#And this one just felt fun to put Rusalka through.

[d-d-disgusting]

what type of soul do you have?

Mainverse Vincent: Tormented Soul.

You have acquired the Tormented soul. you know too much and you're asking where you can put it all down. burdened by knowledge. you make friends in hopes that one day you will be free from the past. nipping at your heels like a hound on the hunt for blood. you so desperately wish to shed your skin and start anew. red raw pulsating flesh stinging in the exposed air. it almost feels good to hurt. its familiar and addicting. but you can't live like this forever. not even for a long time. these things. this loneliness, this hurt and burden will catch up to you. it will turn you into a beast. into the very beast that hunted you. revenge will turn you into the very thing you despise. and when that happens people will no longer be able to tell the difference and put you in the same category. and is that what you want? learn the balance between stroking the soft animal of moving on and yearning for the sweet essence of revenge. it's not always worth it.

:)

Rusalka: Dominating Soul.

You have acquired the Dominating soul. not even a grave could hold your body down. it would crawl right out of the dirt. the omnipresence of simply just your being is overwhelming in an awestruck way. you may not even realise it but people aren't just afraid of you. they look up to you. but the journey to the top is a lonely one. and you ache for a companion. you ache to let yourself feel soft for once. to take of the metal helm and let yourself breathe. let the wind flow through your hair and kiss your cheeks. hopelessly gooey in the middle. but don't be fooled. don't let your leering power. your steel outer shell make you be above others. do not let it fester unchecked and create an ego too big for your mortal body. reality check yourself every now and then, it couldn't hurt. or it might.

Tagged by: @thekingofdemons (Thank you so much for the tag!!) @ others, If I follow you, I'd love to see you do this!

[kira-the-whump-enthusiast]

!!

Tysm for the ask :D

From this ask game <2

Okay this one is gonna be like, a two for one cuz these guys have a very intertwined story!

Name: Amelot Yang Antonio

Pronouns: They/them 🏳️‍⚲

Name: Ciel Yang Antonio

Pronouns: He/him 🏳️‍⚲

A little worldbuilding context to get out of the way: In the fantasy universe Ciel and Amelot live in, there aren't just humans, one of the other beings in this world are the rusalki! Sooo yeah they're heavily inspired by the slavic water spirits, but I sorta changed the lore to put them into my fantasy setting. Though, what's important to know for this loredump is just like. Relations between rusalki and humans are very tense in some areas, and rusalki are able to extend their lifespan by reviving corpses into new rusalki. Some rusalki are willing to murder people in order to revive them afterwards.

Anyways, Amelot and Ciel!! They are funky siblings, and growing up they had a pretty sweet relationship >:) Ciel always protected their little sibling, and he also taught them how to play chess! And when Amelot started getting into chessboxing, Ciel did the same so they could practice against each other! So yeah, they are hanging out, having fun, generally have nice times together. They are each others' best friends.

And then one day, when Amelot was like 13 and Ciel was 18, they went on a hike through the woods, and got lost. So they tried to retrace their steps, but they mostly achieved getting more lost. Eventually, they kinda just ended up staying in place and hoping someone would find them (no tech- this is a fantasy setting.) But then, Ciel spotted something happening in the distance. A little girl in a river, and it seemed like she was drowning. So obviously, he ran over right away, cuz he had to help her! Amelot followed.

And well, this was actually super reckless, because Ciel and Amelot live in a region where rusalki and the people who live nearby have high amounts of tension, and lots of rusalki are very desperate, and willing to trick people in order to kill and then revive them.

Amelot was aware that it might be a trick, but Ciel didn't care, because he could never forgive himself if he let someone die! And so he went into the water to save the girl, and yeah. Amelot was right. The girl was a rusalka, and she tried to drown Ciel. At this point, Amelot panicked and also ran into the water. And while the rusalka was distracted, they took out a pocketknife and stabbed the rusalka in the shoulder. It distracted her long enough for Amelot and Ciel to get away!

So yeah! That was the first of many misfortunes :) Tho, they were found the next day by the townspeople, and they went home!!

But unfortunately for Amelot and Ciel, this whole thing happened right before Green Week. Green Week is the week the summer when the rusalki don't have to be in the water, they can walk on land like anyone else can. And the rusalki remembered Amelot and Ciel's slight! In revenge, some rusalki attacked some of the townspeople. A few of the victims died from their injuries.

And hearing these news just, devastated Amelot. They blamed themself for all the pain and deaths caused, they felt horrible and guilty and they didn't think they could face another person ever again. Their mental well being tanked to the point that they just, ran away.

Their family has a doomsday bunker, and Amelot pretty much stole the keys and locked themself inside. Sort of as self-punishment, and also cuz of fear. They knew the townspeople were looking for someone to blame for what happened during Green Week, and they feared what might happen to them, when it was inevitably revealed that because of their actions, the rusalki decided to enact revenge.

So they hid in the bunker. No one came in, no one came out. At first, their parents came to the bunker every day to try to convince them to leave, but Amelot just moved to a place where they couldn't hear them. Eventually, they tapered off and stopped coming altogether.

It would be an understatement to say this was completely terrible for their mental health! Locking themself in the bunker didn't help at all, it just made them more depressed, more self-loathing, and more lonely. And yet they wouldn't leave, because they were scared of what was outside the door, they were used to the bunker, and because they didn't think they deserved to leave. Long after they started forgetting why they locked themself inside in the first place.

Almost 3 years after they first went inside, their father started coming back to the door again. And he just, talked to them. Talked about how hard it's been without them, but mostly about the little joys in his life that he was trying to appreciate. And he went to the bunker almost every day to do this. Amelot didn't talk back, but they didn't ignore him, this time.

And they thought that life outside the bunker didn't really sound all that bad. And they wanted to talk to someone again. So one day, they opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight for the first time in 3 years. They walked back home with their dad :)

And things seemed to be pretty much the same at home, except their parents looked older. And also, Ciel wasn't there. When they asked where he was, their mother told them he was at a boarding school in another country.

Spoiler alert: that is absolutely not the case at all! Flashback to when Amelot first ran away and locked themself in the bunker. And Ciel was like "I have to protect them" and so, he took the blame for everything. He changed the story so it seemed like he was the one at fault for the increase in hostility from the rusalki. All to focus the townspeople's ire on him. So yeah, he ended up getting arrested, and sent to prison for some serious charges :)

(Amelot's parents never told them this. They didn't want to make Amelot feel any worse by telling them their brother got arrested.)

And the thing about prison in Ciel's country, is that it's absolutely horrible. The approach to criminal justice is pretty much "if we make the prisons bad enough, no one will commit crimes cuz they don't want to be sent here." And so the next three years and a half for Ciel were just. Hell, pretty much. His entire life was confined to a cramped, freezing, pitch black cell. His days altered between total isolation and brutal torture. Some days there was nothing but silence, and some days were filled with the sounds of his own screams.

Suffice to say, when Ciel had an opportunity to escape from that place, he took it immediately. And fate smiled on him this time, and he successfully escaped! So he decided to return home, tho he'd remain in hiding.

And that's how Amelot and Ciel reunited :) Both of them are so, so traumatized now. But hey! They resumed having friendship :D Amelot pretty much still trusts Ciel, they've told him everything about how they're doing and the bunker. (It makes Ciel feel a mixture of guilt and anger that he tries to not focus on- they didn't need to do that, they were safe with his arrest, why did they stay in the bunker? was everything fruitless if they still suffered despite his actions?) Ciel, on the other hand, is pretty much hiding his trauma from Amelot. He's also lying to them of where he's been for the past few years- also telling them that he just went to a boarding school, but he has admitted he's in hiding. He doesn't want to be found out again.

So yeah, they are two guys, and they are doing anything but coping with their trauma :) But hey!! I love them. My angsty children.

(Amelot on the left, Ciel on the right)

[scenesandscraps]

Skinny Dippering

Dipper sighed happily as he sank into the spring’s steaming water. This was the life. A few quiet minutes to himself, letting the heat melt away his cares, alone and surrounded by nature. Even an active mind like his needed some silence now and then.

A silence that was interrupted by a voice behind him: “Dipper? Is that you?”

“Wha!” Dipper tried to both jump up and turn around at the same time, resulting in him bumping his knee on the side of the spring. He clenched his teeth and hissed, only reflecting later that he had barely avoided exposing himself. “Steven? What’re you doing out here?”

“Just walking around, really, and then I thought I heard splashing. Is that a hot spring?”

“Um, yeah. We found it last year. There was a rusalka in it, but we got her to leave and now it’s just a hot spring” “What’s a rusalka?” “Like, a drowned lady spirit. She wasn’t so bad, really, but she froze the spring over and it was kind of messing up the ecosystem. I think she went to Japan or something.” He expected some disbelief, or at least some follow-up questions, but Steven just nodded.

“Cool. I’d ask to join you but I don’t have my trunks.”

“Uh... neither do I,” the words were out of Dipper’s mouth before he could stop them.

“Oh!” Steven looked away, despite not having been able to see below Dipper’s shoulders anyway. “Gosh, I’m really sorry for bothering you.”

“No, it’s okay.  We’re, ah, both guys here, right?”

Steven didn’t really understand that one, but he shrugged it off. “So it’s cool if I come in?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Dipper said, hoping Steven would assume his flush was from the heat. He’d sauna’d with Manotaurs; he’d been to gym class.This wasn’t so different, really. Steven didn’t make a point of going completely out of Dipper’s field of view before undressing, at despite at first politely looking away, Dipper’s curiosity overcame him. He felt a pang of jealousy: Steven’s stocky frame clearly had muscle beneath the fat, and a coating of hair across his chest. In the years since he’d first been to Gravity Falls Dipper had grown taller, but no broader; he’d been called “Pine Needle” at school more than once. 

No thoughts of this kind occurred to Steven, who sighed contentedly as he sank into the water. “Ahh. That’s really nice.” Suddenly he opened his eyes. “Uh, don’t worry if I start sweating pink. It’s not bad for humans.” “That’s… good to know?” Dipper blinked.

They sat together in the hot water for a while. Was it Dipper’s imagination, or was there a faint pink tinge to the water now?

“Hey, Dipper, mind if I ask you a question?” Naked questions. Fantastic. “Uh, okay?” “What’s school like for you?” “What?” “I never went to school. So I’m trying to ask a lot of people what it was like for them, and maybe I can put together what it might have been like for me.”

Huh. Not really a strange question, when he put it that way. “I… don’t like it much.” “How come?” “It’s /boring/. Even when we look at science or stuff I’m interested in, it’s always so… basic. Normal.”

Steven nodded, thinking to himself that normal wasn’t really so bad but not wanting to interrupt. “And the other kids suck.” “You don’t have any friends?” Dipper shrugged. “I mean, a couple. But there’s always these jerks who want to like, call you names or make fun of you or steal your stuff.” “Why do they do that?” “Who knows! Maybe if I knew I could get them to cut it out.” “Well, for what it’s worth, some of my best friends started out trying to kill me. So sometimes things turn around.”

Dipper chewed on that a moment, then said: ”You know, sometimes you say really messed-up stuff like it’s totally normal.”

“I do? What’d I say?” Steven’s tone was one of genuine surprise.

“People trying to kill you and friends aren’t normally part of the same sentence.”

Steven shrugged. “Well, that’s sort of one reason I’m in Gravity Falls. I can’t say I miss that part of my life.” He stretched out and sank below his shoulders. “I’ve actually been meaning to ask you about that.” “About what?” Dipper took a deep breath. “So, don’t take this the wrong way, you’re cool and all, but… Why  /are/ you really here? In Gravity Falls, I mean.”

“What?”

“I just don’t get what this place has for you.”

Steven looked up at the sky, thoughtful. “I told you the truth before. I really did come out here to do something new. It was just sort of lucky that I met Stan while I was driving through, and I decided this would be a good place to give working a try. A place where my mistakes can’t really follow me. I mean, if I flub up my Mystery Shack job, it’s not like Stan can blacklist me.”

“You didn’t have something like this closer to home?”

Steven shrugged. “Sure, probably. But I also needed to get away from my family for a while.”

“Oh,” said Dipper, not sure of how much he could press that particular topic. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s not like they’re terrible people; we love each other very much. But the Gems aren’t exactly good at… human. And my dad…” Steven sighed. “He means well, but he made some mistakes bringing me up. So I needed to get away from them a while and sort stuff out.”

“I guess that makes sense.” 

“Did you think I had some kind of evil plot to ‘raid the secret lab under the Mystery Shack’ or something?” Steven asked with a playful smile.

Dipper’s face went serious. “How did you know about the secret lab under the Mystery Shack?!”

“There’s a secret lab under the Mystery Shack?!” Steven sat bolt-upright, sending a ripple of pink-tinged water at Dipper.

“Wait, you were /joking/?” “Are YOU joking?!” “Um… yeah, hahah, I’m…” aw, crap. Steven wasn’t buying it. And he had that same look in his eyes as Mabel, that same call to adventure. Dipper couldn’t just turn that down. “Look, you can’t tell my Grunkles I told you about it, okay?” “Secret club, deal,” Steven said, with starry eyes. Oh gosh, where to start? How much to tell him?

“Listen, it’s a long story. Is it okay if I start it later? I’m kind of pruning up over here.” “Okay, but you promised.” Steven made a “watching you” gesture with one hand. 

As they dressed, Dipper checked his knee where he’d banged it but couldn’t find a scratch. Huh. It had stung pretty bad; he was sure there’d be a scrape. Lucky him, he figured.

[sarahreesbrennan]

How come between Season of The Witch and Daughter of Chaos, we skipped Sabrina's dark baptism and Tommy being resurrected/killed and went straight into the Greendale 13 threat? Loving the books so far, just curious. 🖤🖤

That’s a great question and I’m so happy you’re enjoying! I’m so sorry this reply is late, I am on unexpected deadline but I know I have a few Sabrina, Fence and In Other Lands answers owing and I am delighted the questions were asked!

There is a confusion that often arises because the category of media tie-in novels (books set in the world of a media property) has two main subcategories. They are similar and have much in common, but aren’t the same.

A) One is novelizations, which is basically a book that tells the same story as the movie/TV show/graphic novels, but through a different medium. The story covers the same space of time, and includes much of the same dialogue. It’s the same story told in a different way.

B) Two is tie-in books, which tell different stories that fit in before or after, or in the spaces between the story. Often tie-in books start with prequels, telling the tale of how the characters get to the place before the story began. It’s a different story but it’s crafted specifically to tie in with the larger story.

Both subcategories are set in the specific story world. Both offer insight into the characters, their thoughts and feelings, and secret motivations, but they are different kinds of story.

I had no idea of these distinctions before I started to write tie-in books myself, so I explain here because hey, knowledge is always useful. I’ve now read a lot of them, because I wanted to teach myself how to write them and because they’re fun, so I thought discussing examples might illustrate the difference.

The Iron Man novelization by Peter David is widely considered especially good. I’ve read it and I like it a lot: great echoes, perfect story beats. (I discuss it pretty technically because I was reading it in order to teach myself to write a novelization, as opposed to a tie-in novel. I have written a novelization, but not in the Sabrina universe and not under my name for contractual reasons!) It tells the story of the first Iron Man movie, how Tony Stark became Iron Man. A novelization means a lot of the (in this case funny and great) dialogue from the movie must be used, but then with a novelization you have to get pretty specific about why the characters said what they said, and how they felt when they said it. One thing I liked a lot in the novel was the insight offered that Tony Stark’s actions at the beginning of the story were frequently driven by sheer boredom--that he was a genius who wasn’t given enough scope for his genius, and was acting out. 

An example of a fabulous tie-in book is Tess Sharpe’s The Evolution of Claire, a book that ties in with the Jurassic World movies, a prequel of how the heroine Claire gets involved in the dubiously moral world of dinosaur park creation. So it happens before the events of the movies, but by reading it you understand Claire better, her ambitions and frustrations. Another such is Leigh Bardugo’s Wonder Woman novel, Warbringer, showing Diana’s much earlier years, and making you understand more deeply how Diana evolved her moral philosophy and her secret insecurities. 

There’s a great article in the Guardian about tie-in novels: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jul/17/tie-in-novelisations-star-wars-jurassic-world

To add to the confusion, stories can have both novelizations and tie-in novels. 

Star Wars famously had absolute masses of tie-in novels. The Star Wars universe is so popular it even has junior and adult novelizations--two different novelizations of the same movie. Patricia C. Wrede, a rather fabulous YA/MG SFF writer, wrote the junior novelizations of the Star Wars prequels. (I’ve read them but if you want to get started on Patricia C. Wrede I would recommend her Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Nothing to do with Star Wars, I just love them.) 

Star Wars also has category B, the tie-in novels. For instance, Resistance Reborn by Rebecca Roanhorse, which is a story that takes place in between the events of the movies The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. I have also read this book. Very cool interstellar war and spies action, but also... for them that like that kind of thing, among which I would include myself... Poe ties Finn’s tie. Thank u Rebecca Roanhorse.

Similarly, there’s a novelization of Maleficent 2 (Maleficent 2: Mistress of Evil by Elizabeth Rudnick), but there’s also a tie-in novel set between Maleficents 1 and 2 (Heart of the Moors by Holly Black) telling you what happened in between the events of those movies. Significant things can happen in those spaces--deaths, courtships, mysteries solved and secrets told. A dungeon scene between Prince Philip and Maleficent is in Heart of the Moors. It’s very important.

So in a novelization, a retelling of a story through a different medium, you get the same events as in the story. But you might get extra scenes that cast a different light on the story, and you will get access to the inner thoughts and motivations of the characters.

And a tie-in book is usually set in between the seasons of a TV show/movies/issues of a graphic novel. It’s a story made to fit into a liminal space, and meant to shed light both on what happens in between the stories, but to cast light before itself and behind itself--so you might learn more about the characters’ pasts, or learn things about their feelings that will illuminate why they behave in a certain way in the future.  

For the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I was hired to write tie-ins, so I wrote a prequel (Season of the Witch) which shows the summer before Part 1, the autumn when Sabrina turns sixteen and has to sign her soul away. It’s an adventure with a rusalka, but also shows us how Sabrina came to be 100% certain her wild witch cousin Ambrose would have her back, why she was insecure enough to do memory spells on her boyfriend (Harvey), and it’s an opportunity to know how the witch world works before our heroine does.

Then I wrote Daughter of Chaos, which happens over mortal New Year’s, right after the Christmas episode that ends Part 1, and before Part 2--because the show didn’t have mortal New Year’s. That was a new adventure that could also tell us how people felt after the events of Part 1, and why people might act the way they would in Part 2. It’s about bad luck spells and enchanted towns, but it’s also about coping with a break-up and how that can put you on a different path, about bereavement and trauma caused by magic, and about longing for affection. Plus it provides us the first hints about hell, before our heroine sees the sparks fly. 

Same deal with book 3, Path of Night, which happens between Parts 2 and 3, in the early spring while Sabrina’s boyfriend (Nick) is in hell. It’s a quest for an item of power to release your beloved from suffering, but it’s also about what happens when you ask a lot (too much?) from your friends, how you can climb out of trauma toward loving relationships (between mean-girl witches and wicked-witch cousins), and how trauma can take someone apart (nobody in hell is having a good time). Plus it provides knowledge about hell before our heroine gets it in Part 3, and glimpses pertaining to heaven.

This month my tie-in novel with C.S. Pacat’s Fence graphic novels comes out (September 29!) and it’s set after the events of volume 4, though the book Striking Distance also works (like Season of the Witch) as an entryway into a new world and an introduction to the characters (in this case a fencing team at an elite boarding school). You try to make every book a possible gateway, but a book 1 definitely should be. (Still, I read Vampire Diaries Book 4 first and caught on just fine, and I recall one reader who read Daughter of Chaos/Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Book 2 and was like, ‘I do not watch this show and did not read Book 1, but I get everything and also Nick Scratch can get it.’)

Another person reading the Sabrina books was like, ‘Sabrina talks a lot about her Dark Baptism in Season of the Witch but then it never happens, Sarah Rees Brennan!’ And this is true, because it happens on the show, and I wasn’t writing novelizations. I think writing Sabrina’s Dark Baptism and Tommy’s death would have been cool and heartbreaking, but I wasn’t meant to retell a lot of scenes from the show. I did snabble a few scenes, but only ones I could use specifically for the purposes of telling the new, in-between stories.

For both novelizations and tie-ins, you get the scripts of the media property you’re working with. Sometimes you get several versions of the scripts. Sometimes you don’t know until you watch the filmed version that scenes got cut. (There were several scenes I read about in the Sabrina scripts, which were cut later, that I used to inform the books. Plus sometimes it’s just fun to watch something and be like, I KNOW WHY e.g. SHE HAS THIS ACCENT/HIS SHIRT DISAPPEARED.) For both you get insights into the story, and especially insights into points of view, that I think you can really only get with books.

For both novelizations and tie-ins, you consult with the writers for the media property, are told things to do and things not to do, and have opportunities to do other optional research. (Things I have done in pursuit of better tie-in novels: written to Sabrina actors and asked them their character thoughts and how they played certain scenes. Forced C.S. Pacat to play with my kitten on a skype call while I took her notes about fencing and feelings.)  

For both novelizations and tie-ins, you have to write them fast, and you have highly specific contracts. Christopher Golden, who’s written many Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Daredevil novels, discusses some details here: https://iamtw.org/from-daredevil-to-buffy-christopher-golden/

So, that’s Options A and B. There’s also Mystery Option C, stories that blur the lines between the two, such as the events of a story told from the point of view of supporting characters, so you see both behind the scenes, the scenes and often before-and-after for the story proper. Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, focusing on Hamlet’s pals from uni. I don’t know what you’d call them. I just wanted to say that they exist too.

Thank you for reading! (Both this and the books.) I hope this was informative and not too dull. :)

[weenietowne]

October 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the Quest for Glory video game series, so what better time to write a bunch of words about it?

It was a game that I played at just the right time in my life to embed itself into my psyche. I was already a lifelong devotee to the Sierra adventure games at the tender age of 12. I learned to type by guiding Rosella via text parser around the land of Tamir to save her father. I read the King’s Quest Companion until the covers fell off. I subscribed to Sierra On-Line magazine, and was briefly pen pals with Roberta Williams (and once received a phone call, to the surprise of my mother who did not know why an adult woman was calling her 10 year old daughter). It was in the Sierra On-Line magazine that I first noticed an ad for the Quest for Glory Collection. 

I saw the game one day at the mall with my dad, and casually asked him to get it for me. I wasn’t really expecting much, but hey, it might be fun. Previous references to the series had always looked too grown up to interest me, but now I was a pre-teen! I was ready for cool fantasy action!

I started up the first game in the Collection and was instantly hooked by a deeper fantasy world than anything I’d ever played in before. I could click on anything and get a funny description, I could get lost in the forests of Spielburg, and I could daydream about the bigger world that this little game alluded to. 

And the best part? That bigger world was right around the corner in the next game. My hero and I journeyed together from one land to the next, in each game reading about the other far away kingdoms that lay ahead of us in our adventures. We jumped from game to game together while getting stronger and wiser, and his friends and enemies went on our journey with us, living their lives in what felt like anything but a static game world.

Full disclosure: I found these particular pixels very handsome at 12 years old. 

They were the last games that I played with my childhood best friend before we drifted apart. We would huddle around my computer all night, walking my hero into traps and laughing at all the funny death messages (this is where I learned the word strychnine). We copied the games onto her computer so she could do the other character class paths- I always went for mages and paladins, while she was more of a rogue type. Since then, there has been a litany of people that I have tried to suggest them to, but a 30 year old adventure game series is a hard sell for a lot of people. My first boyfriend, a friend or two, and my husband make up the entire list of people who got through the first game at my behest and then never continued. They just can’t quite see what I see in these dated little games...but then again, they only played the first one. The first in a series is rarely the star of the show. I wonder if they saw the puns scattered liberally about, the fairly straightforward fantasy quest, and decided that was probably all that was there.

They never went through getting the Prophecy at the Temple of Sekhmet, a somewhat fourth-wall breaking event that felt like it wasn’t just judging the character in the game, but peeking out to the player and asking who they really wanted to be. Or being beguiled by Ad-Avis, an unsettling event playing on the dissonance between the hero’s happily altered perception and the player’s own knowledge of the terrible trap they are both being led into. They never even walked around the savannah for days without any rations in the inventory only to accidentally stumble upon the Awful Waffle Walker, saviour of hungry heroes across the land. 

If you know the flame dart spell you can toast him before eating him.

They certainly never saw my hero slowly fall in love with Erana as he finds sanctuary in her gardens, or found themselves befriending monstrous women like the Rusalka, and Baba Yaga - ladies who are as charming as they are absolutely willing to kill you. The women of the series are a standout- and not just for the time that the games were made in. They are varied and memorable and fun, sometimes allowed to be vulnerable in a very human way, and never there just to be a checkbox for the hero to rescue or win (ok, I guess there is one woman who is literally a tree that you can revive, but even Julanar is interesting). A friend of mine remarked several years ago that she never liked being a girl while growing up, because there were never any cool girls in tv shows or video games. It had not occurred to me until then that all of my favorite things as a kid were created by women, and I had never felt left out the way that my friend did. While Quest for Glory obviously had to cater to its most visible audience of young men, the hand of Lori Cole is strong at the helm beside her husband’s. 

...which isn’t to say there’s no romancing cute girls. Hey, who can’t enjoy that?

I said earlier that I played it at the precise age for it to imprint on my brain. When I was in eighth grade, and right after the release of the last entry to the series in 1998, I began drawing my first comic series. It starred my hero (who in my game was named Mir) and a companion, a gnome girl based on myself (also named Mir).

Yes, it was completely dreadful. 

I’m still working on it, though. 

The story that I’m writing now is unrecognizable from the goofy gag strips that were so funny to me and my friends, but there is still a character named Erana, and there is still a hero that looks essentially unchanged from the paladin that I traveled around Glorianna with. Anyone looking at it who knew of my love for the series would put the pieces together pretty easily. I finished the first version of it in 2003, at the end of my senior year of high school and immediately started drawing a new version. That one lasted 7 years of working on and off, and I drew 217 pages before I gave up, too frustrated with how the story had rambled on and couldn’t go where I wanted it to. The art got better, though.

I didn’t give up, though. I still loved the characters that I had been carrying around in my head since 1998, and I still wanted to tell the Mirs’ stories in the best way that I could. A few years after I stopped drawing it, I started writing again, determined that if I started drawing it again, I’d have the whole story planned out, at least roughly. That’s where I am now in 2019. I’m not someone who finishes projects quickly (I’m still working on an inktober drawing set from two Octobers ago). I’ve been picking away at this comic for twenty one years.

I won’t say that if it wasn’t for this game, I wouldn’t have made anything- I’m sure that something else would have planted seeds and taken root, eventually flowering into some other fandom passion project that I’d transform into my own. The company I work for was founded by friends who were all brought together by their shared love of Earthbound, and have created incredible things both directly and indirectly inspired by it. But for me, it was Quest for Glory. 

Thank you, Lori and Corey Cole, and all of the other people who worked hard to bring the series to life all those years ago.

[authoralice]

A three thousand word mini story thing I wrote for fun between drafting and editing Quickening Blade. So yes, this is a shitty first draft. Maybe I’ll turn it into a book one day! If I did...who do you think Ariel would end up with, Matthew or Otter? 

Mommy had put him to bed early because he had been a bad boy. It really had been an accident when his hand had slipped and his marker had gone onto her wooden coffee table. But mommy never believed him, about anything, or any of the things he saw.

His fingers curled around the knob of his cupboard but he paused when he saw movement behind the doors. It was a small cupboard. Just big enough for his coats to hang and for a few boxes of toys to sit on the floor.

Yet there was an undeniable eye watching him from the crack. It was a beautiful green eye that stared at him with unblinking malice.

This was not the first time he had seen something like this but one had never come into his room before.

Pale fingers emerged from the paper-thin crack between the doors of his cupboard, snaking inexorably towards his hand.

Mommy warned him about not talking to strangers and being very careful around people they did not know.

“Hello,” he told the eye cheerfully, not moving his hand away from the eldritch fingers impossibly stretching for him.

Maybe mommy was right, maybe he was a bad boy.

Smiling, he introduced himself to the unknowable entity residing in the small cupboard. “My name is Ariel, what’s yours.”

The fingers paused, then flashed back into the cupboard.

For a protracted moment, nothing happened. Then a voice emerged. “Are you not scared of me child?”

Ariel giggled, “no, why would I be scared?”

The question seemed to flummox the entity. “I am not of your world. I am here to feed on your fear.” Its voice was fluting and sweet and Ariel found himself drawn to it. Pulling on the cupboard handle, he whined when it would not budge. Not even slightly. The doors did not even have a lock. Yet somehow he knew that the doors would not open unless the entity wished it.

The entity did not wish it.

“I know that too. I want to see you.” His little face scrunched with disgruntlement. “What are you?”

The whole cupboard shook, whether with anger or merriment, Ariel did not know, but he did not remove his hand.

“We have no name,” the voice finally came, “you call us ghost, boogeyman, fairy, god, goddess, demon, angel, siren, rusalka-“

The voice stopped when Ariel yawned. “I want my jammies,” he demanded, “I was too tired to fold them up this morning so I threw them in here, don’t tell mommy.”

Silence once again and Ariel crossed his arms, “the jammies,” he repeated. Sometimes adults had bad hearing, he should be patient but he was really tired today.

“Close your eyes, show me your hands and say please.”

Groaning dramatically, Ariel closed his eyes and extended his little hands, “please.” It was not at all genuine, he was starting to get cranky and he would have to try and tell mommy soon if this entity didn’t give him what he wanted.

But then, as if by magic, he felt something warm and soft in his hands. Opening his eyes, he looked down at the blue fabric, covered in golden stars. “Thanks.” The doors hadn’t even opened, at least he hadn’t heard them creak. That was a neat trick.

“Are you gonna stay in my cupboard, you want anything?” He leaned down slightly, getting close to the green eye. It spoke to him again. “Milk. We like milk. Leave out a saucer before bed. You will be glad that you did.”

Ariel nodded, he could sneak out and get some. “Sure you don’t want it in a glass?”

If the eye could have sighed, he was sure it would have judging from its tone. “No, a saucer.”

Ariel scoffed, “weirdo…” he muttered to himself as he began to pull off his clothes, slowly and awkwardly. Mommy said he was old enough to do this himself now. “What shall I call you?”

“None of us have names. We are Other.”

Ariel paused what he was doing and leveled a scathing look at the eye. It watched him, it never stopped watching him. He was okay with that, the eye seemed nice. “I can’t call you Other. What about…” he put his finger against his lips, “what about Otter? I like that! Like the animal!”

This seemed to distress the entity.

“What…no, you can’t just give someone a name,” it insisted, its voice was still beautiful and melodic but it had lost the gravitas of its previous pronouncements. “Plus, that’s a terrible name.”

“No it’s not,” Ariel commented simply as he slipped out of his bedroom.

When he came back, carefully balancing a pool of skim milk on a chipped saucer, he noticed that the eye was gone. Maybe it really had been insulted by the name? Ariel shrugged and placed the saucer of milk right in front of the cupboard before leaping into his bed.

Closing his eyes, he quickly felt slumber persistently tugging on him until, quite suddenly, he was jerked from that same sleep.

The saucer was wobbling back and forth, as if it had been dropped back down from a sizeable height. All the milk was gone and in its place was a beautiful emerald green flower.

Slipping out of bed, he went over to the flower and picked it up. His nightlight spun in circles, throwing shadows and shapes of light over his face and the cupboard. The doors were open slightly so two glowing green eyes were now visible but only when the nightlight spun to highlight them.

Looking away from the eyes, he examined the flower. Perhaps flower was not the right word. He didn’t know what it was. It certainly looked like something from a garden, with a long green stem leading up to gently curling petals that met at the top. From within the petals, a buttery pale light glowed and ebbed like a slow heartbeat.

“What is it?”

The voice spoke again, thought it seemed to be speaking right into his ear. The eyes were gone from the cupboard.

“You do not have a name for it. Why not give it one?”

Ariel giggled, this was fun.

“Glowy!”

It was only many years later, did he realize three things.

One. It was not fun.

Two. Mommy had been right.

Three. He should never have trusted those green eyes.

It was the first time he had ever been punched. It wasn’t like the slaps his mother had given him, nor the rough jostling when he had been pushed out of the way by the other boys about who should get into the swimming pool first.

This punch was a marriage of knuckles, full body force and deep dislike.

His head spun as he fell back onto his buttocks and hands. The world swayed back and forth as though he sat on the dock of a ship.

Three boys in his own year towered over him. They had all hit puberty before him. It had been funny when their voices had dipped and cracked but now, it wasn’t funny anymore.

The boy that hit him wrung his hand out at his side and let out a bellow, “that felt good! See, laughing at me is wrong. But laughing at you….” As if to make his point, the boy laughed, “there’s nothing wrong with laughing at freaks like you.”

Ariel ran his hand shakily over his lips and it came back with a streak of ruby.

“I didn’t mean to laugh,” he started, “it came out all of a sudden, although you have to admit, your voice cracking like that wa-“

He didn’t get to finish as one of his other bullies took that as an invitation to give him a swift kick to his ribs.

Groaning, he fell to his side, clutching the spot that radiated a second point of pain.

“You’re a freak Ariel,” the leader, Matthew, growled. “A god damn freak. Everyone knows it. Why don’t you do us all a favour and go kill yourself huh?”

The comrades, Luke and Brydon, murmured their assent.

Ariel opened his eyes, he hadn’t even realized he had closed them and watched a trail of ants taking some bread crumbs into their den.

“You still see ghosts and shit? You know things like that aren’t real, you’re crazy Ariel.”

Ariel blinked. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before. It washed over him as ineffectually as placing a pebble in the strong flow of a stream. “Sometimes, I just don’t talk about it anymore,” he admitted as he slowly sat up.

When he did, his gaze landed on a white creature behind the three boys. Green eyes. Those green eyes he had spoken to him when he had been three years old.

This time, there were no cupboard doors to separate them or milk to supplicate it.

Some primitive part of the bullies’ brains bid them to turn.

Between the stationary swings sat a cat. Its fur was brilliant virgin snow, and its eyes were piercing emeralds. It did not stir, even as the two swings beside it began to move, swinging boldly back and forth. But when one swing came forward, the other moved backwards.

A wind stirred around the cat and its eyes grew larger and rounder. The wind picked up whispers, two, then three, then a dozen, then so many that it was hard to distinguish between them.

Help me…hungry, so hungry…why? Why would this…milk and honey….that’s not my child…book? A book?....it’s not normal…

On and on it went. The three bullies stared and Matthew took a faltering step towards the cat.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Ariel muttered as he sat up, his legs crossed loosely in front of him. “It’s not a cat.”

It seemed ridiculous, and obviously Matthew thought as much. He bent down, picked up a stone and threw it.

It went through the cat, ephemeral as mist and fog.

The cat still did not move. The metal chains of the swings screeched as they began to spin, round and around the metal pole that they were hung from, wrapping themselves tight.

The whispers became screams that circled them like carrion birds.

Brydon screeched and ran for his life, bolting out of the park.

“Come on!” Luke urged Matthew, grabbing him by the shoulder and jerking him out of the park. The moment they left, everything stopped. The screams died away as suddenly as they had come and the swings unfurled themselves lazily.

The cat still did not move and Ariel watched it from his seat.

“Why’d you have to interfere? Now they really do know that I’m a freak.” Ariel sighed and rubbed the heels of his palms over his eyes.

The cat spoke. “They were hurting you.” That voice was so hauntingly beautiful that Ariel couldn’t help but look up to watch the cat.

“Yeah, well, they were going to get bored soon enough.” He rubbed his aching jaw, “why did you help me anyway?”

The answer was something he had expected.

“It’s fun to scare people.” The cat supplied, as if the answer should have been obvious. “It’s no fun hurting people, just scaring them. Plus, I was hungry.” Even as the cat spoke, its mouth did not move. The voice came from inside of it, not from it.

Somehow Ariel knew that and stranger yet, that made perfect sense to him.

“Why have you been gone for so long?” The green eyes were assuredly the same that had been in his cupboard, all those years ago.

This time, the cat moved and it tilted its head to the side slightly. “Gone…long…time,” the cat seemed to taste each word. “Time is felt differently by my kind. You humans make lines, clocks, diaries, computers, sundials, pocket watches, calendars….so many different ways to record something that does not exist.”

Ariel shrugged, “it makes living life easier. For humans anyway.”

The cat righted itself so it was sitting perfectly again, with its milky white tail wrapped around its legs. “You would think…with how humans devote themselves to recording something that does not exist, that they would see the Others far more often. We are very real, but you know that, already…Ariel.”

Ariel nodded, “yeah well, sometimes I wish I didn’t. You aren’t even the scariest Other I’ve come across.”

The cat’s unblinking gaze fixed him in place as surely as a butterfly against a board.

“You have not seen me try to scare anyone yet.”

Ariel scoffed, “what about them?” He gestured vaguely in the direction of where his three bullies had fled.

“I had been warming….up,” the expression sounded as foreign as it probably tasted on the cat’s tongue. “I had hardly begun to enjoy myself.”

Ariel blinked and the cat was gone.

Though the cat had gone, the voice lingered for a moment more, “I will get…a clock….and a calendar.”

He was kissing his boyfriend. In public. Ariel dared to lace his fingers through Mathew’s hair, sighing into his mouth. Matthew’s mouth quirked against his own and when Ariel pulled back, his heart was thumping in time with the music.

They had only ever kissed behind closed doors before but now, they were both brave enough to let anyone who was watching know that they were an item.

The music and lights throbbed, keeping time with his desire.

“Want a drink?” Matthew asked, his hazel eyes flashing with the strobes.

“Yeah, thanks.” Ariel tucked a curling lock of hair behind his ear as he rested his chin against his hand, happy to sit and wait in the little booth he and Matthew had scored when the last couple had moved away.

He bobbed his head in time with the music, idly tapping his foot, when he paused.

Green eyes.

This time, the eyes were attached to a human body. The man was taller than anyone else in the club and moved with the languid precision of a big cat stalking prey. The man, it, had milky white hair that pooled over the black leather jacket he wore, incongruous against the sharp features of his androgynous face. Full lips, bright round eyes, cheekbones that would slice open a mortal’s hand.

Ariel swallowed and tasted the peach chapstick that Matthew wore.

The Other stood before him, somehow separate from the club atmosphere. A bubble of calm surrounded him. A woman was talking to her friend and was on track to bump right into the Other before she jerked back suddenly, as though burned.

The Other did not even look as the woman hurried away, rubbing her hands over her arms whilst glancing back at him.

The Other spoke and he knew then, that this was Otter once more.

“Ariel, you aged.”

It wasn’t the nicest way to greet someone. Ariel smiled and leaned his cheek against the back of his hand, “uh huh,” he grunted in reply, “I did, I’m in college now. Last we met I was a freshman in highschool.”

Otter didn’t blink but stared at him unerringly as he always had. Ariel knew that the words freshman, highschool and college meant nothing to Otter.

“Yes,” was all Otter said in response as he moved to sit down in the booth next to him, his movements fluid mercury. Ariel’s pulse fluttered in his throat. The survival instinct he had seemed to lack as a child had developed a little as he had grown. It said to him.

Run.

He stayed exactly where he was.

He hadn’t listened to his mother and he was not going to listen to that voice either.

Something white hung at the back of Otter’s collar and Ariel scoffed as he reached for it unthinkingly, tugging it off his coat. “A price tag?”

Otter looked down at the barcode, “yes?” It was the first time Ariel had heard any uncertainty in Otter’s voice and he scoffed, “did you steal your clothes?”

Otter hardly moved as he spoke, just his lips, forming words for his lilting voice. “Yes, I was told by a stranger that my clothes were odd. I wanted to try blending in.”

The haunting pricks of green fire for eyes, the alabaster hair, the unusual height and the androgynous beautiful face was anything but inconspicuous.

“I got you a vodka and cranb-“ Matthew’s voice started, then died away as he stared at Otter.

Matthew was broad, the typical jock. Yet against Otter he looked…small.

“Who’s this?” There was wariness in that question and even in the warm dark of the club, he could see the hairs on Matthew’s arms standing on end.

“This is Otter.”

The colour drained from Matthew’s face and Otter turned, slowly, to face him. Otter spoke, “the last time we met….you were hitting Ariel,” he cocked his head, “now you’re kissing him?” Otter ran a single digit over the surface of the table in an intricate circular pattern.

“Curious.”

Matthew’s knuckles turned white against the glasses he held. “What do you want?” Otter held up a hand, “I’m not here for you. I’m here for Ariel.”

Matthew’s fear was palpable.

“I don’t care if you’re here for him,” he slowly put down their glasses as he squared his shoulders.

Ariel groaned, he knew that look. Shoulders squared, teeth clenched…

“I’m not going to let you hurt Ariel.”

Otter rose to his feet unhurriedly and placed his hand with the gravitas of an axe fall  on Matthew’s shoulder. “Really?”

Colour returned in a flood to Matthew’s cheeks. The word was layered.

What can you do?

Do you really think you can stop me?

Aren’t you going to run away again?

Matthew wet his lips but before he could answer, Ariel got up. “What is it Otter? I’ll listen.”

Otter’s attention was diverted but his hand remained on Matthew’s shoulder, the sharp tips of his nails pricking his shirt.

“Come to Elsewhere with me.”

“Elsewhere? Where is that?”

A shrill laugh from the direction of the dance floor made Matthew tremble.

“Elsewhere is Elsewhere. Where the Others come from.”