Monsters story
Apr. 9th, 2008 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaThe opening of the story! Really rough structurally and I have no idea how much I'll keep, so feel free to suggest any changes. Which pretty much means responses of "everything you are doing is wrong and the story itself is an abomination that offends god by its very existence" are welcome.
Prologue: Summer Night
The first thing you should probably know is that our town is kind of a party town.
We're not really close to anything, but we're bigger than most of the tiny places around us in the hills, and we've got legal gambling and beer available, as well as a laid back police force, which is all it takes. They bring in money and usually stick to a few blocks in the middle of the town, and of course all our parents make it clear we'd better not be found anywhere near that area no matter what our excuse. And, really, it's not the kind of place to hang out, since fights break out regularly and people go missing now and then, so for the most part everyone does. But it creeps out a little to the rest of us, so a lot of the high schoolers tend to stay out, even if we're not mingling with the transient college students. There's an aura of cool at being out late, even if you're just doing otherwise lame things like taking a walk through town. Rose liked to take advantage of the time to smoke, and we were both night owls of a sort. Even late at night there'd still be a bit of activity around to liven things up, and there were plenty of bright lights about, so much that you could rarely see the stars.
It was late summer, and she was going to be moving before the start of school, so we were trying to spend more time together, and not-quite-midnight walks were part of that.
The second thing you should know is, Rose was obsessed with vampires and stuff like that, which was the other part.
We generally walked in a circuit around town, avoiding the party district in the center. That day we'd reached the richer section, starting at the new McMansions. Rose hated the newer stuff, though I, having less developed taste, thought they looked nice enough.
"That's because you don't know anything about architecture," Rose said authoritatively. "They're fake cookie-cutter imitations of real mansions for people with no taste who rely on corporate decorators to tell them what's popular at the moment and they are ruining society."
Once we reached the older section we slowed down. The bigger trees were found there, with a few of the trees already having tinges of color in their leaves from the cold, and the yards were far more diverse. Flowers of all sorts were everywhere, and overgrown rosebushes leaned onto the sidewalk in places.
A chunk of them were up for sale or just seemed uninhabited. "I wish we were moving into one of these," Rose said, eying a large three-story sprawling place with giant trees on either side that spread wide branches to block the sky.
"Me too," I said, though I meant her staying in town, and we walked silently for a bit. We passed another walker out like us but traveling on the opposite side of the street.
"Wonder who he is," I said then, and we started to make up a story for him when we reached the midpoint of a hill and were distracted by a mover's truck.
It was, as I said, not quite midnight, but still a good deal later and darker than movers are usually active. They had lit up the place somewhat but it still can't have been easy, especially with the big furniture they were unloading. A dark-haired guy, presumably the owner, was berating them to be careful as they moved what looked like a wooden dresser.
Rose's assessment was predictable: "Vampires!" she breathed.
She was more than half joking, but I said anyway, "Can't be. That guy's got his son with him." I was always like that, demanding flaws be reconciled even in things neither of us really believed. "A vampire wouldn't have a kid."
"Sure he could," she said. "Vampires can have kids now." Then she added, "Besides, what else could it be?"
The highlights were too bright, causing glare on any light surface and turning the whole thing into a badly contrasted black and white photo. I couldn't really make out any colors, and the man and his son, who looked tall enough to be our age, were standing a little off to the side, so only the front half of their faces were lit up.
The mansion they were moving into was another of the sprawling and leaf-covered gothic types, built on a raised area of the ground. One of the guys almost dropped another large piece of dark, identifiable furniture, and was immediately subject to a tirade on so much as scratching the wood by the man.
I conceded the point to Rose. "Vampires."
We hung out and watched for a little bit at Rose's insistence. We were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, not hiding or anything, but with the bright lights I don't think anyone would have been able to make us out in the darkness, even with the streetlights around. If they did see us, no one told us to stop staring, and if they didn't...well, it wasn't like we were doing anything wrong. After a bit, with nothing that we could really call a coffin for certain and the man, despite how bad-tempted he was, never turning into a bat or wolf and attacking people, we got bored and continued on our walk.
"I wonder if he's going to go to our school," Rose said thoughtfully. "You'll have to tell me, you know."
"I'm not asking him!"
"How can you pass up a chance like that?"
I rolled my eyes, a gesture lost in the night. "You could go back and ask them right now," I pointed out.
"Yeah, right, Eleanor," she said, and I could make out her tossing her head a bit in a way that typically accompanied her own rolling eyes.
Chapter One:
The first day of school was the first day of school, and while I was a bit jittery with the transition, I wasn't as obsessed with it as before. After ten years worth of first days, it had finally sunk in that they really weren't as big a deal as everyone acted. The nice teachers would act a little harsher than they did the rest of the year, and the mean ones a little less, and everyone would be trying to get their bearings.
Like I said earlier, we're bigger than the tiny places around us, which is to say, not very. Our school's also big on tracking kids, so there was a good chance you'd be with the same people for most of your classes. This year, they'd redone homerooms to reflect this, confirming my general impressions they didn't want us mixing.
I got there early, so I could take a seat in the back where I'd be a safe distance from the teacher if they turned out to be a hardliner and had a good view of everyone else. The last couple years I'd met up with Rose first, but she was no longer around to meet up with.
Jenna, a girl I knew vaguely but had never been close to, sidled over. "Hey," she said. "There's a new kid."
"Oh?" I said absently. "Who?"
She paused, trying to think of how to pronounce what she'd read. "Some weird name, Bren-something."
Before I could reply, two new kids entered, so close together they slipped through the door side by side.
One was a blond boy, the other a red-haired girl. Both were light-skinned, though the girl looked a bit sickly while the boy had plump, pinkish skin. They looked related, although not very. They settled into seats side by side in the corner.
"You guys!" Jenna said immediately. "Is your name, uh, Brendant?"
The boy looked up, seeming startled. After a second, he said, "No. I'm Matt, and this is Crystal."
"Oh." Then she realized: "Wait, are you sure you're in the right place? I didn't see your name on the lists."
The boy, Matt, spoke again. "Our brother had to talk to the principal, apparently they'd lost our enrollment papers. There was probably no time to update the homeroom lists." The girl was sitting with her head lowered, looking nervous.
"Cool. Three new kids."
"Three?"
There was a sudden hush. The newest arrival had stepped in.
He looked like he'd just stepped out of a movie. Glossy, coal-black, slightly wavy hair framed perfect ivory skin and breathtakingly beautiful features. Realizing all eyes were on him, he smiled broadly, revealing a set of perfect white teeth. "Hello," he said, in a rich, smooth voice no one his age should fairly have been allowed to have. "My name's Brewelph."
"Weird name," one of the boys in the front said after a second.
I cringed, but he seemed unphased. "It is," he admitted cheerfully. "It's an old family tradition based on giving kids names that haven't been in fashion since five hundred AD or so, if they ever were. Call me Bre if you like. It's still weird, but at least it's shorter."
It was about then the teacher came in. Pausing a moment to stare, he then seemed to come to his senses and told everyone to take a seat.
Brewelph strode gracefully across the room and slid behind a desk in the row in front of me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the new girl, Crystal, was staring at him, entranced. Her brother grabbed her arm and said something quietly, and she went back to looking down at her lap.
The rest of homeroom was a short affair, just a matter of listening to a drone of announcements and waiting for the bell.
In the hallway, Brewelph headed off with two other boys, the three of them talking like they were already close friends. As the rest headed off, Crystal and Mike exchanged a few more words, then Mike headed off down the hall. She stared down at the sheet with her schedule clutched in her hand, then looked up to see me.
"Um..." she said. "I have Art now. Do you know where...?"
"Sure, I'll take you," I said. "I've got that too."
She smiled and came over to walk next to me. She had a slightly clumsy step, and none of the vibrancy expected of a fiery redhead, but seemed friendly and alert enough.
"So when did you guys move here?" I asked her.
She paused to think and then said, "We moved a couple months back."
"A while before that Brewelph guy, then," I mused aloud. "You know, my friend Rose and I saw them move in. It was kind of weird, I guess they were in a huge rush since they were doing it in the middle of the night. And moving into a mansion, too, like some kind of vampire."
"Vampire?"
"Well, you know, moving in in the dead of night into a mansion, with a bunch of bulky wooden furniture that's all wrapped up that you keep shouting at the workers not to drop."
"Because it's really their coffin," Crystal finished. "Did you see that too?"
"I'm pretty sure it was all dressers and stuff. Plus," I admitted, the detail bothering me in retrospect, "the dad was shouting like that for everything - chairs, vases, you name it. If that's how he was about regular furniture, he'd have lost it completely if they were handling his coffin."
"Or the other way around," Crystal said after a moment. "If he wanted them to be careful without singling the coffin out, he'd have to yell about everything else too. Hiding in plain sight."
"Ooh, I hadn't thought of that." I laughed. It made for amusing imaginary gossip, though perhaps Brewelph wouldn't have seen it that way.
The art teacher seemed good-natured, although one never could be sure in the first few days. We sat together at one of the tables and listened to an overlong description of the course before we were allowed to begin our drawings.
Just like last year, first class involved trying to draw without looking at the page. Just like last year, what resulted on my paper was a long squiggle with occasional loops and a few lines tossed on top at random. Crystal's was a lot neater, prompting a frown from the teacher. "I know it's hard not to look down, but don't," he said, then put another piece of paper on top of her hand. "It doesn't matter what it looks like."
Her next few tries were messier, though still far better than any of mine. I was relieved when we finally switched to real drawing halfway through the class. There's only so much failure a person can take, and being praised by the teacher for the degree of chaotic, unidentifiable jumble I produced was not really helping matters. I wasn't really any better at regular drawing, but at least I could erase my mistakes then.
I was expecting Crystal to be good at this too, but she was actually pretty mediocre, drawing the shapes crudely and missing a lot of the detail. But that's how it is sometimes, people are good at one thing and not another, even when there doesn't seem any reason why. I didn't do much better, barely finishing one corner of the drawing before class was over thanks to my continual erasing.
I'm not sure if I'll keep the first day of school setup, or having them all there at the same time (it's important that Mike and Crystal are there before Brewelph, and it'd give me more time to establish them, but on the other hand I'm not sure if I should be doing things to peg the timeline as a big deal) rather than having Brewelph show up a bit later.
Prologue: Summer Night
The first thing you should probably know is that our town is kind of a party town.
We're not really close to anything, but we're bigger than most of the tiny places around us in the hills, and we've got legal gambling and beer available, as well as a laid back police force, which is all it takes. They bring in money and usually stick to a few blocks in the middle of the town, and of course all our parents make it clear we'd better not be found anywhere near that area no matter what our excuse. And, really, it's not the kind of place to hang out, since fights break out regularly and people go missing now and then, so for the most part everyone does. But it creeps out a little to the rest of us, so a lot of the high schoolers tend to stay out, even if we're not mingling with the transient college students. There's an aura of cool at being out late, even if you're just doing otherwise lame things like taking a walk through town. Rose liked to take advantage of the time to smoke, and we were both night owls of a sort. Even late at night there'd still be a bit of activity around to liven things up, and there were plenty of bright lights about, so much that you could rarely see the stars.
It was late summer, and she was going to be moving before the start of school, so we were trying to spend more time together, and not-quite-midnight walks were part of that.
The second thing you should know is, Rose was obsessed with vampires and stuff like that, which was the other part.
We generally walked in a circuit around town, avoiding the party district in the center. That day we'd reached the richer section, starting at the new McMansions. Rose hated the newer stuff, though I, having less developed taste, thought they looked nice enough.
"That's because you don't know anything about architecture," Rose said authoritatively. "They're fake cookie-cutter imitations of real mansions for people with no taste who rely on corporate decorators to tell them what's popular at the moment and they are ruining society."
Once we reached the older section we slowed down. The bigger trees were found there, with a few of the trees already having tinges of color in their leaves from the cold, and the yards were far more diverse. Flowers of all sorts were everywhere, and overgrown rosebushes leaned onto the sidewalk in places.
A chunk of them were up for sale or just seemed uninhabited. "I wish we were moving into one of these," Rose said, eying a large three-story sprawling place with giant trees on either side that spread wide branches to block the sky.
"Me too," I said, though I meant her staying in town, and we walked silently for a bit. We passed another walker out like us but traveling on the opposite side of the street.
"Wonder who he is," I said then, and we started to make up a story for him when we reached the midpoint of a hill and were distracted by a mover's truck.
It was, as I said, not quite midnight, but still a good deal later and darker than movers are usually active. They had lit up the place somewhat but it still can't have been easy, especially with the big furniture they were unloading. A dark-haired guy, presumably the owner, was berating them to be careful as they moved what looked like a wooden dresser.
Rose's assessment was predictable: "Vampires!" she breathed.
She was more than half joking, but I said anyway, "Can't be. That guy's got his son with him." I was always like that, demanding flaws be reconciled even in things neither of us really believed. "A vampire wouldn't have a kid."
"Sure he could," she said. "Vampires can have kids now." Then she added, "Besides, what else could it be?"
The highlights were too bright, causing glare on any light surface and turning the whole thing into a badly contrasted black and white photo. I couldn't really make out any colors, and the man and his son, who looked tall enough to be our age, were standing a little off to the side, so only the front half of their faces were lit up.
The mansion they were moving into was another of the sprawling and leaf-covered gothic types, built on a raised area of the ground. One of the guys almost dropped another large piece of dark, identifiable furniture, and was immediately subject to a tirade on so much as scratching the wood by the man.
I conceded the point to Rose. "Vampires."
We hung out and watched for a little bit at Rose's insistence. We were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, not hiding or anything, but with the bright lights I don't think anyone would have been able to make us out in the darkness, even with the streetlights around. If they did see us, no one told us to stop staring, and if they didn't...well, it wasn't like we were doing anything wrong. After a bit, with nothing that we could really call a coffin for certain and the man, despite how bad-tempted he was, never turning into a bat or wolf and attacking people, we got bored and continued on our walk.
"I wonder if he's going to go to our school," Rose said thoughtfully. "You'll have to tell me, you know."
"I'm not asking him!"
"How can you pass up a chance like that?"
I rolled my eyes, a gesture lost in the night. "You could go back and ask them right now," I pointed out.
"Yeah, right, Eleanor," she said, and I could make out her tossing her head a bit in a way that typically accompanied her own rolling eyes.
Chapter One:
The first day of school was the first day of school, and while I was a bit jittery with the transition, I wasn't as obsessed with it as before. After ten years worth of first days, it had finally sunk in that they really weren't as big a deal as everyone acted. The nice teachers would act a little harsher than they did the rest of the year, and the mean ones a little less, and everyone would be trying to get their bearings.
Like I said earlier, we're bigger than the tiny places around us, which is to say, not very. Our school's also big on tracking kids, so there was a good chance you'd be with the same people for most of your classes. This year, they'd redone homerooms to reflect this, confirming my general impressions they didn't want us mixing.
I got there early, so I could take a seat in the back where I'd be a safe distance from the teacher if they turned out to be a hardliner and had a good view of everyone else. The last couple years I'd met up with Rose first, but she was no longer around to meet up with.
Jenna, a girl I knew vaguely but had never been close to, sidled over. "Hey," she said. "There's a new kid."
"Oh?" I said absently. "Who?"
She paused, trying to think of how to pronounce what she'd read. "Some weird name, Bren-something."
Before I could reply, two new kids entered, so close together they slipped through the door side by side.
One was a blond boy, the other a red-haired girl. Both were light-skinned, though the girl looked a bit sickly while the boy had plump, pinkish skin. They looked related, although not very. They settled into seats side by side in the corner.
"You guys!" Jenna said immediately. "Is your name, uh, Brendant?"
The boy looked up, seeming startled. After a second, he said, "No. I'm Matt, and this is Crystal."
"Oh." Then she realized: "Wait, are you sure you're in the right place? I didn't see your name on the lists."
The boy, Matt, spoke again. "Our brother had to talk to the principal, apparently they'd lost our enrollment papers. There was probably no time to update the homeroom lists." The girl was sitting with her head lowered, looking nervous.
"Cool. Three new kids."
"Three?"
There was a sudden hush. The newest arrival had stepped in.
He looked like he'd just stepped out of a movie. Glossy, coal-black, slightly wavy hair framed perfect ivory skin and breathtakingly beautiful features. Realizing all eyes were on him, he smiled broadly, revealing a set of perfect white teeth. "Hello," he said, in a rich, smooth voice no one his age should fairly have been allowed to have. "My name's Brewelph."
"Weird name," one of the boys in the front said after a second.
I cringed, but he seemed unphased. "It is," he admitted cheerfully. "It's an old family tradition based on giving kids names that haven't been in fashion since five hundred AD or so, if they ever were. Call me Bre if you like. It's still weird, but at least it's shorter."
It was about then the teacher came in. Pausing a moment to stare, he then seemed to come to his senses and told everyone to take a seat.
Brewelph strode gracefully across the room and slid behind a desk in the row in front of me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the new girl, Crystal, was staring at him, entranced. Her brother grabbed her arm and said something quietly, and she went back to looking down at her lap.
The rest of homeroom was a short affair, just a matter of listening to a drone of announcements and waiting for the bell.
In the hallway, Brewelph headed off with two other boys, the three of them talking like they were already close friends. As the rest headed off, Crystal and Mike exchanged a few more words, then Mike headed off down the hall. She stared down at the sheet with her schedule clutched in her hand, then looked up to see me.
"Um..." she said. "I have Art now. Do you know where...?"
"Sure, I'll take you," I said. "I've got that too."
She smiled and came over to walk next to me. She had a slightly clumsy step, and none of the vibrancy expected of a fiery redhead, but seemed friendly and alert enough.
"So when did you guys move here?" I asked her.
She paused to think and then said, "We moved a couple months back."
"A while before that Brewelph guy, then," I mused aloud. "You know, my friend Rose and I saw them move in. It was kind of weird, I guess they were in a huge rush since they were doing it in the middle of the night. And moving into a mansion, too, like some kind of vampire."
"Vampire?"
"Well, you know, moving in in the dead of night into a mansion, with a bunch of bulky wooden furniture that's all wrapped up that you keep shouting at the workers not to drop."
"Because it's really their coffin," Crystal finished. "Did you see that too?"
"I'm pretty sure it was all dressers and stuff. Plus," I admitted, the detail bothering me in retrospect, "the dad was shouting like that for everything - chairs, vases, you name it. If that's how he was about regular furniture, he'd have lost it completely if they were handling his coffin."
"Or the other way around," Crystal said after a moment. "If he wanted them to be careful without singling the coffin out, he'd have to yell about everything else too. Hiding in plain sight."
"Ooh, I hadn't thought of that." I laughed. It made for amusing imaginary gossip, though perhaps Brewelph wouldn't have seen it that way.
The art teacher seemed good-natured, although one never could be sure in the first few days. We sat together at one of the tables and listened to an overlong description of the course before we were allowed to begin our drawings.
Just like last year, first class involved trying to draw without looking at the page. Just like last year, what resulted on my paper was a long squiggle with occasional loops and a few lines tossed on top at random. Crystal's was a lot neater, prompting a frown from the teacher. "I know it's hard not to look down, but don't," he said, then put another piece of paper on top of her hand. "It doesn't matter what it looks like."
Her next few tries were messier, though still far better than any of mine. I was relieved when we finally switched to real drawing halfway through the class. There's only so much failure a person can take, and being praised by the teacher for the degree of chaotic, unidentifiable jumble I produced was not really helping matters. I wasn't really any better at regular drawing, but at least I could erase my mistakes then.
I was expecting Crystal to be good at this too, but she was actually pretty mediocre, drawing the shapes crudely and missing a lot of the detail. But that's how it is sometimes, people are good at one thing and not another, even when there doesn't seem any reason why. I didn't do much better, barely finishing one corner of the drawing before class was over thanks to my continual erasing.
I'm not sure if I'll keep the first day of school setup, or having them all there at the same time (it's important that Mike and Crystal are there before Brewelph, and it'd give me more time to establish them, but on the other hand I'm not sure if I should be doing things to peg the timeline as a big deal) rather than having Brewelph show up a bit later.
