Don't Fear the Reaper

Maaaan. I just kept on writing on this post.

So a lot happened. Kaylyn aged up into a young adult, getting the Insane trait out of the deal. So that's fun.

Rikash got Absent-minded, Jonathan got Over-Emotional. Daine Dislikes Children, George got Hot-Headed.

Thom kept losing jobs. Over and over and over again, drove me nuts. So I offed him pretty early, before he turned elder.

Jonathan made Artist pretty easy.

Daine got Education - ironic given her traits.

George went through a couple of jobs before getting alien pregnant (SCORE). So now he's in Medical, with a couple of weeks until he turns elder. With Artist lifted, he has plenty of time to knock that out of the ballpark.

The Alien Baby is named Nawat, and came out with the Insane and Absent-Minded traits.

Rikash settled in to being a movie star. The lack of celebrity stars kind of did trip me up, but we're slowly working on that.

Kaylyn married, killed off the first husband, and remarried. I didn't get the trait list on the witch, he died so fast, but Zachariah, the only spouse that matters, is Clumsy, Mean-Spirited, Irresistable, Brave, and Virtuoso, coming prepackaged with a Military career.

Also score, especially since he has so much time to work with.

Both marriages were the results of her breaking up relationships with vampires, which I find amusing. I really don't have anything against vampires, honest!

I killed off Jonathan after he'd earned enough LTW points to net me a platinum ghost - made with love, care, and a lot of ranting. I just didn't trust my luck - Zachariah is a mundane human, and I suspected at least one of Kaylyn's children would be a mundane human too.

So then Kaylyn cleared Paranormal and had her twins, Cael and Richard. Cael is a Brave Couch Potato, while Richard is a Clumsy Slob. As expected, Cael is mundane, while Richard is the witch.

No females - I was hoping for a pure matriarchy - but it'll do well enough. Witch is the only criteria I actually need to make the prestige option work.

---

It was a little after my eighteenth birthday that the Cat came to me.

I named him Pounce.

He only comes around when I'm all alone, I think he - well, he's not scared of the others, he's just not interested in them.

I'm special, he says.

We're all special, but I'm the best.

The Cat came to console me after Mother died. He didn't say anything, he just laid with me while I cried it out. I know she was getting old and all, but I never imagined a world without her in it.

Father just ... wasted away, after that. The Cat was a little more verbose on that subject.

He talks, did I mention that already? He said, it's okay to let go of the ones who aren't useful anymore.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. Doesn't he care that Dad died?

Of course he doesn't. He's a cat.

--

Time moves on. I asked Jon why he's always painting, when every day the thugs come to take the paintings away. He says, well, at least somebody is getting some enjoyment out of the beauty he creates.

I suggested that he try writing books.

See, people will pay money for books, and unlike paintings, the mob isn't as interested in books.

So now he's writing books.

--

Daine is the only other girl with magic, did I mention that before?

It was actually kind of funny, how we found out. See, she was still a kid, and we heard her crying for hours in the walls, but nobody could figure out where she was.

It turns out, in the basement, there's a compartment with no doors or windows - and no light. Daine ended up in there - nobody knows for how long, not even her - and now she's kind of freaked out by the dark. Mom - this was back when Mom was still alive - Mom had to walk her out through the wall.

It doesn't come up much, but one time, when she was really angry, she pushed Dad through the wall and into the dirt on the other side. It took all of us with shovels to dig him out, and then we had to put all the dirt back because it was outside our designated building area.

--

Against my better judgment, I took Thom's advice and met up with a witch man.

He was like putty in my hands, and it was so easy to twist him to my will.

I'm not sure I liked that.

I married him, and I figured I'd use him to get an heir, because the cat is always on me about my duties as heir.

But he was so old. He didn't even have the stamina to consummate our marriage, and actually, I'm kind of glad for that fact. I'm not ready for children - I have a lot of work left to do to bring magic back into the world.

The Cat noted that the man was getting old and useless. What was I going to do with an old man?

So the Cat gave me the logical conclusion.

Daine helped. She hit him over the head, and dragged him through the walls.

He'll suffocate or starve, but he isn't my problem anymore.

--

The Cat was pleased with what I did to my man.

In a way, I was kind of hoping he would be.

It hurt, a little, in my heart. But it was the right thing to do, the Cat says.

--

Time passed. Thom flitted from job to job, while the rest of us did meaningful work. Even Jonathan, who doesn't have a proper job, is more useful than Thom.

The Cat told me it was finally time to kill him.

In a way, I was relieved. Nobody except George really liked Thom.

His place will be taken by one of my own children.

The Cat reminds me that I'm not as young as I once was.

Ah - I remarried. Zachariah, a military man. I had to save him from the clutches of a blood-sucking leech, but he's mine now.

The Cat approves. He's young and strong. He'll do well.

We have plans to have children; it's my long-held wish.

All I want is to pass this burden on to another.

Even though I knew it was necessary, I didn't want to end my elder brother's life. It was simple to do - I thought cold at him, and he froze. It didn't hurt that I stripped him down to his underthings and dragged him outside to die.

Well.

It didn't hurt me.

It never hurts me. Not until after.

I wonder if I'm doing the right thing, but the Cat says I am.

The Cat knows. I should - I must - trust him. Otherwise, who can I trust?

--

George had this wild tale of being abducted by aliens. Of course I didn't believe him, at least at first.

Then he lost his job as a business man, when he had the baby in the middle of his work day.

I don't ... how ... what ... I know medicine is an imperfect science at the moment, but ...

He doesn't have the parts!

--

I did it.

People are learning to trust us again. Magic isn't some horrible thing to be feared - it's a beautiful, wondrous thing. It can do so much for us - at the end, I let slip in an interview that it was Mom's last spell that broke the Endless Winter.

That seems to be what did it.

The humans were reminded that, not all of them are the same - why should all of us be evil monsters?

Everyone benefits from magic returning to the world. Everyone.

The dead, the living - there isn't such a great distinction there.

Oh, there's a lot of work to be done - right now, Zachariah is trying to figure out why the zombies come every full moon, why their packs tear apart the innocent - and the humans are still inherently corrupt - 

But I did my part.

It feels good.

--

I'm getting tired lately.

Tired of everything, really.

I summoned the reaper to take Jon away. I didn't want to, but I knew there were two auras growing inside of me, and only enough room in the family to care for one of them ... if I didn't intervene.

I'm heartbroken. And not just because of the money - I'm not like that! He was a steady source of income - he alone brought in enough money to keep the thugs happy.

Jon was a good man. He deserved better.

We're raising the little green lump of flesh to be a better person than its father.

But it's time. We had our twins, two boys - Mother would disapprove of me naming a male as heir, I'm sure, but I just don't have the strength to try again.

I see it in their auras. Cael is a strong, healthy youth. Richard will be the heir; he has magic.

That much, at least, I can do for Mother's legacy.

Babies!

Then we started cranking out the babies. I had a single child - Thom - followed by twins - Kaylyn (the heir apparent) and Rikash - followed by triplets - Daine, George, and Jonathan. With no fertility treatment, just a lot of kids station workouts. So yeah.

Thom's traits:

Evil (Rebel trait)
Insane
Genius
Clumsy
Loves the Cold
Technophobe

Rikash (my favorite) has the traits:

Slob
Couch Potato
Workaholic
Genius

Kaylyn (the heir apparent) has the traits:

Good Sense of Humor
Neurotic
Virtuoso
Light Sleeper

Jonathan's traits are:

Good
Genius
Diva
Natural Cook (Score!)

Daine's traits are:

Good
Brave
Couch Potato
Schmoozer

George is:

Evil
Excitable
Athletic
Good Sense of Humor

I enabled spring as soon as possible. In retrospect that was kind of a bad idea. Oh well.

Jonathan is working on Artist, and aged up to teen with all the childhood metrics cleared. Alanna aged into an elder in plenty of time to get that squared away.

---

Dad says that Mom got really ... strange, after her big spell. He thinks it was the magical backlash - he was a scientist once, did you know that?

So first it was little things. She didn't like the same foods anymore. It started to hurt whenever she tried to cast spells. Then one day, she played until her fingers bled but she couldn't conjure so much as a single apple.

Then everything hurt, all the time.

She started forgetting things.

Like, she ranted and raged when the humans closed our local high school down for 'safety reasons,' and then she scolded us for not going to a school that isn't even there. 

Now she mostly just kind of sits in her rocking chair. Sometimes she mutters to herself. We have to take extra-good care of her now, because she's old and kind of fragile.

So hi. My name's Kaylyn, and Dad says I'm supposed to be the heir, because I'm a girl, and I'm a witch, even though Thom's got magic and he's older, and we're supposed to keep our magic s-e-c-r-e-t anyway.

Thom's okay with it because, he says, the voices don't like him very much, so he doesn't want to talk to them. I don't know, I don't hear voices.

I don't hear voices.

Thom says that I worry about 'silly' things a lot.

Like, for example, since we have running water, what if somebody left the water on? We'd go through our whole water ration and then the humans would come and kill us because they have guns and we don't even know how to use our magic.

Or worse, what if they shut the water off? We'd all die of thirst and nobody would ever know.

I check the tap a lot.

I'm going to go check it again just to make sure.



Okay, I'm back.

So I'm not the oldest. I've got four brothers and one sister. Well, there was another brother but we don't talk about him because the aliens took him away, Dad says, which is why he isn't a scientist anymore.

Thom is the oldest, like I said earlier, and he's kind of mean. But he's mostly mean to himself so like, we'll hear him yelling at himself in the bathroom. It's kind of scary and sometimes all the candles go out when he's mad, so we have to light them up again.

I guess it could be worse.

Then there's my twin, Rikash, who's kind of weird. He eats the bugs off of the old plates. Like I said, we have pretty bad restrictions on water so we can only wash dishes once in a long while. I mean, I guess he helps clean things up, in his own ... special ... way.

There are the triplets - Jonathan is really full of himself. Daine is really lazy, but she's a good enough sort, and George ... George. I don't like George. He's mean too, but he's more of an extrovert about it. He sneaks up on us and scares us when we aren't looking, he laughs when Thom trips over stuff - even when he hurts himself - and he says he's going to become some kind of Emperor of Evil or something and take over the whole world.

I dunno.

When Thom turned eighteen, the humans came and told him he was going to be working for some hot-shot politician. They said if he didn't, they'd kill him.

I don't think we get to pick what we want to do when we grow up anymore.

A Light in the Dark (Symphonic)

Whoo! I've been spending more time playing the game than writing about it, so I have a lot to catch up on.

Alanna cleared Symphonic, all is well there, though the 'logic' requirement snuck up on me and I'm not sure how.

Ah well.

So then she met a teenager at the park, and I had her nail him down two days after he became YA - sadly, that is to say, after he had an unfortunate engagement with another woman (a werewolf).

Who, ironically, ended up being one of the kids' boss, but we're getting ahead of ourselves!

Then I had him get the science career, and then he got alien pregnant. And then he had the baby in the middle of his work day so he's no longer a scientist.

Instead, he got Fortune Teller. Hooray. I hate charisma as a skill. It's super useful but I hate to level it. I also hate careers that start out with "Hi I'm basically a part time career and my only metric is how happy you are!" I hate Fortune Teller on principle. But it'd be nice to be able to do The Magic.

Zach's traits:

Brave (Rebel trait)
Couch Potato
Social Butterfly
Good
Hopeless Romantic
Mooch

There are worse traits in the world, especially since he still has a good chunk of his adult life left.

---

I applied at the local theater, figuring that if I intended to improve my skills further, I would need funding - if only to acquire a guitar. Imagine my surprise when I was immediately recruited to manage the band!

I bought some new furnishings, even scoring a sweet deal on an old guitar. My ascent through the ranks of the musical "prodigies" who were my peers was relatively fast. It felt like only a few weeks before I had the critics eating out of the palm of my hand, hanging on every magical tune I wove.

But I still hadn't perfected my masterpiece.

I found the boy - my muse, so to speak - one afternoon at the park.

Zach.

It isn't right to want someone half my age, I know that. But he isn't like other humans. He's ... different. Unique.

Without Thom in my life, I had no one but myself to care about, and that was the missing piece to my spellcraft. Love. It's a basic principle - if you don't care about anything enough, the big magic, the powerful spells, won't come. You have to care. You have to want.

On the evening I met Zach, I penned my spell, weaving it into a melody so beautiful, it would cause the very skies to weep.

I needed such power.

The Endless Winter isn't natural. I long suspected, but now I have proof. When I cast my melody forth into the heavens, it met fierce resistance. Another power - an evil, hateful power - eventually broke under my onslaught.

The weather of the world may never return to normal, but one day, soon, the sun will return to us.

Maybe no one will ever learn of my success, of my spell. Maybe I don't want them to.

It's time to turn my attention to the future.

The effects of the evil witch's spell aren't over - they have yet to diminish, much less dissipate - and there is the matter of the humans' trust.

There is the matter of trusting humans, as well.

I will start with Zach. We will have children, and then the world will see.

It's okay.

We can live again.

University Complete

Post-Uni stats:

Athletics 9

Charisma 10

Cooking 5

Guitar 6

Handiness 5

Painting 3

Straight A's despite my reservations about being able to accomplish this.

$3999 remaining funds thanks to the massive fire in the middle of week 4.

Workaholic

Ambitious

Genius

Bookworm

Inappropriate

Good <- Uni trait

This is a far cry from the smooth sailing I saw in Easy Start, but not all is lost. I did get some guitar skill, and I start at Band Manager - which wants 1 more guitar skill than I have.

Not pictured: The sleeping bag that is kept in inventory.

Still, I decided toddler books would be more beneficial than such niceties as a guitar, so I bought the gardening 1-3 book, the writing and painting toddler books. I brought home gardening 3-6 and gardening 7-10 from Uni.

---

My brother, my twin.

He was always in love with his magic, and being forbidden to use it became an issue for him.

The humans used him for an experiment, and - he says - he got a ... sickness, in his magic. It ate him alive, slowly, from the inside.

I hate them. I hate them all.

But I'll be keeping that to myself. For now.

I finished the training camp with flying colors. On my way out, I stole a couple of books, just to spite everyone and everything about the place. Looking at what I took, I shake my head in disgust. Gardening - who gardens these days?

So I'm 'home.' Only home has been reduced to rubble. The only thing left is the basement, everything else was burned to the ground, demolished. Apparently, someone found out that this was the home of a witch, and they burned it. I found Father's ashes in the rubble - I wish I could say I was sad, but we weren't that close to begin with.

I furnished the basement as best as I could with the meager savings I had left, but I don't know that I'll be able to survive on what I have left.

The thought leaves me a bit heartsick.

University Through Term Two

Wintershard Apocalypse: (Prestige) Witch legacy with (Prestige) Uni start.

Term 2 complete.

Skills:

5 Athletics (5 Working out)
7 Charisma (1 book, 4 talky, 2 be)
2 Cooking (1 book, 1 be)
6 Guitar (1 class 5 be)
3 Handiness (1 book, 2 fixing things what got broke)
2 Painting (1 large painting)

Traits:

Workaholic
Ambitious
Bookworm
Inappropriate
Genius

---

My name is Alanna Wintershard, and I have a plan.

"A plan?" I hear you ask.

Well, not literally. I'm not mad; I don't hear voices, you know. But I imagine that would be the question.

If I were to tell anyone about my plan.

So, journal, let me bring you, at least, up to speed.

A year or so ago, the calamity known as the 'endless winter' fell upon us. The nights grew long, the days, short and cold. 

At first, it was dismissed as an unusual, but quite natural, phenomenon. Only, spring never came. That is the meaning of the word 'endless.'

Soon, people were at each others' throats. The faeries blamed the vampires, claiming that they benefited the most from the unnatural weather. The vampires blamed the witches - we have the power to cause such a catastrophe, they reasoned.

Needless to say, the humans blamed all of us.

I don't know if it was vampires, faeries, genies, or an army of unicorn-riding werewolves. I don't especially care. The part that everyone forgets about when they blame each other is, there's a problem. It needs fixing.

So. I have a plan.

We aren't allowed to overtly employ magic, even to fix things. But, I think I can channel a spell through the medium of music. It would be the most powerful spell of my life, and if I'm right?

If I'm right, I might be able to drive winter back.

There is a small hitch, however.

We've been conscripted. Me, my brother, a number of others. We're to report to a facility for training.

The humans' aptitude test suggested business for me, or science and medicine. Distressing, if I do say so myself. I was granted a scholarship to pursue one of those paths, though they grudgingly accepted when I said that I would only go if I could study fine arts. They charged me $2200 for the pleasure of being forced away from my original plans, eating the entirety of the scholarship and a little of my own personal funds.

Then, when I arrived, I was delighted to find a guitar just lying around the dorm. I went to pick it up - this was just what I needed - when one of the thugs who had served as my escort snatched it away.

"Not for you," he said. His accent was pretty thick, and he wore a fancy suit. When he spoke, I thought I saw fangs.

I hope, privately, that he dies in the fire of a thousand suns.

He took the guitar away with him, leaving me alone for the moment.

I explored the compound on my own. There was a sign that prominently displayed the warning: "Please retreat indoors during the night of the full moon."

Sensible.

It hadn't been a problem before winter fell, but now, zombies roam unchecked across the grounds. For the most part, the human military contains it, and zombies don't travel during the day, but the undead frenzy on full moon nights; there is no containing them in a frenzy.

There was a guitar class advertised, so I shelled out a little more money and took it, just to spite the thugs who run this place. Then, I ran home to my dorm; it was, after all, a full moon night.

I felt my magic bubble up, demanding to be used. It kept me awake half the night.

Exploring the dorm itself, I found a number of instructional tools. Privately, I wondered how many of them would be yanked away the second I reached for them. Laughing a bit at my own folly, I approached a curious machine that looked not entirely unlike a stylist's hair dryer, from the days when we still could afford to waste time and energy on things such as appearances.

The machine was labeled a "Brain Enhancer." I was skeptical - of course I was - but I plugged in "Guitar" for the setting and settled in to the chair.

I have a plan, and I won't be deterred by some common crook.

The good news is, the machine works. I understand more about musical theory than I dreamed possible, and my mind filled with ideas for how to turn those concepts into a functional spell.

The bad news is, the third time I used it, it broke, setting an electrical fire on my scalp.

I've been called 'fire-hair' before, but never has it been quite so literal!

After putting my hair out in the sink, and scrubbing myself down for good measure, I set myself to studying the workings of this thing's machinery.

I will not be deterred.

I attended classes and lectures, as well as a workshop about learning to draw landscapes. That last was held outside, in the snow and the cold. I despise the cold.

When finals came around, I breezed through the tests. My grade for the first term was an A.

So far, so good. I repaired the machine and resumed my study of the guitar. Before long at all, I was past the point where the machine could help me - I would have to get my hands on a real guitar to improve further.

--

My dorm-mates seem to be obsessed with the concept of fire, such that their determination to catch themselves ablaze is readily apparent in the number of fires our dorm has had these last few weeks. It is something not unlike a miracle that none of them have been killed while I was away at class.

Perhaps I exaggerate.

I am frustrated, however, as I am the one forced to put monetary compensation forth at the end of the term for anything that they damage. I am not entirely certain why.

Moreover, even this facility is not immune to the rigors of corruption - the same thug who stole away the guitar demanded $300 for some kind of 'protection' moneys. I kicked him in the tender bits, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground and he was counting out all the money I had on me - something like $2400 all told.

More than the broken arm, my pride is sore.

I've resolved to train my body as well as my mind, here. I won't be caught unawares again.