I made things! These things are available at my etsy shop!  I have been meaning to list them for months!

Kathleen
species: mostly human, female
age: early 30s
appearance: tall (5’8”?), long dark hair, brown eyes, fair skin

Kathleen is from the same place as Kaitey (planet, dimension, whatever), and was evacuated with Kaitey to be Kaitey Oliver’s guardian. She does this from the time Kaitey is three years old until Kaitey decides to go claim her adventure at age twelve.  She is not Kaitey’s biological relative, but Kaitey doesn’t find that out for a while.

~~~~~~
“Why don’t I have a daddy?” she asks her mother completely without preamble.  She had only just woken up and come downstairs.

Kathleen very nearly betrays an emotion when she sets down her coffee mug—the slightest clatter sounds when the mug touches the table.  Normally everything Kathleen accomplishes she does so in complete silence. “What brings this on?”

Kaitey stares at the mug, as if she thought it might give her a more satisfactory answer. “Everyone at school has a mom AND a dad,” she says, bringing up a hand to tug on one of her two braids— still mostly intact after being slept on. “Why don’t I have a dad?”

Kathleen picks up her mug again and takes a sip to delay replying.

Kaitey waits.  She is a very patient girl, especially for a seven-year-old.  “You do have a father,” Kathleen says finally, setting down her mug silently. “But he isn’t here.  You’ll find out more about him when you’re older.”

Kaitey frowns, and pulls her braid again so that her head is leaning to the side.

Kathleen ignores this and takes another sip from her mug. “You should go comb your hair out and get ready for school.  Breakfast will be ready when you get done with that.”

Kaitey nods her head— without letting go of the braid, which makes for a rather diagonal nod— and goes back upstairs to her bathroom.  Kathleen watches her go and almost lets out an exhalation of breath that could be called a sigh.  She has to hold back these things, these tiny expressions of emotion.  Kaitey would probably come back down asking more questions about her father, who Kathleen had not know very well.  Kaitey’s mother Kathleen had known quite well, for many years— but that was another secret that was to remain hidden from Kaitey.

Please forgive the following stupid.

~~~

Button

species: unknown
appearance: fluffy, potentially feline face

Button is a creature composed solely of fluffiness, dust, and giggles.  His movement is generated by puffs of air, generally not of his own making.  His sentience is argued by all those who encounter him, but he makes no note of the discussion.  Not all those who encounter him are aware of him, either.  He tends to drift by, swelling in the presense of laughter and diminishing when he gets too close to a nose.  You yourself may have gotten a bit of Button in your nose and sneezed in response, giving him a rare burst of speed. 

Once he fell into a club where a comedian was performing.  The comedian knew his craft quite well, and the crowd was laughing.  The sound of so many titters and chortles and chuckles and guffaws was enough to expand Button to an enormous size.  He thought he was going to burst, but instead, when he pressed against the ceiling of the club, he loosed a large amount of dust, which caused the entire room to sneeze instead of laugh.  Button was able to escape through an air vent.

Button did not know if there were any others like him, and he certainly was not equipped to go searching for them if they existed.  He could only go where the winds sent him.  He was not lonely, and enjoyed seeing all the different things that the air currents passed.  He liked passing by the faces of people best, even though it usually caused them to sneeze.

So when you find youself outside in a light breeze, and you sneeze for no reason, do remember Button and say hello.

In the process of reaching my target word-count for NaNo today, my main character got bitch-slapped.  Also kind of strangled?  Poor guy. D:

~~~

    Next thing I knew there was a hand around my throat and I was being shoved into the earthy wall of the hill.  I got the feeling my night was not going to improve.

    “Who sent you?”

    “Whuuu— Ngg, hnn!” The quality of my words tended to deteriorate when extreme pressure was applied to my esophagus.  He lessened his grip just enough for me to get a gasp of air. “No one! S-Seriouss! Lemmeguuh!”

    The grip returned for a few more sickening seconds.  I was starting to see spots around the edges of my vision, then I was staring at the dirt because he dropped me to the floor.  Massaging my throat, I looked back up at him.  He was giving me a pretty solid death- glare.  I got the feeling we weren’t really going to be friends.

    “Get up.”

    I complied, not really wanting to be strangled again.

    “Follow me.  Don’t try to run.”

    Despite the fact that I knew for pretty sure that I was a decent runner, I decided to follow those instructions as well. “Where are we going?”

    “Shut up.”

    “Hnnng.” It was an involuntary sort of groan that escaped my lips, a mechanism to articulate my extreme anxiety, but that didn’t stop him from turning around and slapping me across the face.  I crashed into the wall of the earthy hallway, inhaling a few spoonfuls of dirt before I managed to uncross my eyes and start walking again.  So. Definitely not friends.  Ever.

You might be interested to know that I have a youtube channel.

NaNoWriMo is happening now, and I started writing at midnight.  So here is what I’ve written so far?  It is a big chunk of text, so I will not complain if you don’t read it.  Also, there is no dialog, so you might not find it interesting?  I don’t even have a name for the character yet, but it’s a dude, and I find him incredibly amusing. :D

~~

    When I woke up on the conveyor belt that constantly moved toward the insta-bake flame of the crematorium, I was a little perturbed.  It had become a custom— enforced by large men in dark suits and sunglasses— to burn the dead a couple years ago, after the vampire problem had become well known and suddenly gotten completely out of hand.  Memorial services were held en masse around large pits of ash, since the number of people cremated was too large for it to be practical to hand out individual pots of remains any more.

    The last thing I remembered was running— not the frantic run of the being hunted, but just a casual jog along the slightly wooded park trail.  It wasn’t even dark out.  I was running under a long stretch of trees in the shade, and then— nothing.  I didn’t remember being grabbed, I didn’t remember being bitten.  I certainly didn’t remember being turned.  From what I they had taught us in school, being turned was a fairly memorable experience.  I guess it’s harder to remember when you’re not conscious for the act.

    So anyway, there I was, on the conveyor belt of burning death— well, just burning for those who were already dead. Conveyor Belt of Burning Second Death for me.  Anyway.  Death.  Big burning scary death of flames.  No matter how screwed up my life (unlife, I guess) was about to become, I was absolutely not prepared for the death option.  So I flipped the hell out.  Almost literally.  I was lying on my back, feet toward the quickly-approaching flames, so I rolled to my left toward the edge of the conveyor belt.  I would have gone right, but there was another (actually dead) body in my way.  I shoved the yickiness of that thought out of my head for the moment— survival first, dead body creep-out second.  Two more rolls got me to the edge of the belt, which was only guarded by a foot-high border of metal.  The majority of the bodies on the conveyor belt were legitimately not-coming-back-to-life dead, so they didn’t worry too much about any of the bodies getting off the belt.  There were other security measures for that, which I was going to have to deal with in due course.

    Hoping that none of the security cameras were pointing in my direction, I grabbed the top of the thin stainless steel wall and hoisted myself up and over.  It was far too easy to do.  I had been told, over and over and over again, about the unatural strength that the human body acquired when it became a vampire, but I still didn’t expect it to be so easy.  I mean, I wasn’t exactly a wuss in real life, but I couldn’t have tossed my nearly 200-pound body over a wall (admittedly a very short wall) without at least a little effort.  Nor could I land silently, on my feet, and directly in between the two rows of spikes that I had not been able to see while I was on the conveyor belt.  I froze for a moment, letting the shock of what had just happened wash over me for a second.

    Unfortunately, it was a second too long.  An alarm sounded suddenly, shrill and echoing so thoughroughly in the crematorium that it felt like solid sound crashing down around my head.  I took off running (this time the frantic run of being hunted), paying very little attention to what was in my way.  Consequently, I ran into a few things. My arms scraped against sharp metal spikes— that whole ‘only wooden stakes through the heart will kill a vampire’ thing was totally debunked.  If the heart was pierced, you were dead. Period.  Again.  Historians kind of figured that particular myth started because that was all they had around in the old days that they could get sharp enough and portable enough.  Now we’ve got lightweight metal spikes that can be powered by more than upper body strength.  Anyway, I was running past a lot of pointy metal, and some of it was cutting me.  Part of me, deep deep down in my panic- blinded brain, was wondering if they infused the metals with garlic somehow (garlic is actually effective against vampires— they’re still trying to puzzle that one out)— but the spikes didn’t appear to be affecting me negatively.  Unless you count the bleeding, of course, and I guess that really should be counted.  So I was bleeding some, but I didn’t notice anything else wrong.  Except being trapped, I guess.  But I was working on that.  Sort of.  I sure was running, though.

    I hit a wall pretty quickly— not quite literally.  My freaky- awesome reflexes prevented me from actually slamming into it, but my nose left a tiny smear of grease (I know, I know that’s gross, so nasty, get over it) before I took a step back.  As far as I could tell, the wall I had just encountered was the only thing that separated me from the outside.  It’s not like there were field trips to the crematorium in school, but everyone seemed to have a basic idea of what the inside was like.  Big warehouse, huge funace, conveyor belt.  Not to mention the security cameras and security personel walking around in kevlar bodysuits with very compact flamethrowers and the standard- issue pointy bolt gun.  The spikes around the conveyorbelt was a new addition to my mental picture of the crematorium.  Make that actual picture of the crematorium.  Since I was actually there.  My brain was definitely trying to forget that this was actually happening.

    But anyway, for some reason I felt pretty sure that the other side of the wall was a much better place to be.  Possibly it was the incinerator behind me.  The wall felt cooler, not that it would have been hard to be cooler than the incinerator.  But, you know, significantly cooler.  So I turned to my left (because it took me further away from the incinerator) and started looking for a door.  Now that I had stopped running, the panic was subsiding a bit— the siren was still wailing, but no one had come after me yet.  It was starting to freak me out, actually.  There should have been at least five security people on me two seconds after the alarm went off, but I somehow managed to get to the wall with nothing but scrapes when I should have been a flaming pile of vampire dust.  To make matters even more unnerving, about twenty feet from where I started, I found a completely unguarded door.  It was locked, but a couple solid kicks to the handle loosened it up.  I opened the door slowly— there still weren’t any security people coming, but I didn’t want to be hasty— also, I didn’t want it to be sunny outside.  I was greeted with the faint sound of crickets and moonlight.  And I ran the hell away.