Atalanta

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

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The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

When Blythe’s alarm went off, she was already awake, sitting in the bottom of her glass-walled shower while hell-hot water flayed her back and shoulders. The raucous sound brought her slightly more into the present, out of the alive-but-not-consious fog she’d been drifting in since giving up on sleep two hours before. She let it ring because it would annoy Kolratheth. It didn’t matter to her.

“Blythe…” The demon’s voice in her head was as sleek and warm as a cat’s purr, but Blythe’s hands had caught her attention. Her knuckles where busted and her cuticles red from where she’d picked at them unconsciously. The nails cut to the quick.

She used to take such good care of her hands.

“The alarm, Blythe!”

Out of pettiness, she waited another couple minutes to rise and took her time drying off, applying lotion, and combing heat protector through her hair. By the time she was finished, Kolratheth was seething in the back of her mind like a petulant toddler—a comparison he did not care for—and Leone’s cat was yowling at the bathroom door. She clicked off the alarm.

“You are a hateful, bitter thing, and I hope you die alone.”

“I was planning on it.” She just had to get him out of her head first.

Blythe tried to slip back into mental oblivion, but the clawed, angry thing that lived inside her rib cage—her, not Kolratheth— was awake and pressing on her lungs like it wanted to get out through her teeth. She clenched them and went to feed the cat, playing a simple counting game her therapist swore would help.

Five red things: her knuckles, the spine of a book on ritual magic, Dragon’s collar, blood in the photos on her pinboard, the string linking them together. Four orange things: the logo on her punching bag, the shade on the ugly lamp Leone’s aunt had given her, the cover of an encyclopedia…

It was supposed to put her PFC back in control of her emotions, but she was still angry when she sat down at her desk and opened her laptop. Eleanor’s email was at the top of the list.

---

When Blythe first joined the Sunday Group, she thought that Kolratheth would like this sort of thing more than she did. As it turned out, he didn’t care about dead bodies—something about how it was much more efficient to sow chaos with living beings. They both disliked the crime scene and enjoyed the hunt—two of the very few things they ever agreed on.

“I’m hungry,” Kolratheth growled as they approached, and a thread of fear and revulsion wound through Blythe’s anger. He leaned towards Eleanor and Alcander’s emotions, twitching to change them. She pulled him back.

“We’re on a case. You’ll eat soon enough.”

“Put it off if it bothers you so much. I’ll take over this body for a while.”

Blythe clenched her jaw, running her tongue over her teeth to make sure they hadn’t begun to sharpen. Still square, but she kept her lips closed when she smiled a greeting at her coworkers. At least, Alcander’s observations distracted her from thoughts of feeding her demon.

“If he was dropped, there might be signs of whoever dropped him on one of the roofs,” she said, “but the real question is why the liquid did that to the pen and not the body. Does it just burn that hot, or does it have properties activated by flame? And if so, why the fuck did the perpetrator not bother to light the body on fire? It would have hidden the evidence.”

She crossed her hands over her chest, distantly annoyed by the wind pushing long strands of dark hair into her face. She wasn’t cold—demons ran hot. Blythe didn’t think she would ever be especially useful at a crime scene. She had no training in this kind of detective work, only in the sort that included chasing down primary sources, but she could ask decent questions. And how else was one supposed to find an answer?



She supposed it was possible that the perpetrator was an amateur who didn’t know the properties of the fluid they had used or that the substance worked differently on human flesh than it did on inanimate objects like Alcander’s pen. Maybe they had wanted the evidence found, though there was no obvious statement to be gleaned from this coated body. If none of those options were true…



“Maybe they were interrupted before they could light up the body. There might be a witness.”

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

Possessed Librarian

Character Name: Blythe Cordova

Concept: Possessed Librarian

Background:

All her life, Blythe was a practical woman. She had a practical job at a practical institution, complete with organization and research. She loved her wife despite her proliclivities for more occult hobbies, but then, no one was without some fault. Her job, her wife, and their life together was as perfect as two very different people in love could make it.

And then, Blythe Cordova's wife was murdered in a string of attacks against women who practiced witchcraft.

Revenge is not a practical thing. It does not improve the life of the avenger nor does it bring back the dead. And yet, for all Blythe’s unflabable practicality, revenge consumed her after her wife’s death. When local law enforcement failed, she turned to a string of unsuccessful private detectives, then her own frustrating investigation. Nothing turned up a more than a whisper of her wife’s killers, and the news was rife with the bodies of new victims. Her reason for turning to the occult was logical: it was the only thing left.

Her wife’s herbal remedies and household charms held nothing for her but the ache of tender memory. Blythe needed something darker to suit her purpose. She searched for it in strange, old books and stranger internet forums, sifting through improbable, baseless claims with all the skill of a research librarian. Eventually, she did find power, and it's name was Kolratheth. The process of summoning and entering a contract with the demon was not difficult. A little blood, an invitation to house it in her mind and keep it regularly fed, and she had what she needed to find and destroy her wife’s killers.

Blythe keeps a secret hope tucked in the corners of her mind where Kolratheth will not see: that the Sunday Group will one day help rid her of her dark passenger. For now, though revenge keeps them both content.

Physical Description:

A curvy woman in her mid-thirties of Latin American and causcasian decent. She has long, black hair and wide brown eyes so dark they appear black. Blythe is careful and immaculate in her dress and appearance, and appears most often in stylish business wear. She is middling in height with high cheekbones, an aristocratic nose, and pouting lips.

Powers and Skills:

Curses and Contracts: the basics of any self-respecting demon’s repertoire. Binding, limited only by the caster’s imagination, and ranging wildly from deadly to painful to irascibly irritating. They stick best when you really mean it.

SinAmp™: like volume nobs, only for sinful desires and negative emotions. The less guarded the mind, the easier to toy with.

Oops! My Demon is Showing: It happens to all of us now and again. Your anger gets the better of you or adrenaline sweeps you away in a tense moment, and next thing you know, your fingernails look like claws and your mouth has gone too wide and too full of needle teeth.

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

I saw "cursed librarian," and my brain ran with it... Kind of :)

Possessed Librarian

Character Name: Blythe Cordova

Concept: Possessed Librarian

Background:

All her life, Blythe was a practical woman. She had a practical job at a practical institution, complete with organization and research. She loved her wife despite her proliclivities for more occult hobbies, but then, no one was without some fault. Her job, her wife, and their life together was as perfect as two very different people in love could make it.

And then, Blythe Cordova's wife was murdered in a string of attacks against women who practiced witchcraft.

Revenge is not a practical thing. It does not improve the life of the avenger nor does it bring back the dead. And yet, for all Blythe’s unflabable practicality, revenge consumed her after her wife’s death. When local law enforcement failed, she turned to a string of unsuccessful private detectives, then her own frustrating investigation. Nothing turned up a more than a whisper of her wife’s killers, and the news was rife with the bodies of new victims. Her reason for turning to the occult was logical: it was the only thing left.

Her wife’s herbal remedies and household charms held nothing for her but the ache of tender memory. Blythe needed something darker to suit her purpose. She searched for it in strange, old books and stranger internet forums, sifting through improbable, baseless claims with all the skill of a research librarian. Eventually, she did find power, and it's name was Kolratheth. The process of summoning and entering a contract with the demon was not difficult. A little blood, an invitation to house it in her mind and keep it regularly fed, and she had what she needed to find and destroy her wife’s killers.

Blythe keeps a secret hope tucked in the corners of her mind where Kolratheth will not see: that the Sunday Group will one day help rid her of her dark passenger. For now, though revenge keeps them both content.

Physical Description:

A curvy woman in her mid-thirties of Latin American and causcasian decent. She has long, black hair and wide brown eyes so dark they appear black. Blythe is careful and immaculate in her dress and appearance, and appears most often in stylish business wear. She is middling in height with high cheekbones, an aristocratic nose, and pouting lips.

Powers and Skills:

Curses and Contracts: the basics of any self-respecting demon’s repertoire. Binding, limited only by the caster’s imagination, and ranging wildly from deadly to painful to irascibly irritating. They stick best when you really mean it.

SinAmp™: like volume nobs, only for sinful desires and negative emotions. The less guarded the mind, the easier to toy with.

Oops! My Demon is Showing: It happens to all of us now and again. Your anger gets the better of you or adrenaline sweeps you away in a tense moment, and next thing you know, your fingernails look like claws and your mouth has gone too wide and too full of needle teeth.

Paranormal Detectives

I wouldn't miss this!

Kingdom of Threndel : Beginning of the End

That sounds good :)

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I'm really sorry, but I think I might have bitten off more than I could chew. Life’s really picked up the last week or so.

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Yes! We just need a few more takers

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Sounds good to me! I really like the story concept

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I'd like to declare my interest!