Character therapy

[the_fantastic_ms_fox]

"Secret are like splinters under the skin," she said "They hurt while they're in there, and they're most painful on the way out."

"Write it down" she advised. "Do it though a character. And control the outcome."

"I'm already partway there," I said. "I have characters."



There's a lot to (re)write. I can give shorts of a few characters. Some of this is old material. I'm writing this for myself and my therapist.
 

Monsterhearts, with some edits and a lot of redaction:

Moving into Fort Lenton, the only child of a single father. Alice falls in with Dale, a queer MMA jock and Liz, a witch, who claim to be prodtecingthe city from monsters. She doesn't believe them at first. Liz saved her from the ensuing scuffle and she doesn't mind the bruises, because thatproves she wasn't hallucinating the whole thing. This shit is real. And besides, she's had bruises before.

Dale buys it shortly in, drunk by Elijah, a centuries old vampire who - we thought - had a thing for him. Petal, a faerie girl shows up at the schooland kidnaps a classmate. At home, Alice is faced with an unsympathetic ogre of a father and the wrong puberty taking her body from her,making it like his.

After the second fight - where Dale bought it - Liz and Alice cut school to hide out at her aunts house while Liz mends Alice. The aunts arewitches, but they don't like Alice, or the trans in her.

Alice likes this monster-hunting stream of things. When Petal kidnaps and apparently drowns Susan, their classmate, Alice wonders if she couldbe like her father. Militaristic and ready to kill the monster. Petal drops over the falls while fleeing an irate Alice and lies broken on the banks.Alice reels, numb.

Elijah kidnaps Liz with the intent to make her undead. Liz's aunts show Alice the way to her. Alice has been doing some reading. It's decisiontime. She's a mortal human in a world of monsters. Does she fight them, slay them, and become the new violent champion like the recentlydeceased Dale? The thing that her father wants her to be? Knowing how dangerous it is, she speaks with Elijah, gets the goods on his plans. 

Instead she takes Liz's place and becomes undead. She can't eat, or go out in the sun, but her body no longer ages - which means there is nolonger the wrong puberty before her. Better a vampire than an ogre.

She wakes up in a grave, clutching her own body, saying "Mine. Mine. Mine."


First Act Done.



There is more to come. There is realizing that Susan isn't killed by the faeries, so much as 'improved' - and being okay with the choice that she made to be imperfectly undead rather than perfectly human. There is being turned ot of her house by her father and being unable to take shelter with Liz'saunts. There is a final choice to make all this hidden supernatural shit blisteringly public and very online, permanently changing the world andrisking herself.


 

Changeling - Areli

Areli was never a nice person. Being trans in late 80s Detroit, semi-employed in the fake ID business, white and androgynous (as opposed to quasi-legally employed, brown and transgressively feminine like a lot of the house system who composed her clients) she had a front row seat to watching bad things happen to people. She concluded this is the way of the world.

She made ID. For those in the house system. And college boys. The Changelings - people kidnapped from Earth to the faerie real, who escaped but changed, decades passed, replaced by duplicate fetches, feeding on emotion - they needed ID. She turned to the Changelings for money, and they obliged. But when she turned to them for help, but they only made it worse. Implicating her. Letting her know her days were numbered. Desperate, practical, scared, angry, an dying of TB - she found out how to open a hole to the other end of time and became what they feared - the thing that takes people.

But she only took people who wanted to go. People who were also desperate. The Changelings tried to stop her, so she maimed a few. They upped the stakes, hurt people as a lure, so took them and left them somewhere bad.

But her contract ran out, or her superior died, and she founder herself displaced in time. She was marooned in 2011, her remade cybrid body malfunctioning. It was twenty-two years later, half a continent away and she was one of the Changelings. They feared her because of what she did. She lived in this fear, rarely befriending anyone, keeping her reasons and methods secret. But when she finally spoke from her heart, she found the emotion in her was distant, and in others, she found little understanding and no agreement.

It was around then that she realized that what she did was right. Even though - or especially because - no-one else "got it."


There was an incident involving a crush on a much younger man. And the frustration that she was too damn late.

End the First Act

 

Mage - Thesea Vase
 

Monica was bright and good at what she did, but didn't live for herself so much as to impress others with how upstanding a person she was. Shewas an Investigative and Forensic Auditor in the employ of the CRA before she was thirty.

Years in, frustrated with the lack of credit that came to her after her investigations took down Bernie Madhoff, and facing an undiagnosed degenerative nervous disorder, Monica volunteered for an experimental study. It was dodgey, she knew it. Dangerously so. She didn't care. Thestudy took her apart and made her a will-worker, like the others who "Awakened" naturally. Only her brain was seriously damaged in the process. And she was permanently labelled as intrinsically unnatural.

Fortunately, Awakened Science can fix you up better than regular science. Not perfect, but they can install a device in your head to connect damaged or severed portions of the brain.Through this prosthesis, her personality has been reconstructed based on interviews with loved ones and best guesses. She's no longer herself, so much as a copy. Like the Ship of Theseus. Empty, a thing to be filled. Like aVase. She renames herself Thesea Vase.

Now she works for her remakers, having her personality re-scripted for tasks as-needed. Their most valuable tool, and their prototype. She wishes for this process (now significantly improved but still imperfect) to be available to anyone who needs it - anyone who could use the power well. She knows she is dangerous.

Trying to hide, she goes back to work at the Canada Revenue Agency and cheats on her husband discreetly. Or not so discreetly, so much as drunkenly and with women whose names she can't remember.

She wishes to re-make her life from scratch. It will hurt her and the people around her. Her marriage will not survive this. Her career with change. She will regret a lot of the things she will do. But the person who comes out of it will be happy-er. Sharp. Less eager to please. And whole. 

Open the Second Act


Alex

It's late. I'm going to bed. This is short. 

Alex had her shit together.  She stopped her medication, came out, started transition, organized giant activist moots and led a cell of guerilla feminists - all of whom held distant blood ties to "The Black Furies," a tribe of violent shamanic second-wave amazon werewolves.

Then said cabal pissed off a lot of said violent amazons and Alex went into hiding to save her life. Around this time, the Goddess chose Alex to become one of said shamanic amazon werewolves.

Alex doesn't need this shit. She'd like an apology from the Goddess and her old life back.
.

 

 

 

Common themes:

Queers.

People who deliberately cut themselves off from social norms, humanity, and guilt to become themselves, even "fully human." Tension. And astrange sense of forgiveness that follows.

People who break the game - who live in a world full of secret powers, and try to make it just, fair and transparent. And who take a lot of shit for it.

Second/third-wave tension re: trans

Romantic frustration, self-imposed inertia or self-sabotge in pursuing it