eod: character meta

[kasihya]

Happy Backup Day!

There are seven parts to each chapter, and a variable number of chapters. Seven would be ideal.

The thing is that this is supposed to be wacky and surreal, and it just isn’t. Like, at all. It’s a bunch of crap, and it’s all Serious and humorless, and it’s got the same fucking tone as everything else I write. It’s not interesting.

Well, maybe they don’t wake up in a field. Maybe they wake up in a strange and misty climate with a whole lot of things going on that they just don’t notice. Or maybe they wake up and reality is just plain wrong. Like, there are all of these things interposed on top of each other. Julian’s monastery of melted people where Ƈhatma’s factory used to be, and in the middle of that city is Tlazohtzin’s palace full of corpses, and Kephri is just like, “Welcome to my life!”

But that also doesn’t make sense.

I like the idea of casual time travel. Or traveling along the time-space continuum while walking through this system of caves, or something like that. Maybe Kephri — OH. Okay. So, Kephri is used to just walking off of his plane. The thing is that he can always find his way back. He can feel it, it’s like instinct. But the reason that people in Kephri’s world live in such close harmony with nature is because that’s the only stable thing from one reality to the next. You can build a house in one reality and it’ll be gone in the next, but a cave is forever. So they tend to live in natural formations across time and space, and they’ll fortify those natural formations, but they’ll never build things from scratch because there’s no point.

Anyway. I like the idea that their physical travel represents temporal movement.

What if the travel isn’t even completely acknowledged in-universe? Or it is, but only the first few times that it happens. They travel, and as they travel, they fade into another world. They fade in and out of various realities.

That’s what’s happening! They faded out of their realities as they ended, and they all ended up on the same plane, even though temporally the end of each world took place at a different time. Now that they are together, they can fade in and out of different realities together. At first they are mightily confused, but then they gradually get used to it. That is the first half of the story. Then the “ten” part happens, the twist that pulls everything out from under their feet and forces them to reevaluate the events of the last few years.

What is it? I feel like, if this is going to be the case, and they are going to grow stronger as a result of these weird time shifts, it should be building towards something. I think that it would be cheap to have it be the result of something completely outside of their control, or at least to have them never get a say in it. I was thinking that maybe they could end up picking up  stuff along the way.

There need to be rules for why they go to a particular place, how long they stay there, and what impels them to move on once they have completed whatever it is that they need to complete. I think that would help to structure the novel. There could be a lesson that they learn from each place they go to, and there is an external force guiding them to each new shifted place. But that external force would have to be them from the future, in order to make it have any effect. I mean, there’s always Oneira, but I feel like that’s not balanced, to have it be just one person. It would have to be a group effort.

Maybe, after a while, they just give up on questioning what is going on. Instead, they embrace it, and look forwards to each new place while it lasts. They rent a house, get to know the locals, and try not to get assassinated.

Then, they end up going back to one of their home worlds. Or they all slide to their own worlds independently, only to discover that they have died there, and life has gone on. This calls into question the nature of the reality in which they have been living.

Or else they go in, and they just don’t get recognized. They’re mourned as dead, and when they reintroduce themselves, they are perceived as separate people from who they were. It is only then that they realize how much they have changed, individually. It is only after going back to who they were that they realize they can’t be that person anymore. Tlazohtzin has a two-year-old son — oh, and raising him can be a big thing.

The next cycle of stories is about shifting. One story about the first time. A second story where they are back in the interim plane, and trying to figure out what happened. A third story where it happens again, and they go with it. A fourth where they deliberately seek out a new world once they have gotten back. A fifth story in which they try to stay in the world once they are there, and fail. A seventh, in which they go with the flow completely.

The third cycle is the one in which time passes. In the first cycle, Huitzilihuitl is born. In the second, they try to settle down to find a good place to stay while Tlazohtzin recovers, because the hospital-world kicked them out pretty quickly. In the third, she and Eiji work out their relationship. In the fourth, Marat and Huitzilihuitl are the focus, as are Oneira and Kephri. In the fifth, Ƈhatma and his feelings about family are established. In the sixth, the dynamics between Ƈhatma, Eiji, Tlazohtzin, and Kephri are explored. In the seventh, the focus is on the family as they have become established.

The fourth cycle is where everything gets cast into a different light. What are the consequences of the end of days?

The fifth cycle shows the way that the family has been affected by the fourth cycle. This is the last one; this is the end.
There are these relationships. Reed sees Tlazohtzin and thinks of child abuse and sexual assault, even though Tlazohtzin accepts her situation as normal. She is also blinded by the unfortunate realities of Tlazohtzin's situation, and sees her as being more innocent and vulnerable than she actually is. (On the other hand, Tlazohtzin sees herself as less vulnerable than she actually is, so neither is completely right.) Tlazohtzin latches onto Reed because she is the first person she sees, and she needs someone to trust.

That is important to remember: that they will all form bonds very, very quickly, regardless of what they feel about each other later on, because the overriding command of "person in a similar situation; must commune" is stronger than "wow, that person is actually a total jerk."

Reed feels similarly about Marat. She is not in the least maternal, but she feels duty-bound to look after Marat. Marat, in turn, sees her as an adult figure in charge, and he will always respond positively to someone who is in charge, simply because it is that with which he is most familiar.

Reed sees Eiji and, for the most part, I think it's difficult for her to connect with him. He is so very poised and aloof, even though he's clearly out of his league, and he looks so completely unlike anything she has ever seen before - he doesn't even look alive. Eiji doesn't like Reed immediately, for the simple fact that she is older than him, and more familiar with situations like this. Even though it's nothing specifically like what she's encountered, she still has protocols to fall back on, and it makes him feel incompetent. He may have the knowledge of what happened, so that prevented him from freaking out completely, but now that Reed is in the picture, she's just taking over his gig and making him feel foolish. He just chalks it up to a general dislike, though.

Reed also isn't sure what to make of Oneira. It's the disconnect of the extremely young-looking body with the way that she holds herself. So, mostly, she has a strong instinct to protect battling with an irritation at the little girl who thinks she knows everything, countered by the fact that she knows, intellectually, that the "little girl" is in fact several thousand years older than herself. Oneira likes Reed because she reminds her of her mother.

Reed doesn't like Kephri because she subconsciously associates him with the worst aspects of her job: the young person with the new ghost, excited about their special snowflake status, and heedless of the consequences. Of course, it doesn't work like that with him, but he IS a stubborn, solitary type of person. He's also shy, although it's difficult to tell this at first because he gives off an actively unfriendly air as opposed to one of fear. Kephri sees Reed as an unknown factor, because she clearly has something else going on with her in her head, but he doesn't know what, yet. Even besides the ability to send images, he can pick up that she's doing something else.

Reed likes Chatma. Most people do, when they meet him, once they understand that he's not going to eat them. She likes that he seems to actively enjoy teamwork, and wants to get along with everyone - in a crisis, thinking like that is important. He's helpful. Chatma likes Reed, too, although he sees her as more of an equal than she probably sees him. It's an age thing. There's also the fact that she worked on a team - "Hey, I worked on a team, too! We're good!"

Violet is a complicated sort of person. I'm not sure what to make of her. She's an ordinary girl who also spent four thousand years as a goddess in the underworld. She's already introverted, and doesn't like to be around other people. She isn't shy, though. I will never be able to thank Ashley enough for making that distinction clear to me. But Violet sees Marat, and she sees a younger brother. She sees someone that she wants to protect - although, honestly, I feel like that is most people's reactions to Marat. Let's do Marat now.

Marat was utterly devoted to Eiji the moment that Eiji turned off the machines and offered to take the fall for him. It's the trauma-bonding principle out in full force, especially effective because Marat is so young, and Eiji looks like an adult. Then there's also the fact that they are the only two inorganic people in the group. Eiji is horrified by the drudgery and working conditions that Marat lives in. He doesn't personally like children at all, and so doesn't relate to him on the level of elder-to-child, but he is still willing to see Marat as someone in need of care and freedom.

Marat is freaked out by Kephri, principally because when he sees him for the first time, he looks like a satyr, or the common representation of the devil in Marat's society. Kephri also doesn't behave like anyone that Marat has ever met, so it's difficult for him to warm up. Kephri, on the other hand, treats Marat like a younger sibling, filling a void left by his own younger siblings when he left them behind.

Marat is totally enamored of Chatma, oddly enough. The feeling is mutual, although Chatma thinks of himself more as a substitute father figure while Marat sees him as a really cool combination of an older relative and a pet.

Marat is mostly confused by Oneira, who looks like she should be an older sibling, but isn't. Oneira feels a strange combination of perplexity and fondness for him, because he is so very young and vulnerable, but has obviously had to do some fast growing up. She probably best understands him in terms of having to not behave like a child anymore.

And if Oneira understand Marat the best, then Tlazohtzin comes in a very close second in terms of understanding his experiences as a child, and the type of growing up he has needed to do. She latches onto him because of all the company, she and Chatma are the only two who actively enjoy being around children, and it helps her deal with her panic to think that she needs to be there for someone smaller and more helpless than herself. Right now, she's pretty much the most powerless of the group besides Marat, so that is what comes of that. Marat, for his part, is frightened by the odd shape of her head, her earrings, and her general appearance, but he warms up to her fairly quickly.

Eiji is very, very confused by Kephri. On the one hand, he is uncomfortably attracted to him: that particular combination of wild and shy would be appealing if it were not the end of the world and they were in different circumstances. On the other hand, he’s organic, which is weird as anything, and he’s also incredibly frustrating to talk to in person, when not admiring from afar.

Eiji is horrified by Oneira. He sees her the closest to how she actually is, and he think she’s an abomination. Oneira thinks that he’s stuck-up and useless, especially for these circumstances. She makes him uncomfortable because of her strangeness, and for the same reasons as Reed. I’d imagine that her snake-hair is unsettling, too. Oneira thinks that Eiji is similar to her older brother — at least, there are superficial similarities that throw her off. It isn’t a good thing.

Eiji is conflicted regarding Ƈhatma, whose personality is attractive — someone humble who wants to work as a team and is happy to not be a leader, finally — but whose form makes him uneasy. It’s like meeting a huge Newfoundland, and the owner assures you it’s friendly but it’s still twice your size. Or, with Ƈhatma, the size of a giraffe with wings. Ƈhatma is stymied by Eiji. He really just wants everyone to get along and be warm and familiar so that he can replace his family right away and not have to process grief. Not that he thinks of it in so many words.

Eiji has great automatic respect for Tlazohtzin. She is both a political and religious leader as well as a mother, two classes of people in Eiji’s world who command respect. Mostly because she is clearly noble, so he feels compelled to give her respect, as part of his duty. Tlazohtzin likes him because he treats her nicely, but she is still wary because she doesn’t know why. She also thinks he’s a bit full of himself for a scholar; cultural differences, etc.