JW's setting is sort of your run-of-the-mill Earth with hidden supernatural things that have some kind of magnetic attraction to main characters. It's sort of a monster-of-the-week kind of setting for a series of short stories I'm working on. As of right now there are no real history differences between our own world and the Earth JW is from. I may eventually decide that some famous figure like Elvis was actually a unicorn or something, but that doesn't really matter in the long run.
There are three classes of supernatural being: undead, fae, and monsters. Undead contains everything from ghosts to vengeful 'demons' to homebrew necromancy projects. Fae are kind of that weird blurry space between creature and spirit and they don't even give a damn. They are unstable, free-roaming, and snobby. Don't mess with them. Monsters are simply creatures bound by biology that haven't been discovered or have fallen off the radar. They're the rarest.
Other dimensions exist and if you know where the thin places are you can pass between them. Like the layers in an onion, there are infinite dimensions circling the main 'base' dimension the stories take place in. Some are just blurry in-between places. It's possible to slip out of the world behind a gas station in Tennessee and pop out of some lady's bathroom in China. However you must know where the roads are. Otherwise, you might just wind up somewhere in the vacuum of space and promptly turn inside out. Some dimensions are exactly the same as Earth except you, dear reader, you actually play the saxophone. Or if you already play the sax, you're a belly dancer. Or maybe a rabbit.
There are three notable dimensions that cluster close to the base-world and make up something called The Memory Dogma: The Attic, The Underbed, and The Basement. They are guarded by three horses: Lost, Forgotten, and False. The memories of man collect here and sort of form a 'mindscape' for Earth as a whole. Some think fae are formed from this place but nobody knows.
One unique feature of this setting is that every single sentient being capable of reasoning between right and wrong has something called a Mindscape. This is a world that exists inside the individual's head and is populated by manifestations of facets of their personality. The happenings and appearance and even the functionality of this little world reflect what has happened to the character. Everyone's is different and VERY rarely do people even know theirs exists. JW has had brief brushes with his since he did some involuntary dimension hopping, but doesn't really understand it. He just knows there's an annoying trap-mouthed man in his head.
History: JW was born around 1950 in rural Tennessee. His family mostly got on with the help of his mother's parents. When his mother contracted pneumonia and died suddenly (heart enlargement) his father fell into a guilt-driven depression and drinking habit which set off the schizophrenia that his own father had suffered from. He grew abusive and JW was taken away from him to live with his grandfather on his mother's side at the age of six or seven. JW lived with him and learned farm work until he was 14. After the death of his grandfather he was placed back with his father who had deteriorated greatly. JW was a sheltered kid and didn't know to look for help. He was pulled out of school after failing tenth grade and kept secluded from people.
He left his father's home at 18 after a violent fight and took his grandfather's horse to a different town. There he fell in with a Mexican-American family after making friends with the oldest son, Horas Valentine. They unofficially adopted him and repaired the damage that had been done to him as best they could. He was fed, clothed, given a role in the family, and spoiled just a little bit. He grew up along side Horas and the two of them did everything together, including sharing an apartment and working at the same deli. They were like Timon and Pumba if Timon and Pumba smoked weed and occasionally vandalized buildings.
JW's usage soon turned into an addiction and the abuse of this drug caused his hereditary schizophrenia to surface. He did not receive any kind of treatment for this because he and his friends wrote it off as bad reactions to the drug. Horas and his girlfriend made a lame attempt at weaning him off of it.
In 1974, JW was startled into an episode by his first girlfriend who was wearing a mask. He mistook her for a dog and stabbed her to death. After realizing what had happened, JW fled the town on horseback. He urged the horse over a poorly built wooden bridge that crossed a river. The horse fell through and sent both of them into the water. Or in JW's case, into a time vortex.
He spent several years in a blurry in-between place that he has little recollection of.
When he awoke, he had found himself mysteriously transported to the year 2007 on the outskirts of a tiny Mississippi retirement town called Hawksaw where he proceeded to confess to murder. Nobody believed him. He spent some time in the town as the only homeless person before eventually being entered back into the system and bounced around between church-sponsored homes and various jobs. Finally he was diagnosed with schizophrenia but lacked the funds to treat it.
He was placed in a historical town house and made its grounds keeper. THEN SPOOKY SHENANIGANS HAPPENED.
What happened was, once the town had shoved him off on taking care of the historic house (good Christian duty and all that) he started taking things down out of the attic and the other rooms to sell. He couldn't hold a job until his medication was established, so it was really his only way to make money. He wound up nearly gutting the house over the course of a couple of weeks. This got the attention of a creature that lived in the walls named Deuteronomy and she was like "AW HELL NAW" because the first thing she thought of when she noticed almost everything missing was that the house was going to be demolished.
Her story was that the Old Man who lived in the house before JW made her to be a companion. He was lonely and nobody in town wanted anything to do with him because he wasn't exactly stealthy about hiding all the 'weird' ritual stuff he did. Truth was he was in a similar self-appointed position to what JW winds up in at the end of the story. Deuteronomy was a sort of homebrew necromancy project made out of various animal corpses (mostly canine) that the Old Man taught a little magic to. Eventually the Old Man committed suicide with a ritual that left all kinds of ominous looking burns all over his room so when somebody came to investigate, a young Sheriff Bugle was called in to see the mess.
This is the reason he was so dead set on finding JW to either be crazy or a liar when he showed up and confessed to a murder that took place thirty years ago and over seventy miles away because he didn't want any more weird stuff in Hawksaw. He almost didn't agree to let JW live in the old guy's house.
Back to present-day, Deuteronomy decides she's going to scare this stranger out of her house so she does her best to appear around corners and be spooky-like. He calls somebody to help look for any holes that a dog could have gotten through but there are none. He's written off and left to deal with it on his own so he ignores her in hopes that it really is just a hiccup. Not fond of being ignored, Deuteronomy attacks him in his bed. During the fight, she attempts to place a curse over his eyes that will show him only horrible visions because her spite had grown so much. Just killing him would have been taking the easy way out. She didn't get a clear swipe at his face and hadn't practiced any kind of magic in over thirty years, so the curse wound up kind of wonky.
He left the house for medical attention and when he returns, Deuteronomy is absolutely gobsmacked that he would come back at all. She descends into the bottom basement of the house to ask the help of a creature that the Old Man made before her, back when he was angry about the stares he got for his thankless job. She releases the monster and tries to strike up a deal with it in order to destroy JW for good, but the monster is like "HAHA THAT'S CUTE, BYE BITCH" and takes off to fulfill the duty it had been created with--basically to destroy anybody that got in its way.
Deuteronomy has a pretty red face under all that fur at this point because if it gets out that there's a horrible creature running around in town, they'll bulldoze the house faster than a golf coarse stamps out a fire ant hill. She confronts JW a second time and begs for his help. It comes to light that there was a misunderstanding and that if JW just stops the monster before too much attention is turned on the house, she'll let him live there and not bother him. All JW ever wanted was a home that was his where nobody would bother him or evict so it sounds like a pretty good deal. For a deal being made with a reanimated wolf corpse. Shotgun in hand, he and Deuteronomy take to the streets. Unfortunately, the monster already frightened a few people and has dragged a police deputy through a windshield by the time they find it. So the secret's kind of out.
Determined to still have a place to live, JW keeps up his end of the bargain by shooting the monster a few times, then trapping it in a family's garage before setting the whole thing on fire. In the end, the monster is pretty dead and even though people are like 'oh no there's a Weird Guy again and it's that guy we helped' JW tells them that so long as they keep him healthy, he'll do whatever he can to keep them from having to deal with weird stuff. It's a sort-of-but-not-really hostage situation that will eventually turn into a self-appointed duty on JW's part.
In the beginning, he's grouchy toward the town and treats them like a bunch of thankless chickens with their heads cut off. His pull point is drifting toward the end of this resentment. He doesn't want to admit to himself that he's grown to like and feel responsible for the town.
In return for housing and health care (over half co-payment for his medication), he keeps watch over Hawksaw. JW keeps nosy people out of the little retirement town and finally has a place to call his very own after being hot-potatoe'd around for so long.
Needless to say, the entire ordeal made him pretty cranky and skittish.
Present-day JW (2009-10ish) is still doing this, though he's got quite a few adventures under his belt.
[OC] JW || No Reserve || 2 of 3
JW's setting is sort of your run-of-the-mill Earth with hidden supernatural things that have some kind of magnetic attraction to main characters. It's sort of a monster-of-the-week kind of setting for a series of short stories I'm working on. As of right now there are no real history differences between our own world and the Earth JW is from. I may eventually decide that some famous figure like Elvis was actually a unicorn or something, but that doesn't really matter in the long run.
There are three classes of supernatural being: undead, fae, and monsters. Undead contains everything from ghosts to vengeful 'demons' to homebrew necromancy projects. Fae are kind of that weird blurry space between creature and spirit and they don't even give a damn. They are unstable, free-roaming, and snobby. Don't mess with them. Monsters are simply creatures bound by biology that haven't been discovered or have fallen off the radar. They're the rarest.
Other dimensions exist and if you know where the thin places are you can pass between them. Like the layers in an onion, there are infinite dimensions circling the main 'base' dimension the stories take place in. Some are just blurry in-between places. It's possible to slip out of the world behind a gas station in Tennessee and pop out of some lady's bathroom in China. However you must know where the roads are. Otherwise, you might just wind up somewhere in the vacuum of space and promptly turn inside out. Some dimensions are exactly the same as Earth except you, dear reader, you actually play the saxophone. Or if you already play the sax, you're a belly dancer. Or maybe a rabbit.
There are three notable dimensions that cluster close to the base-world and make up something called The Memory Dogma: The Attic, The Underbed, and The Basement. They are guarded by three horses: Lost, Forgotten, and False. The memories of man collect here and sort of form a 'mindscape' for Earth as a whole. Some think fae are formed from this place but nobody knows.
One unique feature of this setting is that every single sentient being capable of reasoning between right and wrong has something called a Mindscape. This is a world that exists inside the individual's head and is populated by manifestations of facets of their personality. The happenings and appearance and even the functionality of this little world reflect what has happened to the character. Everyone's is different and VERY rarely do people even know theirs exists. JW has had brief brushes with his since he did some involuntary dimension hopping, but doesn't really understand it. He just knows there's an annoying trap-mouthed man in his head.
History:
JW was born around 1950 in rural Tennessee. His family mostly got on with the help of his mother's parents. When his mother contracted pneumonia and died suddenly (heart enlargement) his father fell into a guilt-driven depression and drinking habit which set off the schizophrenia that his own father had suffered from. He grew abusive and JW was taken away from him to live with his grandfather on his mother's side at the age of six or seven. JW lived with him and learned farm work until he was 14. After the death of his grandfather he was placed back with his father who had deteriorated greatly. JW was a sheltered kid and didn't know to look for help. He was pulled out of school after failing tenth grade and kept secluded from people.
He left his father's home at 18 after a violent fight and took his grandfather's horse to a different town. There he fell in with a Mexican-American family after making friends with the oldest son, Horas Valentine. They unofficially adopted him and repaired the damage that had been done to him as best they could. He was fed, clothed, given a role in the family, and spoiled just a little bit. He grew up along side Horas and the two of them did everything together, including sharing an apartment and working at the same deli. They were like Timon and Pumba if Timon and Pumba smoked weed and occasionally vandalized buildings.
JW's usage soon turned into an addiction and the abuse of this drug caused his hereditary schizophrenia to surface. He did not receive any kind of treatment for this because he and his friends wrote it off as bad reactions to the drug. Horas and his girlfriend made a lame attempt at weaning him off of it.
In 1974, JW was startled into an episode by his first girlfriend who was wearing a mask. He mistook her for a dog and stabbed her to death. After realizing what had happened, JW fled the town on horseback. He urged the horse over a poorly built wooden bridge that crossed a river. The horse fell through and sent both of them into the water. Or in JW's case, into a time vortex.
He spent several years in a blurry in-between place that he has little recollection of.
When he awoke, he had found himself mysteriously transported to the year 2007 on the outskirts of a tiny Mississippi retirement town called Hawksaw where he proceeded to confess to murder. Nobody believed him. He spent some time in the town as the only homeless person before eventually being entered back into the system and bounced around between church-sponsored homes and various jobs. Finally he was diagnosed with schizophrenia but lacked the funds to treat it.
He was placed in a historical town house and made its grounds keeper. THEN SPOOKY SHENANIGANS HAPPENED.
What happened was, once the town had shoved him off on taking care of the historic house (good Christian duty and all that) he started taking things down out of the attic and the other rooms to sell. He couldn't hold a job until his medication was established, so it was really his only way to make money. He wound up nearly gutting the house over the course of a couple of weeks. This got the attention of a creature that lived in the walls named Deuteronomy and she was like "AW HELL NAW" because the first thing she thought of when she noticed almost everything missing was that the house was going to be demolished.
Her story was that the Old Man who lived in the house before JW made her to be a companion. He was lonely and nobody in town wanted anything to do with him because he wasn't exactly stealthy about hiding all the 'weird' ritual stuff he did. Truth was he was in a similar self-appointed position to what JW winds up in at the end of the story. Deuteronomy was a sort of homebrew necromancy project made out of various animal corpses (mostly canine) that the Old Man taught a little magic to. Eventually the Old Man committed suicide with a ritual that left all kinds of ominous looking burns all over his room so when somebody came to investigate, a young Sheriff Bugle was called in to see the mess.
This is the reason he was so dead set on finding JW to either be crazy or a liar when he showed up and confessed to a murder that took place thirty years ago and over seventy miles away because he didn't want any more weird stuff in Hawksaw. He almost didn't agree to let JW live in the old guy's house.
Back to present-day, Deuteronomy decides she's going to scare this stranger out of her house so she does her best to appear around corners and be spooky-like. He calls somebody to help look for any holes that a dog could have gotten through but there are none. He's written off and left to deal with it on his own so he ignores her in hopes that it really is just a hiccup. Not fond of being ignored, Deuteronomy attacks him in his bed. During the fight, she attempts to place a curse over his eyes that will show him only horrible visions because her spite had grown so much. Just killing him would have been taking the easy way out. She didn't get a clear swipe at his face and hadn't practiced any kind of magic in over thirty years, so the curse wound up kind of wonky.
He left the house for medical attention and when he returns, Deuteronomy is absolutely gobsmacked that he would come back at all. She descends into the bottom basement of the house to ask the help of a creature that the Old Man made before her, back when he was angry about the stares he got for his thankless job. She releases the monster and tries to strike up a deal with it in order to destroy JW for good, but the monster is like "HAHA THAT'S CUTE, BYE BITCH" and takes off to fulfill the duty it had been created with--basically to destroy anybody that got in its way.
Deuteronomy has a pretty red face under all that fur at this point because if it gets out that there's a horrible creature running around in town, they'll bulldoze the house faster than a golf coarse stamps out a fire ant hill. She confronts JW a second time and begs for his help. It comes to light that there was a misunderstanding and that if JW just stops the monster before too much attention is turned on the house, she'll let him live there and not bother him. All JW ever wanted was a home that was his where nobody would bother him or evict so it sounds like a pretty good deal. For a deal being made with a reanimated wolf corpse. Shotgun in hand, he and Deuteronomy take to the streets. Unfortunately, the monster already frightened a few people and has dragged a police deputy through a windshield by the time they find it. So the secret's kind of out.
Determined to still have a place to live, JW keeps up his end of the bargain by shooting the monster a few times, then trapping it in a family's garage before setting the whole thing on fire. In the end, the monster is pretty dead and even though people are like 'oh no there's a Weird Guy again and it's that guy we helped' JW tells them that so long as they keep him healthy, he'll do whatever he can to keep them from having to deal with weird stuff. It's a sort-of-but-not-really hostage situation that will eventually turn into a self-appointed duty on JW's part.
In the beginning, he's grouchy toward the town and treats them like a bunch of thankless chickens with their heads cut off. His pull point is drifting toward the end of this resentment. He doesn't want to admit to himself that he's grown to like and feel responsible for the town.
In return for housing and health care (over half co-payment for his medication), he keeps watch over Hawksaw. JW keeps nosy people out of the little retirement town and finally has a place to call his very own after being hot-potatoe'd around for so long.
Needless to say, the entire ordeal made him pretty cranky and skittish.
Present-day JW (2009-10ish) is still doing this, though he's got quite a few adventures under his belt.