OOC: A change of plans
So, every now and then, we write ourselves into a corner. And we have the choice to either write our way out, or to give up our stories completely. Sometimes an idea has so much potential, but you end up taking it in the wrong direction. If you are me, this happens more often than not because I find myself constantly inspired by so many things, I think I tend to go overboard. And the fire burns out long before the story is done. I've played around with the characterization some, I even embarked on a twist to Lauren's storyline. These things don't always work out as we plan though, and I think when that happens, when you've hit the proverbial wall, it's time to start over from scratch. Thus, I have spent the last few weeks really thinking about my character and in a sense, completely re-writing her story. There are certain elements to her that remain the same. But overall, she is a whole new version. Here is her new back story, in case anyone reading her prompts from here on out becomes thoroughly confused. It's mostly tl;dr, so I'll forgive you for skipping over it. But to clear up any possible confusion, I have changed her story entirely.
Uncle Remus said; "You can't run from trouble, there ain't no place that far."
Lauren Santini knows this much to be true.
Born on November 28th, 1986 to Vincent and Maria Santini in Baltimore, Maryland, she had a rocky start from the beginning. Her father worked in construction, and her mother was a nurse. She had a four years older sister, Penelope, known as Penny, and her younger brother, Daniel, wouldn't be born until she was 12. The family lived in Baltimore most of her life, until Maria left when Daniel was only 3. She never bothered to say good-bye to her family, she just left one day. Vincent never said as much to his children, but in the weeks leading up to Maria's departure, she had complained often about the dreams she still had and how having three children kept her from becoming anything she'd hoped to. Not content to spend the rest of her life as an RN, with a husband who had only worked his way up to foreman, she left in search of the greener grass. They never heard from her again.
At the time, Lauren was only 15, and Penelope had just turned 19. The effect of Maria's disappearance caused a deep depression in her eldest, and she eventually dropped out of community college and began drinking heavily in between shifts waitressing. For his part, Vincent began working overtime and even picking up odd house projects in their neighborhood. He said it was to make up for the loss of his wife's income, but Lauren suspected it was because of his own grief, without the luxury of running from it the way that Penny did. Daniel was too young to understand what was going on, and it was up to Lauren to pick him up from daycare on her way home from school, fix dinner, and take care of him until her father got home late each evening.
After almost a year of this sad routine, Vincent decided to move what was left of his family to his hometown of Winter Falls, a small town on the southern Coastal top of Maine. They moved into a large house with his mother, Annette who had been widowed just a few years earlier by a mysterious illness that was attributed to natural causes. Annette was grateful for the company, and took immediate charge of four year old Daniel who had already begun to forget his mother.
The town of Winter Falls had a long, strange history that included housing refugees from the witchcraft hysteria of the 1600's and a near wipe out of the population due to a smallpox infection brought about by some French fur trapping settlers wanting to turn the town into a port. It became known as Cape Croix for a brief period of time before it was reclaimed by its original inhabitants who restored its name and its ownership when an unknown and unseen ailment fell the small group of French settlers. Sometime in the late 1800's, the population of the town disappeared entirely. A few inland inhabitants came to the town after a particularly long and bitter winter to vacation on the beaches and found the town completely empty. No one ever discovered what happened to the lost people of Winter Falls.
Since then, the town has been re-inhabited slowly by various people from all over Maine and the rest of New England. A smaller shipping port, most of its money is made from the shipping industry with smaller tourist and fishing industries. During the summer and part of the Fall, people come from all over Maine and states in close proximity to vacation on the idyllic beaches and to eat some of the freshest seafood in the Atlantic. In the winter, it becomes a desolate place where only the locals still dare to venture. And it is in these cruel winters that the strange deaths occur. Every twenty-five years, someone dies the mysterious death, as it is called. The bodies had sometimes been witnessed coming up from the bottom of the sea. But the victims hadn't drowned. Lauren's grandfather, Lucius, was the most recent victim.
Until Penelope died.
The family had been living in Winter Falls for over a year when one day Daniel turned to Penelope and told her she was going to die. Annette, visibly shaken, chastised Daniel for saying such a thing, and Penny, though disturbed, shook it off and went on about her job at the Dusk Cafe. Two weeks later, her body was found on the shore. There were no marks, no clues, nothing. It seemed as if she had just dropped dead where she stood during a walk on the beach. The doctors could come up with nothing, no diagnosis. Lauren's grief stricken father refused to send her to a larger city for an autopsy. For the sake of the two children he had left, he didn't want to prolong the process of burying his firstborn. The local doctor listed the cause of death as heart failure. But all around town, they whispered. Mysterious Death.
Not long after they buried Penelope, Lauren was at the train station, heading on a trip back to Baltimore to attend a memorial service that some of Penny's old friends and classmates were holding for her. She never made it on to that train. At the station, she caught a glimpse of her sister who was waiting on a different train out of town. Confronting the strange apparition, she was shocked and numbed to realize the thing wearing her sister's skin was not her sister at all. It had no memory of her. Confused, she didn't fight at first as Penny began dragging her off toward the woods that bordered the train tracks. When Lauren realized that it meant to kill her, she began to fight back with a strength she didn't know she possessed. Penelope, who had been killed by a demon whose human body had grown too old and taken over hers, began taunting her. Using Penny's memories, and even some of Lauren's own. When Lauren realized there was nothing of her sister left inside her old body except for memories, she found the will to kill the thing that had taken over her sister, before it killed her.
Just when she found herself on the ground, deep within a layer of snow, feeling her last breaths slip away, she managed to throw the demon from her. It landed on the train tracks and was decapitated by the oncoming train. There were screams from the people standing at the station who saw the frail body of a woman land on the tracks. But once the train came to a complete stop, there was no body to be found, not even a single human trace. Lauren, who had been hit by a spray of the demon's blood, hung back in the shadows of the trees until the employees were able to convince the waiting passengers that it must have just been a trick of light, bouncing off the snow. Once the train had left again, and the employees were back in the warmth of the station, Lauren came out from the woods. She spent an hour studying the tracks but found nothing but a thin layer of obsidian power that sparkled from certain angles.
She crept into the bathroom of the train station and cleaned the blood off of her, stealing a coat from a sleeping passenger waiting for the next train to cover up the rest of it. She never told anyone what happened that day.
But she suddenly found herself remembering things she'd never witnessed. Her memory stretched back over four hundred years, and continued to expand with each person she knew or met. Another thing she never spoke of. Though she now knew the secrets of Winter Falls, and its long thread of death.
At 18, she left for Loyola University to study nursing herself, in the footsteps of her mother. But in New Orleans, she only found more demons and monsters. And not only that, she found that it was up to her to kill them. After two years, she took what was supposed to be a semester off to return to Winter Falls. Daniel was having the same terrible premonition, one that weakened him for days on end. Yet all of his prescience was related solely to the Mysterious Death. Afraid that yet another demon was after her family, she went back to find it. She took a job at the Dusk Cafe where Penny had worked, and began searching for the entity she believed to be there. Instead, it found her.
The demon that had taken over her sister came from a cult of demons that originated from Winter Falls. It had been a century since they'd all dispersed from the towns' shores. And every century, they had to return to the Devil's Cave to perform a ritual that was over a thousand years old, allowing them to continue stealing lives and displacing souls. They would swim out to an underwater cave, perform the ancient rites, and then return to the shore. Lauren witnessed their return one night, and knew the end of Winter Falls was truly near, as Daniel had told Annette in his delirious state.
The summer after Lauren left Winter Falls for the last time, it was discovered that the town had again disappeared. Only she knew that she was the sole survivor of the demon cult's mass possession of the town, and the subsequent carnage. Her little brother, Daniel, had not been possessed. But he had died all the same. A haunting vision came to him and when he was done speaking of it, he slipped into an unconsciousness he never woke from. She buried him in an old cemetery next to some of their ancestors, beside a little girl who had been said to be possessed by the devil and given his foresight. She'd been drowned as a witch's test during the mass hysteria of the 1600's. The rest of the town was empty, save for a sparkling black layer of sand.
Instead of going back to school, Lauren used the last of her money to go to California in search of her mother. Daniel's last words still haunted her, along with all the memories she continued to gain, every single step of the way. Instead, she ended up with an old friend.
But so far, she's still running. There really is no place that far away.
Note: Some ideas contained within are inspired by Stephen King, and Kenneth J. Harvey's "The Town That Forgot How To Breathe". The concepts were not copied, but merely drawn from, so any likeness is meant to be very loose, in a lot of the ways original characters based on various fandoms take inspiration from said fandoms. Though not directly spelled out, Lauren is also from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, being a vampire Slayer, and obviously that concept is not at all mine. Nor is her Supernatural-type twist.
Uncle Remus said; "You can't run from trouble, there ain't no place that far."
Lauren Santini knows this much to be true.
Born on November 28th, 1986 to Vincent and Maria Santini in Baltimore, Maryland, she had a rocky start from the beginning. Her father worked in construction, and her mother was a nurse. She had a four years older sister, Penelope, known as Penny, and her younger brother, Daniel, wouldn't be born until she was 12. The family lived in Baltimore most of her life, until Maria left when Daniel was only 3. She never bothered to say good-bye to her family, she just left one day. Vincent never said as much to his children, but in the weeks leading up to Maria's departure, she had complained often about the dreams she still had and how having three children kept her from becoming anything she'd hoped to. Not content to spend the rest of her life as an RN, with a husband who had only worked his way up to foreman, she left in search of the greener grass. They never heard from her again.
At the time, Lauren was only 15, and Penelope had just turned 19. The effect of Maria's disappearance caused a deep depression in her eldest, and she eventually dropped out of community college and began drinking heavily in between shifts waitressing. For his part, Vincent began working overtime and even picking up odd house projects in their neighborhood. He said it was to make up for the loss of his wife's income, but Lauren suspected it was because of his own grief, without the luxury of running from it the way that Penny did. Daniel was too young to understand what was going on, and it was up to Lauren to pick him up from daycare on her way home from school, fix dinner, and take care of him until her father got home late each evening.
After almost a year of this sad routine, Vincent decided to move what was left of his family to his hometown of Winter Falls, a small town on the southern Coastal top of Maine. They moved into a large house with his mother, Annette who had been widowed just a few years earlier by a mysterious illness that was attributed to natural causes. Annette was grateful for the company, and took immediate charge of four year old Daniel who had already begun to forget his mother.
The town of Winter Falls had a long, strange history that included housing refugees from the witchcraft hysteria of the 1600's and a near wipe out of the population due to a smallpox infection brought about by some French fur trapping settlers wanting to turn the town into a port. It became known as Cape Croix for a brief period of time before it was reclaimed by its original inhabitants who restored its name and its ownership when an unknown and unseen ailment fell the small group of French settlers. Sometime in the late 1800's, the population of the town disappeared entirely. A few inland inhabitants came to the town after a particularly long and bitter winter to vacation on the beaches and found the town completely empty. No one ever discovered what happened to the lost people of Winter Falls.
Since then, the town has been re-inhabited slowly by various people from all over Maine and the rest of New England. A smaller shipping port, most of its money is made from the shipping industry with smaller tourist and fishing industries. During the summer and part of the Fall, people come from all over Maine and states in close proximity to vacation on the idyllic beaches and to eat some of the freshest seafood in the Atlantic. In the winter, it becomes a desolate place where only the locals still dare to venture. And it is in these cruel winters that the strange deaths occur. Every twenty-five years, someone dies the mysterious death, as it is called. The bodies had sometimes been witnessed coming up from the bottom of the sea. But the victims hadn't drowned. Lauren's grandfather, Lucius, was the most recent victim.
Until Penelope died.
The family had been living in Winter Falls for over a year when one day Daniel turned to Penelope and told her she was going to die. Annette, visibly shaken, chastised Daniel for saying such a thing, and Penny, though disturbed, shook it off and went on about her job at the Dusk Cafe. Two weeks later, her body was found on the shore. There were no marks, no clues, nothing. It seemed as if she had just dropped dead where she stood during a walk on the beach. The doctors could come up with nothing, no diagnosis. Lauren's grief stricken father refused to send her to a larger city for an autopsy. For the sake of the two children he had left, he didn't want to prolong the process of burying his firstborn. The local doctor listed the cause of death as heart failure. But all around town, they whispered. Mysterious Death.
Not long after they buried Penelope, Lauren was at the train station, heading on a trip back to Baltimore to attend a memorial service that some of Penny's old friends and classmates were holding for her. She never made it on to that train. At the station, she caught a glimpse of her sister who was waiting on a different train out of town. Confronting the strange apparition, she was shocked and numbed to realize the thing wearing her sister's skin was not her sister at all. It had no memory of her. Confused, she didn't fight at first as Penny began dragging her off toward the woods that bordered the train tracks. When Lauren realized that it meant to kill her, she began to fight back with a strength she didn't know she possessed. Penelope, who had been killed by a demon whose human body had grown too old and taken over hers, began taunting her. Using Penny's memories, and even some of Lauren's own. When Lauren realized there was nothing of her sister left inside her old body except for memories, she found the will to kill the thing that had taken over her sister, before it killed her.
Just when she found herself on the ground, deep within a layer of snow, feeling her last breaths slip away, she managed to throw the demon from her. It landed on the train tracks and was decapitated by the oncoming train. There were screams from the people standing at the station who saw the frail body of a woman land on the tracks. But once the train came to a complete stop, there was no body to be found, not even a single human trace. Lauren, who had been hit by a spray of the demon's blood, hung back in the shadows of the trees until the employees were able to convince the waiting passengers that it must have just been a trick of light, bouncing off the snow. Once the train had left again, and the employees were back in the warmth of the station, Lauren came out from the woods. She spent an hour studying the tracks but found nothing but a thin layer of obsidian power that sparkled from certain angles.
She crept into the bathroom of the train station and cleaned the blood off of her, stealing a coat from a sleeping passenger waiting for the next train to cover up the rest of it. She never told anyone what happened that day.
But she suddenly found herself remembering things she'd never witnessed. Her memory stretched back over four hundred years, and continued to expand with each person she knew or met. Another thing she never spoke of. Though she now knew the secrets of Winter Falls, and its long thread of death.
At 18, she left for Loyola University to study nursing herself, in the footsteps of her mother. But in New Orleans, she only found more demons and monsters. And not only that, she found that it was up to her to kill them. After two years, she took what was supposed to be a semester off to return to Winter Falls. Daniel was having the same terrible premonition, one that weakened him for days on end. Yet all of his prescience was related solely to the Mysterious Death. Afraid that yet another demon was after her family, she went back to find it. She took a job at the Dusk Cafe where Penny had worked, and began searching for the entity she believed to be there. Instead, it found her.
The demon that had taken over her sister came from a cult of demons that originated from Winter Falls. It had been a century since they'd all dispersed from the towns' shores. And every century, they had to return to the Devil's Cave to perform a ritual that was over a thousand years old, allowing them to continue stealing lives and displacing souls. They would swim out to an underwater cave, perform the ancient rites, and then return to the shore. Lauren witnessed their return one night, and knew the end of Winter Falls was truly near, as Daniel had told Annette in his delirious state.
The summer after Lauren left Winter Falls for the last time, it was discovered that the town had again disappeared. Only she knew that she was the sole survivor of the demon cult's mass possession of the town, and the subsequent carnage. Her little brother, Daniel, had not been possessed. But he had died all the same. A haunting vision came to him and when he was done speaking of it, he slipped into an unconsciousness he never woke from. She buried him in an old cemetery next to some of their ancestors, beside a little girl who had been said to be possessed by the devil and given his foresight. She'd been drowned as a witch's test during the mass hysteria of the 1600's. The rest of the town was empty, save for a sparkling black layer of sand.
Instead of going back to school, Lauren used the last of her money to go to California in search of her mother. Daniel's last words still haunted her, along with all the memories she continued to gain, every single step of the way. Instead, she ended up with an old friend.
But so far, she's still running. There really is no place that far away.
Note: Some ideas contained within are inspired by Stephen King, and Kenneth J. Harvey's "The Town That Forgot How To Breathe". The concepts were not copied, but merely drawn from, so any likeness is meant to be very loose, in a lot of the ways original characters based on various fandoms take inspiration from said fandoms. Though not directly spelled out, Lauren is also from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, being a vampire Slayer, and obviously that concept is not at all mine. Nor is her Supernatural-type twist.