[glow=red,2,300]Seven Deadly[/glow]
Have you ever just needed to be bad?
In the Mirror Kingdom, nobody does. Nobody needs to be particulary good, either. The rulers of the realm, the Seven Virtues, have that covered, so all anyone really needs to do is to live simple lives with carefully meted pleasures, have children, and once in a while disappear into the castles of the Virtues and come out looking exactly as they did before, no harm done. Come on now, does that sound suspicious to you? It does to Alexander, who gets a glimpse of the real nature of the Virtues after becoming the sole witness to what is deemed a horrible accident. Alexander must break the rule of the Virtues, and his only allies in his insane battle are the ones the Virtues exiled long ago, the Seven Sins. Not only must he convince the deadly Sins to come to his aid, but when his task escalates into a battle between Virtues, Sins, and all types of Fiends in between, he must learn whether or not he can trust allies who are just as dangerous as his enemies.
Alexander Raines: He was a normal eighteen-year-old with a pretty normal (read: dull) life. Then one day, he went to the library. One day, he saw the fire. Now, he's on the run from the summons of the Virtues, seeking the Sins as the only allies who will listen to him. Funny, sarcastic, and violently determined, Alexander refuses to give up his quest, no matter the family and friends he may lose and the pain he may suffer on the way.
Simone: Beautiful, strange, and enigmatic, Simone meets Alexander when they're both strangers on a train, both running from something terrible. Pursued by a hideous creature, longing for adventure, Simone yearns to break away from the mundane life imposed by the Virtues. As their paths cross, Alexander learns more about her than he'd ever thought or dreamed.
Astrid Alias: A curly-haired brunette, blue-eyed and packing pistols in every spare pocket of her trenchcoat, Astrid is Gluttony’s left-hand girl—a streetwise, hard-as-nails femme fatale in his gang. Astrid doesn’t take anything from anyone, not even Gluttony, whom she tolerates with admitted fondness. She likes power, she likes when she has power, but she uses it to have fun and, occasionally, get the right thing done.
[the Sins get less and less human-looking the further up the list they get. Pride's the worst, Lust is the most human.]
Pride: The most dangerous of the Seven Sins. Beautiful and vain, powerful and sadistic, she is the Sin most likely to stab you in the back, then twist the knife.
Envy: Looks like a child, (albeit with green hair, green eyes and blue lips), is more than centuries old, and is incredibly creepy. Not to mention that lifelong grudge she's got against a certain one of the Virtues. Or those claws.
Wrath: Wrath hasn't been seen around the Mirror Kingdom for a while. Being locked in Pride's dungeon can do that to you. If you're Wrath, it can also make you ticked off to the point of more instability than you already had. He's back, and he's not pleased.
Sloth: Sloth looks pretty dull. She is. She looks kind of asleep at the moment. She probably is. But it isn't recommended you wake her up. She's not the fourth most powerful Sin for nothing, you know.
Greed: Greed in human form isn't pretty. Even with all that gold (even his eyes). Those are dragon's scales on his palms and he'll rip your jewels off as well as ask for them nicely. He may say hello, but...oh, was that a shiny object? Eccentric, ADHD, obsessive and sharp-toothed as this human form may be, it's his other form you've really got to watch out for.
Gluttony: Gluttony doesn't actually eat that much, so watch where you go with those jokes. He drinks instead. It's the new millennium, after all, and he's quite the coinosseur, didn't you know? And the fedora? He never takes it off. Or the trenchcoat. He's always dreamed of running an underground crime mob, except with bottled alcohol instead of money.
Lust: Lust could (and probably did) write the book on tall, dark, and handsome. He's the quintessential ladies' man (not to say his tastes stop there, he's very into equal opportunity). He may look good, but he's packing quite a punch if need be. That he looks so human is just an advantage. He's also pretty smart. He knows, after all, that he's been created for lust--not love--and he doesn't set his sights on anything higher.
Kindness: Have you ever heard the saying ‘killed you with kindness’? Yeah. Kindness rules the city Alexander lives in, and she is the first to recognize Alexander as a witness to the fire. Few people have ever seen her face, and Alexander certainly doesn't wish to, but he'll end up staring into her violent violet eyes before his journey's done.
Humility: Humility, the counterpart to Pride and the leader of the Virtues, is a being made completely of silver heat and hatred. Humility looks like an angel, in form, with a sword made of poisonous lead. In what passes for Humility’s human form, he has golden hair, silver skin and shining silver eyes. He is the most powerful Virtue, and the most cruel.
Patience: Patience is the most gruesome in appearance of the Virtues. She is a huge, bloated pale beast, with empty eyes and a mindless sharp-toothed smile.
Diligence: Diligence is a robot, a clockwork cyborg monstrosity much like the ones the other Sins create in place of people to serve as their spies in the cities. Diligence has no feelings, just mindless, tireless hard work and destruction.
Liberality: The counterpart to Greed, ‘Libby’ Liberality hasn't been seen for a while. Huh. That's strange. That's very strange. Maybe Patience knows something about her disappearance, but who wants to ask?
Abstinence: The counterpart to Gluttony, Abstinence is, at least outwardly, beautiful. When her human glamour is stripped away, though, she becomes an emaciated skeleton, gaunt-eyed and hideous.
Charity: Charity, the Virtue to rival Lust, had frequent run-ins with the Sins throughout the years, and hasn't been seen for a while. Perhaps she's biding her time. Perhaps something worse is going on behind the scenes.
Technofiends: Technofiends are the reflections of technology – the most common fiends found in cities. Usually summoned unconsciously, Technofiends are not particularly dangerous unless they are constructed by a sorcerer or another magic-user. The only really inimical Technofiends are the radioactive ones and the Leeches, the ones that tend to group around large power sources such as Diligence. Leeches are blind, only able to sense energy, and resemble long, thick power cords with rows of hooked teeth.
Bloodfiends: Bloodfiends are created from the reflections of living humans. They can be unconsciously or consciously summoned. Consciously, they are summoned by human blood. Most magic-users choose not to summon Bloodfiends by human sacrifices, because sacrificing the whole human to the fiend would provide the fiend with emotions, making them stronger but near impossible to control. Rather, most summoners use Bloodfiends as mindless zombies to do their bidding. Bloodfiends who are unconsciously summoned usually come from just the reflections of humans, or are created after long and bloody wars. They are mostly weak, incomplete reflections and die out or are dragged back into the beyond. They are frightening, but very easily defeated.
Shades: Shades are incomplete reflections of random objects. The Realm is rife with Shades of all things that have crossed over from our world. Most Shades are easily banished or even ignored. Some can be unsettling, but they are rarely if ever hostile.
Rawfiends: Rawfiends are the most dangerous and most powerful fiends. They are born from the raw emotions of humans, and occasionally from sacrificed humans or the emotions of a mass slaughter of humans, but they cannot be unconsciously summoned – only consciously, which gives them another name ‘the Called Ones’. Since they cannot be summoned unconsciously, there are very few Rawfiends in the Realm, because there are few who call them. However, this makes the ones that are called even more dangerous, because Rawfiends that are not called live on the other side of the reflections, feeding off passing scraps and growing stronger and more evil. Fallon, Pride's servant, is a Rawfiend, as are the more powerful henchmen of the Virtues.
Dares taken:From Zylaa:
-Dare: Use some common trope from a genre of your choice, and then hang a lampshade on it.
-Double Bonus: If a character literally hangs a lampshade as the trope occurs.
I swear I didn’t start the fire, but I knew who did.
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I was looking for books. I was just an eighteen-year-old college student trying to pass his courses and live his mundane life. If you compared my life to a cup of tea, it would be dull, boring tea, with maybe a dash of cinnamon, for the sarcastic comments I tried and usually failed to think of, maybe some lemon, for the moments few and far between of teenage angst (we didn’t go for that sort of thing in Regnamira) and some sugar, because I like sugar with my tea.
Then the fire happened, and my tea boiled over.
The newspapers called it a freak accident and most people believed it. There had been few casualties, after all, conveniently enough the old librarian who told people strange things they didn’t always want to hear, things they didn’t understand. He babbled on about government conspiracies, looked a little crazy, and, worst of all, he lived in a place full of books. Books are dangerous, making him a recipe for disaster.
People don’t worry about a little accidental fire, rare as it is nowadays. But you see, East Southside Library was supposed to be fireproof. That librarian wasn’t supposed to be working that day, but somebody had changed his hours. I’d been talking to him minutes before the flames started.
“Mr. Raines,” he said, old hands fluttering around a pile of books, “one day, they’re going to come for me.” He must have known. “Do you enjoy books, Alexander?” His gray hair was matted, messy, sticking up one side. He probably didn’t keep a mirror. He seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t. Mirrors can be shifty things to have around you in our world.
“Very much,” I replied, shifting the stack of research material I held in my hands. Schoolwork had piled up to such an extent I spent most of my afternoons either in the library or at home plastered to a computer screen drinking highly caffeinated substances. It was a normal teenage existence.
“Good,” the librarian said. “Good. Enjoy them. Enjoy them as much as you can. Enjoy everything as much as you can,” he looked with wide eyes around the library. If his eyes had been hands they’d be reaching out to enfold those thousands of books. “Before they take it from you,” he whispered. It was creepy.
What happened next was worse.
The first wave of flames swept through the door before he finished speaking. I stumbled back, dropping the books and gasping in the hot air that tore my screams away. The fire consumed him, that strange old librarian, and the last I saw of him his eyes were closed. Then I got around to the important business of getting the hell out of there. Tripping over books and shouldering past dusty shelves, the heat hungry on my back and licking at my hands, I threw myself from the tiny back window.
And now, I bring quotes from each chapter so far:
Chapter 1: I don't believe in sparkles. After a few weeks, the glitter starts to come off.
Chapter 2: "No, you
fainted," Simone said, one corner of her mouth quirking up. "My hero."
Chapter 3: If Simone was the ashes, the coals still glittering faintly with blue and violet lights, this man was the flame. I thought of moths and candles.
Chapter 4: "Mmmfghrblh," I mumbled, flawlessly pronouncing ten consecutive consonants.
Chapter 5: As I let go of his hand I got the sudden, unsettling feeling that
deliveryman was some sort of code for
well-trained assassin.
Chapter 6: "Hey, Salvador, those bushes weren't there the last time I was here. Are you investing in decorative shrubbery now?"
Chapter 7: If this were a novel, this would be where I had some revelation concerning him, but I didn't. I'd barely known him twenty-four hours.
Chapter 8: It was a perfectly happy existence. It was a chilling lie. "I don't think you'd like it," I said softly. "When I left, it was pretty - cold."
Chapter 9: It is hard to concentrate on a man when he is wearing a cat.
Chapter 10: If Gluttony was an old bottle of wine with a faded label and an acquired taste, Lust was a buried fire sprinkled with sparks, wrapped in the cover of a paperback romance.
Chapter 11: "What weapons does Gluttony have, other than that pistol he's carrying?" "Um, I'm pretty sure if he tried to sell his liver on the black market, only a weapons dealer would buy it..."
Chapter 12: Why did everyone have to have a tragic backstory? It's not like we were characters in a book or something.
Chapter 13: "Let's not be hasty." "Says the man holding a gun to a girl's head!"
Chapter 14: Lust brought his arms down and the fire roared from his palms, blazing the first line of Bloodfiends into dust.
Chapter 15: "When all the weakest links are out of the way, who survives?"
-"The strongest," I said. He shook his head.
-"The cruelest," he said seriously.
I have two or three ideas for this one--depending on which of these stories I can keep myself from starting until November, or which ones that dreaded Real Life can keep me from starting.
I have two or three ideas for this one--depending on which of these stories I can keep myself from starting until November, or which ones that dreaded Real Life can keep me from starting.
Here's hoping the story *is* as vivid as the hook. That pesky inner critic is calling out from his box in the back of my closet that it's not--but hey, who listens to those guys anyway? And oh, trust me, I'd be up for a swap! I really want to read your NaNo once it's finished. *pushes contract at you* *hands quill* xD