So, the writer in my attic, K Orion Fray, sends out a weekly writing inspiration e-mail, which includes a writing prompt.
A prompt from many weeks ago:
Take a character guide, like the one I’ve attached, and make a character. Don’t spend too much time working on details; just get the basics and worry about kinks later. Then take the city you live in, or a city you are familiar with, and drop them into the middle of it. Have them figure out how to deal with it (especially if you’ve made a character who normally wouldn’t be in your city!), walk around, interact with people…just see what you can do. Sometimes, you could be surprised at what you learn!
This story – well, vignette – is in the same world as
A Scene Description and
A Place Description
A Deletion and
A Conversation
And I used the generator inventrix made me for Addergoole/Fae Apoc, so:
The character is female
5 ft. 5 in. tall.
slim athletic build.
shoulder blades perfectly straight light brown hair.
greengrey eyes.
light skin.
posture is notable in some fashion
Aria strolled down the streets of what passes for a downtown in Burchester, NY. She’d been here less than a month – moved here for work, for a dream job in terms of pay, benefits, duties, co-workers – pretty much everything except location, which just happens to be in the rustiest of rust belt cities, in the coldest of Great Lakes areas, in the armpit of America.
And that was fine, because she didn’t want all that much to do with her family anyway. Go… Orange, or Red, or Slightly Reddish-Orange, or whatever the college colors were around here. Go being in Burchester and not Springfield.
Burchester was weird, though, and she was never quite sure if it was because she was new, or because the city was just weird. Something about it got under your skin.
Like the street art. Someone had put a lot of money into this bus stop, the one shaped like an umbrella, and that was lovely. But somehow, it never seemed to quite look right. Any angle you looked at it, it looked just a little bit off.
Not everything was creepy – except in that city-that-was-past-its-prime way, like these sad flower boxes. Maybe sometime, once, they’d held flowers. Now they held trash. Aria picked up a few pieces and dropped them in the nearby garbage can, trying to ignore the slimy feeling they left of her fingers.
And some things were beautiful. She rounded the corner – she wasn’t even all that sure where she was going – and came across a rose garden, striped across three acres in the most brilliant rainbow of floral beauty she had ever seen.
Aria took in the scent. Maybe Burchester wasn’t all that weird. Maybe she just shouldn’t have moved in in February.
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