i believe ive shared this thing once before in one form or another. in case i havent, this is a sorta rework of a poem i wrote maybe five years ago while i was reading "Letters from an American Farmer" by (deep breath) J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur for a class on colonial american literature. the names an obvious giveaway but i still like it.
anyway, i thought itd be fun to the text an accompanying visual element this time around. like i said, the writing is old, so cut me some slack.
Drew ✨the fam✨ the other day. All pics courtesy of Ember's owner @losech 💕 you can find more of my art on @/juminakata_arts on instagram, or my patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=57325490) which is 18+ just for occasional gory art
im bored of editing this and im about to go on a trip and be away from my computer for a bit so im posting it now and if its cringe, than its cringe!
that dogheaded saint part 1: a story from the other school
summary: a young angel-in-training makes a visit to the home of one of her classmates, who himself happens to be one of the school's somewhat infamous monster hunter gang. in her determination to break through the boundaries of teenage social hierarchy, she learns a dangerous secret, and is made to wonder whether being capital-g-Good is enough to be a good friend.
this is within the same world as dear demonic diary but can absolutely be read as a standalone. idk when ill get around to that second part but i know i want to write it so.... we'll see!
Wisps of smoke were sifting through the gap in the supply closet door, and Coach knew well enough what that meant. She opened the door and the girls inside startled, nearly upsetting the censer filling the space with the thick scent of sandalwood.
She took in the scene: four juniors surrounded by assorted sports equipment and spare jerseys, crowded around a channeling board in a circle of tea candles. It wasn't one of those cheap mass-produced boards with the characters only printed onto some varnished slab of plywood either. If she were to guess, Coach would peg it as belonging to one of their parents.
"Girls, we talked about this," she sighed. "No séances on school grounds."
One of the girls, a blonde wearing what appeared to be an homage to a Victorian mourning dress complete with black veil, began to whimper and the others flocked to her side with crystal pendants all a-jingling to comfort her.
"Have a heart, miss, her boyfriend just died."
The begrieved wailed, "Danny!"
"Shaunee, sweetie, we've been over this. Daniel isn't dead. He just changed schools."
"Same difference," a witchlet with a severe purple smokey eye muttered under her breath.
"He hasn't answered any of my texts in weeks," Shaunee sobbed, eyeliner already streaming down her face. "Something must have happened to him. I'm a quarter banshee, I know about this stuff!"
Coach repressed the urge to roll her eyes. "Okay, everybody out. And put out those damn candles, that's a fire hazard. This is your final warning, ladies. If I catch any one of you using magic unsupervised one more time, it's a week's suspension for all of you."
The young witches cried out their collective complaints.
"And I'm confiscating that board, too."
"Miss, no! My mom'll kill me!"
Called it. “Well luckily if she does I’ll have this handy board so I can make sure you're attending detention from beyond the grave."
"Detention?!"
"Yes, detention. You're lucky I'm not sending you straight to the principal's office." A collective shudder went through the group at the thought, Coach included. She didn't prefer to subject anyone to that, no matter how deserving. "You brought an unauthorized magical object into school and now my basketballs smell like a Bath and Body Works."
A couple of the girls smirked at one another with badly repressed laughter. "Smelly balls."
"What's that?" asked Coach. "You want to run ten laps?"
"We're not even in class right now!"
"Twenty laps it is. Hop to it."
Another collective groan as they trudged out to the track. Coach gathered up the channeling board, the candles, the incense, and took them to her office. She unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk and tossed the lot in, to rest with the confiscated bounty of semesters past. Firecrackers, vape pens, a compact grappling hook launcher, several softly glowing amulets of various ornate designs, a petrified severed lamb's head with taut leathery skin and haunting glass eyes that followed you around the room, and a couple accumulated grams of weed. And now this, of course.
Certainly, Coach thought, she had gotten into her fair share of trouble at that age, but back in those days she would have never dared talk back to a teacher like that. This generation was a new breed. Or maybe she was just going too soft on them.
The lamb's head distended its ragged jaw and emitted a low gurgling string of Old Arabic.
Wherever there are special young people, there will be special schools designed to aid their journey. There are schools for monsters and mut
Summary: A teenage demon recounts her hectic day at St. Strange's, a self-proclaimed school of second chances for paranormal flunkies and troublemakers like herself, as well as her unlikely best friend, a morally conflicted angel who is struggling with her ideals as well as control over her divine power.
dedicated to two of the greatest loves of my tweenage life: graphic novels stylized as diaries and YA fiction about kids going to special fantasy highschools. final version (for the foreseeable future) with edits, now featuring some small illustrations!
this is a standalone but I'd like to write some more short stories set in this world in the future
[Case file MN-2-091464] Ann Funtown: the crying berserker
Since her birth Ann’s abilities were unparalleled, far exceeding expectations for her series. She was capable of secreting a substance from her tear ducts that, when reacting with oxygen, became a powerful airborne agent that caused anyone within a hundred foot (est.) radius to go into a primal, enraged state. In this “berserker” state, the affected parties would violently and indiscriminately attack one another for the duration of the episode. Mysteriously the girl herself never appeared to suffer any effects of this herself, and those affected never sought to harm her.
It is regretful that attempts at a more detailed analysis never saw fruit. After several unsuccessful attempts to study Ann and her unique power, the director (antecedent) called for a full halt of experiments involving her genetic series, on the basis that the FT facilities couldn’t afford to lose anymore staff. The team assigned to her case instead switched focus towards neutralizing the effect of her abilities, but once were met with complications, making the only effective solution a crude pressure-sealed helmet. With the design approved, Ann was equipped and at last properly integrated into the MN project. For the safety of herself and others, she was made to that helmet every waking hour from ages 2-7, until she proved capable of controlling herself without it. Other than some acute claustrophobia and a lingering anxiety disorder, no ill effects of this practice were observed.
The volatile nature of her powers aside, and barring only a few incidents, from that point on Ann grew swiftly into a mature, highly disciplined young woman with a strong desire to distinguish herself among her peers. It was for that reason that the gradual decline of her performance over her last few semesters was so surprising (though perhaps it shouldn’t have been.)
However it was only after the director (present) proposed a pause in her studies that Ann experienced her first psychotic break, causing her to assault a staff member with wildly uncharacteristic force and viciousness as she demanded to know why he was wearing a mask, why everyone was hiding their faces from her, why they were standing so close. Remarkably, there were no tears at all as she struggled in vain to remove the helmet that wasn’t there.
[Case file MN-8-011262] Simon/Simone Funtown: the twin telepaths.
Simon-and-Simone, born premature and conjoined at the shoulder in the FT Genome Research Facility, trial series 8. Physically fragile but highly psychically proficient with telepathic activity being detected as early as age 3. Despite this, they refused to use their powers to communicate with anyone but each other. In fact, most of the time they seemed to be completely oblivious to anything in the world outside their shared thought space.
It was practically impossible to communicate with Simone-and-Simon, since they frequently swapped their consciousnesses or sometimes appeared to disappear entirely into their heads for extended periods of time, so it was difficult to discern exactly which one you were talking to at any given moment or what, if anything, was getting through to them. For the most part their other siblings didn’t pay much attention to them, possessing an instinctual understanding that they wouldn’t be able to engage with them as they did each other, but their relationship was not without affection.
For reasons that remains a mystery to this day, one early winter morning the normally placid and well-mannered children left their room and walked out into the snow. By the time they were found, one of the pair was already dead from cold and the other not far behind. The remaining twin (heretofore referred to as “Simon-or-Simone”) spoke once, for the first and only time in their life, to refuse the emergency surgery that would separate them from their deceased sibling and save their life, calmly stating that they had already died.
