cosmicgrapevine

[cosmicgrapevine]

At that moment, the garage door creaked open behind them. Kenny lost his focus and the nails scattered everywhere, some of them bouncing off Tabby’s head. His dad started yelling before the car was even in park. “What the hell are you doing, trying to give me a flat? Clean this shit up, now.”

Kenny grumbled and bent down. “Guess I’ll show you later,”

“Show them what?” Mr. Boyd continued. “You stay away from my tools, got it? Why are you still here? I thought you were leaving for your trip thing.”

“Canceled. Last-minute thing.”

“Aw, lil’ Kenny won’t get to hang out with his butt-buddies,” Keith said. He was in uniform, swinging his bat around. He glared at Lynd. “I know you,” he said. “You’re that new kid in Coach Bob’s class. You think you’re gonna replace Will, huh?”

“Oh, they found a replacement?” Mr. Boyd said, his mood brightening. “Yeah, pity what happened to Valdez, but you’ve got the right profile for middle infield. You had much DP practice with Keith yet? Or is Coach Bob gonna move you to shortstop and put Delacruz at second? I tell ya, this is the worst Knights team in a couple years, so whatever he does, it better work.”

It’s high school baseball. My god, you people are INSANE. Tabby wanted to say. Mr. Boyd gave her an approving look as well. Maybe a little too approving. The other boy finally brought a girl home, it seemed to say. He may be a loser, but at least he’s not gay. Tabby moved closer to Lynd and nudged him discreetly. “Uh, I’m not on the team yet,” Lynd said. “Maybe soon. I’ve got some…other things going on.”

Mr. Boyd looked doubtful it was anything that important, but the phone rang from inside and he left to answer it. Keith sneered. “Yeah, we don’t need you on our team. This was supposed to be our year, bro. Me and Will. We’ve been playing together since little league, and we’re not gonna be the ones to lose the title streak. So you can fuck off.”

“I’m not here to ‘replace’ anyone,” Lynd said cautiously. “Moving to Kahoti has been good to me, and I want to give something back.” Tabby rolled her eyes. “You know there’s more than two guys to a team, right?”

“Your girlfriend’s got a mouth on her. You might wanna fix that.”

“Insult me if you want,” he said softly, his natural accent creeping back in. “But not her.”

“Yeah? Gonna do something about it?” Keith smiled. He wanted a fight.

Mr. Boyd flung the door open. “Kenny, phone! It’s Dean Hansen from school. Christ, it's always one fuck-up or another with you.”

Tabby flinched at that. It reminded her of too many nights in Chicago. But if Mr. Hansen was calling this number, something was up.

“Hey, Kenny, glad you’re home,” the dean said. “Listen, I’ve got a meeting with the county school board, completely slipped my mind. Could you watch the kids for a bit?”

“Absolutely. Be right over. Hey, can I bring Tabby and Lynd too?”

“More the merrier. Oh, one more thing. My wife tells me you called Fawn a bitch in front of the whole crew. Is that right?”

Kenny blushed and gulped. “Indirectly, sir. But yes.”

“Well, do it again and you’re indirectly banned from next year’s Equinox too.” Kenny agreed and hung up.

“C’mon, really?” Tabby pouted. “Do I look like a baby-sitter to you?”

Kenny looked her up and down. She was wearing flare jeans and a pink ringer tee with a rhinestone tiara on it, and had her hair pulled back in a clip. “Well…” he said and shrugged.

#tabby #lynd #kenny #keith #mr. boyd

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“It used to be a health resort,” Jordy said. “Back in the old days, people thought hot springs would cure anything, y’know, so rich people’d come out here and stay for a couple weeks. Then it went outta business in the ‘30s and the Colonel—that’s Travis’ great-grandpa—bought it for cheap.”

Melanie let him ramble. She’d been fishing for information about the Barretts and their ‘citadel’ all the way up, and Jordy had been the most eager to provide it. It also gave him a chance to share her seat, inching closer with each curve of I-75 until his arm was around her shoulder. Melanie didn’t mind. She kind of liked how corny it was. She’d seen it on TV a hundred times, now a boy was trying it on her in real life. She’d seen fake girlfriends turn into real ones on TV too. Maybe she’d try that one on him.

Everyone onboard knew they weren’t actually dating, so he didn’t need to maintain the illusion. But he wanted to. And she wanted him to. He’d turned on the charm, and it worked, and she’d resent it if he wasn’t so…well, charming. Did she really like him? The way he liked her? She couldn’t say. She didn’t want to ask herself yet.

Her spirits dampened slightly when she got a full view of the next week’s lodgings. “People live here?” She blurted out.

“Yeah, it’s…it ain’t the prettiest,” Jordy admitted. “When the Colonel bought it he bulldozed the whole thing, rebuilt it like this. Wards are stronger when there ain’t any fancy shit gettin’ in the way, he said.”

The Wards here must have been very strong, as the Citadel was a solid block of gray cement, broken up only by plain glass windows. The foggy valleys and narrow, rocky gorges they’d driven through to get here put Melanie in mind of some fairytale castle, but it looked like a Siberian prison at best, a nuclear waste dump at worst. There were several cars and buses parked haphazardly in the front lawn, and the hot springs bubbled away in the back, with their sharp chalky smell.

“Only Travis’ great-aunt lives here, and two of her kids,” Fawn said. “The top floors are for guests, and during Equinox, all the high school delegations have to stay on-site. It’s in the contract. ‘Cause killing Halfmires is fine, but god forbid we stay in Knoxville and party with college kids.”

“Fawn, you ain’t partyin’ either way, come on,” Jordy said. “Hey, looks like the AEGIS bus is here. You gonna room with that Dutch girl again?”

“Trudi? Hope so. You’ll like her, Mel, she’s awesome.”

“Wait, Dutch? Some kids flew here from the Netherlands?”

“Switzerland, actually.” Fawn said. “About 30 years ago a lot of the old European Warden schools put their funds together and built a new boarding school in Geneva. AEGIS stands for something in French, I forget what. The other two schools sending student reps are St. George’s in Memphis, and Wallenbrook in Pennsylvania.”

“Well, they all sound…fancy.” She suddenly wished she wore something other than old jeans and a Kahoti Knights sweatshirt.

“The AEGIS kids are pretty cool. All Americans are the same to them, I guess.” Fawn said. “The others, though, yeah, we’re trashy new money to them. Especially the Georgies. Your grandpa’s been gnawing off bits of their Gulf Coast territory for years and they hate him for it. Well, too bad, guys, it’s not the 1800s anymore.”

#writing sample #melanie #jordy #fawn

[cosmicgrapevine]

Hey weird-esoterica-shit side of tumblr, is there any esoterica/occult/conspiratorial/etc connection or significance to the letters AVC, in that order? It's for The Book. (The abbreviation of 'Acquaviva Circle, the town's ritziest neighborhood where Florentino lives. It contains an artifical pond--the titular 'water of life'--that will become significant in a supernatural ritual later in the story.)

[cosmicgrapevine]

So I'm about 60% done with the draft of this manuscript, and have more or less figured out how the endgame is gonna go. At this point, Melanie is attending, with several teammates (and several others, including Tabby and Lynd, staying home) a spring-break gathering for magic users and supernaturalists at the country house of a veteran Warden family in east Tennessee. There, she'll learn a lot more about her family history and what Marksteppers really are--that I've got pretty much planned out. What I wouldn't mind some ideas on is that there are going to be three other student delegations, all from private academies devoted to the magical arts, one in the New Orleans area, one somewhere on the East Coast, and one in Switzerland or maybe France.

These other schools are, metatextually, the sort of blueblooded, centuries-old, gothic institutions that normally take center stage in books like mine, whereas the Lost Kids are stapled onto a normie-ass American public high school founded by the very new-money and future-focused Florentino Cervantes, and I'm not sure how I want the culture clash to work there. I want to avoid the sort of 'ew, commoners' reaction, because I think that's hacky and predictable (although it will probably bubble up at some point), and I think it would be more interesting just for the groups to be curious about each other. In a "Wait, you don't do x? Our school does that all the time" way. Part of my purposes with setting this book in the late 90s was to evoke the bigness of a world without Google or smartphones, so I wanna get this right.

Anyway, if any of you have any ideas I'd love to hear them, particularly of the 'I always wanted to see someone take the piss out of such-and-such Magic School trope' kind.

[cosmicgrapevine]

They stopped at school first; every teacher except Miss Vernon had loaded them down with spring break homework, and Melanie wanted to plead her case to Mr. Hansen. It was past 4:30 and the halls were nearly empty. Just as she was ready to knock on the dean’s door, someone inside smashed their fist against it, hard enough to rattle the handle. Melanie flinched and stepped back, staying away from the windows.

“Fuckin’ hell, Gary, what’s gonna change your mind, huh?” It was Travis. Goddammit. “Dead body? Is that what’ll sway ya? ‘Cause it’s comin’, believe me.”

“Mm…nah.” That was Mr. Hansen, who sounded utterly unworried. “Sure, I had my doubts at first. But he’s been a perfect student, and practically gone native already.” They were talking about Lynd. “All he needs is to make a few friends outside the LKPC. I gave Nate Goldman a nudge; said he should teach Lynd some ball. We do need an infielder.”

“Friends? He’s a Markstepper, Gary, a born and bred killer. They don’t have ‘friends’. And he’s the second one to turn up here this year, in the heart of Warden territory, and rumors are flyin’ about Equinox too. The Marksteppers are plottin’ something, and that boy’s a part of it, and y’all are buyin’ his ‘Oh, I just want a hooome’ bullshit like he’s your long-lost son. Just gimme a chance to prove it—”

“I said no.” Mr. Hansen’s voice had changed, now simmering with contempt. “You’ve always been an asshole, Travis. When you were fifteen, I thought hey, he’ll grow out of it. But now you’re twenty-four and even worse, ‘cause the old man spoiled you rotten all those years. Now you’re on his bad side for once, after that stunt you pulled with the mirror, and you can’t handle it.”

“So in you crawl, trying to get me to go behind Mr. C’s back with you, and you think the best way to do that is threatening one of my students?” He chuckled. “Tell you what, if I hear you went through with it anyway, I will personally flash-fry all the fat out of your vicious little brain, and you know that’s not a metaphor, pal. Now get lost.”

Melanie didn’t have time to react before Travis slammed the door open. He did a double-take upon seeing her, and for a second Melanie flinched, worried that she’d be the literal punching bag for Travis’ frustration, but instead he simply snapped “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I j-just had a question for Mr. Hansen…”

“You didn’t hear a fuckin’ thing, got it? Not a fuckin’ thing."

Melanie eagerly nodded. She just wanted him to go away. And he did, his stomps echoing down the stairwell.

Mr. Hansen approached her, shaking his head. “I’m sorry you had to hear that, Melanie,” he said.

“What’s he want with Lynd?”

“Oh…” Mr. Hansen shook his head. “Just the usual Warden chest-thumping. Can’t handle being shown up by a Markstepper. But I promise you, he won’t hurt anyone. I’ll see to that.”

“Why do you guys keep that psycho around?” She said bitterly. “How can you trust him?”

Mr. Hansen leaned in. “If it was up to me, he’d be out on his ass, for exactly that reason. But it’s not up to me, and I think you know who’s calling the shots here. Travis and the old man, they have a history. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can say. Now, what did you need?”

“I’ll ask later,” Melanie said. She just wanted to get out. When she was in fifth grade, and her dad was neck-deep in chasing down mobsters, she’d learned about made men. Mafiosos who had the blessing of the boss to do whatever they pleased, who answered only to him. That was Travis. He could do anything, hurt anyone, and Florentino would cover for him. He was in Florentino’s doghouse now, apparently, but who knew how long that would last?

No, there was no justice in Warden-land. There was only power. Mr. Hansen could lie to her—and himself—but he knew it too. He knew Travis wouldn’t respond to reason, only violence, and he knew he could deliver that violence, in the form of some horrific literal-brain-melting magic, if he had to. She didn’t trust him either. She didn’t trust any of them deep down. Not even her parents.

Of course, in her dad’s mafia tales, there was one level between the boss and his made men: his actual family. Like her. She wondered what Travis would have done otherwise.

#melanie #travis #mr hansen

[cosmicgrapevine]

"Look, we've been soldiers together for months," Tabby said, "and it's been great, really. But tonight I don't want to be your comrade. I want to be your princess." She sidled up to him and straightened his tie. "And I want you to talk fancy to me, like you used to." Lynd nodded, a sly grin forming on his lips. "Oh? 'Talk fancy', is it? Well, my love, close your eyes and listen." He put his hands on her bare shoulders, swaying her back and forth. "Picture a castle of white stone on a jagged cliff, its towers gleaming in the moonlight. Below, briny waves lap at the rocks. Above, an endless tapestry of stars bids you to look into the heavens. And there you wait for me, on the highest castle wall, the silks of your beautiful gown trailing behind you like a sparkling river, your golden hair glimmering as the wind caresses it."

"You know I will arrive. It is the...anticipation that drives you mad." He gently massaged her shoulder muscles. She shivered in delight. "And soon I am here, the wind carrying my feather. We can hardly wait to embrace each other; our hearts swell as I take your hand, leading you to our bedroom. It is a beautiful place, because it is our place." He gave a slight purr. "You cast off your gown, toss aside your jewels and stilletos; I strip off my jacket and vest, but not the shirt. I let you do that, one. Button. At a time." His daring hands were tickling the sides of her breasts, moving closer to the middle of them with every delicate whisper. "And then...we make love. We have been waiting so long. Ever since I confessed my love to you, and you to me. And we feared this, we feared what the world would say. But now, tonight, there is no world. There is only us. Only our love. And with that, we are invincible." He kissed her on the cheek, long and deeply, letting go with a throaty chuckle. "Was that fancy enough for you, my love?"

It took Tabby a few sways to realize Lynd wasn't holding her shoulders anymore. "Ugh...oh God," she said. "I wish you hadn't said that."

"Why not?"

"Because now we have to actually go to prom before we can fuck, and I don't think I can wait."

"I think you can," Lynd said. "The anticipation is the best part."

[cosmicgrapevine]

Would you trust them to kill demons? I would.

[cosmicgrapevine]

If JKR found time for a Yule Ball chapter, I'll find time for a prom chapter.

#tabby #lynd #drawing

[cosmicgrapevine]

Jordy chuckled, but took Ryan’s advice. She followed him to a test-your-strength machine and paid two bucks for three swings. “Really, though, thanks for coming. Means a lot to me.” “Well, don’t thank me yet. I’m still waiting to hear what happened with Shanti.” Jordy swung the hammer. Whack! The weight went halfway up. “Fawn told you most of it,” he said. “Not much else to say. I made a mistake and paid for it, and I’ve moved on.” Swing two went higher. “OK, you’ve moved on. Great. What about her victims?” Melanie said. “I didn’t fuckin’ come here to talk about my ex,” Jordy put the hammer behind his head and grunted. He heaved it forward in an overhand swing, bashing the rubber button with all his might. WHACK! DING! The bell rung and the carny clapped. “Alright, baby doll, looks like your man just won you a prize! Step right up, take your pick! You think you can beat that, sir? Alright, c’mon!” And he’d already moved on to the next customer. Melanie rolled her eyes and grabbed the first thing at hand—a knockoff Garfield beanbag doll so overstuffed it looked pregnant. She tossed it at her ‘man’ and said “Tough shit, ‘cuz I did. When a guy refuses to talk about his ex, girls get suspicious. We have to.” He looked around nervously. “Let’s find some place more private, OK? Ferris wheel?” “Works for me. If today’s the day it goes down, Ryan’s dad can sue them.” The metal armbar and red plastic seating stung Melanie’s skin as she climbed in, Jordy’s bulk pressing her against them. The metal creaked as their seat rose, soon clearing the trees and revealing acre after acre of suburban sprawl. Kahoti’s white walls were just visible in the distance, like a desert mirage. “When you’re a Warden,” he said, “Eventually you’ll meet someone who you can’t tell the truth to, but can’t let go of either. So you lie, and you get good at lying. Fawn does the same with the orchestra kids, Miss Vernon with the teachers, we all do.” “But one day she came to me sobbing. Her ‘teammates’ humiliated her in front of everyone. She was gonna either kill them or herself. So I caved. Taught her a few exorcist tricks. Nothing dangerous. Memory spells so they’d forget their homework, compulsions to pick their nose in public, just pranks. But it wasn’t enough, she kept looking for nastier stuff. After a while, I bailed. She found another trainer.” The wheel creaked as the trip down began. “Never found out who.” “Never found out? How many people could it have been?” “There’s dabblers and small-timers everywhere. Old man leaves ‘em alone unless they start shit. And apparently one of them’s got some serious juice. I didn’t even know until she rung me up on New Year’s Eve with those girls locked up in a trapping Ward. She was mad with power by that point. If I didn’t help, she’d have gone after me next. “So there’s my story. One moment of weakness. Trying to help my girlfriend after a bad day and I ruined three girls’ lives. So what’s the word, Your Honor? Guilty or innocent?” It wasn’t just his story, Melanie thought as the ferris wheel creaked to a stop, but the way he told it. Every word was as bitter as medicine as he stared, dead-eyed, into the sky. She could question his judgment, but not his sense of guilt. “Innocent, I guess. Until proven guilty. You must be pretty confident I’m not gonna be like her.” “When I heard Mr. C’s grandkid was moving in, I thought, shit, no matter what else she’s like, at least I can tell the truth about my life. Then I realized you’re a rookie too.” He chuckled. “But nah, you’re not like her. You think about things before doing ‘em, and you don’t got that mean streak. Honestly, Tabby reminds me of her more than you do.”

#writing sample #melanie #jordy

[cosmicgrapevine]

Samantha Nietz. Heidi Haley. Robyn Calvino. Tabby had overheard those names, in ‘hey, what happened to…’ or ‘did you hear about…’ scraps of gossip. Every school had its scandals, and one the size of Kahoti surely had some juicy ones. She was getting a front row seat to one of them—literally, as Shanti drove them to the Nietz house. Shanti was new to Kahoti herself, as of last August; her father’s job had brought him from Boston to Tampa Bay. With her looks, she turned heads as soon as school started, but even in fall, the school’s dating scene orbited around the baseball team. Jordy got first dibs, which he happily took, and after a fairytale homecoming dance, other perks started piling up in her corner; a spot on the cheer squad, teachers suddenly deciding that D+ essay was really more of a C-, and, of course, magic. Such was life when the Cervantes Mafia took a shine to you. “It never really bothered me that magic was real, you know?” Shanti said airily. “There’s all kinds of crazy stuff out there. But maybe I just didn’t understand it well enough.” Success, of course, bred resentment. Girls who had spent three years on—or wishing they were on—the squad stared daggers at this newcomer flouncing right in and stealing away the school’s biggest hunk. Just before winter break, the three aforementioned girls dreamed up a disgusting prank-slash-threat involving a chunk of raw ground beef, some used tampons, and Shanti’s cheerleading uniform. “I think the beef was what really made me snap. Like, they know I’m Indian, they know that makes it worse. If they’d just used, I dunno, raw fish…” she shrugged. Shanti planned her revenge meticulously. She had Jordy spread rumors about a big blowout New Year’s Eve party for all the cool kids at his uncle’s (fictitious) beachfront place, then drive the girls there the day of. Jordy, apparently terrified that he’d wind up on the hit list himself, complied. Shanti was waiting for them, with a trapping ward to keep them from escaping and enough Ward-Ash to turn their psyches into her playground. Robyn was the animal-noises girl Tabby had heard about, and she did indeed get it the least-bad, thanks to a last minute desperate apology. She would only snort or moo when talking to boys, so at least going gay was still on the table. Heidi was forcibly implanted with a sort of all-consuming nymphomania in return for calling Shanti a whore, to the point where her parents started home-schooling her for her own protection. And Samantha, the raw-beef mastermind, got it the worst of all. Shanti parked in the cul-de-sac in front of the Nietz house and tapped the horn—three quick beeps. Soon, a ghostly figure appeared at a bedroom window, a girl with raggedy hair, sallow skin, and disheveled clothes. “Pathological germophobia,” Shanti said proudly. “She can barely leave the house anymore because she’s so scared of getting infected with something. I made her scared of soap and laundry detergent and stuff too, she thinks they’ll poison her. And the cool part? She knows that’s not true, but her fear is just too strong to ignore. So she just sits in her room, getting filthier and filthier. Maybe she’ll die in there.” Shanti’s final lie, the one that truly sealed her enemies’ fates, was successfully spreading the rumor (again, with Jordy’s help) that they had gone to an even wilder New Year’s party, one with ravers and hallucinogens, and got high enough to get permanently re-wired, explaining their new compulsions and fears. It was a bullshit story, one even a DARE officer wouldn’t buy, but hey, they were all suburban teens, and drugs were scary demons on the nightly news. It worked well enough.

#writing sample #tabby #shanti

[cosmicgrapevine]

A drawing of some of my book characters. That's Melanie in the middle, Florentino on the left, and Janet and Fred up top. Florentino is Fred's father and Melanie's grandfather, so hopefully the resemblance came through.

[cosmicgrapevine]

After Lynd finally confessed his feelings, his and Tabby’s relationship had progressed like many high school romances: namely, they talked constantly about each other when asked, brought it up unprompted when not, and used every teacherless three-minute-window to sneak around some corner and lock lips. They would emerge with red cheeks, sparkling eyes, and smiles that said ‘I’m only acting embarrassed because I’m supposed to’. If they weren’t her friends, Melanie would want to slap them.

And every time they were all together, Jordy would look at Melanie, pump his bushy eyebrows, and smile in a different way: that could be us. Just say the word. His offer was still on the table, and she was still kicking it down the road. She knew she’d have to decide soon. Jordy’s three-month dry streak was attracting just as much attention as her own sudden appearance in town and her resemblance to the local land baron. No one had said anything to her face, but there were looks. Whispers. Melanie responded as she always did to attention: keeping her head down, her work done, and her mouth shut.

Thankfully, the school gossip chain was currently more focused on ‘that weird foreign kid who kicks everyone’s ass in gym’ and his ‘hot girlfriend’. Coach Bob had taken a shine to Lynd, which meant most of the baseball team had, which meant most of the school had. There was even some talk, started by a couple of Jordy’s teammates, of drafting him onto the team to replace Will Valdez, the second baseman with a broken ankle. Lynd had demurred, saying he knew nothing about baseball. And, of course, that he was busy.

#writing sample #tabby #lynd #melanie

[cosmicgrapevine]

A Not-So-Brief Summary of my Novel's Worldbuilding, Characters, Plot, and Themes

@tototavros was asking for a more comprehensive summary of this project at some point, so here goes. This is a rather 'organic' project and some of the details have changed over time and will continue to change, but I'm pretty solid on most of it at this point.

This sideblog is for my posting pieces from and other content related to my WIP manuscript Through the Grapevine, an urban fantasy novel set in the late 1990s that straddles the YA/New Adult border in tone and content. While the first novel is a fairly self-contained narrative, I am writing and marketing it as a 3-4 book series.

Metaphysics: While this mostly isn't relevant in the first book, if you pan out wide enough it turns out that our universe is only one of an uncountably high (but not infinite: something something maximum number of vertices in an n-dimensional something something) number connected by a structure known as the Viabract or Great Vine. The number of universes able to support life at all, let alone a civilization of intelligent beings, is much smaller--many universes are tiny, half-formed, or incomplete 'junk dimensions'. "Our" universe has a reputation for being unusually safe, stable, and predictable, in part because our stricter physical laws make magic more difficult to perform, and magic is ultimately a force that borrows against metaphysical stability, especially on the large scale.

The Viabract is the ultimate source of all magic, although that magic manifests locally in different ways, and skilled supernaturalists can use it to travel between dimensions. The interior is a series of interconnected tunnels to which normal notions of size and distance don't really apply. The only (arguably) living beings native to it are agglomerations of pure magic called Mires, which in their natural state look something like overgrown amoebae but can possess other beings to give themselves 'real bodies' and grant significant power to their hosts. (A non-sapient possessed animal is called a Halfmire, while a sapient possessed animal is a Fullmire)

Main Characters: My two POV characters are Melanie Kitz and Tabby Jelenski, high school juniors at a Catholic school in Chicago who have been friends since childhood. Melanie's parents, Fred and Janet, are a Chicago PD detective and a social worker for Child Services, and thus she's led a fairly privileged life. She is ambitious, hoping to get into a good college and start a career in politics or activism, and prefers to follow the rules and keep her head down.

Tabby's parents, Steve and Rita, are divorced and estranged: her paternal uncle went to jail for laundering mob money through his pawn shop, which ruined her parents' already tenuous relationship. She lives with her abusive mother, her father moved to the suburbs to live with said brother once he got out of jail, and while she deeply despises her mom she's not on great terms with her dad either. She is adventurous and reckless, planning on running away to anywhere-but-here as soon as she's done with school. She rebels against her mother through petty crimes and sleeping around with neighborhood boys.

While he's not a POV character, Lynd's arc is nearly as important as the other two. He shows up one night at Melanie's house, looking for her paternal grandfather Florentino, a man she thought had been dead for decades. He claims to be a representative of an ancient order of demon-hunters called Marksteppers who live in the wilderness and forsake human civilization, and his 'clan' seeks help from Florentino, who is the most powerful living Warden, a different school of magic (broadly speaking: Wardens are rules-magic engineers, Marksteppers are spirit-magic shamans, and they do not work well together). It is soon revealed that Lynd has ostensibly arrived in search of some information, but really wants to leave his old life behind and see what life in the 'normal world' is like.

Lynd is of the Ash Clan of Marksteppers, one of nine 'Great Clans' that rule the others and whose members are significantly more powerful. While 'normal' Marksteppers are basically human, Great Clan members are closer to demigods: they don't age, can't reproduce, and the (more or less) only way to join a clan is to kill a current member and inherit their powers, thus taking their place.

Setting: All three wind up in Kahoti, Florida, a private suburb north of Tampa built, funded, and operated by Florentino. Wardens' chief magical tool is Wards, a form of defensive magic which borrows energy from the Viabract and uses it to create barriers. Historically, Wards could only be applied to single structures, as they relied on a physical anchoring point and their power could not be transmitted through empty space. Florentino is a pioneer in Warding larger areas: his first big breakthrough was (ironically) magic-proofing Walt Disney World, using the rides, monorails and the like as vectors for Wards. By the '80s, he had mastered his craft enough to build an entire community with enough space for 30,000 people, all fully Warded and protected (real life inspirations include private and/or planned Florida communities Seaside, Celebration, and Golden Oak).

Plot: Once they settle down in Kahoti, the trio joins the Lost Kids, the in-training demon-hunting group at Kahoti High (this is, at its core, a Wake Up Go to School Save the World story). The central enemy in the story is Blackmires--Mires which seem to be created artificially, hijack hosts instead of symbiotically bonding with them, and can be transferred from one person to another with the old memories intact, none of which normal Mires are supposed to be able to do.

The mastermind behind their creation is Gerald Scutaro, aka The Centipede, a former mafioso who found a way into the world of magic and used it to benefit his organization, until he got too powerful for his own good and his fellow mobsters tricked him into a Vegas trip in the early 1990s where they gave him the Rasputin treatment and left him for dead. He survived, however, to meet Anna McCarthy, current Lord of the Sumac Clan of Marksteppers. Along with another Sumac, they invent Blackmires by combining normal Mires with the Sumac Clan's signature Black Water, a substance that in small doses makes people uninhibited and hedonistic, and in large ones mutates them into monsters that the Clan Lord can control.

McCarthy and Scutaro's ultimate plan is to gain possession of two bractoscopes, items that superficially look like mirrors but are actually portals into Warded areas that they couldn't access otherwise, use them to funnel their troops into Kahoti and take it over from the inside. And that is not just for its own sake, but to secure possession of a valuable territory for the coming actions of all nine Great Clans: an attempt to summon their creator goddess back to life and turn Earth into a fortress against their extradimensional enemies. (This is not an 'Evil Plan' necessarily: some Marksteppers and humans alike think that it will lead to a new golden age for Earth as a center of interdimensional travel, and Marksteppers in general are fond of humanity and see themselves as its protectors.)

On the more interpersonal level, Melanie was already an ambitious young woman, and learning that she's the heir to her grandfather's vast empire and a prodigal (grand)daughter to this new community only heightens that aspect of her. She learns how to use this power to the benefit of all while still keeping her morals intact. She struggles in understanding her grandfather and his work; he is at turns capricious, downright cruel, and deeply merciful. Tabby and Lynd, meanwhile, quickly find themselves falling in love with each other, their shared outsider status and being targets of suspicion deepening their bond. With Tabby's help, Lynd assimilates quickly to this new world, to the point where she fears he'll lose the spark that brought them together in the first place.

Other Characters: Florentino Cervantes himself is my flashy, sun-soaked spin on the mentor character, a wizard and business baron whose two trades mutually support each other, and who mostly farms out the mentoring to his subordinates. Travis Barrett, an aggressive and vicious hunter, is his second in command, and is secretly Melanie's older brother: Florentino forced Fred and Janet to give up their firstborn to him in return for leaving their lives entirely. Since the Lost Kids meet primarily at school, most of their adult support doubles as school staff, including Gary Hansen (dean of students), Amanda Vernon (physics), and Lou Bonifacio (driver's ed and assistant baseball coach).

Gary's daughter Fawn and Lou's nephew Jordy are both 'lifers', with Fawn specializing in infosec and cover-ups and Jordy being more of a front-liner with a magic-infused baseball bat that can turn into a massive magic-fueled sledge. Kenny Boyd and Anthony Nicks began their training in middle school. Anthony is the team nerd of sorts: tech whiz and loremaster with perception-altering powers, while Kenny is a cynical metalhead and skateboarder with the ability to control metals. Finally, the 'Pool Crew' consists of Drew, Jevon, Conrad, and Corey, who answer directly to Travis and whose preferred magic is the gun kind. Jordy's girlfriend Shanti Khatri had a spot on the team for a minute, but was kicked out and memory-wiped for targeting her classmates with mind-altering magic.

Of the bad guys: Ernest Brunswick is a 200-year-old English aristocrat who gained Markstepper-immortality at age 30 or so, and the chief chemist in the creation of Blackmires. He is estranged from Scutaro and McCarthy when the story begins and seeks to undermine them. Other agents include Dale Patterson, the first Blackmire who could successfully travel from body to body, but given he was a white supremacist before being transformed, insists on possessing only white men, and Rachel Bosart, a one-hit-wonder pop singer from the '70s who is looking to ride Scutaro's magic into a younger body. While none of the students start out demonic (in the non-mundane sense at least), the bad guys do get their claws into Shanti and star pitcher Ryan Hyde as well.

Themes: The most central theme to this story is freedom vs. safety, exemplified by Tabby and Melanie respectively. Wards provide safe havens from demons, but must be carefully controlled and are not open to everyone. Personal choice is also a major factor: destiny and chosen ones do not really feature here (although some characters think otherwise), and emphasis is repeatedly placed on how all three tritagonists choose to learn more or go deeper. While I'm trying to avoid going all Ernest Cline, 90's/y2k nostalgia is a factor as well, playing up the pre-9/11, pre-Columbine sense of freedom and optimism, as well as one of the last eras where having a social life didn't require being constantly plugged into the internet.

[cosmicgrapevine]

Hey.

Ask me something and I'll answer in-character as one of my book characters. If you don't know anything about them that's fine. Keeps me on my toes.

[cosmicgrapevine]

Kenny lined up the tip of his sneaker at the corner of the sidewalk and tapped rapidly. After about a dozen taps, Melanie felt that familiar prickling feeling. In some distant corner of the sky, a glimmering, translucent shape formed. It looked like the underside of a plant, roots and branches splayed in every direction, crossing over and under each other in impossible ways and flashing every color her eyes could perceive. It was terrifyingly massive, like a rogue moon or planet barreling down on them. The shape pulsed with the movements of Kenny’s foot; when he stopped, the pulsing slowed, and the glimmering faded. The structure slipped into nothingness one branch at a time, and then nothing but cloudless blue sky remained. They were far from school now, and the winding sidewalks were mostly empty. Not that it mattered, as no other pedestrians so much as looked up. “That’s the Viabract?” Melanie breathed. On the way over, Kenny had described a massive, invisible structure, a dimension unto itself full of mind-scrambling departures from the laws of physics, that overlapped in and over and through the mundane world. It was from there that Wards derived their magic. Even the small, drawn-on ones siphoned off its power. “You’re full of shit,” she had said. Slime-demons hiding in dark corners was one thing, but this couldn’t be true. This would mean that Wardenry was built into the universe itself. It would reduce all modern physics and astronomy to shreds with one stroke. Kenny had smirked and said good thing it’s a secret, then. “Yup. That up there was a Root: lots of branches all coming together, so it’s a good place to build Wards. That Root covers all of Kahoti, and that little trick I did is the only way to see it.” “How’d you find it?” “It was my entry test for the Lost Kids. The old man had me running from school to the library to the museum downtown, one riddle after another. Cracked it eventually, though.” He nodded at the street signs; they were at the corner of East Skyview Lane and Gordian Court. “‘East Skyview’ is like, take a wild guess, and then Gordian was this Greek king, challenged everyone to untie this huge knot if they wanted to be king, and the dude who won just fuckin’ chopped it in half with a sword.” He shrugged. “Or something like that. Been a few years.” “Anyway, Mr. C likes that story because back in the day, everyone said Warding a whole city was too complicated. It could only possibly work if he duplicated the structure the Viabract itself. So he did.” Kenny gestured broadly. “All these weird-shaped streets and buildings, they all overlap with some little branch of it. That’s why Mires can’t get in; the whole town is the gate, and it gates off that part of the Viabract.” After a few days of reticence, Tabby told her yesterday about her and Lynd’s adventure, including Lynd’s theory that he had a test of his own to pass. She thought he was grasping at air, but now...“Could a Markstepper get past?” She said, trying to sound casual. “They’re not Mires, so…” “Why, you know any?” Kenny said. Melanie tensed for a second, but then Kenny laughed. “Chill, it’s a joke. Of course you didn’t, there aren’t any for miles around here. Too much ‘civilization’ in Florida, if you can call it that. But I’ve heard rumors.” Melanie nodded expectantly. “They can enter the Viabract. Walk inside it,” Kenny said. “Fight the things that live inside, keep ‘em from crossing over. So no shit they can’t get past, that’s like nuking yourself with magic and trying to get past a geiger counter. If that’s right, of course.” He shrugged again. “I think Mr. C can travel through the Viabract too. He’s old as shit, how else is he getting around so fast? Anyway, this is boring. I’m going to Anthony’s.” Maybe he can, Melanie thought. And if he can… “Hey, can I come with? I haven’t talked to him much yet.” Kenny looked back at her. “No offense, but it’s probably gonna stay that way.”

[cosmicgrapevine]

Tabby sat with her legs crossed, not daring to move a muscle. They were easily a thousand feet up at the moment. There was really nothing keeping her from falling to her death, other than her own stillness, but she felt safe anyway. Lynd steered, and she wrapped her arms over him, like they were sharing a Harley speeding down an empty highway. “Why do you think he didn’t rat on us?” She asked. “Spite, I imagine. Travis was his captor, not us.” Tabby turned the mirrors over; she was holding them so they wouldn’t slip out of Lynd’s coat. “We should just keep these. Hold them for ransom so Florentino will let you in.” “I would rather not try to extort the most powerful Warden in the country, but…hm. Never mind, I’m surely mistaken.” “No, keep going.” “It’s just…the words he used. I kept mulling them over last night. ‘No power on Earth’. ‘Out of my hands’. And even if a sailor cannot stop the tides, he can navigate them. Wardens choose their words carefully, just like everything else. Perhaps he is saying there is a path, but I must discover it on my own. But if it exists, it will be near impossible to find.” “Let’s say we find it. You make it to Kahoti, what’s first on your list?” “Well…you said Melanie is already attending school again. I would like to join her.” Tabby started laughing, so loud that she worried someone on the ground would hear. “Dude,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye, “You did not risk death for weeks on end just to go to fucking high school, gimme a break. Like, hold out for college, at least.” “Markstepper education is very informal, focused on survival and pragmatics. I know nothing of history or the sciences…I can barely read, surely you have noticed; I learned all those languages by speech alone. And I cannot even drive a car: the whole ride down, I felt so useless. Where else would I learn these things?” “Look, it’d be great if that’s how it worked, just show up and say ‘I need knowledge! Teach me!’ But it’s not. Even if they let you in without an ID and stuff, you’re gonna do things their way. Their classes, their rules, their system. And the other kids…” Tears flew from her lashes again, and not tears of laughter. “They’ll find whatever you hate about yourself and cut you with it until all that’s left is scars. Just for fun, just because they can. I’m sorry, but there’s no way they’ll accept you.” They were close to Kahoti now, its winding streets almost forming a pattern to her eyes, some small piece of Florentino’s Ward, before it slipped away again. What if this is the last time I see Lynd? She thought suddenly. Florentino doesn’t want me here; if Rita pushes him he’ll ship Dad and me back on the next flight out. She couldn’t let that be the last thing she said. “I—I mean, my last school was like that, but maybe this one’s better…” “No, you were right. Idiotic of me to think otherwise. Once I get what I need from the old man, there’s nothing for me here. Try pushing your weight downward; we’re descending soon.” His voice was flat. “There are certain lies Marksteppers tell each other. One is that the civilized world is nothing but panicky cattle who would be slaughtered without our protection. Another is that actually joining that world is the height of dishonor, an unforgivable betrayal of your clan. We beat that into each other until we never forget it. And they must not have beaten me hard enough.” His voice wasn’t flat anymore. “I want to stay.” He said it with a mix of shame and bleak acceptance, like he was confessing to a crime. “You’re the first person I’ve told,” he whispered.

#writing sample #tabby #lynd

[cosmicgrapevine]

Growing up a shonen fan left me with a strong appreciation for numbered-and-ranked teams of antagonists, some of whom are not actually evil and some of whom very much are. I do hope to clean up and color this one at some point, but for now, in roughly ascending order of power, here are the Nine Great Lords of the Hunt: Lords Pine, Cedar, Sumac, Maple, Birch, Elm, Oak, Willow, and Ash.