Neon’s A Doll A Migraine-less Day, More Or Less - 2019 edition!

[neon_jellyfish]

Well. Florianne sounds delightful.

Importantly: is she going to teach the flowers to sing?

Also, that crystal moss... Sure we can take some? Jewellers might like to see it...

I don't think she's going to teach them to sing, because that isn't her goal. However, if a certain influential person decides that singing flowers could be a great article to ex²port, it might become Florianne's goal after all...

Nah, the crystal moss wouldn't be good for jewelry-making. Even the fully solidified crystals are still rather soft (as in, they scratch easily and they can't hold facets well), if you don't let them age for long enough, you could cut to the soft core, and, most importantly, even old solid crystals can still sprout new moss, so you would end up with very mossy jewelry box and unwearable jewelry...

LOL.  This is great fun.
I wish my orchids could eat intruders.  
Then again, they'd only be helpful once the intruders were IN, because it's too cold to grow them outdoors to surround the house...  :/

Oh, don't worry about the cold, these giant ones are frost hardy. Weather in Oddwickshire is rather cold, too. But as they are now, they would eat all your chocolate and none of the intruders...

About a year ago, I was reading some funeral homes' advertisements (yeah, my idea of fun can be a little, uh, nevermind), and they all seemed really bent on conveying just how oh so affordable they are. 

Ha haaa! Are you my long-lost cousin from another continent! Back in my high school and post high school days, a few friends and I were funeral parlor obsessed. We called our imaginary funeral home Haven of Rest Funeral Parlor. Our catch-phrase was:
Elegant, Exquisite, and Extremely Ex.pensive
Haven of Rest Funeral Parlor
If You Don't Have the Money, Don't Waste Our Time

I also subscribed to The American Funeral Director magazine for a number of years. (It was pretty boring; mostly standard business management articles, and not enough pictures of hearses or coffins)

*snip*

Florianne is another radiantly beautiful resident of Oddwickshire. Is exceptional physical beauty a common trait throughout the region?

My great-grandfather, my grandfather and my grandmother were doctors (grandma is still alive, just retired), so there are some interesting books on pathology and some real human bones and a comlete skull in their house. The book about forensic pathology is especially interesting! We (me and my cousins - the spaceship crew) were always allowed to play with them (because being curious and motivated to learn was a good thing), and I think my love for the macabre might have been born back then...

Well, all my characters were created for my dolls, so they're beautiful by default. But I guess that with the omnipresent magic, being pretty isn't all that hard in Oddwickshire (just make sure you know what you're doing, beauty spells can go wrong sometimes. But hey, who said that frogs aren't cute?)

A chocolate eating plant? That wouldn’t get a pot in our house.

I keep my chocolate reserves carefully hidden...

The flowers look like their glowing from it being dark in the room.

That's just something orchids do on photos. They semi-translucent petals reflect the light so that it looks like their own bioluminescence.

Florianne is an excellent mad scientist.  Both the plants she is trying to grow sound very interesting, and I' sure she'll be able to tweak the orchids a bit more to increase their palate from just chocolate.

(the orchid is beautiful, and I like how it's angled so it almost looks like it's searching for the chocolate )

I'm sure she'll succeed. She's like a mad dog, once she sinks her teeth into something, she won't let go...


Day 209

Okay everybody, brace yourselves - wall-o'-rant incoming! I'll post a TL;DR version first and the full version at the end of the post.

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If we walk down this street, we'll get from Florianne's house to the Triangle Square. There have been some debates about its name. They went roughly like this: "Your Majesty, 'Triangle Square' sounds like a geometrical nonsense, we would like to suggest a new name..." "Hmmm... It does sound like a nonsense, which is why we'll leave it exactly as it is!"

Traingle Square is Oddwick's largest and most busy square, and its name comes from its shape. All three districts meet here - one side of the square belongs to Old Town, one to Graveyard and one to Cabbage Gardens. The most impressive building of the square is the Library, taking up half of the Old Town side of the square.

TL;DR Version

The Library is very pretty, very magic, has some dangerous books, is opened 24/7 and has day and night shifts. We have one shelled and two unshelled characters here!

A note on fairies
If you decide to read the full version, you might get confused about fairies. Faires in Oddwickshire aren't one genus, they're a huge family of very diverse species, some are human-sized (like fairies from Czech folklore, which I wanted to include here), some are your typical tiny winged creatures, others are somewhere inbetween. There are many kinds of fairies tied to certain elements or natural habitats. It's a mess. The Schwarzgrab upgrade turns you into the human-sized fairy.

And now we finally get to the characters! First the shelled one:



Iselle Honeyford

Iselle is the head day librarian. She knows every single book in the library from memory, and she’s an ex³pert script-tamer (you can’t become head librarian if you’re not an ex³pert script-tamer). If you want to read something but don’t know what, she’ll always pick just the right book for you. Day shift is under her command, and important decisions have to be made together with head night librarian, but they often take turns, so that one of them can enjoy some free time.

Aside from reigning the library, she likes to travel around Oddwickshire and collect folk tales, write down every regional variant and then prepare the collections for print.

She’s a caffeine addict and she loves to prepare her own coffee. Lately, she picked up latte art, but no matter what image she tries to create in the foam, it always ends up looking like a letter…


Aldegar Nightingale

Aldegar Nightingale is the head night librarian. He’s a banshee, but he couldn’t and didn’t even want to inherit the family death-foretelling business, because Oddwickshire banshees are matriarchal, so the oldest daughter is always the main heir, and Aldegar has four older sisters, plus, he hates noise more than anything. And the banshee business is all about noise.

Banshees, by the way, are very important, because if you didn’t preoder Schwarzgrabs’ impeccable services yet, and you hear a banshee calling your name, you have 24 hours to secure the afterlife of your choice. You basically get a heads-up and a sufficient time reserve for free.

But back to Aldegar. He’s gay, which is extremely rare with banshees, so between hating the very principle of banshees’ existence and not having the slightest chance to find himself a partner in his community, he had no reason to stay. He decided to move to Oddwick and get a quiet job. The library was perfect for him, and because he’s very reliable and serious about everything he does (that’s another banshee thing, thoroughness and reliability are a must when you have to inform people they are going to die very soon), he became the head night librarian in no time.

And he finally found his soulmate.


Samael Whetstone

Samael isn’t a staff member, but he spends a lot of time in the library. His life story is complicated. For example, even calling it a life story is somewhat problematic. You see, Samael is a grim reaper, he never really had a life to begin with. People in helping professions in general have higher chances to suffer from occupational burnout, and if your job is technically a helping profession, but everybody hates it, and hates you for doing it, and you’re destined to do it by simply being the biological species you are, it’s practically inevitable.

Long story short, Samael, after millennia of ending lives and being hated for it, was completely exhausted, suffered a major breakdown and simply couldn’t go back. After recovering (for the most part), he settled down in Graveyard and wanted to do something creative for a change, so he took violin lessons. He became insanely popular violin virtuoso, with crowds of fans.

At first, he enjoyed being popular and seemingly loved by everyone, but he soon found that being popular as an idol is far from being truly loved, accepted and appreciated, and his overly zealous, constantly yelling fans littering the stage with lace-trimmed bloomers are tiresome more than anything else. And they don’t even care about his music, they only like him because he’s “so hot, omg!!!1!11!!”, whatever that means... He wanted a quiet refuge where being an idol wouldn’t mean anything. So he started hiding in the library.

There, he met Aldegar, and they found that they have a lot in common - death-related former jobs they couldn’t bear to do anymore, strong aversion towards noise… Aldegar showed Samael some great books, and Samael showed Aldegar some great sounds. They discovered literature and music thanks to each other. Then they started meeting in their favorite coffee shop once a week (it’s hidden in a narrow street in Old Town, and Samael’s fans have no idea it exists). Then twice a week. Then every day they could… And before they knew it, they were holding each other’s hand and they were very, very happy.

(Samael isn’t necessarily gay. He’s a grim reaper, so he simply doesn’t care about gender and sexual orientation. Grim reapers don’t discriminate.)

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And now onto the way too long version (just the Library, so if you're only interested in characters, you don't have to read this)

The Library

The building is dark and cold, appropriately gothic in style. It is famous for its many stained glass windows, depicting scenes from Oddwickshire folk tales (which are rather grim and mysterious - true to the nature of the land they originated from, and half of them are ghost stories) or illustrating peculiar local flora and fauna.

The interior is decked out with dark wood encrusted with ornate carvings that match motifs on the windows, imagine english Arts & Crafts furniture with a bit of a Wonderland twist. There are lots of plants in all parts of the building, the roof is made of special glass and the attic is one big greenhouse. The reason is that a large part of library personnel are library fairies. They were originally forest fairies and developed into new species after spending centuries in the library (nobody knows for sure why they took such an intense liking to it), but they still need a lot of greenery. The roof greenhouse serves as their dormitory. They’re cute little helpers, and if you can’t reach to the top shelves, they will gladly get the books for you. But they can pull pranks, too. If you’re too loud, you’ll get one ‘shhhh’ from a human-sized librarian, and if you don’t comply, the fairies will make sure you behave.

The light in the library comes from lamps utilizing various glowing crystals from the Underground. Their light is safe for the books, they last for years and they don’t cost anything, so it’s a perfect solution.

You can find the usual set of sections here, but there are also sections with magic books. General Magic section has books on magic theory and basics of witchcraft for beginners. You’ll find more advanced and specialised books in the Higher Magic Works section (don’t skip the basics!), but the most interesting volumes are stored in Forbidden Vault. You can only enter there with script-tamers, specially trained staff members, because these books have not only information on magic, but also their own magical properties, and their magic mixes with magic that’s naturally seeping from the Underground, which can cause a major mess on regular basis. They need a lot of taming before you can read them. If you need to study the books in Forbidden Vault often, the library offers a course on combat techniques for magic reading, self-defense against feral tomes and survival in the case of book-emergency. If you take this course and pass the final exam, you can enter on your own.

Oddwick library is opened 24/7, because about a half of the population is nocturnal. The staff is divided into day librarians and night librarians. I do recommend staying up late and visiting the library at night at least once, it’s a mesmerizing ex²perience. Night staff consists of a variety of nocturnal creatures that usually stay hidden from light-dwellers’ sights, so the library presents a unique opportunity to get a close look. Don’t stare too openly, that would be rude, but they do tolerate a curious glance here and there, because they know they’re quite a spectacle. There are boogeymen, talking owls, a will-o’-wisp, some werecats and vampires, a few mares and lampads… And the night fairies are also different, with dark blue or purple skin and glowing eyes.