Cheekyhead (Title Pending)- Vapor's NaNo

[Vapor]

All right, everyone. I’d like you all to meet Cheekyface.

SPOILER: Click to show

Exibit A. The doodle culprit, circa Freshman year

Cheekyface is a reoccurring little sprite… disembodied head thingy made up of about 99% teeth and 100% cheeky, whiny attitude that first started plaguing the edges of my notes around my Freshman year. So named because he is a face. That is cheeky.

Then for a good two years he stayed off my lined notepaper, good riddance. But then this year he started popping up in the margins again, inexplicably, and I started thinking about where on earth the little nosetweaker came from.

And thinking.

And thinking.

And suddenly I had a cast and a vague plot and maybe a plot twist and awwwww, crap, it’s another thing I have to write.

And since I haven’t really written in a good year- okay, maybe two. Two and a half, depending where you’re counting from- I thought maybe, just maybe, it would be easier if I tackled a story not as close to the chest and not-as-set in stone as my usual- like that of Cheekyface and the gang- during an event that would put pressure on me to succeed- like NaNo- maybe I’d actually get things done.

Let’s see, shall we?


Updated Synopsis:

Nadia Hillburger is a mild-mannered Economics major that doesn't drink, party, or date, thanks very much. That is, until her upstairs neighbor decides he can fix all that by summoning a major demon of the occult to 'get that uptight black girl from downstairs to loosen up'.

What she gets instead, one late night in the library, is a loud-mouthed, excessively expressive, crude, floating, and above all, cheeky head popping into existence over her shoulder that only she can see. Declaring itself a bona-fide lust spirit, it promptly follows her every movement for what seems like the sole purpose of making lewd commentary.

It's very annoying.

But when it soon becomes apparent that down-below has just a black-and-white view of the sliding scale of corruption and purity as up-above, and a box of sex toys is enough to merit Nadia a thumbs up on the corruption scale, what is Cheekyhead left to do?

Nadia would prefer if the answer wasn’t, “become an obnoxious roommate”. Especially since as the more time Cheekyhead spends with her, the more human he becomes; and while it seems like a good thing, as it turns out, if an incorporeal personification of a sin starts becoming more human, it messes with balances and things start taking notice...

SPOILER: Click to show

Nadia doesn’t ask for much. For nicknames that make sense, for a few hours of uninterrupted study-time a day, for someone to not look at her oddly and ask ‘why’ when she tells them she’s majoring in Economics.

There are many things she doesn’t actually ask for, but she does occasionally think of, darkly- including, but not limited to, for advertisements to stop telling her she needs to have skin a dozen shades lighter and a waistline four times slimmer, for her friends to lose against her in Scrabble for once, and for the overbearing guy from the floor above her to stop telling her she “needs to loosen up and stop being such a prude”.

Unfortunately, the guy from the floor above her hasn’t gotten that through his skull. All it takes is one too many bottles and a drunken whim to read aloud passages from a suspicious book for a joke (always a great idea) and one late night in the the library, Nadia is stuck with this loud-mouthed, excessively expressive, floating, cheeky head that only she can see. Declaring itself a “bona-fide lust express of a shoulder demon going whoo-whoo, sweetheart!”, it promptly follows her every movement for what seems the sole purpose of making lewd commentary.

It’s very, very annoying.

But soon it becomes apparent that ‘prude’ is but a label, and a label given to her by a perfect stranger. What does a corruptor demon do when it realizes its victim is, in private, extremely comfortable with their sexuality?

Nadia would prefer if the answer wasn’t, “become an obnoxious roommate”.

(Mix together the realization that humanity isn’t a sliding scale of corruption/purity, that down below has just a black and white view of morality as up above does, that humanity is something that even little obnoxious demons can sponge up, that college is, actually, a much better place to be than down below-and finish up with a dollop of the fact that, as it turns out, if an incorporeal personification of a sin starts becoming more human, it messes with balances and things start taking notice… )

(Excessive wordvomit on the story pending)

Note: Just so you know! Actual story is prooobably going to be teen-rated. I seriously doubt I'll actually show anything or discuss specifics, and on this actual thread I'm going to keep it about PG-13, but I will probably bring up the subject of things like sexuality (and gender politics and consent and morality and discrimination and very bad economics jokes and other hard-to-swallow things) in vague terms if nothing else. But in the end I'm aiming to keep this pretty light and more satirical than anything.

[Vapor]

Going to ramble a bit, now, on this story, because I can.

Cheekyhead is just basically made for 2-D animation, his entire mannerisms are so dependent on really exaggerated expressions and distortion (not in the least because he has so little in the ways of body parts to express with-his "flame" goes a long way in showing his mood, flaring up or pulling close to his body depending on his energy, spouting multiple 'flames' or a single rounded one, anging towards or away from the subject of his interest...etc ) which I think is going to be hard to convey in writing. (Or even drawing, I'm hardly an animator.) Other characters are also very tied in to their design (I confess to loving having casts with lots of really different body types, though again, I often feel like I fall through to actually drawing them effectively) and have joined Cheekyface (y'know what he really needs a better name but Cheekyface is such a good label) in taking up the margins of my notes. (I'll need to scan them and my more recent doodles of Cheeky in sometime to post, hm)
That's one of the reasons I've weighed the benefits of doing this story as a script- either for a comic or an animation. Something to think about, certainly, though I hardly know the format for either well enough to write 50,000 words.

Anyway. Here's some ramble brainvomit on the story, most of it copypasted directly from a relevant Skype conversation, with current elaborations added in in bold.

SPOILER: Click to show

And it follows her everywhere and hovers and makes commentary and lewds at her friends until one day it follows her home and it finds out she has “special toys” of some sort. And he's befuddled, and she's like "well, yeah, I have them, they're nothing to be ashamed of, what I present in public- especially to someone like (unfortunate friend) isn't what I do in private for myself and that's all right' and he's really put out, saying 'well, that's my job done, then' and she says 'what, really, that's the extent of your corruption' and he says 'well, yeah, they kind of have high thresholds of decency when they wrote the employee manual' and then '...can I stay anyway?" And it turns out for all of his focus on sexuality he's actually not all that into the objectifying of people or things into sexual objects and has some depth to him

Cheekyface is actually really not that good at manipulating people, which is admittedly a fault for a corruptor spirit… demon… thing. He’s also not actually that knowledgeable about the deed itself. An adventurous couple who are friends with Nadia basically blow his mind beyond the basics. As it turns out, humans are a lot more creative than what those down below give us credit for. But once Cheekyhead is introduced into a world where he’s not shoehorned into thinking on a one-dimensional subject all day (sexsexcorrupthumansyay) he generally gets a lot less focused on the subject and turns his excessive energy onto other subjects.
Like cooking. He cannot get over chemistry and making new things out of other things.
In the end he’s actually pretty nonjudgmental. He’s always ready to make a skeevy comment but when he’s told off he backs down- he’s actually not that enthusiastic about forcing his idealology onto anyone and after a while his energy basically plummets when he makes someone uncomfortable.

He’s still pretty perverted though.


And it's very hard the first month or so, but it gets steadily better, which they later find out is because at first cheekyhead was existing by stealing energy off of her soul/aura- but as time went on, he had enough substance (meaning his personality becomes more humanlike), and begins to both take less aura and begin to give aura back (like how normal humans would interact)

I’ll probably talk more about this later and change things, this entire thing already is probably way too influenced by Bob the skull for me to borrow ideas from the Dresden Files

But as it turns out, if an incorperal personification of a sin starts becoming more human, it messes with balances and /things/ start taking notice...

(also they both get frustrated because no one can see him, so on a long shot, they give out stone-rimmed glasses as party favors (because folklore says you can see spirits through a stone with a hole worn in the center) and it actually works
so suddenly all of her friends can see, but not hear, cheekyhead
and so he's sort of put out and goes back to lewd commentary as usual right in the face of someone who promptly informs them they can lip-read (just really like that one-liner))

((also, in order to find out more about cheekyhead, Lydia asks a friend to research and says she's curious about the mythology behind a character in a book, and when the friend gets curious, Lydia fudges some probable passages describing the character
cheekyhead says 'hey, you're not half bad at that' and encourages her (in his usual overbearing fashion) to write dirty novels that could be great 'with my ideas and your... ability to use a keyboard!")

((when the story ends, they totally do end up publishing a series of dirty novels with cheekyhead credited under a psydonym))

As you can see, Nadia was originally Lydia in thinking-out-processes.
I still don't have an actual antagonist in mind, but I'm thinking on it.
Cheekyhead is not the only personification of lust, but one of many in a sort of beaurocratic corporate-situation.
After a while and as he becomes more 'humanlike', Cheekyhead is more and more able to influence objects and have a more solid presence- cumulating in being able to press keys on a keyboard, giving off heat, and eventually losing some of his incorporeal abilities to pick up thoughts or possess objects that aren't humanlike.

Stay tuned for thoughts on the rest of the characters other than Cheekyhead at a later time

[Vapor]

SPOILER: Click to show

(earliest doodles to more recent- done a few more since then but )
Just mostly getting thoughts down and trying to characterize.
The three at the bottom should give you a pretty rough idea of three of the most prevalent (human) characters: our main character, Nadia, Elena, and Lea (Liv? Lexy? Lani? There are too many names ending with 'a' here). (just realizing it's now a bit creepy that Elena and Lea don't actually have faces. whoops) I've said a bit about Nadia already, but here's more about the other two:

Elena can be the sweetest thing since they first smooshed high-fructose together with corn syrup, but she's also whiplash smart and will cut right to the quick when presented with an argument. She has a long history of enjoying the heck out of debate teams and mock trial events. She also can't cook anything without it having enough spice to kill a small elephant. Her parents pressured her to go into Law, but she's majoring in Philosophy instead, and lord help you if you insinuate it was a mistake.

Lea's one of those people who's levelheaded and cool in a crisis, the one who people instinctively turn to for guidance in a group because she excludes a feeling of casual control. She's the one you call when you need to get a problem carefully pulled apart, talked through, and neatly organized. ...It's all the times when there's not an immediate crisis that she's not so smooth. She hides it well, but in private she constantly second-guesses herself and picks apart her work for mistakes. Once a Journalism major, now a Computer Science major, is now silently worrying whether or not to change her major... again.

Elena and Lea are also pretty much the sweetest couple in existence. Lea soothes Elena's temper out when it's misplaced and makes sure she eats food that doesn't shrivel tastebuds every once in a while. Elena's good at spotting Lea's funks and soothing, cajoling, or knocking her out of them as need be. They cuddle. They tag-team against Nadia in Scrabble. They hog all of the zombie movies from the local rental place. It's adorable. [/spoilers]

[Vapor]

About 2 thousand words behind, ('bout 3 thousand and a half, now, I guess, since its a new day) and now I'm up at 1 am vomiting my guts out and unable to hold down solids.
...Man, between the halloween organization fallout, the Harvest Bowl coverage for the newspaper, and this, this has not been a good four/five days for writing
I'm honestly feeling the urge to drop, even though I know I shouldn't. Bleeeh, because it really isn't turning out the way I wanted. Not nearly lighthearted enough, and all the wonderful little quirks I have pinned down in my head for characters are falling flat on the page.
/rantywhiney

[Vapor]

Hey, Vapor of the future. Here's a good tip: It gets so much easier if you (a.) write out of order, and (b.) ensure that there's another character to interact with Nadia so she's not monologuing. Protips.