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#they've torn the school down tho so who knows
inkskinned · 1 year
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for a while i lived in an old house; the kind u.s americans don't often get to live in - living in a really old house here is super expensive. i found out right before i moved out that the house was actually so old that it features in a poem by emily dickinson.
i liked that there were footprints in front of the sink, worn into the hardwood. there were handprints on some of the handrails. we'd find secret marks from other tenants, little hints someone else had lived and died there. and yeah, there was a lot wrong with the house. there are a lot of DIY skills you learn when you are a grad student that cannot afford to pay someone else to do-it-for-ya. i shared the house with 8 others. the house always had this noise to it. sometimes that noise was really fucking awful.
in the mornings though, the sun would slant in thick amber skiens through the windows, and i'd be the first one up. i'd shuffle around, get showered in this tub that was trying to exit through the floor, get my clothes on. i would usually creep around in the kitchen until it was time to start waking everyone else up - some of them required multiple rounds of polite hey man we gotta go knocks. and it felt... outside of time. a loud kind of quiet.
the ghosts of the house always felt like they were humming in a melody just out of reach. i know people say that the witching hour happens in the dark, but i always felt like it occurred somewhere around 6:45 in the morning. like - for literal centuries, somebody stood here and did the dishes. for literal centuries, somebody else has been looking out the window to this tree in our garden. for literal centuries, people have been stubbing their toes and cracking their backs and complaining about the weather. something about that was so... strangely lovely.
i have to be honest. i'm not a history aficionado. i know, i know; it's tragic of me. i usually respond to "this thing is super old" by being like, wow! cool! and moving on. but this house was the first time i felt like the past was standing there. like it was breathing. like someone else was drying their hands with me. playing chess on the sofa. adding honey to their tea.
i grew up in an old town. like, literally, a few miles off of walden pond (as in of the walden). (also, relatedly, don't swim in walden, it's so unbelievably dirty). but my family didn't have "old house" kind of money. we had a barely-standing house from the 70's. history existed kind of... parallel to me. you had to go somewhere to be in history. your school would pack you up on a bus and take you to some "ye olden times" place and you'd see how they used to make glass or whatever, and then you'd go home to your LEDs. most museums were small and closed before 5. you knew history was, like, somewhere, but the only thing that was open was the mcdonalds and the mall.
i remember one of my seventh grade history teachers telling us - some day you'll see how long we've been human for and that thing has been puzzling me. i know the scientific number, technically.
the house had these little scars of use. my floors didn't actually touch the walls; i had to fill them with a stopgap to stop the wind. other people had shoved rags and pieces of newspaper. i know i've lost rings and earring backs down some of the floorboards. i think the raccoons that lived in our basement probably have collected a small fortune over the years. i complain out loud to myself about how awful the stairs are (uneven, steep, evil, turning, hard to get down while holding anything) and know - someone else has said this exact same thing.
when i was packing up to leave and doing a final deep cleaning, i found a note carved in the furthest corner in the narrow cave of my closet. a child's scrawled name, a faded paint handprint, the scrangly numbers: 1857.
we've been human for a long time. way back before we can remember.
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cuppacoffii · 11 months
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I'd like to introduce these four, my little scringbos, my mippy doos, my blorbobibos, my eebos! information and designs are subjected to change!
okay so I'm gonna info dump a little because I constantly rant to my poly about them a lot and now I'm gonna do it here SO read below the images!
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These four! I guess I'm just gonna call them Graves Group cause she was kinda like the group orchestrater and is a very powerful witch with the ability to see, channel and communicate with the dead. She's had that power since she was a very little kid (her scar is from an accident trying to remove that power from herself). These four live in Eon City, Sports has her entire life and so has Silver, but Anon and Grave come from another city beyond the forest.
I kinda already spoke about Grave in my first bit here but she's the daughter of Enchantress Anon, a witch millions of years old who knows the ins and outs of deep, ancient arcane magic and passed knowledge down to Grave. Grave had a hard time making friends when she was a kid, her abilities developed way too quick and she would talk about her encounters with the dead. So while the other kids in class were boasting about what abilities they already had she comes in with "I met an interesting ghost yesterday. His head was torn right off his shoulders, yet I could still speak to him with nothing above his neck." and scare everyone away-
but there was a boy who always found her encounters interesting, her knowledge on every way someone could die, the horrors of the anon body. This boy was named Anon! (I'll explain what anons are briefly. (they aren't related to Tumblr anons) they are beings made of light and stardust with a Material that makes them up (thos material can be anything, Light, Color, Sheet, Electric, Matcha, ect)) Just Anon, he was born with no material, no powers of his own. He didn't have parents, either. just his siblings to care for him. They weren't even really his siblings, they were starchildren, born asexually out of pure star particles. Even without powers, or anything that he thought made him interesting, he was so spontaneous and happy, and obliviously dumb. He liked her, and the things that made her creepy to other people, he too had a fascination with ghost and the undead, but he'd be far too afraid indulging in this fixation himself. Eventually Grave introduced him to her witchcraft, and he became like her assistant!
One day while they were playing in the woods, they came across a girl that was spying on them, and was recognized to be from their classes. She was bolder, and a bit of a bully from what they've heard, but she was nothing like that. She was just loud, and her banter was playful. Sports Anon lived with her mom and younger brother at the time, and had a little sister on the way. She was reckless, a daredevil, a spirit of fire with unusual strength and the ability to materialize sports equipment out of thin air (limited to one at a time. She strayed away from anything spooky or witchy, she made up games to play with rulesets that made little sense- yet the three of them had a blast either way.
They began to hang out a lot more during school, they brought lunches to share with eachother. During one of these lunches, they spotted a new kid to the school eyeing them, and of course Sports went out of her way to sit him down with them. He was terribly shy, and quiet, it was like he didn't know how to socialize at all, but that didn't bother them. He was very observant, and smart, but he had a very one-way thought process. Silver Anon had 117 siblings, and increasing knowledge on combat. When he wasn't home, and training, he found himself loosening up to the others, even if it did seem like he was rude to them sometimes.
But that's when they were kids, and when Silver had both his eyes.
Now, today, Anon and Grave live together in an apartment (no they aren't a thing, Grave likes women and Anon likes candy), Sports still lives with her mom and now her little sister, and Silver lives in the heart of the city, the richest, most stuck up part of the city.
this was supposed to be a short post um ahahA- I'm gonna cut it here but if anyone has any questions or feedback my ask box is always open (please ask me about my characters I am begging you PLEA-)
oh I'm gonna have so much fun showcasing these poor bastards- Coffee Anon OUT!
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