Alder's Grove

First Line of yesterday:

Why don’t we share the van sounded so reasonable, until you got down to brass tacks.

Last Line of yesterday:

“Better than waiting, at least.”

Current Word Count:
3187

Words Yesterday:
1518

Par:
3000

Death Count:
~1

Sixth in a series of stories leading up to my Camp Nano Project - this one, from Raven's point of view, features Jason.

Landing page here.

---

It was a warm day, the sort of sandwiched-between-two-rainy-days sort of miracle you get sometimes in early Rochester June, and I didn't have anything I had to be doing at the moment, or anywhere I really absolutely wanted to be, so I wandered down into the quad with my laptop.

Jason was there, with Craig and Glory Harrington, Jason on the guitar, Craig on the fiddle, and Glory on drums and vocals. I'm not sure what they were singing - an Irish folk tune I wasn't familiar with - but the whole quad was full of it.

It wasn't just the song, either. The music was nice, if I closed my eyes and forced away all the other influences and just listened. Glory had a pretty voice, and Craig could play the fiddle to shame the devil /and/ all of Georgia. But Jason wasn't playing the guitar so much as he was playing the people.

I let it wash over me. It wasn't anything malicious - everything's okay and hey, it's not that big a deal and calm down, you'll work it out. Not bad music for finals time. And all around them, people were sprawled out, reading their homework and just chilling.

Stuff like that, it can go bad fast if anyone notices. But a couple people playing on a college quad - that was easy enough to hide. And Jason was my friend, so I sprawled out somewhere near Glory's feet and started singing my own counterpoint to her lovely melody.

I don't know if Jason knew what I was doing. I don't know if he even knew what he was doing. Didn't matter; the point was more that nobody else figure it out than that he do.

This is the 15th in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano project - Escape from Rochester.

Thirty-two students & their friends need to get out of Rochester before the gods'-war destroys everything. How will they make it out - and how many of them will survive?

Landing page here.

Ric Wilkins, Packaging Science major

Ric found faith late in life, and he found it because he had a particular interest in Cadens.

He had a couple first-year classes with Cadens, and from her found out about Interfaith Council. It sounded like a fun time (to be fair, he'd been smoking quite a bit...) so he went along, to see what it was all alike.

Maybe it was his altered state, maybe it was something in the air, maybe the hand of god really did come down and touch him, but Ric has been devout ever since. Exactly what he's devout at is up to question, but he appears to be very strong in his faith in... something.

Even when he's clear-headed - which isn't often - Ric has a hard time putting into words what it is he believes. He knows that he believes it very strongly, however, and that coupled with his easy-going attitude mean that the rest of the Interfaith Council puts up with him, even when they'd really rather not.

Ric looks like a classic surfer - shaggy, frizzy blonde hair to his shoulders, sun baked skin, blue bloodshot eyes. He's far skinnier than he has any right to be, all things considered, and slouches such that his already-medium-height of 5'9" appears to be closer to 5'2"

He likes origami, a lot, as well as any other form of fitting pieces together, and got into Packaging Science because he thought it would be cool - which is has been, at least on good days. He's not a very good friend - he weasels out of everything - but in the moment, he's pretty friendly.

This is the 14th in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano project - Escape from Rochester.

Thirty-two students & their friends need to get out of Rochester before the gods'-war destroys everything. How will they make it out - and how many of them will survive?

Landing page here.

Cadens Montgomery - New Media Interactive Development

Cadens has felt the presence of the strange and the weird in her life since childhood - she has heard voices where there were no voices to be heard, she has known things she had no right to know, and she has understood things that were beyond her.

Her mother took her to church because she wanted to be sure Cadens had a strong moral background - although both Cadens and her mother had always known that something was a little weird about Cadens' father, it was an open secret, the sort never mentioned at the dinner table.

Cadens held on to that faith, and the moral backing it gave her, after puberty showed that she was a little bit weirder than most, after her powers developed in full. She kept her faith when she went to college, and when a relationship with Brendan went very quickly south.

She is a slender girl of medium - 5'5" - height, with long red hair that she wears loose most of the time. Her eyes are black and, in the right light, appear iridescent, like a beetle's wings. She wears her fingernails painted to hide the fact that they're chitinous.

She wants to be a news reporter, but is interested in the way the internet and social media are being used to move news and information. She prefers - unsurprisingly - sound-transmission media and has her own youtube channel.

She dated Lewis' roommate Rob for a while, but found they were too far apart in core beliefs; right now she is finding herself single and not sure if she wants to be or not.... but has enough things on her plate that it's a distant fourth in terms of priorities.

Of course, then the world ends...

This is the thirteenth in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

The gods have finally made it to New York - to Rochester. Now it's time to clear out.

Because I find it amusing how I'm getting some of this detail, I've added the generator description at the end. Names from http://random-name-generator.info/

Brendan Harris IT/MBA

Brendan never considered himself particularly religious - indeed, he still doesn't think of himself as being all that faithful. The books have interesting stories, the moral code is nice if simplistic, and the way people interpret the books is very, very interesting.
( Read more... )

This is the twelfth in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

As the gods attack Rochester, a group of R.I.T. students and their friends must get out of the city, before it's too late.

Rebecca James, Political Science

Faith isn't something that's always come easily to Rebecca. Her family was always religious, although not often devout; the disparity between the show of faith required and the behaviors beyond that show of faith dispirited a teenage Rebecca and sent her away from the church for a while.

In her first year at R.I.T, finding herself surrounded by illegal and immoral - and, more importantly, non-conducive to studying - behaviors, Rebecca turned to her faith as a way to cope. She found the Interfaith Council, where she met Juan and Pauline, and found there what she'd been missing in her family's religious practices.

She's a senior now, and has ended up the de facto leader of the group - their nominal head rarely makes it to meetings, and it is assumed he has the position because his father is their staff adviser. It's the same sort of thing that bothered Rebecca in her church back home - but her time in the Interfaith Council and her own renewed faith have allowed her to handle it much better; she works around other people's lack of belief and does not expect them to be more pious than they are.

Rebecca is medium-height, 5'4" tall, round in all the right places, with an easy smile that contrasts with her often-studious expression. She has warm brown skin and hair a couple shades darker; her hair falls in loose curls to mid-back when she wears it down, which is rarely. She moves like she belongs wherever she is, a trick she learned from her father.

She's gotten into marathon running in the last two years, adding an amazing stamina and rock-hard muscles to her curvy frame. When she's not studying - Dean's List and a 3.98 GPA - she's often finding new uses for discarded things - in a rich-student school like RIT, there's no dearth of that. If she had the time, she'd probably minor in sculptural art.

- first person or third person limited?

This is the eleventh in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

The story follows the flight of a group - students and their friends - from Rochester, NY; as the world crumbles around them, where can they possibly go for safety?

Douglas King
Game Design & Development

Douglas went to R.I.T. because it was one of the best, and because they offered impressive scholarships and a five-year combined Masters/Bachelor's program. He got into Game Design because it was a good career move, and because the concepts of game design interested him.

He got into the Friday night Shadowrun game because game design didn't stop at computers, and the Tuesday D&D game for the same reason - and because Aih played in the Tuesday game, and Aih had a smile that lit up the world.

He got into Anelle's parties because he met Jordan in one of his classes & she invited him; he got into the parties because the people there seemed more laid-back than the guys on his floor and more intense than the stoners in the quad.

From Anelle's parties it was a pretty easy jump to Oak & Rowan. It really wasn't his thing, not to begin with, but Aih was there, and Aih not only had a lovely smile, but she saw the world in a way nobody else Douglas had ever met did.

And from there it was a skip and a hop to Raven's Thursday night drinking in the swamp, and closing his eyes to the world and opening them to the other world.

Douglas is a wee bit on the short side - 5 foot seven - and a whole lot on the skinny side - barely over 100 lbs. He has dark skin, nearly ebony in shade, and eyes that shifted to a light blue-grey at puberty. His hands are almost clawlike, although that could be attributed to his thinness.

His hobby is 3D rendering; nearsighted AND farsighted, sometimes he feels like he can see space better in programming than he can in real life.

First in a series of stories leading up to my Camp Nano Project - this one stars Lewis.

For information on the events they're discussing, see faeapoclive and faeapoclive

"I know a guy on one of the research teams." Blake had claimed the best seat, the way Blake did, his back to the biggest tree and his left hand next to the cooler.

Lewis had considered doing his usual new-guy-takes-bitch-seat, on the far side with his back to the path, but something about Blake just irritated him, so he sat with the cooler to his right hand and fed sticks into the fire. Technically, they weren't supposed to have fires out here without staff supervision. Technically, most of them weren't old enough to drink yet.

Technicalities didn't seem to matter much with this group... and, unlike other groups he'd hung out with, the real world didn't seem to bother the group much with those technical issues, either. Not once in his first year here had they been interrupted by campus safety.
( Read more... )

This is the eighth in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

The story follows the flight of a group - students and their friends - from Rochester, NY; as the world crumbles around them, where can they possibly go for safety?

Sophia Kennedy
Education Major (Theatre Minor), Nazareth College

Nazareth is a good college. It's good for education, it's got a solid reputation... and it's really not the place you go if you want to play Shadowrun. Which is how Sophia ended up spending Tuesday nights - and then Friday nights and then Thursday nights - hanging out at R.I.T.

She didn't expect it to be her crowd at first - too techy, too male, too numbers-crunchy when she wanted story - but after a bit, she found that if she talked to the right people, she could end up in games she enjoyed.

And then someone mentioned Oak & Rowan, and Soph, who had always been just a little interested in the supernatural, found herself Very Interested. She met Craig there, and Jason, Ess and Galen - and that's how she found herself settling into lotus at one of Raven's special gatherings.

Sophia is short, five foot nothing, and looks younger than her calendar age. Her blonde hair falls into chin-length sausage curls - the length an attempt to get it to behave which failed miserably - and her eyes are cornflower blue; people who should know better sometimes call her Little Shirley Temple.

She's always been an outdoors sort and hopes to teach ecology when she gets out of school; she's been taking classes for that at University of Rochester during the summer. She has a particular knack for animals that some call uncanny.

Jason Walker
Media Arts & Technology

Jason is the music. He's known so all his life. He feels the music in ways that nobody else seems to understand; he can compose songs which seem to change people's emotional state, seem to change the weather, sometimes, if he hits just the right note.

It's not your typical psychic power - at least, it's not something he'd ever heard anyone else talk about. He assumed, back in high school, that it was "just" a talent with music and lyrics, nothing "special."

Then he saw a poster for the Oak & Rowan group, and things started becoming a little more clear to him. He was expecting a bunch of new-age mumbo-jumbo, but figured it was at least good for meeting new people. What he got was Jo, who ran the group, sitting down in private with him and having a two-hour conversation about the forces of the world.

There was no question after that: he kept coming back to Oak & Rowan. He met Craig there, who liked to pretend to be a werewolf on the weekends but, more importantly, who played the guitar and the violin, and Craig introduced him to Raven, and that's how he ended up at Raven's group, drinking beer out in the swamp on Thursdays and passing around an old guitar.

Jason is tallish and pretty, 5'11" and skinny, with blue-black hair in curls just past his chin and blue-green eyes. He's paler than his hair color would suggest, and prettier than his near-gauntness would seem to allow.

When he's not making music, he's a big fan of climbing things - the taller, the better.

This is the fourth in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

The story follows a group's flight from Rochester and the challenges they meet along the road to someplace safe, although, in the midst of the apocalypse, where "safe" may be might be the hardest question.


There would have been easier career choices, but Jordan (Taylor) has been into computers since her first-grade class was introduced to them.

She could have gotten into M.I.T. - she did get into M.I.T., as well as R.P.I. - but R.I.T. was a lot closer to home (her family lives in Greece, a suburb of Rochester), and with her maternal grandparents aging, she felt it important to stay near her family.

Near, but not with. She lived in the dorms for the first two years, and then moved to the apartments with a handful of newfound friends, two from her major and one from an elective, Anelle.

She didn't really mind Anelle's parties, since she helpfully kept them to non-study weekends, but the people that showed up were a stranger mix than she was used to. It meant that she found herself drinking with a guy who claimed he was really an elf, and playing Strip Jenga with a girl who pretended to be a vampire on the weekends, discussing philosophy with neo-nords... and kissing two lesbians under a full moon.

It was the lesbians that really did it, but it was Anelle's fault that Jordan ended up visiting Raven's little drinking parties in the swamp, and it was Anelle's fault that she tried one - and only one - D&D game.

Sometimes all it takes is one game.

Jordan is tall, 5'8", and built round in the chest and the butt, slender most other places. She wears her hair short and natural, but platinum blonde, liking the way it contrasts against her dark, near-ebony skin.

Her eyes are grey and slightly canted at the sides, her lips are full and her nose is long and aristocratic.

She has a fascination with the physics of time (as well as the psychology of such) and takes as many electives on the subject as she can.

This is the third in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

The story follows a group of friends and acquaintances as the faerie apocalypse destroys Rochester, NY - their flight from Rochester and the challenges they meet along the road to someplace safe.


It isn't like Jennifer Walker likes fights. They just seem to happen around her.

Of course, sometimes she started them on purpose - or sort of suggested that they start and let things take their course. But, like the time where her nose got broken, sometimes she just said something and then all of a sudden there was punching.

Puns can be made about volatile tempers and Chemical Engineering majors.

Jennifer isn't the sort to end up hanging out with gamers, not really - her hobbies include cooking, casual sports, and poker - but she ended up in a three-way fight with two frat boys on the quarter mile one night, and it was Rob and Lewis on the way to one of Raven's parties who caught her, helped her staunch the bleeding, and got her out of the scene before Campus Safety came. Since the frat party was clearly a no-go, she ended up drinking with Raven's friends in the swamp.

Jennifer is cute, though she'd be a lot cuter without the perma-broken nose. She's got a round and curvy build that she covers with some level of fashion skill, blonde hair in improbable curls to her hips, green eyes, and skin a nice deep honey-brown; she's been called California Barbie a time or two, although, at a mid-range 5'6", she doesn't really have the legs for Barbie.

There is a tiny bit of fae way back in her bloodline, somewhere. She has an uncanny knack for finding clean fluids and people have stopped trying to drug her drinks at parties. It's what ended up first interesting her in chemistry, back in Jr. High.

Let's be honest, Lewis didn't go to R.I.T. to meet girls, and he didn't go to party. You don't go to a tech school for either, especially when you're paying more than 50% out of loans and summer job money, and you don't aim for partying with a Biomedical Engineering major.

On the other hand, when his roommate decided that Lewis needed more socialization, Lewis wasn't about to argue, and when Rob dragged Lewis to parties and the parties happened to involve girls, Lewis wasn't going to argue with that either. Which is how he met Anelle, which is how he met the Oak and Rowan group, which is also how he ended up joining a Tuesday Night D&D group... which is how he ended up spending Thursdays drinking with Raven's group out in the swamp.

Lewis is tallish, an inch over six foot. He's muscular - even after a few months of college; he hits the gym four times a week. His eyes are dark blue, his skin fair and freckled, and his pride and joy is the mane of sandy-brown curls he wears down past his waist.

He thought about going into geology - he really likes rocks - but it was go into Biomed and pay 50% or go into geology and pay 100%, and that pretty much decided itself.