Most interdimensional entities that humans consider horrifying demons and eldrich horrors actually consider humans pretty dangerous unless they're actively trained fighters. Your average extraplaner being isn't used to dealing with a species that evolved to hunt in groups, and developed to survive in violent scenarios.
Most final girl situations happen because young entities deeply underestimate that humans have such a strong will to live, and are willing to fight back agasint a stronger foe. Most older entities keep at bay for this very reason, which is why you just see them stranding around being creepy.
That pale long limbed cryptid you spotted in a subway station moved so quickly because it doesn't want to end up near you. That shadow person whose hovering over you in the woods is trying to observe you, but it will teleport away if anyone comes near it for a good reason.
And that doppelganger that's standing by your door at night just wants to observe you too. He was smart to try to copy your roommate's face, but he doesn't realize how good humans are at recognizing eachother's faces, and that his copy will be disturbing to any human who sees it. And he got way to reckless with his movements and bad attempts to imitate human speech. Trying to trick the human who he wants to study into coming to his dimensions is an even bigger mistake, especially since he didn't realize how quickly the human would catch on. He's soon going to learn things he should have read up on before hand: humans will try to attack things they're afraid of if they can't run away, humans can use almost any hard object as a weapon by holding it and swinging, and that those decorations on your wall are called 'swords' and were not originally designed as decorations...
The two of them demonstrated two starkly different attitudes towards the mortals they had to interact with on a regular basis, and the difference sprung, curiously, from the same root source.
While one was aloof and detached owing to their (not unfounded) belief that whatever mortals they were dealing with today would soon be dead and replaced by similar mortals more-or-less saying and doing the same things, the other was intensely interested for this exact reason.
One saw no point getting involved, the other saw a lot of point in getting a lot of involved, because the chance would never come up again. That this involvement typically took the form of fucking with (or just straight-up fucking) mortals arguably made this approach no-less unhealthy than simply refusing to engage at all.
Frankly, the pair of them had issues, but you try living for a few hundred years and not developing issues.
Inspired by the random thunderstorm that just popped up out of nowhere. Enjoy.
💧Rain - What's the most emotional scene you've ever written?
❄️ Snow - Who is your coldest / most stoic character and how do they express themselves (if at all)?
🌨 Sleet - What's the most you've ever written in one sitting?
☀️ Sun - What's your favorite part of your WIP?
🌫 Fog - What was the hardest part of your WIP to write?
🌬 Wind - What was the easiest part of your WIP to write?
🌪 Tornado - Who is your most impulsive character and why?
🔥 Wildfire - Who is your most emotional character and why?
🌌 Clear Skies - How long have you been writing your current WIP?
☁️ Cloudy - What inspired you to start writing your WIP? (or in general)
⚡️Lightning - Have you ever spontaneously added something to your story that you wouldn't have added normally? If so, what made you do it?
🪹 Drought - What do you do to help with Writer's Block?
💦 Flood - How many WIPs do you have?
🏝 Hurricane - Do you often stick to one WIP and finish it, then move on, or do you bounce between WIPs?
🪨 Landslide - Which WIP has the most worldbuilding?
⛰ Earthquake - Which WIP has the least worldbuilding?
🌊 Tsunami - When and where do you like to write?
🌋 Volcanic Eruption - What's your biggest flaw as a writer?
🌈 Rainbow - What do you think makes your story unique / stand out?
🌙 Eclipse - What's the most common / reoccurring theme of your WIP(s)?
Missus Robyn Clarke, in all of her rotund glory, stood on the porch, a look of disappointment etched across her triple chins. Not at anything that the Quin’s have done. No, Mr. Jacob Kaczmarek hadn’t come out of his apartment for a few days. Though she loathed the idea of intruding upon the old man’s privacy, something told everyone—even Cara—that something was not right. At the least, they needed to check on him. Though she tried to follow the woman up, Cara didn’t force the issue when her father gripped both of her shoulders. For soon after an awful aroma, one the girl had never smelled before and one she would never forget, permeated the entire house. Mother said that was the scent of death. Cara had never felt so sick to her stomach.
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There's an orc attending your college. Your city is pretty diverse, there's a lot of human cultures represented there, and even harpies and dwarves are common. But an orc is still a really rare sight. And she's not assimilated at all, she wears the symbol of the dark lord around her neak, and the strange black cloths from the wastelands she came from, and she always seems to have a gun somewhere on her. It's strange just to see an orc in person, she's not like the green skinned monsters you see in movies, her eyes are pitch black, and her skin is so pale you can see veins, she's muscular and tell but also strangely skinny, and her teeth are sharp and spiked like a sharks, this one doesn't have tusks, just these rows of serrated teeth.
Everyone avoids her at first. There's something creepy about her. She doesn't move like a human. She emotes weirdly, being stoic during conversations, but sometimes smiling or laughing at odd times. In class it becomes clear that she lacks knowledge anyone growing up in your society has, but has extensive knowledge on things most humans will never know. She also very clearly supports the dark lord and the demons who serve him, and gets mad when his narrative of conquest and strict genetic hierarchy is challenged in class.
You end up paired with her for a class project. It's weirdly awkward. But you end up spending more time with her then most. It still takes awhile to get used to her mannerisms, and you have to convince her of evolution in a long debate (but eventually you do convince her). She seems strangely naive to a lot of things. Every time she does something that she considers a failure she goes into self loathing, and she gets really afraid she's going to be punished. You have to explain to her things are going to be ok sometimes.
You try to spend time with her. She supports the dark lord but out of a strange sense of fear more than the type of ideological support humans in nations not under his control have. When she does something that she thinks is heresy agaisnt him she becomes afraid. And while she's angry at people who follow gods other than him (which is basically everyone here) she's more afraid of them than everything. When a holy symbol you own touches her she's surprised it doesn't burn her, you have to tell her it's ok.
She has a lot more freedom here than she did back in the wastelands. You slowly help her realize she doesn't have to worry about being punished for sinning agasint the dark lord. She's able to go on the internet for the first time, you help her get everything set up. You also introduce her to your freinds, only some of whom feel safe around her, but those who do seem to like her.
It's weird just hanging out in her dorm. She can be weirdly laid back and introspective at times, at least when she's not nervous or paranoid. But when she's just relaxing she'll tell you about things, about the beauty of the desert sands, about what it was like to observe the rattlesnakes and condors and wyverns of her homeland. How she likes to observe the city, the way the diffrent people flow through it, she was scared of it at first but now she likes to explore it, and the way it lacks stars at night but the lights from the buildings replace it. She says she wishes she could stay here forever, that she wishes she could be an artist but that she was sent here to learn skills useful to the dark lord's empire.
There's something nice about showing her new things. You get to take her to a musical for the first time. Get to show her neighborhoods you like. Get to explain to her what public transport is (though she got scared feeling trapped in a subway car). You get to show her stuff she never got to experience because orcs are never really children, she loves getting to hold a plush for the first time, or watching cartoons for the first time, it's like she's finally getting to live an experience she never had. Even though she's a well armed adult she really likes plushies once she finds out about them, they weren't something she was allowed to have back home.
Over time she starts meeting people and learning things that go against her worldview. As she makes more friends, understands new things, slowly learns that she shouldn't be punished for mistakes, she slowly comes around to seeing how fucked up the world the was raised in is. She tells you she doesn't want to worship the dark lord anymore, she cries just from saying it. You hug her, and realize she's never been hugged before, she seems to really like that feeling. She bathes in the waters of a healing goddess, and she worships something out of love instead of fear for the first time.
Eventually the spawning warlock who spawned her and her siblings comes to visit her. You told her to be careful but she ended up spilling that she doesn't worship the dark lord, she ends up spilling all the things a warlock like that considers a sin. When he leaves she tells you she can't go home. Not ever. Never again will she see the shifting sands, or flying condor, or flowing serpents of her homelands. She's trapped where she is now.
You know it hurts her a lot. She says she feels like she's in a small pocket of safety. Back home she'd be hurt for being an apostate. In human lands outside of the city she'd be hurt for being an orc. But she's safe here. She stays in her apartment for awhile, while you try to make things work. She's finally changing her major to art, and despite everything she's finally free, free to watch the starless sky, free to not be punished when she makes a mistake...
mysterious character with a fancy truck turns up--neighborhood gossip for WEEKS
...
It wasn’t Dave’s nature to be nosy. He had an easy time cutting down to the heart of something, asking the question that no one seemed to be asking. He was newly in his seventies after all, fully retired besides the occasional phone call with a mentee from the University, and the annual board meetings in San Francisco. He did not get to where he was by pussyfooting around.
But Mark was mysterious. Always was. Not the type of person to reveal much, even when you asked him. This was always why Dave felt some distance between himself and Mark—he liked Mark, obviously, and it wasn’t even that the distance between Mark and Dave was Mark-imposed. Not at all. But Dave could feel it, and he was sure that Mark could too.
So walking past this expensive truck he took a single gentle glance into the interior, and his brow furrowed. That didn’t make sense.
The front door to Mark’s little house swung open and out came a man, tall, with a bleach-blonde cropped haircut. He wore a heavy black jacket and a filthy pair of jeans that stopped just at the top of his black snow boots, crunching through the snow towards Dave, who gave a congenial wave and kept on walking. The tall man thrusted his chin (neck tattoo, words, couldn't tell what they spelled) in acknowledgement of Mark in the neighborly fashion that made it clear he didn’t want to speak. The guy opened up the back of the Rivian while Mark headed back up the hill.
Read pt 1 here
At the ground floor, the guests were already thronging. Vampire nobles sipped goblets of blood, chatting idly with the few fae that deigned to grace my crowning with their presence. Shapeshifters mingled with the Chosen emissaries of the gods. Even a small contingent of elves lurked mistrustfully in a corner, though there was not a human in sight.
I approached the elves, casting a slight glamour to obscure my fiendish appearance. It would not do to frighten them off, after all. “Hello, distinguished guests,” I said in Syvniqian, their native tongue. I had brushed up on my linguistics during those long, lonely nights whilst my sister flirted in court, and it finally paid off.
The lead elf, resplendent in a museli veil and robe-dress, long braid trailing the floor, said, “We appreciate the invitation, Lich-Queen. It is a rare honour to witness the rising of a new star. We are Saivere, Vice-Councilman of Sylvandor.”
My smile must have slipped when I heard that they only bothered to send the Vice-Councilman, for Saivere quickly added, “We mean no offense, Lich-Queen. Head-Councilwoman Naibara is currently with child, and she cannot undertake the journey to these lands.”
I forced a smile back onto my face. This was not the Ceredellian court, I reminded myself sternly. These people did not shun me for being low-born, for having not-quite-human features or a far more beautiful sister. When they said they meant no offense, they did not lie.
Nodding, I exchanged pleasantries with the rest of the delegation, before extricating myself. I could not show favouritism as a host, naturally.
Oh, by Astril, I was a host at a court party! It gave me a thrill, and I wanted to giggle like a little girl, which was a most undignified look on a powerful Lich-Queen.
I had to quickly cover it when a shapeshifter approached me. The shifter wore the body of an angel, wings the colour of salmon, hair twisted into a bun, and seemed vaguely masculine. He smiled and bobbed his head in a small bow. “Our leader politely requests your attention. She would like to speak to you regarding some international matters,” he said.
I nodded. “Thank you,” I told the shifter, turning to follow him through the hall. “Might you tell me what I may call you?”
Names were a touchy business, I had found, especially amongst inhumans. Elves, by and large, tolerated the use of their name by an equal or superior, but shifters and spirits were extremely prickly about the matter, often insisting on going by titles and nicknames instead.
The shifter paused and titled his head to a side. “Ya know, I haven't quite thought about it,” he said, a hint of an accent creeping into his voice. “I was thinking Hashbrown, perhaps. Or Chocolate-cookie. Or maybe Cake. I do love human foodstuffs.”
I barely hid my wince. It was hard to tell a shifter's age, what with the whole shapeshifting, but this one? Yeah, he was a kid. And nobody, not even a kid, deserved to be saddled with a name like Cookie. At the same time… It was hilarious.
Amusement won over kindness, and I said, “Why, I am certain a powerful shifter warrior named Cake would shake fear into the hearts of any human who heard it,” I said wryly. “By the time you are fully grown, the mere mention of chocolate will frighten children into silence.”
“Ya really think so?!” He beamed at me. “My sis’ always tol' me I'd be a fool to call myself that. I'm so glad she was just teasin' me. Oh, thank you so much!” He briefly moved to embrace me, then remembered who I was and backed off, hand kept by his sides, though his wings were all aflutter.
The sudden breach of decorum should have irritated me, but it didn't. It made me feel slightly bad about messing with this overly-earnest kid. “I advise something like Brown, or Cho, however. Just to keep things subtle,” I suggested, trying to minimise the damage I was doing to this kid's credibility.
The shifter considered my words. Then a smile lit up his face. I meant that quite literally. In fact, he rather glowed, attracting curious glances. “Hash,” he announced. “You can call me Hash.”
“Sure, Hash,” I replied, smiling slightly. “Please, lead the way.”
He marched off towards the back of the hall, and I followed, appreciating how my guests moved aside to let me pass. I had always been the one doing the moving, in the past. They bowed and scuttled, my ghouls mingling amongst them, holding trays of hor d'oeuvres. Idly, I plucked one and put it in my mouth, savouring the explosion of salty roe.
The shifters were lounging in a corner, their leader a tall woman with the claws of a Lich and the greying skin of a ghoul. She rose when I approached, her mouth spreading into a sepulchral grin. “It is an honour to witness your coronation, Lich-Queen. Such an honour, that I have taken a Lich-form to honour your people,” she explained. “I hope I have done it justice.”
Looking at the gems encrusted on her high cheekbones and those eyes like shards of diamond, I could only say, “You have.”
She was beautiful, with her long limbs and elegant toga. Suddenly, I felt like an awkward girl-child, struggling to stitch cloth whilst my sister was given lessons by the High Magician. Useless. Ugly. Unwanted.
I shook my head and dropped my human guise. “I appreciate the effort,” I said, taking control of my tongue. “Now, what was the matter you wished to speak with me about?”
The shifter spread her hands and smiled. “This is the first gathering of inhumans in millennia. I hoped to ask you to call a meeting of us immortals. I have a… Proposal, of sorts. One that might be impolite to be mentioned in the presence of our elven siblings.”
I nodded, and tapped the sides of my face in the shifter gesture of agreement. “Certainly. If I may know what the matter is first, of course.” It would not do for them to surprise me before my new allies.
The shifter reciprocated my movements, and said, “We would like to suggest an alliance of all the immortals — to band together and reclai-”
The doors slammed open. I startled, missing the rest of the shifter's words. “Welcome Her Majesty, the Third Spirit Empress! The great Sucsu'anane No-clan has arrived,” Blood-toil, my doorman, announced, halting all conversation within the room.
Empress Sucsu'anane stood in to the fore, and… Well, I hated to say it, but she looked like a little girl playing at Queen. Her crown barely reached Blood-toil's elbow, and he was not a tall ghoul. Her eyes were wide and doll-like, their effect only exacerbated by her oversized dress, which spilled onto the floor. “Hello, sisters,” she said with an atrocious accent, pronouncing her ‘r’s like ‘e’s. “It is I.”
The little looking glass was unremarkable; it wasn’t encircled in gold laurel or hung by a length of green ribbon as was the custom of the time, and there was a certain fogginess that rendered the gazer as if they were looking into a fairy pool, but Cedar was drawn to it all the same. This mirror was the only thing in his uncle’s house that he could stomach, not because it was the most simple object, but because nobody else seemed to want it – everything else had been at best, bickered over, at worst, screeched about by his family from the delphine carpets to the inkblack books to the icefire chandeliers– and so he took it from the wall, said his polite goodbyes and brought it to his little room over the bottle shop. After he found a suitable place and hung it, his fingers traced the arcing light in the bevel. And he found that it sang. A quiet ringing note that was barely audible, but it sang all the same. Cedar wondered back to the street musician who played the goblets, and how the varying levels of champagne within influenced the magic of the music. Cedar ran his thumb around the mirror’s edge in a slow, deliberate crescent, and brought watery chiming notes forth, each beginning to ripple the mirror’s surface, the fog giving way to a shimmering view of the lost lake of mists.
It's very fun to travel to see your friends and family but it's also nice to come home where you know how to write :)
...
Dave usually walked Lyla. She was highly reactive and liked to escape into the woods. In her second month home, she went after a bear. Dave found her with teeth marks on either sides of their ribs. They thought that Lyla would learn, but mostly, she didn’t.
It was on the walk that Dave saw a new car out in front of the house. One of those Rivian electric trucks, green with a powerful stripe of illuminating fluorescent light. It was spotless, even then, as the snow was starting to melt, and everyone’s car was covered in dirt, tiny rocks, and phantom puddles of ice that dotted the roads.
He wondered if Mark bought a new car with the mystery money from his mystery job. Mark’s house wasn’t fancy, but it was a home, and Mark was circling the end of this twenties from the best that Dave could tell. However he was able to afford the place was a mystery to Dave, but if he’s buying himself a new car, well, how much money is Mark making?
But his questions were answered around the next corner when he found Mark’s L.L. Bean-issue Subaru Outback, crouching behind the truck that looked like a spaceship. So Mark had a guest.
You sell items to adventurers for a living. It's relatively easy to get business in a frontier city like the one you live in. You were planning on becoming an adventurer yourself but an injured leg when you were young prevented that. But because you already know how to find items, and how they should be fairly priced, so it's a good living.
Not everyone who thinks of themselves as adventurers actually are adventurers. You sometimes have to sell weapons to naive groups of kids, who have no idea what they're doing. Useally you humor them, they tend to go off into useless places with no gold to be found, an old mineshaft that's been explored a thousand times over has become famous for such things. If they seem like they'll go somewhere way more dangerous than they should, you point them to the mineshaft.
Of course, most of your business is from actual adventurers. They tend to be wanderers, foreigners, a lot of ex merchants or ex millitary, or children of nobility who cant inherent, the type of people who never had the chance to make a safe living. Most of them are nice to you, and if they're not you know how to get them to leave.
You also know how to become a protecter for the adventuring parties who need it. Your shop is basically the center of their community in this part of the city. If a spellcaster is part of an illegal religion, or performing banned practices, you know what symbols to sell them to help them hide themselves. If someone is clearly a runaway slave or serf, or from a race that's considered a monster in this part of the world, you know how the forge the right documents. There was a hobgoblin who frequented your shop for a long time, who you sold weapons to, who you had to testify in front of the city sherif was not a hobgoblin but was infact a member of a rare subrace of elf that you made up to protect him. You may have also recently made an entire fictional category of magic legally real for the sake of protecting some necromancers you know.
There are some people you never sell to. It's not considered good principle to sell to people who would gladly kill your other clients. There was a group of warriors weilding holy magic who talked a lot about punishing sinners, they came back with the heads of goblins and hobgoblins a lot, and vampires, and humans of religions other then theirs. After they started bringing in more of their freinds you cut them off.
There are people who you wished you hadn't sold to for other reasons. There was this human noble girl who you sold a suit of armor to, she had run away from an arranged marriage and joined an adventuring party so she could be as far from her parents as possible. She seemed so excited to be in a big city, to be out in the world, she chatted with you for hours about an epic poem from ages long gone that she liked. When she came back to your shop after her first quest she had turned undead, something happened in her first dungeon that changed her, her skin was pale, and her teeth had turned sharp, you just remember her shivering and trying to cry, and muttering about how cold she was. Her other party members said they were happy she was more durable like this, they didn't seem to care about her outside of that.
And of course, there's the fact that every adventurer you know, useally doesn't come back eventually. When a full party goes you can assume they left town, but when just one or two from a party is missing there tends to be one explanation. Most adventurers don't have long careers, and mortality especially high for rookies. But you don't tend to ask if anyone is dead, it's better to just assume they went home, as implausible as it may be.
