Holy Heresy Intro
A questionable holy man, a '90s metalhead ghost and a skeptic gun-for-hire travel across the country fulfilling uncanny missions given to them on an old, pink flip phone.
DETAILS:
🩸 genre — supernatural, horror, urban fantasy, mystery 🩸 themes — (forced) found family, belief/faith, destiny vs. free will, beauty in the monstrous 🩸 status — in progress 🩸 medium — mixed medium 🩸 wordcount — TBD 🩸 warnings — assume everything's in here pls
Story Tag | Playlist
Summary, Characters & More Info under the cut:
SUMMARY: The world is a minutely-designed machine, giant and endless, that runs and breaks and gets fixed and runs again in a relatively smooth routine. Sometimes though, anomalies with no known solutions appear: lingering spirits, stretching doorways to other planes, uncanny creatures that challenge the limits of our beliefs, and everything in between.
To reconcile these anomalies is Father Mateo Santiago's Holy Mission, which he's guided through by an old, pink flip phone he simply can't get rid of. He takes out its battery, smashes it, throws it out of a moving car, drives over it, yet every single time, it materializes back into his possession, sending him tasks and directions he can't help but think are divine. Together with a vengeful ghost he promises to help and a morally-defective hustler he can't shake off, Mateo chases the messenger on the other side in the hopes he could hand in his resignation from a job he's never asked for, though the road is long, challenging, and full of perils he can't even begin to reason into reality.
CHARACTERS:
Mateo Santiago: A priest God never paid. Literally, so he gets by on what he calls "a social experiment in human kindness", though he's not as gullible as he'd like people to think he is. He more often than not sides with the anomalies as opposed to the humans claiming to be terrorized by them, and while he calls his mission holy, the physical and mental sickness he suffers from whenever he ignores the phone drive him more than any faith he may or may not have.
Billie Quinn: Once stuck as a haunting echo, the more she helps with the Holy Flip Phone cases, the more she regains the shape of her former self. She considers her soul being bound to Mateo's bible to be punishment for all the violence she caused in her ghostly rage, and her imprisonment as his partner makes her desperate to find her remains quickly and pass over, though the phone has other plans for her.
Jude Bellamy: Markets himself as the world's best errand boy. You pay him, he does it, whether it's your grocery shopping or icing your enemies. He considers himself a consequence of people's actions and is happy to provide for whichever side, but can't wrap his mind around the supernatural being more than a fairytale until he becomes unexplainably intrigued by Mateo and his weird mission.
Nora/Cora: Wherever there's an anomaly, there's also a friendly face. Whether she's Nora the sweet Waitress, Cora the sharp Librarian, Maura the snarky Tattoo Artist, or any other variation of herself, she's a beacon of safety and aid should she be needed in the Holy Mission of the week. But who is she outside of her given role? Are they sisters? Clones? And where does she go when the case is closed?
Andrey Roman: Trained in the art of hunting Evil since he was a kid as a family affair spanning generations, he now finds himself alone, far away from home, and a member of a hunter group that isn't quite a fan of his origin or superior skills. Once he runs into Mateo & Quinn and learns of their less-than-conventional methods and unlikely partnership, his unshakeable belief that anomalies must be eradicated is pushed to its limits.
The Narrator: Our guide through the tale of Mateo's journey, its context, subtext, morals and lessons. He's the bridge between our viewing pleasure and Mateo's trials, though his initial objectivity and omnipotence slowly dissipate the deeper we go into the story, where his origin grows more and more questionable. Is he simply just a storyteller, or is he part of the tale himself?
MORE INFO:
The Inspiration: Nostalgic and quite sad at Supernatural's wasted potential (it's a great show when it wants to be, don't get me wrong, but we're on tumblr, most of us are bearing the scars of what it was like when it was bad lol), I wanted to come up with something that could scratch that itch the early seasons did, but in a way that would stretch the limits of what that kind of world could offer - and obviously embracing the gay, duh. This whole story started out as an AU of Metanoia, but quickly evolved into its own thing that's slowly consuming me, and I love letting it fry my brain on a daily basis.
The Intentions of Form & Storytelling: This story is meant to be quirky in all the right ways. If parts of it feel better written as a theatre play, that's what they're gonna be. Some bits I'd love to turn into a graphic novel. Some bits could be upside down, mirrored, incomplete, tangled up. This is a playground where I'm not just allowed to experiment with my weirdest, darkest, most reality-stretching thoughts, but I'm encouraged to. My grand vision is to make this into a TV series eventually, where (the universe willing) I could bring back "fillers", 24-episode seasons, longer story arcs spanning several episodes for some of the more complicated cases, and where we can play around with form, style, and do things we've always wanted to do, but couldn't. Sky is the limit here.