lady horatio

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

I'm late! But working on my post now, so it will be up before I go to bed. In the mean time, how is everybody? :)

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

I'll try to get a Mandy post in when I get home from work tonight, but if you beat me here, @Naril, I am more than happy to see what Morgan and Co. are up to! :)

Ʌ D V E N T

I'm so sorry, all--I haven't been around much, and I just got terribly stuck. I realized too late that Alex may not have been the best choice for this role play, and I haven't been able to get her past the first post.

@Antarctic Termite, thanks very much for including me! I think I'll retreat into a lurker position, if that's okay. I'll take Alex out of the characters tab, and I can also remove her IC post, if you like, so there aren't any loose plot threads hanging around.

Have fun, all you crazy godlings. :)

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Have now read the new post--Shiloh is sassy and I love it!--and responded to Austronaut's PM. I don't want to get in the way of what she's going to do, but @Naril, if you're still here, want to do a brief collab dialogue post, since we're both on? :)

Also, congrats, @vietmyke! That month of freedom has got to feel great (and it sounds like it was well-deserved). My Halloween was quite fun, though not at all quiet, as my friends tend to get loud if you gather too many of us together. :P We're very competitive at charades.

Edit: I have to go to work, so Naril and I will do a collab post another time. If anyone else wants to post, please, don't wait for me! I'll check in when I get home tonight.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Hi, everyone! Sorry, I wasn't on at all this weekend with Halloween shenanigans and whatnot! Catching up on messages and such now and excited to read the new post! :D

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Ooh, Naril, that sounds so nice! In FL, we barely even know it's fall.

I'm good, Habibi! Hung out with the bestie yesterday and went to my first Halloween party for this season. I was supposed to be Velma from Scooby Doo, but didn't get the pieces together in time, so I pinned some felt to my orange dress and went as a pumpkin instead xD

Ʌ D V E N T

Sorry, so sorry, but my post is finally up! My perfectionism was kicking in hardcore--I wrote about five different splintered versions of the damn thing--and I wasn't feeling well yesterday. But I was determined to get something up tonight! Might edit it a little later, if that's okay.

I promise in the next post Alex will start interacting with the rest of the world. She's had a long day; she just needs to take a beat.

Ʌ D V E N T

Every nerve in her body was screaming—and then it wasn’t. The pain didn’t just fade; it disappeared so surely that it could have been a dream. She might have been dreaming for a while, her self somewhere else while the rest of her figured out what to do about a body.

Alex came back to herself like waking up, like opening her eyes—the world was gone, and then it wasn’t. Making sense of it took slightly longer. It began with the feel of gravel digging into her side, the weight of her body against the asphalt. Next came heat against her back, out of place in the cool November air. Finally, the sounds of disaster: the cacophony of screaming and sirens.

Now that she’d taken stock of her surroundings, it was time to look closer to home. Alex eased her way, slowly, so slowly, into a sitting position. Heavy curls slid over her shoulders, familiar and comforting.

Her body looked just as she remembered it should, not a single limb out of place, no cuts or broken bones. The brown skin of her arms and legs was smooth and unmarked, save for the expected scattering of freckles. Though it felt like she shouldn’t be, she was whole.

Alex remembered, belatedly, that she’d skinned her knee last week, running late to an audition downtown. The scrapes on her palms had been superficial and were already healed, but she’d come down hard enough on one leg to draw blood. There should still be a scab there.

The moment she thought it, there was.

Alex stared. I’m in shock, she thought, and then, It’s too loud.

Immediately, the noise lowered, as muffled as if she’d closed a door between herself and the rest of the world.

Alex swallowed.

There were people nearby. The ones who were screaming, or the ones who hadn’t gotten up. There was a fire raging. And all she could focus on was the way the world dimmed when she wanted it to, the way bile climbed her throat when she spotted a man holding up a charred skull, or the unavoidable fact that not too long ago, she been inside that husk of a vehicle, sitting right behind the driver.

She could hear her mother scolding, Alexandra Denali, never take one thing in this life for granted, and her father saying, gently, Alex, don’t just look for the helpers; follow them. And still, she couldn’t make herself move. Jericho would say she was in shock; Ravi would say it was her underused sense of self-preservation kicking in.

Her grandma would say she was being self-absorbed, and that was probably closest to the truth.

Chasing the voices from her head, Alex took a deep breath, forcing herself to focus on the way the air filled her lungs. (Clean air, because she coughed once on smoke and willed it to go away.) She exhaled just as carefully, feeling a little more at home in her body as she did so.

In a moment. She’d deal with it all in a moment.

Ʌ D V E N T

My apologies for the delay! I started a draft of Alex's post, but haven't had a chance to polish it to better fit in with the posts that have already gone up. Tomorrow's my day off, so I'll try to have a post up then as well.

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - An Urban Fantasy Adventure!

Hi, Naril! I'm okay. Currently wailing because an author I love will be in my state tonight (and in a city only two hours from me tomorrow), but it's looking like there's no way the bestie and I can go. I am so mad that we didn't know about this sooner. >> (I'm also horribly spoiled, as we will be meeting different author next month, and she'll be right in our city. I JUST WANTED TO SEE BOTH OF THEM.)

But my weekend was good, and I spent last night hanging out with two friends and taking advantage of someone else's very large comic collection! :) I read the first five issues of Spiderverse, and they were great.

How's everybody else?