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.