Something of a Prologue The World The Creator The Characters The Story Masks Role "Mask" Previous Names/Incarnations Other Principle Characters Jenna Marie Campbell The Angel

 

Something of a Prologue

 

 

This is all in my head.

No, really. It is.

 

Laea Wake is the story of me. Sort of. I think that for anyone who feels a little... dissociated... a little broken, this could be a story about you too.

 

I had these stories in my head long before I wrote them, but I could never quite get the idea down in a concrete way, I had a real fear of people just thinking I was crazy. Then I read the writings of someone else here, and it was like all the pieces made sense, and that it was okay to write it like that, because there were people out there who would understand it. This is why I think that it's worth writing and re-writing these stories, even if they are a little too... abstract for the majority of the population. Don't get it? Just ask.

 

Take the concept of multiple identities. Dissociation, even, as mentioned before. Several well-developed shards of the personality. Several people, one body. This is something like that. The world in and of itself exists in nothingness. That part is not important. What is important is what the world is - every single iota that makes up the immaterial parts of a person, of me.

 

The characters are the most prominent aspects my personality, broken down into tiny bits. Some of them can be characterized as very basic emotions - happiness, sadness, anger. Some of them are more complicated abstract concepts - memory, forgiveness, insanity. These shards of me are developed into characters, and their interactions, if you can spare the brain cells to concentrate on the symbolism, are meant reflect on the inner workings of the mind. Well, my mind at least.

 

 

The World

The story is set in Laea Wake, which was originally created in my head through a series of recurring dreams and nightmares that went on for years. I don't have these dreams that often anymore, but Laea Wake serves as the world in which everything that makes up me as a person resides. It's the inside of my head, as it were. Major emotions, ideas, and abstract concepts take physical form in the way of characters, most of which are known as Masks, and even objects or settings. This is where symbolism comes into play a lot of the time.

 

The Laea Wake Safehouse was constructed in my head many, many years before I thought of writing this down as a story. Before this house, they resided in a place called Haven; but this is a world of demons and magik and so, to protect themselves, they created the Safehouse, which no demon can enter. Outside of this house are other areas, generally known as boroughs, where hundreds of random characters and settings exist. These settings were originally included in the main settings of the story, but no longer are. Especially one, the Orphan Borough, so named because the majority of residents are characters created by me as a child with a seriously overactive imagination and have no home and no place, so they live on the streets.

 

The Safehouse is where the major pieces of my personality reside, and where they can be used and controlled. Characters that live outside of this house are not really characters at all, they're the parts of my personality that are in my subconscious, that I don't intentionally use, or that are very, very minor.

 

 

The Creator

Neither long ago nor far away from where you are now, a young woman sits in silence as the rain pours against a window that does not belong to her, the whole of her history contained within her, yet only a small bit of it available to her reckoning. Years before, when this young woman was still small, something broke her. She was neither fragile nor vulnerable, and yet she shattered at her core...

 

 

Miranda is the soul. Miranda is who I am and was since the day I was born, that immortal part of me that will never change, regardless of what may happen. She is the Creator and the one who creates and controls the world and all of the other characters. The other characters are Masks, they are what Miranda uses to interact with the outside world. They are emotions, actions, psychoses, what have you. They can be killed, but they can also be changed into new characters, and they don't understand the world like Miranda does. They are merely players.

 

 

The Characters

... In a last act of self-preservation, she took these shards of her soul and developed them into something she could understand, into something that could live and grow independent of her, something she could not break further, and yet something that could, eventually, become whole again. She never spoke of these new creations, perhaps because of the drastic similarities she had noticed to cases of multiple personalities or dissasociation and this was, at least to her, nothing of the sort. She realized, of course, that she could be entirely wrong, but to her these creatures were not personalities, merely parts of her. They acted as masks for her to survive in the world after she broke into pieces...

 

 

The Latchkey Children are all the individuals created by Miranda. There are Masks, which are used by her (Terra, Rain, etc.), and Orphans, who are not used.

 

There were, before I had the courage to write down the story, originally dozens of Masks.

 

Orphans are Children who were created but never adopted, as Sugar and the others once were. They grow and change in years along with me. If they are born they are not necessarily 0, of course, but the age in which they choose to/must take form. Therefore, if you are 7 when you are born, and three years go past, you're 10. You're not 3, or 7. Just to establish that. There is an aging system. Ages can also be overridden by a Creator such as Miranda, because she can do that. Because she said so.

 

 

The Story

... A mythology developed over her history, giving a delightful grandiosity to the happenings of her life which were mundane to all but her. The girl had always been quite terrible with issues of memory, and she was able to lock away what little mental record remained of her childhood this way. Everything that she experienced from then on became a part of her personal mythology, remembered and repeated- especially the mistakes...

 

 

Miranda originally created new Children at will- mostly just to fill her freshly created universe, but some were especially favored. This universe reflected her own life in the 'real' world. Changes and new creations would reflect events and feelings in every aspect of her life and her being as she grew. When she was about thirteen, there was an event known in Laea Wake as the Split.

 

It was at this time that Miranda developed the ability to create specific Children from herself, from pieces of her own soul, and to Captivate them. She could take their created selves, their essential spirit, and use it in accompaniment with her own. The Children she used for this practice were, appropriately, called Masks. However, she did not use the characters of Laea Wake in real life in order to hide her true feelings (for instance- to seem happy when she was truly sad inside) but instead to show feelings which she was incapable of feeling. These were really parts of her, but she was incapable of feeling or knowing or being the various things that these Masks held within them. It was, in short, that she sectioned off parts of her personality and put them in little boxes, and the boxes were the Latchkey Children, and when she Captivates them she is able to access those parts of her being.

 

After the Split, Miranda began creating Masks rather than Children- useful characters which were a part of her rather than individual manifestation of the whims of her imagination. She built a home specifically for these Masks, a sort of Orphanage. These few special characters lived in this house with Miranda and Kit. The very first Mask and the most dear to Miranda was Murmur, originally named Samantha. Murmur/Samantha was able to learn to harness the liquidity of the rules of the universe and created what she called magic- the power to manifest her feelings and desires consciously, whereas for the rest of the Children such things as changes in their appearance or the world around them happened subconsciously and without their understanding as to how or why.

 

... When she was older, these masks truly developed into personalities. The girl had created some of them from pieces of herself, her psyche, her thoughts; but created one, and only one, from the deepest part of her, the only part that truly was her- the soul. This Mask was special, and she became almost a second version of the girl. She was named Samantha.

 

 

In the story, the main character Murmur finds herself to actually be composed of two creatures, herself and a demon. Demons and Angels are referred to as such because they are manifestations of the extreme ends of the spectrum of good and evil within this universe. They are to the extreme that they become their own separate entities. She purges herself of the demon and it forms itself into a Child, a girl. The demon becomes Lisha, who becomes Murmur's best friend.

 

You see, it all began with the girl; and then a series of misfortunes befell her and she found herself alone, all her life in vain. Young Samantha - who held all the terror and confusion of a life that was not her own - locked in a cold, dark room against a corner, held back by her father, her mother cold and alone somewhere. The girl had the most intense magic in her. She sensed a demon inside herself, one that would pull that power away from where she kept it, one that would turn her entire being dark and, being the girl she was, rather than banish it she befriended it. She cast a spell and cast it out of her and held it until it stopped crying, then gave it form and shape and even a name. Lisha, the Darkness before Midnight. How true this name would become could hardly have been known to the girl but then again, she was very powerful...

 

 

Lisha was characterized by an unrelenting need to control, to leash, her demonic nature. However, Lisha, the symbolic dark side of Murmur and therefore of Miranda, was unable to control her nature. This was largely due to run-ins with a demon which had infiltrated Haven at the time, known as the Vampire. Murmur had fallen in love with the Vampire and so none of the other Masks were able to kill it or really defend themselves from it for fear of Murmur, who was the most powerful of them. Akin to her own nature, the Vampire woke something in Lisha, and when it attacked her, the chains that she held around her true nature were let loose. When Lisha lost all control of herself she became purely evil, and became the character Jenna. Jenna was unable to feel, unable to care, and this was what made her most dangerous.

 

... Lisha befriended Kit, the soul and memory and ghost of the Angel, and tried to control herself. Lisha tried so hard to control herself. Harder than anyone tried anything ever before, and that is in her very soul, to do everything in her power, to never hold back, but soon she was no longer able to grip the chains she held around her own darkness. Before she could realize what she had done the Black had consumed every part of her, running her eyes dark and her hair raven colored and her skin the most beautifully dark color. It stretched through and through and through her and when it consumed the last part of her she was no longer herself. She called herself beautiful... She called herself Jenna.

 

 

With all control abandoned she was truly no longer Lisha, but an entirely different incarnation. She possessed none of the innate senses of loyalty to Miranda that were essentially programmed into the rest of the Children. Jenna killed off nearly all the Masks, leaving only Miranda, Murmur, Seven, Foxtael, and Iris. Through the magic that Murmur, and by now a number of other Children, had developed, Miranda was sealed into a room that was protected and so no one else would be able to enter. Foxtael, Iris, and Seven ran away from the Safehouse. Foxtael and Iris set up their own haven, and Seven retreated to the Orphan Borough.

 

So, then it was just Jenna and Murmur. Murmur was left because she, as the strongest magic user in her world, was the only one able to fight Jenna. However, without the others she is soon subdued and nearly killed. Here, the Angel is introduced. The story begins a short time later, with only the characters Murmur, Rain, and Kit left. You have to actually the first chapters to get the rest of the explanation.

 

This begins the second, or in actuality the first, part of the story - the aftermath of Jenna's first attack. This part of the story is nearly complete, and occurs with first just Murmur and Rain, and then Violyn, Sunny, Jack, Seven, and Kaiya living in the Safehouse. Iris and Foxtael live in their own haven on the other side of Providence, but they all meet up once in a blue moon. Miranda is still locked up in her room for the majoirty of the story, until she realizes that it is necessary for her to come back. Soon after this, Rain falls back into her demon nature, and Jenna is reborn.

 

In the aftermath of Jenna's second attack, the third (second) section of the story is born. This is when the new Children are born. Some of these "new Children" are actually old Children who were killed in the first attack, but revived by Miranda, and some are brand new Children.

 

It's also important to note, in terms of the new Children, that before Jenna's first attacks, the Masks were not concretely outlined as far as roles and personalities, and so these aren't yet defined in the same way that they are for the key seven.

 

 

Masks

 

The names of the seven key masks are:

Terra Fire

Mountain Rain

Violyn Rushdie

SugarBlue Sunshine

Jack Augerin

Kaiya Bravery

Severance "Seven" September

 

and the two masks not included in the initial story:

Iris Ayame Price

Foxtael NorthernStar

 

 

Role

Many of the Latchkey Children are given roles to play, or certain powers that they have. I named them mostly to distinguish them from each other. There are Powers, Creators, Authors, Inventors, and other miscellaneous rolles like Artist or Memory that are characteristic to a single individual. Powers are magic users and include Terra, Rain, and Foxtael; Creators have the ability to create new characters/masks and include Miranda, Terra, and to a smaller extent Rain; Authors record the happenings of the house and include Terra and Jack, whose notebooks become the actual story of Laea Wake; and Inventors like SugarBlue (Sunny) and Violyn can create anything out of things that already exist (very useful in solving problems). Roles like Artist (Iris) and Memory (Seven) are pretty self explanatory.

 

"Mask"

Represented emotion/concept, like happiness or sadness, or even as abstract as the concept of forgiveness. Terra is the mask of Insanity. Rain is the mask of Sorrow, Regret, and Guilt. Violyn is the mask of Wrath and Rebellion. Sunny is the mask of Compulsion, often thought of as Perfection. Jack is the mask of Obsession. Seven is the mask of Memory, as she holds all of the collective memories of Miranda and everyone else. Fox is the mask of Change. Iris is the mask of Love.

 

Previous Names/Incarnations

Each Mask is given the ability to change, essentially becoming an entirely new person. This is most notable in Terra and Rain. Terra has been through several incarnations since her birth, mostly due to the fact that she is the oldest of all the Masks. Rain was once Lisha, best friend to Terra, but then changed and became Jenna, then again and became Rain. These three incarnations are no more the same 'person' as any two seperate people in the world, but each incarnation carries the actions, the history, the sins of the one before it. This is especially a problem with Rain because even though she would not hurt a single thing, she has to bear the burden of killing almost all of the original Children as Jenna, and also with taking Lisha, who was quite beloved, away from Terra and the others.

 

 

Other Principle Characters

 

 

Jenna Marie Campbell

There is nothing more to truly describe Jenna than that it/she is the personification of pure, unadulterated evil. She seduces, lies, deceives, smiles, with bright dark green eyes and straight black hair down her back. All of her is faded, old, but she herself is so bright, young, healthy. She does not care about anyone, she wants only to control, to deceive, to be the best. She will not take you just for the act, but to control, to prove that no matter how unattainable one thinks he is, she can have him, take him, warp him, twist him, take away everything he loves and leave him cold and naked and armorless. She is a walking dead thing. She will never have love- be loved, or love. She will never care. She has no home, if she does not want to sleep on the street she will seduce someone, anyone, and take their wallet in the morning. She has no real name, she has no real face, she has no family, she came from nowhere, she simply is.

 

The Angel

The Angel is the only character who lives outside of the world of Laea Wake but is able to exist within it wherever he wishes. He was originally known as Kit, a dream that Miranda had which had haunted her all her life, a dream which was passed down to Murmur. He is one of the hardest concepts to explain without misconstrueing. He's like a ghost or a soulmate or a fantasy that became real.

 

They all see the Angel. The Angel sees not one of them. They love with him, they lie with him, they live with him. He had even begun to subconsciously branch out, separating his own soul to fit Miranda's pieces. Trying to adapt to them, contort into compatible, complementary pieces. It was as though her mind were some great jigsaw puzzle and he had stolen the finished picture from her. He knew what pieces were missing. He knew not only how to achieve it, but what 'complete' meant to her. There was a small, evolved piece of him for every shard of her soul. He did not see her masks, but only her. He saw through them like air, and so to bring to light such things to him was jarring, searing, repugnant. Miranda began at random. "Sex is not allowed here. It complicates. It destroys. It is best left to interactions in the ouside world where mistakes are happenstance mischance and impurity is the unavoidable inevitable, the unsuitable inedible, the unstable indelible..." her mouth moved but her voice stopped. She started again, as though someone had momentarily muted her. "Even Seven. Even Jack," she said, and it was clear they had missed some large portion of the speech in her moment of silence. Jack sighed, his eyes glazing over, showcasing uncharacteristic content. Kit stiffened, his eyes darting away, showcasing uncharacteristic contempt. "He can't see you. He only sees me. Were he to see you, he would likely shun you. But even Jack is caught up in the affair, and more young boys before him. He doesn't know how many scratches should be on his bedpost from just this one body. Even now, he will do his very best to forget such articulations, and yet he is our protector, and holds the key to the very heart of our existence. The key to the heart we share, and the heart we shall become. He cannot be counted out for blindness, nor faulted for denial. To save our wretched life only to have it shatter in his hands... "We cannot... we must not forget our personal mythology. Neither Jenna nor myself. Our demons and gods. Our Angels."