Character Sketches WIP Part 2 -- Cherie and Aura

Cherie waved goodbye to Abe and Marilyn as they exited the Atelier Cafe, located in the heart of the Eiffel Tower, and nowhere at all. The bell on the door jingled twice as Cherie swiped at the counter with a dish rag, powering it down for the day. 

A moment later, the doorbell jingled again. Cherie looked up, frowning. A teenage girl entered. She was of slim build, with shiny, straight brown hair. She wore a blue-and-gray argyle cardigan paired with a poofy, leopard-print skirt.  A pair of oversized black steel-toed hiking boots completed the ensemble, along with stacks of colorful bracelets and necklaces that jangled and chimed as she moved. 

She paused just inside the doorway, looking around the dim, empty diner. It was a small room, ten-by-ten, with three round tables that each had a pair of chairs perched under them. The tablecloths were blue gingham, and each table had a small vase of spring flowers in the middle of it along with a sugar shaker and a little cup of toothpicks. The counter took up one entire wall, with a swinging door that supposedly led to a kitchen but actually led to nowhere. "Are you open?" the girl asked, doubtfully. 

Cherie hesitated, and then smiled warmly. "We just closed, but I haven't powered down the coffee maker yet," she said. That was a lie, but a simple clockwise swipe at the counter powered everything up again, including the lights and music.

The girl smiled. "Is that Taylor Swift?" she asked.

Cherie nodded. She was a Swiftie. Ninety percent of the music in her cafe was just musical versions of Taylor Swift songs done with full orchestra. As the girl approached the counter, this version of "I Know Places" hit a single harp glissando while soft timpani rolled beneath delicate, tiptoeing violin notes and a low clarinet hum. 

"What is this place?" she asked. "And was that Abe Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe I saw outside?"

This girl was full of surprises. First of all, nobody aside from Abe and Marilyn entered or exited through the door. They were summoned by Cherie and just appeared at whichever table she wanted them at. Cherie had not summoned this girl. Second, the girl was surprised but not shocked at seeing two dead human celebrities leaving the establishment, dressed as a waitress and a busboy. Third, she hadn't blinked when the lights and music had come on, as though by magic.

"It's a liminal space," Cherie answered.

"A liminal space," the girl said. "What's that?" She paused, then before Cheri could answer added, "I wanted a place that doesn't really exist in a specific time or place, where I could just think for as long as I needed to," she said. "Is that what a liminal space is?"

"Close enough," Cherie said. "How did you get here?"

"Lush," the girl answered, simply. She gestured toward her ears, where two gold studs gleamed in her ears. "I've had them since I was a baby, and if I think of a place I want to be, I can just go there." 

"Neat," Cherie said. What the girl called 'lush' was a collection of microscopic psychic supercomputers that clung together like magnets. They responded to thought and could be manipulated like clay. They could take on the properties of anything from living flowers to plastic building blocks to cooked food. Lush's entire cafe was made of lush. She used it to call people to her from other worlds, but she'd never imagined using it to take her to other places. Then again, as an agoraphobe, of course she wouldn't.

The girl grinned. "It used to freak my mom out. She just thought that I was magical because she adopted me from a mermaid and mermaids don't exist in our world -- I mean, they're supposed to be mythical." She glanced down. "I was born with legs and no gills, so my birth mom couldn't take care of me." The girl shot her hand out. "Sorry, I'm Aura. And you're Cherie?"

For a moment, Cherie was taken aback again. Had the girl's earrings told her that? No, Cherie's nametag had. Cherie mentally rolled her eyes at herself before shaking the girl's -- Aura's hand. "Nice to meet you," she said. She couldn't remember the last time she'd ever meant a word of that polite phrase, but this girl was...different. Interesting. Uninvited, but not unwanted.

Cherie had never had anyone come to the cafe of their own volition, and she never realized how lonely it was to always choose her company, but never be chosen as company. Then again, Aura had come, looking for a place to think, not for Cherie, specifically. She eyed the girl. "Were you looking for a place to be alone?" she asked.

Aura blinked, and thought. "I guess I hadn't imagined being able to talk to anyone about this, so I wasn't imagining anyone." She frowned. "You're not AI, are you? You don't seem like -- I mean, I've only met one avatar, but you seem more --"

Cherie took advantage of Aura's awkward pause long enough to answer. "I'm human. I'm from the only universe whose technology ever advanced enough to create what you call lush."

Aura's eyes grew wide. "Wow. What was the difference between your universe and the rest of them?"

Cherie hesitated. "Do you know anything about communism?"

Aura shrugged. "Just that you have to stand in line for bread."

Cherie laughed. "Yeah, that's what I thought. So, in a nutshell, communism is the idea that the world is better when people work together, share resources, and everyone has enough to live comfortably. A lot of politicians like to pretend to be communists and end up being fascists, where the rich have the most and the poor don't even have what they need. 

Anyway, on my world, everyone is equally valuable, so everyone grows up with adequate food, shelter, clothing, and access to education. And since there are no such things as patents or copyrights, everyone has the ability to build on technology that already exists. So, a society that values education and innovation, where every single person in the population who has the potential to create great art or technological advancements, can."

Aura looked impressed. "I'd be interested to visit that world." She tugged at an earlobe, blinked and focused back on Cherie. She looked shy. "If that's okay?"

Cherie laughed. "We don't get many visitors, but yes. We like sharing our knowledge with people from other universes. We're pretty proud of it. Back when the supercomputers were newer, we shared them with neighboring universes, but it ended up being another type of currency and threatened to cause so much more oppression than would be there naturally. We --" she paused and grinned. "I say we like that includes me, but this was thousands of years before I was born -- anyway, people in my world ended up creating facilities one each version of Earth for hundreds of universes, where an AI avatar could determine when the knowledge of lush would be beneficial to the people there, and in those cases, reveal it to the population."

Aura thought for a moment. "That makes sense. The avatar that I met -- her name is Lush -- she lives in a giant underwater mountain." She paused, frowning. Then she sighed, heavily. "I wonder if that's why she sent me to you. I have a decision to make."

Cherie was surprised. "How could I help?"

Aura sighed heavily again. Her golden tiger eyes were clouded with worry or weariness. Or both. "My world in one-of-a-kind, too, but in a bad way," she said, sadly. "According to Lush, there are many universes where bad people get a hold of lush but my world is the only one that is about to be blown apart."

"Whoa. What do you mean?"

Aura scrubbed at her face with her hands and then leaned heavily on the counter. Immediately, a stool popped up next to her. She looked at it for a moment, bemused, and then sat down. Elbows on the counter, chin resting on one hand, she was quiet for another moment. Then she took a deep breath. "In my universe, there are four really evil people who are hoarding lush, drilling down into the Earth so that they can cause a rupture that will cause the Earth to split into four mini planets." She shook her head, as though she couldn't believe how stupid the concept was to her.

Cherie had to agree. "What? What about the atmosphere? Amongst other things...."

Aura nodded, rolling her eyes in exasperation. "Exactly!" She shook her head. "But that's what they want to do. They think that there will be enough lush for each mini planet to maintain its own atmosphere, but they're all idiots!" She broke off, breathing hard, her face pinkening with disgust. "They've calculated all wrong. There's not enough lush create an atmosphere for each small planet.  Also, there are people living where they want to create the cracks through the entire Earth, but they call it 'acceptable losses' --" here, she used her fingers to create air quotes, "because it's all people they don't know or care about. Not to mention the affect on merpeople, who they don't even know about and other aquatic life and a million other things they haven't even thought of!" 

She stood and paced the small cafe, chairs and tables moving out of her ways so that she could stalk in peace. She didn't even notice. She took a scrunchie out of the pocket of her sweater, and pulled her hair into a ponytail. Then she took the ponytail out, smoothed her hair, and tried again. After three attempts, she seemed satisfied, and her frantic pacing slowed down. She returned to the counter, hopped up on the stool, and then plopped her forehead down onto the counter.

Cherie watched all of this, bemused. She'd had no idea that there was a universe in this dire of a situation. This would definitely be something the people back home would know about, but she hadn't been in contact for hundreds of years. They'd only ask her about the novel. She pulled up her own stool and sat, watching the girl. She wanted to help, but she had no idea how. Why would an AI avatar have sent the girl here?

Aura's shoulders moved with each breath, and once her breathing had slowed enough, she took one deep breath, pulled herself up, and then propped herself up again, elbows on the counter. She looked so helpless, that Cherie wanted to give the girl a hug.

"Is there anything that can be done?" Cherie asked. 

"Yes," Aura said, glumly. "That's the worst part." She dropped her arms and her head returned to the counter.

Cherie stared at the girl for a moment, non-plussed. Then she remembered that she ran a cafe. Something -- lush, as Aura called it -- told her that the girl was a hot chocolate connoisseur, so Cherie mentally ordered the girl one in a large mug, specific to the girl's tastes with just a hint of cinnamon and topped with a fluffy layer of whipped cream (and sprinkles). Then she divined the girl's untapped taste for cheese cherry danishes, and pulled a fresh, warm one out of the toaster oven. She set the food and drink in front of the girl. The dishes would keep them at the perfect temperature, so the girl could take her time.

When the girl raised her head again, she looked so miserable that Cherie had to wonder what she was being called upon to do that could possibly be so bad. Then, she had to smile as the girl, distracted from her misery by the unexpected treats took a sip of the hot chocolate and closed her eyes, worry melting away into an expression of pure bliss.

Cherie had grown up in a world where lush was plentiful. She'd never eaten a bad meal or worn a piece of clothing that made her too hot or too cold. She'd never slept in a bed too hard or too soft. And she'd never felt unappreciative of these facts, but she'd never felt appreciative of them, either. Until she'd come to the cafe and met people from other worlds. They didn't even know to be horrified by the worlds they came from, by the discomfort and indignity that greed had built for them.

After she finished her treats, Aura stared at nothing for a while, then she seemed to return to her body. She looked at Cherie. "According to Lush, mine is the only universe where this is an issue. Which is a good thing because the solution -- her solution --" she paused, as though wanting to make sure Cherie knew that the solution wasn't Aura's idea. When Cherie nodded, again bemused, Aura continued. "Is to pull all of the lush that exists from every world, including her origin universe -- and yours, I guess," she added, looking guilty. "Your world would be able to replenish, over time, obviously, because you know how to make the lush," she added hastily. She averted her gaze. "But all of the existing lush would be gone, to keep the mini planets from becoming space junk."

Cherie considered the implication of Aura's words. At first, it didn't sound so bad. Lush was a luxury, not a necessity. Expecially in her universe, where the denizens hadn't destroyed the ozone and created a trash heap out of every ocean, it would still be hospitable. She wondered how it would affect other worlds? Even ones that didn't know about lush still had lush floating around; its AI avatar monitoring and quietly helping when it wouldn't risk detection.

She tried to imagine thousands of universes scraped of all of the small pieces of comfort and safety that lush provided. It would be interesting to see how that would change the people who would come into the cafe. And then, like a bolt of lightening that lasted a million years, Cherie realized that there would be no more cafe. She'd have to return home, a failure. The novel unwritten, and aside from a few pathetic attempts, not even really started. Her family's kind acceptance -- her gorge rose, and she had to choke down her fury at what she was being robbed of.

All of the sudden, she hated the sweet, anxious face of the teenage sitting across from her. She wanted to reach back into the girl's stomach and retrieve every particle of the perfect hot chocolate, every crumb and morsel of the pastry. She wanted to shove the girl out of the door of her cafe, out of existence. She hated the girl more than she'd ever hated another person. This girl had just stolen everything from her, and from the look on her face, she knew it. And she hadn't done it to just Cherie, she'd done it to everyone who'd ever come to rely on lush in any capacity.

"That's the decision you have to make?" Cherie said. Her voice was cold and sounded like it was coming from miles away. She could feel her lips moving, but hadn't intended to speak. "Whether to save your universe or make every other universe slightly worse?" She couldn't even feel her lips anymore. "Doesn't seem like much of a question."

Aura looked like she wished she could disappear. Which was funny, because her wishing was what had brought her here in the first place. The absurdity of the thought snapped Cherie back to herself. Of course the girl had to save her universe. Cherie's stupid novel, the human lives that had already been sacrificed in justification of it, it was never going to happen, wouldn't have happened if Cherie had stayed here for another thousand years. Cherie had always been a fraud. And, of course, the fate of every single human on an entire planet was more important than Cherie's hobby. It was an easy choice. She didn't understand why Aura was agonizing over it, unless there was something Cherie didn't know.

But Aura seemed to be at a loss for words. Cherie realized that she'd stood, knocking her stool over. She righted it, and sat back down. She tried not to think about losing the cafe, having to return home. She focused on the girl. "What am I missing?" she asked, her voice shaken, but warmer than before. She waited.

Worldbuilding -- Lush Part 3

Cherie

Cherie is not a character in any of my novels, she's a character I made up for this blog as a way to explore the characters I already know and the ones I want to create. The Atelier Cafe is a place of reckoning, where Cherie can beckon a potential character for her novel, and then also pull in that person's rival or former lover, or dead sibling, and basically test the character under pressure. 

Some authors interview their characters, which is not a far enough mental remove for me to be able to relax and explore the character. I also get really intimidated by character sheets. There are too many options for each character, and I don't want to be "wrong". Hence why I have a character that I get to explore every version of (Aura). 

Cherie is an aspiring writer who rents The Atelier Cafe, a liminal space entirely made of lush that is her equivalent to a cabin in the woods. She doesn't age while she's in the cafe, and she uses the lush to pull in people that she thinks might make good characters in the greatest novel ever written in any universe.

Like Aura can think of a place that she wants to visit, and then can travel to the universe in which that world exists, Cherie can think of the kind of person she wants to observe and call them to her cafe. Cherie doesn't spend a lot of time interacting with her "customers", she mostly observes and manipulates. Marilyn Monroe is her waitress and Abe Lincoln is her busboy. When they go home, they remember The Atelier Cafe as a dream. I don't really plan to explore Abe and Marilyn as characters any more than I want to explore Cherie, but I thought that some characterization would be better than none and Abe and Marilyn are enough a part of the zeitgeist for readers to fill in a lot of blanks, even if the characters their interacting with are from different times or worlds.

The Atelier Cafe may be a safe space for Abe and Marilyn to retreat to when their own world is too hectic and scary, but not everyone is safe there. Cherie is not generally cruel, but she has been careless with pulling in mortal enemies without proper safeguards, more than once, especially in her early years as manager of the cafe. The cafe works on Freddy Krueger rules; if you die in The Atelier Cafe, you die in real life. Survivors of Cherie's little experiments, which to be fair, is a good 90% of her patrons, return to their own worlds, remembering their experience as a particularly vivid dream. If Cherie is vigilant enough, wounds and lost limbs can be replaced by lush before the people are sent home.

Although Cherie is not a sadist, she is a human with a lot of power and not a lot of personal consequences -- and she's been in the cafe for a long time, probably hundreds of years -- so she does stop thinking of her patrons and people from time to time. And she's less careful with the ones she doesn't like.

For my purposes, the cafe is a precursor to a true character profile. It's a place for me to explore all of the blank spaces on a character sheet without feeling like I'm doing homework. And I may explore the same character more than once until I lock in who the character is. I can also have multiple versions since this cafe can pull in characters from any universe. She could potentially pull in a version of herself from a different universe, but that is a thought that would make her shudder.

The King

I forget his real name, I have it written down somewhere (hence the need for a blog, to keep all of this shit together). But, basically, he's a king from ancient Egypt who ends up dying. I don't know how; he's never been a main character. I think I always assumed that it was of old age, but I never picture him as being particularly old. Anyway, he ends up in the Afterlife. The only people you meet in the Afterlife are the ones who loved you and all of the people who loved them. It's sort of like LinkedIn; potentially, you could meet everyone in the world that way (but almost definitely won't).

In The King's case, he ends up there with only the servant who was buried with him to keep him company in the Afterlife. This is a person who he genuinely cared about during his lifetime, but he is pretty bummed that she's the only true connection he ever made. And he's kind of sad for her, too. She's a pure soul and deserves more than just him for company. She doesn't seem to mind, which only makes him sadder.

He ends up exploring the Afterlife, and finds that it's basically just another universe, made entirely of lush (not that he calls it that. This is a name specific to Aura's home universe that she spreads around. I may need to come up with another name for The King to use, maybe just magic?). He figures out that he can manipulate the lush and find other people that way, but he's still bummed that according to this very advanced AI, he lived an entire life and only made one true friend. 

He decides to return to his home universe and try again. Bodies in the Afterlife are made of lush, so he picks a form and goes back to being alive. When The Mummy (I'm forgetting her real name too) follows him, she spends millennia trying to track him down, but he always evades her. He wants her to build her own life and forge more connections so that her next version of the Afterlife isn't so bleak.

There are a couple more reasons, actually. First, he's kind of a selfish, materialistic creep and he doesn't want to ruin that image of himself in her eyes. Second, he just wants to have fun, and keeping a little Jiminy Cricket in his pocket doesn't appeal to him. Finally, and most selfishly, he's reassured by her continuing attempts to track him down. He's not confident that he is capable of forging more connections, and he fails to do so for many centuries. Then he loses track of her for a while, and when they meet again, in Beverly Hills, he sets her free to pursue her own life, for once and for all.

The King is one of the evil billionaires who causes The Rift -- not actually so evil as to want it to happen, as, if it's going to happen, he's going to be one of the main players. Or, maybe he is just trying to keep the whole thing from getting too out of hand, and fails. I haven't decided yet.

He's around during Rifted Times, and also survives The Mend. He is the "great evil" that Jane is supposed to defeat in her story. He sets up the prophecy and everything. Once he realizes that there is a child who fills the random character generator shit he filled out for the prophecy, he kind of panics and tries to thwart her. In the end, he does end up returning to the Afterlife. It's still pretty sparse, but the people there are ones that he cherishes.

Is the Mummy one of them? Good question. She is also in Jane's story. She's the owner of a pirate ship that takes Jane to the island volcano where Jane is prophecied to kill the king. (Although now that "pirate" has more accurate connotations than it did when I came up with this character, I may just make her a regular captain.) The Mummy is the one who figures out that the prophecy Jane is chasing is The King. Bear invites The Mummy to come with, but The Mummy doesn't want to see The King. I THINK she will probably meet him in the Afterlife, but maybe he'll spot her last. Make him sweat a bit.

The Mummy

 I call her The Mummy because when she wakes up in The King's tomb, she thinks that she's a mummy, and the lush creates the form that she sees herself as. The Mummy's life as a slave for The King's daughter was rough. The daughter, Ahmose, was about as sadistic as they come, and was incredibly cruel to The Mummy, including making The Mummy convince her parents that she doesn't love them. Ahmose alienates The Mummy from the other servants, as well. Ahmose tells them that The Mummy spreads gossip and lies about them, when really it's Ahmose. (Ahmose and The Mummy are almost the same age.)

The Mummy's only relief on Earth is the few moments that she steals in the  middle of the night when Ahmose is asleep. She visit's The King garden, where they sit and play chess (or some equivalent). So, her version of The Afterlife is her and The King in a gorgeous gazebo set on top of a waterfall, playing every board game that has ever been invented in any time period.

When she finds The King gone, her only wish is to find where he is, so the lush returns her to the tomb, where The Mummy misses The King by just a few moments. It's The Mummy's own horror at her situation and body that prevents her from finding him immediately.

The Mummy finds clothes that she can swaddle herself in, so that no one can see her face, and she goes about, trying to find The King. Her body doesn't need food or sleep, but neither does The King's, and  he's actively avoiding her. He's also handsome and brought a bunch of extra lush with him that he can turn into gold, so he's also rich.

The Mummy makes a few connections throughout the thousands of years of looking for The King. In Atlantis, she makes friends with a teenage girl and shares her secret (that she's a mummy). The people who live there believe that the volcano needs to be fed in order to keep it from erupting. The teenage girl outs The Mummy and The Mummy is sacrificed. The volcano erupts anyway.

The Mummy is hurt and angry, and she sulks within the silty ocean water for about a 1500 years before emerging. When she emerges, all of her rotting flesh has been melted away and she's fully opalized bone. I think this is a combination of her not visually imagining herself as anything for that long, and maybe something approaching empathy on the lush's part. Letting her become a beautiful version of how she saw herself. Technically, bones can be opalized in salty, silty waters that volcanoes create. It's (barely) within the realm of reality for an entire human body to be opalized in 1500 years in the right conditions. The Mummy doesn't know that her body is made of lush but maybe the idea of opalized bone was introduced to her on Atlantis and she was really taken with the idea.

Anyway, The Mummy emerges from the ruins of Atlantis, ready to find The King and drag him back to The Afterlife. She's tried being a person twice now, and has failed both times. She wants the comfort and beauty of her little gazebo and waterfall and her board games. Unfortunately, he continues to evade her until we get to with witch trial times in America. (I don't want all of her being sacrificed to be about foreign people doing backwards things when we have our own sordid history we can pull from.)

The mummy makes friends with some teenage girls and is betrayed again. She's burned at the stake. Her beautiful bones are blackened, but she washes the ash off and is her beautiful, betrayed self again. She goes back to trying to find The King, triply done with trying to be a person.

I started writing her story in earnest around 2010, and I'm not sure if I want to set it then or update it. It's hard to write about modern times without mentioning Covid or ICE or Palestine, so I may need to just set it in an alternate (better) universe where none of that shit happened/is happening. But, I also want it to be set in "real" Beverly Hills so I may have to figure out how to mention that stuff. Ugh. Life is so fucking horrible. Anyway.

With these modern times, The Mummy is a genius computer hacker, but she has an accountant named Karen who monitors and keeps up all of The Mummy's aliases. When a fictional couple that work as two of The Mummy's aliases die in a plane crash, The Mummy has to pretend to be their teenage daughter. She moves into one of her mansions and enrolls in Beverly Hills High school. Here, haunted by the ghosts of teenage girls that have made her entire existence torture, The Mummy is spurred on to find The King.

She does! And he tells her not only that he's been avoiding her on purpose, but that she doesn't need to look like a skeleton. He tells her about lush and about how he chooses his own form. He has no intention of returning to the Afterlife any time soon, and he shoos her (gently) out to go build a life for herself.

The Mummy is crushed by The King's attitude. She's always thought that he was in some sort of trouble that he needed her to rescue him from, and is very hurt by the fact that he's been avoiding her. Especially because him having that conversation with her a couple of thousand years earlier could have saved her a lot of heartache. She finally sees the resemblance between him and his daughter.

Her saving grace at this point is that she has finally made some true friends; the teenage girls at Beverly Hills High. She also has a -- maybe -- boyfriend. She allows her body to grow flesh and hair and to even remove her bandages so that her friends get to see her. My favorite part is that they all just start talking to her normally before realizing that her bandages are gone. 

The Rift happens around this time, and I don't have anything on this character until we get to Mended times, when she is a ship captain (maybe of illegal things) who helps Jane figure out that the prophecy is bunk created by The King for his own amusement. She declines the offer to join the group and see him. It's been literally thousands of years but she's not ready. She likes her life, and she's letting her body age naturally. She figures that when she's too unsteady on her sea legs, she'll sacrifice herself to the sea and go see the collection of connections she's amassed in the Afterlife. She's not sure if The King will be one of the connections. 

I'm not, either, honesty. When I was writing his blurb, I thought that maybe it would be too harsh to have The Mummy reject him for eternity, but now that I've finished writing hers, fuck him. He does not deserve to have her in his Afterlife. I'm happy for him that he still has connections, and more than one, but maybe this is one that he deserves to lose forever. Then again, if any of his connections have any of her connections, then they will be linked in the Afterlife. It would be interesting to see how hard he fights to make that happen and whether or not she'd fight to make it not happen.

Worldbuilding -- Lush Part 2

 Jane 

Jane is Bear's best friend. (Bear is Aura, post-Mend.) Jane's story is about being a  child who was prophesied to save the world from a great evil. She grows up with the expectation of "becoming" a hero, any moment, but as her cue approaches, she realizes that she's not ready. So, when a man shows up claiming to be her brother (from another mother) and that the prophecy is really about him, she's relieved. She's actually more worried about the disappointment of her village because they've been hyping her up her whole life, than disappointed for herself.

As it turns out, since the prophecy is called "Beware the False Moon", the man who shows up is lying. He truly is her half brother, but the prophecy isn't about him, even though he really is her half-brother. So, she sets out on her quest, still waiting to feel like a hero, and it doesn't happen. She goes through all of the trials that the prophecy -- prophesied, and she still doesn't feel like a hero. 

The "great evil" that she has to face down is an ancient Egyptian king who has survived The Rift and The Mend, and like Aura (Bear) is essentially made entirely of lush at this point. He (not the greatest guy historically but not greatly evil) created the prophecy knowing that he'd be ready to move onto the Afterlife soon (another thousand years or so) but he'd need someone to help him unravel the lush that makes up his existence. Then he waited for a time/place/person who would find him to kill him. He was going to put on a big show and be defeated very dramatically.

Unfortunately, this would require Jane to have the killer instinct of a true hero, and she just doesn't. Fortunately, Bear, has been regaining his memories as all of the Auras and going through a literally epic identity crisis throughout the story, and coincidentally telling the king's story to Jane and her quest group the whole time. When Bear recognizes the king, the king drops all pretense of being the great evil and Bear helps dismantle the king and frees him to return to the Afterlife.

At the same time, Bear is at the climax of his identity crisis, all of his memories flooding in, so as he dismantles the king, he also dismantles himself. The particles of lush explode out and just become part of everything in the world. So, the king is effectively dead, but so is Bear.

Jane is devastated. Not only has she failed this epic quest that she has been trying to mentally prepare herself for her whole life, but it turns out to be fake, and then she loses her best friend. She decides not to return home, instead, setting out with her half-brother on a quest he needs to complete, so that she can get to know him better.

That's the end of Jane's first story arc. In the second story, Aura/Bear comes back as Beaura and Jane has to deal with the loss of her old friend and embrace her new friend, who is so similar but so different. The biggest issue is that Jane was the only friend that Bear had in the world, and now that Beaura has all of their memories, Jane worries that she's not special enough to compete with everyone Beaura has loved before.

That's only a small part of that story, but the only part I've figured out so far.

Cherie

Cherie is an aspiring writer who rents The Atelier Cafe, a liminal space entirely made of lush that is her equivalent to a cabin in the woods. She doesn't age while she's in the cafe, and she uses it to pull in people that she thinks might make good characters in the greatest novel ever written in any universe.

Like Aura can think of a place that she wants to visit, and then can travel to the universe in which that world exists, Cherie can think of the kind of person she wants to observe and call them to her cafe. Cherie doesn't spend a lot of time interacting with her "customers", she mostly observes. Marilyn Monroe is her waitress and Abe Lincoln is her busboy. When they go home, they remember The Atelier Cafe as a dream. 

 

Worldbuilding -- Lush Part 1

The magical system in the worlds of A Thousand Auras is  based around a light sci-fi substance called "lush". Lush is made up of grain-of-sand-sized supercomputers that come from the only known universe where humanity is largely communistic. The supercomputers can cling to each other like magnets, or be separated. They can be manipulated by hand like clay, but the best results come from just thinking about the form you want them to take. So, if you're hungry, you can turn a ball of lush into a hamburger and eat it. And it will taste exactly how you imagined, if not better.

The limitation of form is based on how much lush you have. So if you had a fist-sized lump of lush, that's how big the hamburger could be. If you had a mountain of lush, you could make a whole lot of burgers. But lush can be more than burgers. It can be clothes, and it can even take on the shape and properties of living things like flowers and animals.

The main areas that lush show up in my universes so far are:

Aura

Aura's birth parents are merfolk, but she had a genetic anomaly that affects one in a million merpeople. She was born with legs instead of a tail and she can't breathe underwater. Her birth mother, Darcy, gifted Aura with gold stud earrings before handing her over to her adoptive mother. The earrings are made of lush, and as soon as Aura was old enough to imagine other worlds, she was able to travel to them. 

Aura's adoptive mother (Britney) assumed that Aura's ability came from being a mermaid, but merfolk in in Aura's birth universe don't have any more magical powers than two-legged people. They're just evolved from fish instead of monkeys. 

Anyway, Aura grew up just assuming that she was magical, when she's thirteen, it occurs to her that there might be other merfolk born with two legs like hers. Lush takes her to meet Coral, a mermaid princess born with two legs who gets by underwater by using a prosthetic tail and a device that allows her to breathe underwater. 

Coral takes Aura to a top-secret underwater facility made of lush where Aura gets to meet Lush, an AI avatar who gets to do fun exposition dumps. (This is why lush is called "lush" in Aura's world but someone like Cherie, whose home world invented the supercomputers, just thinks of lush as computers.)

AI Lush lets Aura know that a secret cabal of powerful world leaders have found out about lush and are trying to mine the planet for it. Lush and Aura work together for three years to try to remove stockpiles of lush from four of the evilest billionaires and to discredit the idea of lush as being a hoax. But, after three years, Lush lets Aura know that they have failed. The four billionaires have started fighting amongst themselves and have decided to explode the world into four equal pieces, with the lush they have control over creating an atmosphere for each quarter, ostensibly creating four planetettes that each billionaire can control.

The problem is that the billionaires have miscalculated and are basically just going to end up killing everyone on the planet. The only option that Lush can suggest at this point is to have Aura gather as much lush from all of the universes she can visit and reinforce the atmospheres that the billionaires are intending to create.

The downside to this is that all of the universes, thousands of them, will be stripped of lush and many of them will be detrimentally affected. Lush thinks that she can avoid deaths, but a lot of people will be affected by poverty, hunger, and potentially life-threatening situations. Or, since Aura's home universe is literally the only one in which the billionaires have reached this particular level of evil, maybe this universe gets what it deserves and Earth just isn't in it anymore.

Aura is torn. By this point, she's made enough friends in enough worlds, parallel as well as completely different from ours, that the amount of people (etcetera) who will be affected if she saves her home universe will far outweigh the population of her Earth. And, of course, since Aura can bring people with her when she travels to different worlds, she could save the people that she loves the most, but what about the people she loves less, the people she likes, and even the people she actively dislikes? And what about the people she's never met? Each one of them is just as unique and irreplaceable as the people she knows. Allowing them all to die because of four evil billionaires (and their evil friends and all of their banally evil staff members) doesn't seem right either.

She meets Cherie at the Atelier Cafe where they debate the matter, and in the end, Aura chooses to save her home universe. The way that she personally is affected is that she's no longer able to travel. There isn't a grain of lush that is free for her personal use, every single grain is being used to hold each of the four planetettes together. 

So, Aura, who has been able to travel freely to any world she can imagine since before she could speak, is stuck on one part of a broken world. She works with Lush to try to stitch it back together for decades by scraping up as much lush as possible between the worlds so that she can bring the worlds back together. Just as she's dying of old age, she finally succeeds. I'm not sure if lush keeps her alive longer and the Rifted period lasts for hundreds of years, or if the Rift only lasts like eighty years before Aura is able to perform The Mend.

The event of the worlds being blown apart is known as The Rift. The event where the worlds come back together is called The Mend. So, history is divided into Pre-Rift, Rifted, and Mended times. Due to The Rift, humanity in Aura's home universe lost a lot of technology and history, so history in the Rifted time period is mingled and mangled with myth quite a lot. It's amazing how quickly humanity can lose track of itself in just a generation or two. To be fair, there was still a lot of loss of life, and it was a pretty traumatic event. People were more interested in surviving the day and then the year and then the generation for a while. Because all of the lush in the world had been pulled to hold together the atmosphere, many technologies also fell apart.

During the event of The Rift, Aura basically mind-melded with all of the other Auras in alternate universes and for the whole Rifted time, she's basically been living as every potential Aura. So, she gets confused a lot. She always knows her mission, but she'll tell the same story more than once and the events will be different, or the people in her life will have different vocations and stuff. 

When The Mend happens, she loses all sense of herself completely. When we meet her again, she is in the shape of a male unicorn who insists he's a bear (he can shape shift into a bear, but he usually switches between his unicorn form and his human form that has a unicorn horn in the middle of his forehead). He knows all of the Aura stories and the stories of The Rift and The Mend, but not as memories. He's also no longer flesh and is entirely made up of lush at this point. Eventually, he remembers who he is but doesn't feel like Aura or Bear, but some combination. He resumes human form, but is kind of androgynous and starts going by Beaura.

The Mended time period has plenty of lush but in a mostly concentrated area in the middle of the planet, integrated into the planet's core. Very little is available for human use, and it's generally thought of as magical, but anyone can learn to manipulate it.

Coral

Coral is a mermaid princess born with two legs who gets by underwater by using a prosthetic tail and a device that allows her to breathe underwater.  Because she holds the device in her mouth, she's mute underwater and uses sign language in order to communicate with other merfolk. She's twenty-three when she meets Aura and twenty-six when she ventures out onto land for the first time.

She discovers the Lush facility when she's nineteen. She's far from home when her breathing device fails and the facility sends out a mechanical shark to steer Coral to the facility. Lush saves Coral and helps Coral solve the mystery of who has been sabotaging her breathing devices.

When Coral is twenty-three, she meets Aura and I haven't really worked out why, maybe Aura's ability to travel to whatever world she wants to go to clues her in, but she takes Aura to meet Lush. Aside from a coin-sized bit of lush that Lush gives Coral to use as a breathing device (or whatever), Coral doesn't really have anything to do with lush. I imagine that she might help Aura save the world, but I'm not actually sure. Maybe she just gives Aura a shoulder to cry on or advice or something.

Coral's main story arc is about venturing out on land, becoming a nanny for a deaf six-year-old, and falling in love with the six-year-old's father. She also has an incident with the girl's uncle (Tom), wherein the lush rushes into his face and heals his adult severe acne. It was something he was super self-conscious about and the mind-reading AI picked up on it from a mile away. 

Coral will also lose the lush when The Rift happens, so when she visits her family, she'll have to rely on less technologically advanced breathing gear. I'm not sure what The Rift does to ocean life, especially where her parents live, but I imagine everyone will be fine. I'm not the kind of author who likes to kill her characters; even the red shirts get to live.

Tom 

Tom is the uncle of Coral's charge (whose name I don't remember at the moment). He works as an accountant but he really wants to be a dollmaker. His twin sister died a couple of years prior to him meeting Coral, and he's still grieving. Even though he was super self-conscious about his severe adult acne, he's not really prepared for how differently people treat him once the lush fixes his face. 

This is the extent of his interaction with lush, but it means that he knows something about Coral that his niece and brother-in-law don't. He and Coral become pretty good friends, and she becomes kind of an honorary sister. Although she doesn't fill the space that his twin left behind, she does give him a glimpse of magic and it kind of jump starts him into being interested in living again -- or at least to stop resenting each breath that means he's still alive.

Tom's story is also a love story between him and an old college girlfriend who turns out to be his new boss, Sal. I came up with this story in 2009-ish, and now I'm wondering if Sal should be a dude, but I have never written or even come up with a gay relationship to base a story on, so I feel a little insecure about that idea. We'll see.

Jane 

Jane is Bear's best friend. Bear is Aura, post-Mend. Jane's story is about being a  child who was prophesied to save the world from a great evil. 

Character Sketches WIP Part 1 -- Cherie and Aura

Cherie waved goodbye to Abe and Marilyn as they exited the Atelier Cafe, located in the heart of the Eiffel Tower. The bell on the door jingled twice as Cherie swiped at the counter with a dish rag, powering it down for the day. 

A moment later, the doorbell jingled again. Cherie looked up, frowning. A teenaged girl entered. She was of slim build, with shiny, straight brown hair. She wore a blue-and-gray argyle cardigan paired with a poofy, leopard-print skirt.  A pair of oversized black steel-toed boots completed the ensemble, along with stacks of colorful bracelets and necklaces that jangled and chimed as she moved. 

She paused just inside the doorway, looking around at the dim, empty diner. It was a small room, ten-by-ten, with three round tables that each had a pair of chairs perched under them. The tablecloths were blue gingham, and each table had a small vase of spring flowers in the middle of it along with a sugar shaker and a little jar of toothpicks. The counter took up one entire wall, with a swinging door that supposedly led to a kitchen but actually led to nowhere. "Are you open?" the girl asked, doubtfully. 

Cherie hesitated, and then smiled warmly. "We just closed, but I haven't powered down the coffee maker yet," she said. That was a lie, but a simple clockwise swipe at the counter powered everything up again, including the lights and music.

The girl smiled. "Is that Taylor Swift?" she asked.

Cherie nodded. She was a Swiftie. Ninety percent of the music in her cafe was just musical versions of Taylor Swift songs done with full orchestra. As the girl approached the counter, this version of "I Know Places" hit a single harp glissando while soft timpani rolled beneath delicate, tiptoeing violin notes and a low clarinet hum. 

"What is this place?" she asked. "And was that Abe Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe I saw outside?"

This girl was full of surprises. First of all, nobody aside from Abe and Marilyn entered or exited through the door. They were summoned by Cherie and just appeared at whichever table she wanted them at. Cherie had not summoned this girl. Second, the girl was surprised but not shocked at seeing two dead human celebrities leaving the establishment, dressed as a waitress and a busboy. Third, she hadn't blinked when the lights and music had come on, as though by magic.

"It's a liminal space," Cherie answered.

"A liminal space," the girl said. "What's that?" She paused, then before Cheri could answer added, "I wanted a place that doesn't really exist in a specific time or place, where I could just think for as long as I needed to," she said. "Is that what a liminal space is?"

"Close enough," Cherie said. "How did you get here?"

"Lush," the girl answered, simply. She gestured toward her ears, where two gold studs gleamed in her ears. "I've had them since I was a baby, and if I think of a place I want to be, I can just go there." 

"Neat," Cherie said. What the girl called 'lush' was a collection of microscopic psychic supercomputers that clung together like magnets. They responded to thought and could be manipulated like clay. They could take on the properties of anything from living flowers to plastic to cooked food. Cherie supposed that the girl wouldn't need more than a few billion in order to transport herself from place to place. She utilized a lot more than that. Her entire cafe was built of lush.

The girl grinned. "It used to freak my mom out. She just thought that I was magical because she adopted me from a mermaid and mermaids don't exist in our world -- I mean, they're supposed to be mythical." She glanced down. "I was born with legs and no gills, so my birth mom couldn't take care of me." The girl shot her hand out. "Sorry, I'm Aura. And you're Cherie?"

For a moment, Cherie was taken aback again. Had the girl's earrings told her that? No, Cherie's nametag had. Cherie mentally rolled her eyes at herself before shaking the girl -- Aura's hand. "Nice to meet you," she said. She couldn't remember the last time she'd ever meant a word of that simple phrase, but this girl was. 

First Post

Hi there! 

I created this blog in 2019 to track the progress of a novel that features a main character named Aura who can travel to different worlds. When she's around 16, it occurs to her that she can visit herself in alternate universes, and so she does. I got partway into Chapter 3 before I got stuck and haven't written on the story since. That's not to say that I don't work on her in my head, but that doesn't make for a great blog.

So, while I was brainstorming with ChatGPT about potential names for a prompt and character profile repository, all of the more generic ones I liked were being used, so I thought that A Thousand Auras might work. The title doesn't really say what it is, but it's something that makes sense if you do. A lot of the story hooks and outlines I'll share here will involve Aura, as she's a mythos anchor for a lot of my story ideas.

But obviously, if a hook idea or anything sparks your interest, you don't have to use Aura as a character in your story. I just think that the name can work for both projects, the repository and the novel.

Anyway, I created an AI disclaimer page so that it's clear that I work with AI to help structure, flesh out, and edit the ideas in this repository. There are so many people who hate AI (with reason) that I don't want anyone to be disappointed AFTER using a bunch of the resources here.

The only other section that I've set up so far is my Character List. I used to work at a placer where I'd just be given lists and lists of peoples' names and made it a habit of writing down the ones that I thought could be fun character names. There are over 400 names on the list, and I want to create Character Profiles for all of them.

I also created a page for hooks, and one for outlines, and I think that I'll probably use the blog to develop them as I go along. I suck at structure, so I'll probably use ChatGPT for the outlines, but I may get good enough at them eventually that I won't need to use ChatGPT for them.

Anyway, those are all of my current hopes for the content of this blog. How I expect this to change my life, I don't know. Best case scenario, enough people will find it an like it enough that I can create a Patreon or something and be able to pay bills. Worst case scenario, I'll use all of this stuff to develop stories that I can hopefully sell and pay bills.

Actually, that's not the worst case scenario, but that's about as dark as I'm willing to go in this blog post. 

Have a great day!

Chapter 3

Aura always forgot about the smell of the cloud world until she smelled it again. It was like if cotton candy wore cologne. She felt Princess' grip tighten. Aura opened her eyes.

Princess was looking around, her mouth wide open. Aura giggled. Her face had probably looked the same the first time she'd come here.

The sky was the same perfect blue she remembered, and rainbows arced in half-circles that disappeared into clouds at each end. The cloud that she and Princess were standing on was bouncy enough to feel like they were floating but firm enough that they didn't fall through -- although their bare feet did sink in a couple of inches, with mists of clouds tickling their shins.

Princess opened her mouth to speak but before she could say anything, a streak of violet knocked her over and then bounced away.

 The streak had