hellooo, i'm katie (she/her) and this is my art blog (my main blog is @burntoutdragon). here I post all my drawing, crocheting, embroidery, crafts, and other artsy stuff!
most of my drawings have to do with my favorite musicals, like starkid/hatchetfield, little shop of horrors, hadestown, maybe happy ending, heathers, ride the cyclone, and others
(but i do draw dragons once in a while... once a wings of fire fan, always a wings of fire fan hehe)
my artfight username is katydid26, and i'll probably be posting the stuff I make for artfight here as well
also!!! please let me know if you have any recommendations or requests!! i'd love to hear from people :)
Belatedly uno reversing BUT I'd love to hear more abt your ocs!! I'm very Not normal abt the Lords' champions and was thinking abt them the other day bc I'm obsessed w the concept
AAAHH HIII!!!
thank you for askingggg!! apologies that this has taken approximately 2 billion years, i promise i literally was giggling and kicking my feet with joy when you asked! and then the giggling stopped because finals were murdering me and i sadly did not have time to focus on the voices in my head.....but now finals are over!! happiness exists again!!! i can talk about the gremlins in my head!!! YIPPEEEE
CASSIDY
ok some context first: to me, different key centers in music are different colors. i wouldn't call it synesthesia, per se, it's more of an association. i don't actually see the colors, but the music just reminds me of the colors, if that distinction makes any sense haha. i might make a chart or something with all of them on the future just for fun.
but basically i've decided Cassidy has a similar thing, and i've given her all of my interpretations of the colors of various key centers. when she was under the influence of Pokey, she tended to write and play in Bb and Eb, because i associate these keys with various shades of teal and blue. in the good endings, when everyone makes it out alive, she abandons composing for a while, because it reminds her so vividly of Pokey's grasp on her mind. but after lots of talking with Ruby and with the others (and lots of therapy) she realizes that she does actually miss composing, just not the "blue" vibe her music tended to have. because pokey was in her brain for so long, she had to actively struggle to compose in keys that arent "blue". and of the new keys she was allowing herself to compose in, she had more success with some than others. namely, she found herself drawn to C (yellow), Db (gold), A (red), and Ab (dark red), and she realized that those are all colors that remind her of Ruby.
so she goes to Ruby and is like "you're saving my music!! it's gold now!! YOU ARE THE MUSIC COLORS!!"
and meanwhile Ruby is all "love i don't understand any of this at ALL, but if youre excited im excited?!"
WYATT
in the bad endings, Wyatt becomes The Homeless Man after Ted dies, and it's this horrible, awesome, Freudian-shadow-self sort of situation. this all was inspired by a piece we studied this semester in my music history class: an arrangement of the poem 'der doppelganger' by franz schubert. (going to nerd out for a minute, hope that's ok!) this piece is part of the romantic period of classical music (in the 1800s ish, hard to draw clear boundaries as some elements of romanticism were present in, for example, Mozart's later compositions, and persisted into modernist conventions despite their efforts to free themselves of the past, but a good approximation is Beethoven thru Mahler with some wiggle room. this movement put a lot of emphasis on horror and awe and the supernatural and the sublime over the simply beautiful. it's also my favorite period of music if you can't tell haha) and more specifically from the Lieder movement in Germany (rising German nationalism led to increased appreciation and pride of folk songs and poetry, which led to composers arranging/incorporating these things into their music, and a general increase in vocal music. fun fact, this sentiment absolutely affected other art forms, which is how we get things like Grimm's collection of fairy tales. not-so-fun fact, these movements tended to hold a few types/genres of art as "truly representative of x culture" and tended to demonize the rest to add to "common enemy" sentiments, which is surely not applicable in this day and age at alllllll). anyway, der doppelganger is a poem originally written by heinrich heine, about encountering a figure on a dark night, staring at a house that your past lover used to inhabit, and then the clouds shift and the moonlight shines on their face and gasp!!! it's you!!!...hence the name doppelganger. schubert explores this sort of awe and horror and disgust in really cool ways, with some crunchy chord voicings, melody lines, suspensions, and resolutions to keys the main piece isn't centered in (i havent taken music theory yet so i don't know all the fancy terminology but i can definitely tell you Something Is Up with the music in the best most haunted way). anyway i just really loved the idea of Wyatt-but-not-Wyatt staring at his old home, his old school, the graves of his friends with haunted eyes, his breath rattling in and out of tired lungs, desperately trying to recall a part of himself that existed before this curse. he is not the narrator of the poem, but the pallid doppelganger staring back at the ghost of his childhood.
ough i just love torturing him hehehe :)
anywayyy in the good endings, Wyatt makes a giant bucket list of everything he missed out on as a kid that he wants to experience with his siblings. he's rightfully furious at Blinky for so thoroughly messing up his childhood, but he wants to reclaim it any way he can. his siblings had always been concerned about him, and tried to help him any way they could, but because his introduction to Blinky happened so young they never really got to know Wyatt for Wyatt. they're starting over and kind of meeting each other for the first time, and redefining their sibling bonds on their own terms, outside of a god who stole Wyatt's childhood from him. this is accomplished by a plethora of pillow fights, movie nights, ice cream, pranks, stargazing, dares, playing bad music too loudly, impromptu road trips, late night talks during slumber parties, and other wholesome sibling shenanigans. a very well-deserved happy ending.
RUBY
I mentioned before that Ruby, due to Tinky's influence, doesn't experience time in the same linear way we do, because Tinky constantly moves her from timeline to timeline, so she gets glimpses of different scenes from different parts of her life from different versions of herself. it's like asking a random number generator what order you should read the chapters of a book in, but surprise! you're actually reading multiple unrelated books and also the random number generator hates you and just loops the chapter numbers of various death scenes.
this is, of course, devastating and tragic and stuff, but one of the things that causes her the most pain is that because of all the skipping around, Tinky purposefully never let her see her thirteenth birthday, which was her first kiss with Cassidy. Ruby knows it's a small thing, in comparison with the knowledge of a thousand different ways she and her friends can die, but it still hurts. really bad.
in the good endings, Ruby eventually gets all the memories she missed out on back, albeit really slowly. she also is the only member of the group who even vaguely remembers Miss Holiday (btw going to refer to her as Holloway/Holiday interchangeably). so, 20-30 years later, after everyone graduates high school and moves on with their lives, Ruby runs into Holloway. depending on Ruby's age and Holloway's visible age (cause i think there's gonna be some weirdness with her whole eternal youth thing because of "miss holloween"? idk don't quote me on that) the conversation may sound slightly different, but because in my soul i believe every single person in Hatchetfield played by Kim Whalen is related in some way, Ruby senses that Holloway is a long lost Hatchetfield Redhead TM, and invites her to one of the Barnes family gatherings. (i mean, she's more right than she realizes, cause Holloway is her mom, but Ruby has no idea about THAT whole ordeal. nor does anyone else in hatchetfield)
so it comes up at one of the gathering things that Holloway has some history with music and Ruby is like "OMIGOSH!! my wife is a musician!!!! you guys need to meet!!", so Holloway "meets" Cassidy, and they start chatting about music. Holloway starts alluding to her past, and she half expects Ruby and Cassidy to snap out of it and forget everyithing at any moment, but they don't.
Because Cassidy and Ruby are so closely connected, and Ruby remembers Holloway due to some Ethereal Plot Device loophole in the contract Holloway signed, i have Decided that means Cassidy can remeber bits and pieces about Holloway too. and, as Holloway discovers a few jam sessions later, this lets Cassidy remember Holloway's music as well. Holloway gives Cassidy all of the music that has been building up in her head for, what, seventy years?, under the guise of "hey, i'm not doing anything with it, you can use as much or as little of these ideas as you want". she leaves their lives, becuase she's not sure exactly what loophole is letting her do this, and she doesn't want to push too far and ruin everything. eventually, Ruby and Cassidy forget most of what they learned about Holloway. except for her music. and every so often, when Cassidy is stuck on part of a song, Ruby remembers thos mysterious old notebooks she found, full of scratched out lyrics and half-written melodies, and they pore over them until they find something that breathes with the music like it was meant to be.
after so many decades, a daughter that Holloway initially thought of as a curse is the catalyst that lets people hear Holloway's music once again. the music itself is changed, of course, and isn't quite what Holloway had initially envisioned. then again, neither is Holloway herself.
MACKENZIE
i dont remember if i've said this before but she's probably like a niece of Linda Monroe. I think Nibbly is rather attached to that family, like Tinky with the Spankoffskis.
when Mackenzie survives in the bad endings, she becomes a deranged, serial killer-esque figure that murders and consumes more and more. becuase of Nibbly's strength, her hunger becomes a force that literally cannot be contained through any mortal means, so she breaks out of any and every attempt to arrest/capture/jail her, wreaking gory havoc as she goes, until she is inevitably killed.
also, I really really heavily considered giving her a prion disease in all the endings she survives, whether good or bad, but i looked up various prion diseases and how they work, and decided against them because:
1. they are GNARLY and terrible and gross and really really disturbing and i dont want to think about incurable fatal progressive neurodegenerative diseases more than i have to
2. idk if i want to kill her in a supposedly happy ending. yes, i know it could be a sort of thought-provoking, fair, narratively satisfying ending, little shop of horrors style, about how some actions cannot be undone, a parallel for nibbly's lasting impact on her life, social circles, and her own psyche, but. have you considered. wholesomeness and fluff? i have. yes please.
3. it's also really unlikely that she would have gotten a prion disease because of where in the body they tend to accumulate (nervous system tissue, especially in brain! horrifying stuff, really) and the fact that the person she cannibalized wasn't eaten in entirety, and also it's pretty rare for a person to develop prions on their own as they are proteins so misfolded that they become dangerous to the person themselves (rare because prion disease cases are rare at about 1 in a million.. but not compared to other people with prion diseases... wikipedia says 85% of documented creutzfeld-jakob disease occurrences are from unknown reasons and not genetic or mad cow disease reasons... yippee...). the reason they're so sensationalized is when cannibal cultures happen some prey on both victims outside the group and dead members of the group, so if one person were to at some point consume/develop prions, it would be spread throughout the group, especially if nervous system tissue is consumed along with the rest of the body. this is what happened with kuru, i'm pretty sure, and how it spread through so many members of that community.
i don't know as much about her future compared to the others, but I know that she has the option to become a professional athlete doing Sports Things TM, but chooses to become a personal trainer instead, making sure her clients have a healthier relationship with sports and fitness than she did. also, she's vegan. for obvious reasons.
BEN
in the bad timelines, he comes to terms with what he's done to the people who took a chance on him and trusted him, and spends sleepless nights wondering if he and Max were just destined to be terrible people, and dies tragically somehow idk im still working this one out.
in the good endings, Ben asks Holiday to teach him everything she knows, and becomes a school psychologist specializing with teens and supernatural stuff in Hatchetfield, kind of taking over some of the weight she's been carrying. even though he eventually forgets Holloway, he remembers what she taught him, and continues researching supernatural things in the Waylon's library that Liam discovered, because Liam is a little bit... busy... in these timelines. he's a big advocate for the whole "people can change" thing, because he knows it was the support from his friends and their faith in him that kept him back from the edge, and that stopped him from descending into the madness Wiggly had planned for him. he still wonders what life would have been like if this one thing had happened, or if that other thing hadn't, but it doesn't drive him insane like in the bad endings. in these good endings, he knows that there comes a point in everyone's life (or death) where you have to choose where your allegiances lie. it gives him peace, knowing that the Jagerman name is not synonymous with "failure", becuase both he and his brother chose well.
LIAM
fun fact my guy is the epitome of bi panic and i love him for it
(um what do you mean im projecting? who said anything about projecting? uhh not me...even though i'm very much looking forward to writing this... WHO SAID THAT)
another fun fact in the scene webby greets him in the Waylon library for the first time, he realizes she's a good four to six inches shorter than him. she is an immortal spider goddess with eight eyes and eight limbs and fangs and has been here since the dawn of creation and has devoted her very essence to combating the dark forces of the world. and when she grabs his shoulders all imposingly he has to crane his neck to look down at her. and that makes me very happy
Liam isn't present in the group in most of the bad endings, but there are stray timelines in which he is called by Webby but things go *awry* and he, along with the four losing champions, dies tragically. There are also a few timelines where he and Holiday succeed in breaking the curse, but all five of the champions still die, leaving him alone and traumatized. I think in these timelines he becomes a sort of hermit in the Waylon library, reliving the horrors he witnessed over and over again, blaming himself for not having studied hard enough to save his peers, reading more and more, searching desperately for a way to bring them back.
in every single timeline, he and Wyatt still have some complicated *feelings* for each other that they need to work through. sometimes they do, sometimes they dont. sometimes they get together before they die, sometimes they loathe each other before they die, sometimes one of them dies before either of those things can happen. but in all the good endings, Wyatt realizes that he was being a bit clingy, what he really needs is space to figure out how life works without the crushing stares of a thousand eyes, and he can't string Liam along for that. and oh sweet irony, Liam is the one who dumped Wyatt back in middle school, so although they part ways as friends and still stay connected, Mr Woodward gets a taste of his own medicine and it SUCKS.
in the good endings, he gets out of Hatchetfield like he always planned, and studies library science at Insert Dream School Here, which just so happens to be in California. There, after some prodding and manipulation from Webby, he runs into one Hannah Foster.
yeah long story short all of the good timelines for my ocs are also conveniently the ones where the Fosters make it safely to California and Lex makes it big and can afford to send Hannah to Insert Dream School Here. so, Webby sets up Liam and Hannah and they commiserate about The Horrors and they're perfect for each other and they live happily ever after and never step back on Hatchetfield soil ever ever again, the end.
Meet Liam Woodward, a junior at Hatchetfield High, member of the varsity cross country team, and student volunteer at the school library.
He had a pretty standard childhood, which honestly surprised him a little. No shocking deaths. No outstanding trauma. No harbored grudges against friends or relatives (well... his Uncle Bill had been a bit overbearing ever since Alice moved away, but he couldn't really blame him for that). With the sort of omnipresent creepy vibe the town gave off, Liam was sure that something more visibly wrong would have happened before, but he wasn't complaining.
In his first few semesters at Hatchetfield High, he was content to devote his time to his studies, to running, and to volunteering in the library. It was his safe space, somewhere to retreat to when the tensions of Hatchetfield High became too much, or when the world just had a tinge of... wrongness to it. Here, in the school library, sorting books, surrounded by the knowledge of generations, he could finally breathe.
Admittedly, the spiders made that hard sometimes. Liam was about ninety percent sure the library has a infestation- nearly every day he spotted an arachnid scuttling over a stack of books or whispering down from the ceiling. They were lucky it was him who worked there, and not one of his more violently-inclined classmates. It was weird though- any time he found any in the storage room and tried to catch them, they scurried away to the wall behind one of the more ancient-looking bookshelves, and just... vanished. There one second, gone the next.
He'd been volunteering at the library for a year or so before he finally realized how they did it; there was a tiny tear in the wallpaper, and a hole in the wall behind it.
It was a few more weeks before he lost his balance carrying a stack of books and fell against said wall, which made a hollow, echoing thunk.
When the school librarian took her lunch break, Liam felt along the wall, searching for something, though he wasn't exactly sure what. There- behind the bookshelf! Buried under layers of wallpaper and paint, could that possibly be... the shape of a hinge?
His curiosity got the best of him, as it would have anyone. It took some time, of course; unpeeling what seemed like centuries of paint and wallpaper wasn't exactly easy to do (or to keep under the radar), but at last, he revealed a small door. It opened to a cramped staircase descending into darkness, the stone steps covered with an inch of dust.
A gray-clad figure awaited him at the base. White hair tumbled over her shoulders, and her eight black eyes blinked open at him.
Liam's first words directed to an immortal goddess were: "HOLY SHIT!!"
Liam is a part of my untitled hatchetfield fanfic, where every so many years the lords in black each choose a sort of "champion", and pit them against each other for entertainment. However, unlike his peers, Liam is not a champion. In some timelines, he sort of flies under the radar, and doesn't really interact (anymore) with the real champions. But in each of the timelines where he finds the Waylon's lost library, it means Webby has finally had enough of her brothers' sadism. Liam is less of a puppet or a victim, and more of a steward or a savior, but he is chosen all the same.
It was Webby who appeared to him in her spider form all those times, and it was Webby who then grabbed his shoulders (with two of her six hands, was he hallucinating?) and explained everything. The Black and White, her brothers, their games, the Waylons, and the fact that some of his peers had their days numbered.
"The Waylons built this library to hold all of their... everything. From spellbooks to grocery lists, it's all here." Webby gestured to the shelves, crooked and warped, slanted at odd angles, stacked with books and scrolls and layers of dust. "After they were murdered, and an earthquake blocked the undergound tunnel leading here, I guess the remainder of the cult forgot about this place."
She let go of Liam, and he rubbed his shoulders. "Why can't you break the curse, then? Or... whatever this is?"
"I can read the texts, but I can't use them. They're sort of in-between this world and the Black and White, and I'm very much on this side of the Black and White. But, if my brothers can make their victims into something in-between, some amalgamation of human and supernatural.. then maybe you could be the same."
"The same?" Liam flinched.
"Not the same," Webby said hurreidly. "I'm not going to... be in your head, or anything. I'm not going to control you."
"Why not?" Liam watched the goddess for a moment, watched a few of her hands fiddle with the gray lace of her dress, watched her nervously click her... fangs?... mandibles? "How do I know you're not one of them? Am I supposed to just take your word for it?"
She paused at that, and wilted a little. "I mean... yeah, I was kind of hoping you would..."
After a moment, she grinned. "Alright, hear me out. Giving a victim knowledge is the opposite of what my brothers would do. They... prey on people by keeping them in the dark. If their victims don't know they're being toyed with... or don't know how to do anything about it... then no one can stop them."
She pointed, suddenly, into the darkness. A small whoosh, and something ignited- a candle, in an old-fashioned holder, on a desk littered with papers and books and broken quills.
"I know you want answers about the world," she continued, "And I want to give you those answers. Like my brothers, I only have so much power. But unlike them, I can't use all of it. I... won't use all of it." She leaned closer, each beady eye fixed on Liam. "I need someone else, in this physical realm, to do what I can't. Please. Its not just for your classmates, it's for everyone after... and before. Do you know how many people they've killed just from these games? Hundreds. And they'll keep going, and people will forget, because this town is so, so cursed, and... Look, if there's any chance to save anyone, even a tiny bit of hope, I think we have to do something. It's not like I picked you at random, man. It's not every day that a mind like yours comes along. You might be their last chance. What do you say?"
"I mean, I was going to help you anyway. I've never exactly run across an underground secret library with a sidequest before. But when you put it like that?" Liam grinned. "Yeah. Let's save the world."
With Webby's help, he learns to decode the Waylons' writings, and begins sifting through their works, their spells, their studies of the dark forces of Hatchetfield. He learns of the dark arts they used, but Webby also teaches him ways to counteract these spells, secrets to harness the powers of truth and goodness and wisdom.
Holiday tracks him down eventually, because although no one knows about his time in the Waylon's library, his peers see him coming and going from the school library all the time, and everybody talks about everything in high school.
Liam thought he was prepared to meet the five champions. He was so very wrong.
When Holiday called him into her office, Liam first saw a girl with blue hair and enough studded jewelry to rival a Hot Topic clutching the hands of a redhead girl who, as best he could guess, was having some kind of panic attack. An obnoxiously blond, obnoxiously pink-clad cheerleader scrunched her nose like 'really?', and that one pathetic basketball player curled his lip.
"Liam-?"
Oh. Shit.
He swallowed the lump in his throat that definitely was not there before, and painted on a smile. "Hi, Wyatt... Hi, everyone. Miss Holiday's, um, told me a bit about you guys."
Next time he saw Webby, he told himself, he would ask her how she possibly expected him to deal with the scene band geek, the walking panic attack, two egocentric jerks who hated him on sight, and his ex-boyfriend.
i'm actually so excited to be working on the last (ish) hatchetfield card
of course, that excitement is making me go ooh! I should add little nods to the other cards! little easter eggs! tiny details that aren't super relevant and probably won't be that noticeable and that only I will ever know about! this sounds like a fantastic use of my time!
all this to say, i think the Librarian card will probablyyyy be finished sometime in 2027
ok so liam is being a pain in the butt and i feel bad for not posting in a bit so i think i'm just going to start posting a few of the random sketches of ocs and stuff I've been doodling during class
Meet Benjamin Jagerman, a junior at Hatchetfield High, and the most mediocre player on the basketball team.
Not that anyone would ever say it to his face. No one wants to hear a spluttered "You see this jacket? Yeah- uh, it was my BROTHER'S" or "My brother would totally smite you if he was still here" for the thousandth time.
Deep down, he knows that he doesn't have the same iron fist on the school that Max did. After all those years, his brother was still right- people only tolerate him because he's pathetic. A wimp. A wannabe Max, swaggering around like someone a head taller and with twice the sports prowess. No one has the guts to talk about it to his face, but even if he's not at the top of the HFHS food chain, he's certainly not at the bottom. He's safe where he is, from his peers at least.
But not from the eyes that flicker from every shadow, or from the feeling of tentacles writhing under his skin. Or from the snide, sinister, all-too-familiar voice of the Hunter-turned-Messenger that echoes in his dreams.
"You've been avoiding me, f*cknugget."
Ben is a part of my untitled hatchetfield fanfic, where every so many years the lords in black each choose a sort of "champion" and pit them against each other for entertainent. Ben's patron is Wiggly, and Wiggly always sends the ghost of his puppet's relative or friend to be his mouthpiece in these games, to whisper his plans in his puppet's ear. In this case, he had readily available one brutally murdered, emotionally stunted, and furious Max Jagerman. It was too good an opportunity to miss.
But this time, Wiggly knows he's not just playing aginst his brothers. There are other forces at work in this timeline, forces that would put a stop to their games. And he can't have that.
Ben sometimes wonders if in another life, things would have healed. It would have taken time, of course, as trauma always does. But maybe the nightmares would have stayed gone, and he could have moved far away from hatchetfield. He could have found somewhere to start over, somewhere there were no shoes to fill. He could almost imagine it- the fresh air, and the freedom, and the peace.
Obey me... choose me... and I'll let your little Maxie-poo go...
But that wasn't an option. If Max was still alive-ish, if it really was him there every night, writhing in pain, spitting words that flickered with whispery green undertones, then was still hope, in a twisted sort of way. Maybe whatever demon was controlling Max was telling the truth. If Ben really could get his brother back... maybe, for the first time, Max would be proud of him.
And he would do anything to make Max proud. Anything.
But... if you're a rotten little Benjy...
The first time Ben was sent to Holiday's office, he didn't have much to go off of besides a vague feeling of unease Max had given him the night before, and the fact that four other names were called along with his. Turned out, they belonged to a band geek, a stoner, a weirdo, and a cheerleader. Huh. He'd been in worse company before.
Holiday folded her hands on her desk, looking each of the students up and down. Was he imagining it, or did she pause looking at him? Was that concern that flitted across her face? Suspicion? What does she know?
...you're going to choke and f*cking die on the blood of your fwendy-wend.
"This isn't like all the other times. We don't have to choose who lives and dies. We don't have to choose a winner," said Holiday.
But... the only way Max goes free is if I win.
"There's someone I'd like you all to meet," she said, gesturing to the door.
They're going to kill Max. Again.
Choose well, Benjy-wenjy...
The office door creaked open. A sixth student stepped into the room, clearing his throat.
finally actually started embroidering the jean jacket i thrifted and it's bringing me so much joy
supposed to be a fritillary butterfly because those are the pollinators of violets and i'm putting various flowers all over it and i'm literally so so excited
i honestly don't know if it would trigger someone with trypohobia/entomophobia but I don't want to accidentally hurt anyone
Meet Mackenzie Finlay, a junior at Hatchetfield High, and the most... uh... competitive person on the cheer team.
She prides herself on being... well, not liked exactly, but... feared. Respected. Worshipped. Adored. Hatchetfield High royalty.
Of course, not all her subjects are loyal ones- namely, the geeks, the lowlives, the losers of Hatchetfield High. No matter; hate is simply awe warped into a different kind of passion, and Mackenzie can work with that.
It hasn't exactly been easy, defending her spot in the most powerful clique in HFHS. Ever since that stupid car accident her sophomore year by the Witchwood, and then people spreading rumors about her "psychotic break" a few months later, she's had to claw her way back up into her old social circles. Thankfully, things had started to break down without her. It took some doing- tapping on a few shoulders, whispering in a few ears, reminding her peers that she had made them great- but in the end things were back to normal at Hatchetfield High.
Even though Mackenzie herself didn't believe it. Even if there's a deep, primal something inside her that surely wasn't there before the car crash, something that she thought (prayed) would disappear along with Caitlyn. Something that gnaws and gnaws and gnaws, fiercer by the day. Something decidedly not normal.
Mackenzie is a part of my untitled Hatchetfield fanfic, where every so many years the lords in black each choose a sort of "champion" and pit them against each ohter for entertainment. Mackenzie's patron is Nibbly, and he heightens her physical strength and flexibility, but also manifests her ambition as a physical hunger, one that can only be satisfied by human flesh.
It was Nibbly's Sniggles that caused her to swerve off the road sophomore year, cackling promises of strength and glory and a price to be paid. After that, she tried to fight off the hunger pangs. She really did. But a person can only take so many days of growling stomachs, so many sleepless nights of organs screaming, so many weeks and months of single-minded, reeling, throbbing hunger.
Mackenzie did what anyone would do. She snapped.
She came to in the Witchwood, not far from where her car had run off the road. A shovel in one hand, a hole in the ground at her feet, a corpse resting on the bottom. It took her a second to recognize who it was, to see past the blood, the torn clothes, matted hair, and chunks of flesh ripped off. Caitlyn. A girl on the cheer team, someone who always seemed to get the spotlight over Mackenzie. She was annoying, but not annoying enough to warrant... this.
Mackenzie was full for the first time in months. And more terrified than ever.
The first time the school counselor called Mackenzie to the office her junior year, she panicked initially. Did someone find out about the *incident*? Was she going to juvie? What would this do to her reputation??
And the answer was... complicated? Since when were school counselors chill with murder? And with a bunch of losers? And... "Look, Holiday, if you're so damn obsessed with libraries, just talk to the dweeb that volunteers there... whats-his-face, uh... Woodward?"
Holiday's head snapped up, mouth hanging agape, eyes filled with something Mackenzie couldn't quite place. "You know The Librarian?"
Was that... hope?
(also college is kicking my butt and i dont feel like making a fancy interpretation of the card like for the others. here: ambition/hunger can be good, can be bad. there ya go. i may or may not have named after a certain king of scots, so...)
(Also also shes 100% related to Linda Monroe somehow... distant niece maybe idk)
Meet Ruby Hallow Barnes, a junior at Hatchetfield High School, and one of the top-performing members of the school Chess Club.
The first thing people notice when they meet Ruby are her eyes, and their strange intensity. Weird. Piercing. Accusatory. Fearful. Anicipatory? Glancing at a door full seconds before a person enters, flickering to a chess piece her opponent won't move for another minute, wincing when in close proximity with some people but not others. I know how you will die, they seem to whisper, and I'm not telling.
It hasn't exactly aided her in making friends.
Ruby knows that Hatchetfield has a sort of strangeness to it, mysteries that go beyond the grinning golden spirit that lends her glimpses of cause-and-effect threads during chess matches, or the quiet redheaded angel that once gave her a jean jacket. Frankly, any energy that she would have expended investigating is taken up by being bumped from timeline to timeline like a volleyball, and watching various iterations of ways that she and Cassidy will die.
The psychiatrist Ruby's parents made her see couldn't figure out what was wrong with her, but she did suggest that Ruby find something that helps her stay grounded, like a craft or hobby. Hence, the embroidery. The planning, the rhythm, and the feeling of the real thread and fabric against her skin help distract her from the threads of Time tangling around her, and the omnipresent leering of the golden spirit.
And it works!
... some of the time.
Ruby is a part of my untitled Hatchetfield fanfic, where every so many years the lords in black each choose a sort of "champion" and pit them against each other for entertainment. Ruby's patron is Tinky, who selected her for her intellect (and for her ancestry). He started showing her different threads of time during chess matches, to help her see what an opponent may do and how to anticipate it. Then, he started shifting her from timeline to timeline, from one alternate universe to another, lingering especially on all the ways Cassidy (and three other strangers, but she doesn't want to think about that) will die. Whenever Ruby feels time shifting around her, she knows the only thing she can do is grit her teeth and wait out whatever torture Tinky has in mind. She knows Cassidy wants to help her, but between planning for the Roller-Rama (which was a terrible idea, by the way) and dealing with her own spirit/ghost thing, Cassidy is just as exhausted as Ruby is.
But- wait. Hold on. Who is this new counselor? The jean jacket angel? Why did she suddenly return after so many years? Why is she uniting the champions? Ruby knows, she knows that the Piper, Lab Rat, Needleworker, Queen Bee, and Player find each other on their own in every timeline.
So what is the angel (the... Witch?) doing here? Who is this Librarian character she wants them all to meet?
And, most importantly, why couldn't she see this timeline before?
Oh goddd the state of the songbird siblings in TGWDLM. It feels to me like a timeline where she and Paul have cut ties for good. They had one of their many regrettable fights, where Olive walked out and immediately wished she could take it all back, every hurtful thing done and said.
But Paul's made up his mind already. He's written her off. He doesn't see his nephew and doesn't care to, because it's not his problem. And Olive knows this, that he won't look after Richie (but sure, he'll babysit his coworker's child). Finds out on the day of the apotheosis that Paul's had her number blocked for a long time now. So she can't even reach out to her baby brother, tell him you can hate me all you want, but we need to keep each other safe right now, please. It can't end like this.
Paul's whole day is focused on the CCRP gang, on Emma, on taking shelter at Hidgens' place and then braving the journey with Bill to get Alice. He doesn't think of her, not once.
Only when the grenade goes off-- in that split second where his life flashes in slow-mo-- does that inner child rear his head. And he remembers the feeling of being so little, and being with Olive in one of her rare moments of love and security. Knowing she was there, and she'd look out for him.
Then coming back into his adult self and remembering their parents are long gone-- but that Olive is still out there somewhere. Maybe even still alive. Paul already pulled the grenade, so that doesn't matter. The other important things in his life, like Bill and Emma, take precedence again.
But there was that small little moment. After the pin, but before the End, where a young boy thought: I need my big sister.
Meet Wyatt Smith, a junior at Hatchetfield High School, and member of the Smoke Club. No one really knows much about him- his peers tend to get weirded out from his blank stares and unintelligible mumbles.
Of course, he wasn't always an antisocial ball of anxiety. He had a pretty normal early childhood, at least as normal as one could have with four siblings constantly bickering and getting into mischief.
When he was four, he went to Watcher World for the day with his family, but wandered off while his parents were wrangling his siblings. They reacted like any reasonable parents would (complete and utter panic) and scoured the park, but the security guards forced them out at the end of the day. His parents fought their way into the park as soon as they could the next morning, and found Wyatt sitting quietly by the front gates. Through their flurry of hugs, ushering him into the car, and peppering him with questions, he said nothing, and would not meet their gaze.
Wyatt did not have the words for it then, but during that night wandering Watcher World, Blinky pried into his mind and drew back the "curtain" obscuring the Black and White from the physical world. Wyatt saw the Sniggles, their train to Snoozle Town, and all of the mechanisms they used to influence the physical world.
Then, after hours of eldritch revelations, when Wyatt was exhausted and shivering and delirious, and when clouds blotted out the stars from the sky, Blinky revealed his true form to the boy.
And really, what human mind could be equipped to handle all of that?
Wyatt is a part of my untitled Hatchetfield fanfic, where every so many years the lords in black each choose a sort of "champion", and pit them against each other for entertainment. Wyatt's patron is Blinky, who gives him the ability to see how the forces of the black and white manifest in the real world. This is more often than not closer to a curse than a blessing, and Wyatt joined the Smoke Club in a sort of desperate attempt to cope with the eldritch revelations he sees on a daily basis.
He's relatively certain that something is wrong with this new school counselor. Maybe this is one of his parents' elaborate schemes to try to get him to go to therapy. Maybe Holiday is just trying to get him locked up in an asylum somewhere. Either way, he is not going to open up. He can't afford to do that again, not after that bookworm dumped him.
Besides, none of the others in this intervention would believe him anyway.
