kicking professions. She herself can handle a gun and knows some form of martial art. No, I haven't decided which there, either.
kittydesade: (fight like a girl)
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.
kittydesade: (ta-da!)
Day 23: Keith from Kardashian Demon Hunters
Keith! I love Keith. Okay, so Keith is from the Kardashian Demon Hunters. Keith is ordinary. Apart from being drop dead gorgeous because he's played by Taylor Kitsch, he's pretty ordinary. He's Sophie's boyfriend, which they kind of accidentally fell into and he kind of without meaning to stalked her for a couple of afternoons. Which is to say he waited for her to show like a lovesick puppy outside of the library where she'd been doing her research. She pointed out that that could and did make her uncomfortable, and he agreed to stop and that he didn't mean to make her uncomfortable but he could see where she felt that way. Because he's that kind of guy.

Keith is also a ginormous geek. The biggest nerd she knows. When he first found out about her abilities and what was happening to her and her sisters the geek references flew thick and fast. A lot of times what he says flies over her head. On the other hand a lot of times either he'll explain them to her or she'll ask him to pass along the media, and she'll enjoy it, or even at the time it'll clarify things to her. He's not at all ashamed of his geekery, which kind of has something to do with being a model but also has to do with him just not being ashamed of who he is, and he also doesn't hold it against Sophie that she's not one. He just likes her spark. So to speak.

There's not much to Keith in the book just yet, since he's one of the supporting characters and that is mostly his function, to support her and provide a sounding board and protection when she needs it, or just emotional support when she needs that. He's got a pretty strong family base, and he's as I said before, a model, so really fucking handsome and also focused on fitness and keeping up his monetary asset i.e. his body. He is, however, also investing some of his earnings, so he'll have something to fall back on. See also: not stupid.
kittydesade: (Default)
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.
kittydesade: An open book with the top edge smouldering on fire (break my staff burn my book)
Day 19: Solace
Okay, so after several entries describing the other characters in Turing Shrugged we come to one of the main protags, the heroine, I suppose. I'm not sure why I say I suppose, she does a lot of arguing, deducing, and fighting for the causes and incidents in the story, but anyway. She's the heroine. I've forgotten her non-code name, if she has one. I don't think I ever gave anyone but Ananda and Bodhi real grown-up names.

Solace had briefly been a programmer, an analyst, she wore a lot of hats before she came to work on the AI and AE (artificial environment) project. Partly her lack of specialization showed a restlessness employers were wary of, but partly it also showed a multiplicity of skills the board and her supervisor needed for the project, so she was recruited and hired. She demonstrated an instinct for dealing with the artificial environment and talking to the AI that was more acute than they had expected, certainly more acute than her boss or the two other teammates who became monitors because that was where they excelled. She was the first one, possibly would have been the only one for months if circumstances hadn't intervened, who talked to the AI. She was the one who gave him a name, and she was the one he trusted out of process of elimination, everyone else was either too guarded or too eager.

And Solace tends to be somewhat guarded herself, aloof from a lot of people, but also open in the sense that she doesn't conceal her opinions or her feelings very often. She's guarded about what she says, tries not to promise things she can't keep, but she's honest and willing to talk about a lot of things to the AI. And she advocates for it, which was not common for the rest of the team in the beginning except for Saudade.

She's also somewhat lonely, well, a combination of alone and lonely, which leads to some compromised judgment in some places. But for all that, she does manage to keep a level head and deal with the problems and threats that come up in the course of the story without falling too much.

--

Day 20: Victor and Kitten
So, Victor! I guess I already talked some about Victor, didn't I. His childhood was by and large unremarkable, not poor per se but not rich as he grew to become, either. He was just smarter enough than the other boys and charismatic enough to become their leader. First of a gang of boys, then as they got older he drew other young men into his orbit, then he stormed into the mayor's office and pretty much declared he'd be taking over the town. There wasn't much anyone, including the sheriff, could do to stop him because by this point he'd already recruited two necromancers and a minor hedge wizard to his side.

This was the start of a good fifty-sixty years of rule on his own. He closed down the mayor's house, though he kept it running for a while, and bought a farm a little distance away on the edge of town so he could have land and cattle and visible prosperity. He also bought a building, a tavern from which he could conduct his business which was mostly the buying and selling of fancy food and drink-stuffs, the finer things while he left the day to day grub and resources to other people. He gathered around a crowd of gunslingers and magicians which, at his fullest strength, was somewhere around thirty or so. And then there were others in town who took this as a sign that, if they allied themselves with him, they could also get to bully other people, so they joined up and enforced along the sidelines.

After about fifty-sixty years of this Kitten dragged herself into town. She'd been running for a long time, and Kitten wasn't her real name but when she refused to give it, he gave her a nickname that stuck faster than anything she could have said. (I think her real name was Andromeda, if I remember right. That's at the end of Sandborn, I could always go and look I suppose.) She did manage to shoot enough of his men to ensure that they respected her at least, and yet was blocked from leaving the town. She took rooms in a boarding house elsewhere and stayed, restless but very, very tired from running. It was as good a place as any.

And she sensed a kindred spirit of a kind in Victor, as he did in her. By this point everyone had gotten used to him not aging like a normal human, it contributed to his authority over the town and reinforced his power, so he didn't mind it. Kitten stayed around a good twenty years before he realized she was like him and yet was also far more educated, far more quick minded in some ways (also even more suspicious and in some ways more impulsive than him, because while he was sometimes impulsive it was never to the detriment of either his rule or the town's existence). After around ten years he began trying to talk to her, at the fifteen year mark he began courting her. By this time the water had become barely noticeably scarcer, but not enough to frighten anyone. Around twenty two years they married, and had a few years of bliss before Kitten had a child, Dorothy. She lived another five years before she took sick, quickly sick, and died. Victor lived a little over ten years after that, before Kitten's threat came to town and destroyed what was left of it, including all the people. It couldn't destroy Victor directly, though. It had to cut his throat first.
kittydesade: A series of arches centered, seemingly endless (endless doorways)
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.
kittydesade: A white feather quill laying across an open book with yellowed pages (am scribing)
Day 16: Gretel
Ah, Gretel. She even has a last name now! In multiple drafts over twelve? How long have I oh god twelve, I wrote this for Nano 2003. So, in multiple drafts over twelve years, she hasn't had a last name until a couple days ago. Or at least not that I retained. So. Gretel Canbury, guitarist and piercer/tattoo parlor worker by day or at least by afternoon when she's not playing music, is one of the main characters in White Lightning's main and same-titled story.

Gretel is a pretty fierce girl, not just because she was raised with a lot of brothers and a cop father but also because she was raised by a fierce mother who taught her to go after what she wanted. And then got into a huge year-long fight with her when what she wanted turned out to be a life in the city playing music and punching holes in people for a living. That took some dealing and some reconciliation, but eventually she was able to be convinced that just because Gretel was doing something less than respectable, didn't mean she wasn't a successful adult doing well by herself. She was raised in the country among hillbillies, I think in Virginia but I didn't rememer to put it , comfortable around guns and hunting, her brothers pointed guns at her in jest (she was NOT amused, neither was her cop father), her brother became a cop too. She, on the other hand, went off in search of adventures, or at least new people.

In the story itself, without giving too much away, Gretel gets angry and does some foolish things in defense of her friends when they come under attack from Humans First. Not involving violence per se, but definitely peripheral to a lot of it. She tends to get angry a lot; not because anger issues but because of her childhood she has less fear around guns, and she lives and works with a number of people who have been mistreated or are being mistreated by others, thus, angry. She is very protective and also relatively low on impulse control, although not nearly as much as Julien. Gretel, at least, has some sense of not so much right and wrong as appropriate vs overbearing.

Day 17: Pax
Pax! Paaaax. I do love Pax. He's a monitor in Turing Shrugged, which means that he monitors vital functions, program structure, and interacts with the people embedded in the virtual environment. He's a very good monitor, he's able to keep track of several lines of input at once with minimal degradation of his abilities. He's highly intelligent, but he doesn't feel like he has good instincts for working in the virtual environment, and he prefers to keep an eye on his people.

I don't have much on Pax, now that I think about it, or not as much as I do on some other people. He's pretty easygoing, and he's in love with Solace although he's not pushing anything on her. He's working his way around to being resigned that she doesn't love him back, and he enjoys her company nonetheless. I'm reasonably sure he's venting to someone off screen, maybe a roommate? Someone he sees in off hours and he gets precious few of them later, so it'd almost have to be a roommate or a neighbor with a strange shift, about how he sees her hurting and he wishes things were different, and so on. Some way to get that out because he doesn't want to put that on his relationship with Solace. She's not doing anything wrong, and she deserves friends, not assholes. His opinion, not mine.
kittydesade: A stack of old, slightly tattered cloth-bound hardbacks next to a porcelain cup of tea on a saucer (quiet day of reading)
[personal profile] 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.

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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.
kittydesade: Vials containing things like feathers or flower petals (potion ingredients)
Day 15: Winter, Rack, and Petra
Winter, Rack, and Petra are the stars of a thing I'm currently working on. They're sort of a trio of a cabal of magic users in the Black Ice world, although cabal might be exaggerating because they're not organized in the least. They swear a lot, Rack's the only one who can cook any variety of the food out of the three of them although Winter's not bad, himself, and Petra lives off her boyfriend's cooking. Winter's extremely fussy about his house, Rack mostly lives at Winter's. Both Rack and Winter are in their late 60s or so, and Petra's just hit her 40s, though she still gets treated like the girl of the group because, well, over 20 years younger.

So, Winter. I can't remember what Winter's full name is, come to that, I'm sure I wrote it down in the draft of Gray Matters. If I weren't so distracted and exhausted right now I'd look it up. He's an older man, he's been doing a lot of small magic for decades, helping out with the police in collecting evidence, like a sort of independent lab tech. He's content to do that, lead workshops, form groups and help people on a small, minor scale. It augments his social security income and provides him with a more comfortable lifestyle than he would otherwise be able to afford, and it also gives him an excuse to look around into the limits of what he can do, both in terms of sheer power and in terms of creativity and versatility. He's got an eager mind to learn, enjoys reading and crossword puzzles and finding out new things, but he's also generally quiet and a homebody.

Rack is a Jewish magician, acting as a rabbi in many respects even if he doesn't have the formal training or title of one. He acts as counselor, as scholar of law, as advocate, among other things, for a number of people within and without the Tribe. He also argues incessantly with Winter, but that's sort of a matter of course. He's been a strong advocate for Jewish magicians both Qabbalistic and not, and he's also done a great deal of work and counseling and participating in local town halls quietly nudging people to more accept the different, not just the non-humans but also the magically active in the community. There are, of course, differences that he has a hard time accepting, but he's an advocate for a lot of people regardless of whether or not he accepts or understands various aspects of their nature. He's also cranky, stubborn, swears copiously, and is not always the most politic of advocates, either.

Petra is a woman with several problems, emotional lability being one symptom of them and likely an undiagnosed form of bipolar disorder. She also has a minor unspecified seizure disorder because it hasn't come up yet, because I'm not sure if it should or needs to come up in the story in which I'm writing this trio and because since I don't know if I need it yet I haven't done the research. The point being she has a physical/neurological disorder that incapacitates her periodically for certain times. She has a long-suffering boyfriend who has a more acceptable/normal job at a bank as a manager, and several dogs, large breed, who she's rescued and adopted and who have become sort of like her familiars. She would call them her animal friends. Well, she would also call them her familiars because it amuses her to play into that sometimes. She's three quarters Cherokee, was raised on one of the main reservations and moved up north more to get away from her overbearing family and be with her boyfriend, who'd gotten a job in a bigger bank, than any sense of detachment from her people. She continues the traditions as best she can.

All three of these guys were pretty much pulled together straight for this story, so if these backgrounds seem a little rushed it's because they are. I need to do some note-taking and some arranging for this to become more solid, but these are the rough sketches and eventually I'm sure they'll fill out some more. Also at least now I have some idea of where I need to do the research.
kittydesade: (black ice - darren)
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.
kittydesade: A white feather quill laying across an open book with yellowed pages (am scribing)
Day 13: Julien
JULIEN. Holy shit, was I going to talk about Julien today? This'll be fun.

Julien is one of my oldest characters who's still going. I mean, there are older characters, but none I've written off and on quite so consistently over the years. Julien is a musician, and half Sluagh half Leanan Sidhe, which accounts for his pale skin, eyes, and white hair, his inability to tolerate bright light (he wears sunglasses pretty much all the time) and despite all this, his fine features and tendency for humans at least to consider him beautiful and charismatic rather than freaky looking. If he didn't have the Leanan Sidhe side, going by his mother, his limbs would be too long and disproportionate, and too bony, his eyes would be more turquoise than pale matching the rest, and he would blister in the sun.

Julien's parents defied fae custom if not actual law (they consider themselves above such racial prejudices) by marrying and also pissed off at least a couple of people who wanted access to Julien's father's lands and considered themselves easily marriagable to a Leanan Sidhe princeling. They had him, they raised him in their world until he was of a comparable age to go to a human high school and then they put him into a human high school (he was about fifty or so) to have him learn about the human world. He enrolled in a human college, where he fit in fairly well and met Jackie Street. They were in a ballet class together, and a few other classes, and they began hanging out and he found a spirit in her that he could respond to, that he felt comfortable around the way he didn't feel necessarily around other humans, or even other people. They talked for hours, they sat around the lounges and while she tried to study, and he made some gestures in the direction of studying, they discussed each other and learned about each other. He never made any secret of the fact that he was fae or what type he was. She didn't know about the various prejudices but something about the way he said it made her ask, so they spent several nights talking about race relations among humans and fae, and it was the first serious conversation they had. He learned some about her own family, and she learned a lot about his and he discovered that not only did he feel comfortable talking to her about sensitive fae and family things, he found words for ways he felt and ways the rest of the fae treated his family in the way humans talked about such things, because the fae didn't. Or not around him at least.

At some point during college, more specifically during a summer break when he had gone back home, he found that this greater confidence and ease he had learned in the human world translated into attractiveness in the fae world. At least enough to seduce a young fae woman who had a somewhat more enlightened view of interbreeding and the Sluagh and so-on. They, too, were able to talk, although as the summer went on they found less and less to talk about (a thing that had not happened with Jackie although he didn't realize this until years later) and ended up having more and more intimate relations. Eventually he went back to the human world, and she tried to come to terms with that summer and what had happened, proving that magical summer bliss traps don't only happen to humans.

After college he went and managed to talk another fae his age into helping him start a club. A night club, somewhere he and his talented friends could show off, it basically started out as a vanity project so he would have somewhere to play music and turned into an evening entertainment shelter for many of his friends. He discovered a wider sense of people who were half-breeds or misfits or didn't belong in some way or another, and how they could all fit in together in their uniqueness or individuality or simply their being alienated from the people who were supposed to be their friends or family. So he kept up the club and made it safe, hired other people who knew what it was like to be on the outside of society to make it safe. And he and Jackie started a band.

Things went surprisingly well for a while until unrest started. Humans First started coming by, they started attacking his friends, and predictably, Julien retaliated. Unpredictably, this coincided with the return of his daughter into his life. Although her mother had (allegedly? I'm still working on this one) died in a car accident, not being used to the human world, her grandparents were seeking for termination of Julien's custody rights both in the human world, where he did maintain a legal identity and citizenship, and in the fae world. And to tell more would be spoilers, I think.
kittydesade: (singing in the wilderness)
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.
kittydesade: (death on boats)
Day 11: Bodhi
BODHI. I'd forgotten I was doing Bodhi today. Okay, so, Bodhi.

Bodhi is also part of Turing Shrugged, with Saudade, since I'm doing more recent characters for OC October I guess. Barring some of the early ones. Bodhi, in sharp contrast to his friend Ananda, is generally serious and grave and does not have a sense of humor that anyone is aware of. (He does, it's just very dry and in some ways very stereotypically British.) For the purposes of this book Bodhi is played by Ben Kingsley.

I don't actually have a real name for Bodhi other than that. I'm not sure why Ananda's real name is Noah, for that matter. But I do know that Bodhi grew up with a public school education some place like Shrewesbury or Westminster, one of the original bunch. He didn't mind it so much, didn't fit in quite as enthusiastically as some others but he did blend with the kind of ignorance of his own privilege in some ways, and then in other ways being aware of how much he didn't look like your usual public school boy. He did make fast friends with Noah, who didn't look like them either and who after a few minutes was content to let him sit and read and just spend time with him, finding other pursuits. They eventually also went to university together, kept in touch while they explored different schools of mathematics and computing. And as irritating as it is, as far as I know they were quite attached, never dated, did fool around some, and I do not actually know if they were lovers when Ananda/Noah did the thing or if they were simply housemates and old friends. They're remarkably closed-lipped on that point. When I bring the novel to print I'll have to come down one side or the other or leave it out entirely, but for now I'm content to shake a fist at them and be sullen that they aren't talking.

Bodhi is a very serious person, treats everything as though it were serious business. Not life and death serious, but worthy of grave consideration, as a result he can also be a slow and considering person and sometimes he takes too long to act. On the other hand it also means when he does, he rarely regrets the decisions he makes at least as being unconsidered. Sometimes he doesn't have all the facts, that can lead to regrets. But he's also aware, more aware than most, that this is not his fault if he doesn't have all the facts. His parents probably instilled this considering in him, not deliberately but because this is how they also were. He prefers to have plans and backup plans for things, and gets restless and cranky when he doesn't know what to do. He feels very certain about things and takes it as a flaw in his character, or a flaw in himself, when he can't see at least several paths, one of which he can analyze out as the right one.

For all this he is also very emotionally vulnerable. No, he doesn't mistake emotions for things he can control, he allows for that, but it also means he's slow to reach out to people he cares about for fear of being disappointed or hurt, or simply because he doesn't know what to do with all these strong emotions and it paralyzes him. Often this is when Noah shakes him out of it, or another of a couple of close friends, there's at least one woman who is close to him, who there was a brief chance of romance with at one point long in the past, maybe at university? But who eventually found him tiresome and in need of too much emotional maintenance, so they never continued their relationship. He doesn't regret this either, entirely, admitting that he was kind of a pain to put up with then. He is at least more emotionally intuitive now and isn't particularly looking for a romantic relationship. (Is this because he's in one with Noah? WHO KNOWS. Not me.) And a couple people have said that if he does decide to start looking, he'd be a much more considerate and capable lover than he was when he was younger. But, still, not looking. He finds the rest of his work, his friendships and his research, fulfilling enough that he doesn't feel a lack.

And then the thing with Ananda/Noah happens, and he feels very much torn apart and set adrift, and now it's an open question what he'll do next as the project wraps up the first phase and moves on to the second.
kittydesade: (lovers)
Day 10: Glaucon
We can thank [personal profile] 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.
kittydesade: (black ice)
Day 7: Randi Teller
Randi. Miranda "Randi" Teller is one of my absolute favorite characters. Inasmuch as she looks like anyone she looks like Rosario Dawson, which puts her at least at the same height if not a couple inches taller than her current boyfriend, which also amuses me. Randi. Hm.

Okay, so, Randi was born to a somewhat religious Catholic mother and a less religious lapsed Catholic father, and promptly escaped their suburban middle class staid life to the city as soon as she damn well could. She did a two year associates' degree and ended up an EMT when she had the whammy put on her by someone, a love spell designed to make her fall in love with the unlikeliest biker ever. It was one of at least a couple such spells, meant to disrupt that particular biker gang for other reasons. It worked less well than expected, partly because Randi has a damn good head on her shoulders and realized this soulmate lovebond compulsion had to be imposed from the outside because no way in hell was her mind that overwhelmed by emotion. Granted, it was possible, but it didn't seem likely, especially when she'd never met the guy. Literally never met. Their eyes locked across a room once.

So, that happened, and eventually she got out of it by expedient of the guy in question dying. It's a long story. You can buy it if you want! And she went on to study nursing while working as an EMT, and somehow after that became a tad obsessed with the preternatural as well. She studied it and its effects, and became about as knowledgeable as you could without being able to affect it yourself. She also kept in contact with some of the bikers, because she had made some genuine friends and because they did like her for herself, and also because of her mad leet not reporting to the police medical skills.

Cut to some time later when she's working as a sort of transition nurse, shepherding preternatural patients and patients affected by magic around between hospitals, halfway houses, and ERs, when she meets this guy. This guy who also works at one of the halfway houses she stops by sometimes, and they get to talking, and this is also when all hell's breaking loose for her, for him, for a lot of their mutual acquaintances. This is also in that long story you can buy, but the short conclusion is she ends up finding herself a real boyfriend on her own, a decent guy, who she's falling in love with of her own accord and of her own damn emotions. Which is also a relief.

He might not be human, and her mother might disown her for that, but at this point that's the least of the chances she's taking both with her romantic life and her life in general.
kittydesade: (mecha)
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.
kittydesade: An open book with the top edge smouldering on fire (break my staff burn my book)
Day 4: Christabella Fox

I didn't mean to turn this into a flashback fest, but while I was looking for Spike and Chloe I found this, and now I have no idea what to do with it. Write more in it?

Much of the character biography is within the writing itself, as with the last two. Unlike the last two this wasn't originally intended to be a character biography, it's just something I wrote and posted on my writing journal with no larger world that she appears in at least as far as I know. It feels like something along the lines of the Italian city states, though that might just be the sheer amount of DaVinci's Demons and the Borgias I've been watching.

I get the feeling this piece, it's not exactly a story, it's written from not just the one unreliable narrator (the last three paragraphs?) but the rest of it might be cobbled from sensationalist newspapers. If I do end up writing more of this character I'm going to have to write down two separate lists, one for all the rumors and one for the actual facts about what she did. Three lists, one for what she believes she did, what she believes is happening, because what she believes and what is don't seem to exactly be going together anymore.

Anyway. Below the cut, Madame Christabella Fox. I have no idea from whence she came, but here she is.

Read more... )
kittydesade: A white feather quill laying across an open book with yellowed pages (am scribing)
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.
kittydesade: (Default)
Day 2: Chloe
It turns out I'm actually lifting this with only minor edits from something I wrote... when was this document created. Oh, goodie, March of 2006, god this is old.

Chloe Kyne is fifteen when she starts to lose control of her powers. Her father has been away for seven years by this point, and it is not all that she hoped it would be. She was eight when they had their last fight, when she yelled at him that it would have been better if he’d never come back, and she had thought it would make their lives better. It didn’t.

The smaller parts of her powers, the calling rain and the ability to feel the wind and electricity, those parts she enjoys. The larger parts of her powers, the fact that they’re tied into her emotions and that it can give her migraines and spiral out of control if she isn’t careful, those parts scare her and make her cranky and moody. It gets worse when puberty hits and she has only somewhat of an idea what’s happening to her. Spike and Chloe have manifested different powers, different aspects, and she feels cut off from her only companion in that way, as well.

Like her mother, Chloe is a loner. She’s perfectly content to sit around by herself and make things out of the earth, garden, build something with tools, or read a book. She’s comfortable inside her own head and has few friends, all of them connected to the family in some way or another. She also is impatient with the people in the town, figuring that it’s pointless to try and change their mind about her and that if they aren’t willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, she shouldn’t have to tolerate or extend her hand to them. She is civil in school and civil to the townspeople, but that’s the extent of it. They consider her to have airs and graces, and don’t like her for that as much as for her strange powers, but she doesn’t know or see this.

Chloe is scared more of the time than she’s willing to admit. Scared of her powers, scared of her solitude, scared of her future. She doesn’t want to be stuck on the farm the rest of her life, but at the same time she’s too afraid to go out and seek other options. She definitely doesn't want to turn into a pet rainmaker for the town, though it's always been one of the more fertile areas of the Blasted Lands. Though Spike has a plan for the future, she doesn’t, and she both resents and admires him for that. Admires because he is capable, strong, resents because she doesn’t want to be hanging onto him the rest of his life and yet she also doesn’t want to lose him. Her mother is a fixture in her life, always been there, always will be. Her father is a source of much confusion; she is puzzled by his love for her, and hates him for making her into someone who can never be normal.

Through talking to the gods few magicians and sorcerers who come through town she realizes that she is more at home among them than she is in the town. She enjoys not only feeling important, but also dealing with large-scale matters, fixing things and keeping a kind of order on a general level. Being with the gods self-styled immortals, or as good as as far as she knows also gives her a sense of peace she has never found at the farmhouse, although if asked she couldn’t pin down exactly why. Some of them scare her, but the ones she met are nice and she considers them friends, or rather will after Violet is revealed to be a conspirator and not her friend after all. With them, she finds acceptance of herself and the manifestation of the storms in her blood, she finds a way to make peace with who and what she is.

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Jaguar

December 2023

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