Character Sketches WIP -- 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, aside from 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 orchestras. As the girl approached the counter, his 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 and could be manipulated like dough. They could take on the properties of anything from living flowers to plastic to cooked food. She supposed that the girl wouldn't need more than a few billion in order to transport herself from place to place. Cherie 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, her nametag had. Cherie mentally rolled her eyes at herself before shaking the girl -- Aura's hand. "Nice to meet you," she said. And for the first time, maybe ever, she meant it.

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

Chapter 2

Princess' room was decorated in various shades of beige, brown, and gray, shot through with silver and gold accents. Princess didn't have a headboard. Instead, the entire wall behind her bed had been covered over with champagne-colored velvet. Pale pink, blue, and purple rhinestones served as buttons to tuft the fabric onto the wall. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, its clear crystals sending subtle rainbows around the room.

"This is beautiful," Aura said, which was an understatement. She felt like she'd been transported to the inside of a crown.

"Thanks!" Princess said. She unbuckled her shoes and then slipped them off. Aura was relieved that she and her other self had something in common besides their earrings. The first thing Aura did when getting home was kick her shoes off. However, whereas Aura would have just kicked them under the bed, Princess re-buckled the shoes and then walked them over to the closet. "Do you want to take your shoes off?"

Aura nodded. She wore steel-toed hiking boots about a size too big for her. She unlaced the boots and then slipped them off. Princess swung open the closet door and turned on the light.

Aura's closet was a mishmash of colors, patterns, and textures. She didn't have any room in her closet for shoes, so they lay jumbled under her bed most of the time, and she generally wore her hiking boots with everything. They were usually the easiest to find, bleary-eyed in the morning, and they came in handy in a lot of the more dangerous or colder worlds she visited.

Princess' closet, on the other hand, was a serene oasis of pastels. Shoes in equally pastel colors lined a low shelf stretching across the bottom of the closet. A similar shelf that ran across the top of the closet displayed tiaras in different shapes and sizes.

As Aura moved closer, she saw that half of the closet was taken up by long dresses made of sequins and chiffon. They were glorious, even within the confines of their clear garment bags. Aura sighed. "Wow." she said. "Do you, like, do pageants or something?"

Princess laughed. "No, I just like to dress up. Sometimes, I wear them to school. I went casual today."

Aura almost choked at Princess' definition of casual. She looked at Princess' closet again. Not a pair of jeans or sweatpants to be found. "Do the other kids make fun of you for dressing up in a ballgown?"

"No," Princess said. "Sometimes, I text my friends in the mornings and they dress up, too. Sometimes they don't, but that's okay."

Aura couldn't breathe. She handed her boots to Princess and then turned away. She walked over to the window. Princess had friends to text in the morning? At school, Aura either had kids who actively bullied her or kids who didn't. Sometimes, she served as a temporary friend for new kids who hadn't made any friends yet, but they usually forgot about her pretty quickly. Aura's real friends all lived in different worlds. She'd always felt like that fact balanced out her inability to make friends in her own world.

But here was Princess living in the same house, going to the same school, dressing like a weirdo, and being accepted. What was the difference? The sense of inferiority that had sparked in Aura when she first saw Princess burst into full flame. Aura's entire body was covered in hot, shame-filled goosebumps. She felt a telltale tingling in her earlobes, signalling her preparation to return home.

"Do you want to try one on?" Princess asked. "I think we're probably the same size," she added with a laugh.

Aura turned. "Try one on?" It was hard to concentrate on Princess' words over the roar of envy pounding in her ears. "You mean a dress?" The tingling in her ears receded.

Princess shrugged. "Yeah. I do it all the time. I get bored if I wear the same thing for more than a couple of hours."

Aura walked back over to the closet. She looked at Princess. "Which one should I try on?"

Princess grinned. She ducked into the closet and returned with a bright purple silk dress, the same color as Aura's backpack. It had horizontal stripes made of matching sequins running across the drop-waist bodice. The stripes continued onto the box-pleated skirt that fell to mid-calf. "Grandma got me this, and I didn't have the heart to tell her it wasn't quite my style."

Aura was speechless. It was the most beautiful dress she'd ever seen. She took it with reverent hands and went into the bathroom attached to Princess' bedroom. The bathroom was painted entirely in gray, with silver accents. She shucked off her school clothes, dumping them clothes onto the counter next to the sink. The dress slid on, the hem tickling her shins.

She returned to the bedroom, the swish of the skirt demanding to be twirled. Aura complied. Princess emerged from the closet. She had changed while Aura was in the bathroom. Now she wore a floor-length ballgown with a form-fitting bodice of opalescent sequins. The skirt flared out from the waist in long strips of chiffon made up of a rainbow of pastel colors.

"Wow!" Princess said. "If I'd known how good I'd look in that, I would have worn it a long time ago!"

Aura blushed.

"Sit down and I'll do your hair," Princess said. She gestured to a vanity made of natural wood that gleamed like gold. It had a ring of lights around the mirror and about a thousand drawers. The chair was made of the same natural wood and upholstered in silver velvet. Aura settled herself onto the chair, feeling like a queen.

Princess took down Aura's ponytail and brushed her hair with a silver-handled brush. "So, you're me," she said.

Aura nodded before remembering that her hair was being brushed. She cleared her throat. "Yes. Back at the school, you didn't seem to know what travelling was...is that true?" She could see Princess' reflection in the mirror.

Princess huffed a half-laugh."I mean, I travel, but only within my own dimension using like bikes and cars and planes and stuff. How were you able to get here?"

Aura shrugged. "I don't know. Mom says I've always been able to travel to different places. Even when I was a baby, I'd take her to other worlds. It scared her at first, but she got used to it."

"Hmm..." Princess said. Absently, she gathered up Aura's hair into a low ponytail and then started rolling it up from the bottom. "So, can other people from your world travel to other worlds, too?"

"Not as far as I can tell," Aura said.

"Is your world, like, closer to the Milky Way or something?"

Aura laughed. "I mean, I don't know. I just got here, but I didn't sense anything like that. I just tried to sense the next closest world and then I could feel this one, and then I was here."

Princess frowned. She used several hairpins to secure the roll to the hair just above the nape of Aura's neck. Then she fluffed out the edges of the roll. It looked like Aura's hair had lost several inches and now curled up to just below her ears. She turned her head left and right, admiring the effect. Princess went into her closet and returned with a simple tiara. She settled the tiara onto Aura's head, but placed it over her bangs, about an inch above Aura's eyebrows. It matched the style of the dress. The sparkle of the tiara mesmerized her.

She glanced up at Princess and realized that Princess was still frowning. "What's the matter?"

Princess flushed and turned away. She sat down on the edge of her fuzzy gray duvet. "Why can't I travel to different worlds?"

Aura stood and crouched in front of Princess. "Maybe you can. Have you ever tried?"

Princess' expression brightened. "No," she said. She leaned toward Aura, her eyes flashing with excitement. "Do you really think I could?" She frowned again. "Wouldn't I have done it by now? Plus you said that your mom told you that you've been travelling since you were a baby. My mom never said anything like that."

"Hmm...I don't know why you haven't traveled but maybe I can teach you to."

"Really?" Princess shot up from her bed. "Okay! Let's try it!"

Her sudden movement made Aura lose her balance.

"Sorry!" Princess said, She bent over to help Aura up.

"It's okay," Aura said, laughing. "At least I know how you feel about the idea."

"What if I can't do it?" Princess asked. She looked uncertain, an expression that Aura assumed was alien to Princess' face.

"Let's just try it," Aura said.

Princess took a deep breath. "Okay," she said. "What do we do?"

Aura held out her hands. "Take my hands and close your eyes. Okay, good. I want to go to one of my favorite worlds. It's a world made of clouds and rainbows and the only sentient creatures I've ever seen there are pegususes."

"What's a pegususes?" Princess asked, her eyes still closed.

"They're like horses except that they're rainbow and they have big bird wings."

"Wow," Princess said. "i can't even imagine a world like that."

"Try," Aura said. "Picture yourself surrounded by clouds, like giant pieces of cotton candy -- and that's what they taste like, except that instead of sugar, they're made of tiny drops of sweet water. In some places, they're so thin that you can almost breathe them, and in others, they're so thick that you can jump on them like a trampoline."

Aura felt it, the tingling in her ears that indicated her connection to another world.

Princess let go of Aura's hands. "Hold on, my ears are itching."

Aura opened her eyes and grinned at Princess. "Perfect!" Aura said. "My ears always itch before I travel."

Princess' eyes opened wide and she pulled her hands away from her ears. "Really? That means it was working!" She grabbed Aura's hands again and closed her eyes. "Okay." She let out a deep breath. Clouds, clouds, clouds...oh -- it's not working!" she said, pulling away again. "I'm too excited and can't concentrate."

"Okay," Aura said. "What if I take us this time? I'll take you there, and then you can try to bring us back, and if you can't, I'll bring us back."

"Oh. Okay," Princess said. "And I'll try to pay attention to what you do, so that I can try to do the same thing later."

"Awesome!" Aura said. She took Princess' hands again and closed her eyes. She brought her mind back to clouds and rainbows, and felt the answering tingle in her ears.

Chapter 1

"No, dummy, not different planets, parallel universes."

Aura's pencil stopped moving but she didn't turn her head.

The classroom had 18 desks, but each desk was wide enough to sit two kids at a time. Tommy and Jane were one desk over and one desk behind Aura. They were twins and their birthday was in June, so they were already eleven. Jane was the expert on science and Tommy was the expert on using the nuggets of knowledge he gained from Jane to conduct experiments that usually resulted in black smoke billowing out of their garage. They lived across the street from Aura which meant that she had a good view of the frequent carnage.

The twins talked constantly, but Mrs. Malone had given up on reprimanding them halfway through the first semester. The other kids had learned to tune them out.

Aura had too, but her subconscious must have picked up on something because her earlobes were itching. She stared blankly at her half-finished math problem and listened.

"You mean the fourth dimension? Isn't that time travel or something?" This was Tommy.

"No. Yes. Sort of. Think about a world exactly like this one except if the dinosaurs had never gone instinct. A lot of things would be different."

"Yeah, we could ride baby dinosaurs to school every day, instead of our bikes," Tommy said. "So, how do we get to that dimension?"

"It's only theoritc -- thee -- it's only theories right now. There's no way to prove it. We don't have the technology to go to a different dimension."

Tommy's disappointed groan melded into the sound of the final bell.

"Finish the assignment you were working on as homework," Mrs. Malone called out over the shuffling papers and the rise in chatter.

Aura pulled herself together and closed her textbook. She packed up her notebook and pencils and shoved them into her backpack. Her ears were practically on fire. They didn't hurt -- it was more like an itch that increased in intensity every second.

The closest girl's bathroom was full of laughing and chattering girls so Aura braved the hallway again. She ducked into an empty classroom. Aura breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that the teacher was gone, too. Her mother said that when she traveled, she flickered like a light bulb that needed to be replaced. It was only one flicker, but the kids already thought Aura was weird, so she always made sure to hide when she felt the need to travel. She stood in the corner behind the door and closed her eyes.

Aura had been to fantastical worlds with all kinds of intelligent species from colorful blobs to full-on robots. Books, movies, TV shows -- even overheard conversations -- could spark a tingle in her earlobes that would indicate that there was a world where that thing was possible. For whatever reason, it had never occurred to Aura that there were worlds very similar to her own, until today.

She opened her mind to a world similar to hers, but different. A world with another Aura. Travelling always reminded Aura of being in an elevator -- that exact moment when the elevator stopped moving up and then dropped down slightly, right before the doors opened. That drop always made Aura slightly nauseated, both in an elevator and when she was travelling to different worlds.

She took a deep breath and opened her eyes -- and looked into her own.

"You weren't there a second ago," the other Aura said, stepping back, eyes wide. "How did you get here? Who are you? Why do you look like me?" she demanded.

"I -- traveled --" Aura said, looking around. She and her dimensional twin were in the same empty classroom Aura had been alone in just a moment ago. The other girl looked taller than her. Better posture, maybe? Yes. Also, although her hair was the same color, it was smooth and silky, like a YouTuber's. It was pulled back into a loose, sideways french braid that fell over one shoulder. On top of her head was sparkly headband in the shape of a tiara. It should have looked babyish, but it didn't. A subtle flick of mascara around her brown eyes emphasized the tiger-ish look that Aura's mom described Aura as having.

Whereas Aura could never decide what to wear to school and just ended up covered in a rainbow of colors and patterns, this Aura had chosen a soft baby blue sweater and slim-cut khaki pants with glossy beige Mary Janes. The only fashion preference they seemed to share were their simple gold-stud earrings.

The other Aura looked confused. "Traveled? What does that mean?"

Now Aura was confused. Did this Aura not travel? "I traveled to this world, from mine. I'm you, in a parallel universe."

The other Aura still looked confused, but also intrigued. "Huh. Okay. I mean, I can't think of any other possibility, unless I'm dreaming." She looked around the empty classroom. "We should probably get you out of here. My mom -- our mom? Anyway, she won't be home until six. I can hide you there until then, and we can chat but it would be better if no one else saw us together. Do you know where I live?"

"Um. I don't know -- is it great-grandma's house? 1030 Park Lane?"

The other Aura nodded. "I'll go first. Wait half-an-hour, and the school should be empty by then. If you run into anyone --" she looked Aura up and down, taking in her orange leopard print skirt and pink-and-yellow argyle cardigan. "Just tell them you're in the school play. I'll figure out how to cover for that later. I'll go the usual way, and you do the sneaky way."

She took Aura's stunned silence as agreement, and walked out. Instead of a backpack, she slung a large tan tote back over one shoulder. Aura stood there a moment, looking down at her outfit. Was the other Aura's comment an insult? The other kids liked to make fun of Aura's colorful style but this Aura, despite her demure appearance, had sounded matter-of-fact, rather than mean.

Aura slid down to the floor and unzipped her purple backpack. Aura wasn't really a mean-spirited person, and she had no reason to assume that the other Aura was either, so she dismissed the comment and pulled out her Math homework.

After half-an-hour of long division, she packed up and then made her way home. The town looked exactly the same as in her world. She wondered what, aside from the other Aura's fashion sense, was different. The main way home was three blocks north and six blocks west of the school. However, she could get home in almost half of the time if she went through various backyards.

Everything went fine until she got to the neighbor's house whose backyard was separated from Aura's backyard by a fence. In Aura's world, the fence was chain-link, with a gap big enough for Aura to slip through, almost without crouching. The neighbors were always promising to upgrade it to tall, wooden pickets, and apparently, in this world, they had.

"Shoot!" Aura said. What was the sneaky way home with this giant fence in the way?

"Aurora?"

The voice came from the other side of the fence. It sounded like Aura's voice. "Yeah," Aura answered. It felt weird to be called Aurora. Everyone except her grandmother called her Aura.

"I had a feeling you might get stuck here." Two of the pickets swung to the right and other Aura's head poked through. She grinned. "I loosened two of these boards."

"Genius," Aura said. "I'll have to do that if the Johnsons ever put up the fence in my world." She stepped forward and held the boards open for her self. Other Aura stepped aside and then Aura slipped through. "By the way, everyone calls me Aura."

"Aura," the other Aura said, eyeing Aura's outfit again. "That fits. Everyone calls me Princess."

Aura eyed Princess' tiara and regal posture. "That fits," she said.

Princess grinned.