A Confession

Every now and then when we’re writing our ridiculous chain story we need a reminder about who all these bizarre characters are and what sort of shenanigans and crimes they’ve been up to. We have enough to keep track of for our novel writing, and there’s no way we can do that and cram the entirety of the chain story into our heads as well. It’s nearly 750 entries long, FFS!

Luckily, we have a solution: the Dramatis Personae. That’s right, a nigh-exhaustive list of all the important characters, places, and organizations in our ongoing saga is just one of the services we at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises LLC are proud to offer. Unluckily for both you the reader, and us, is that we hadn’t updated the damn thing in several years. Oops. For a while we were able to remember enough to limp along. We thought we were doing pretty well, but Jen just reread the whole thing, and, um. Let’s just say we forgot a few minor things. Like an entire wedding. A wedding our protagonist was the groom in. Granted, he was impersonating someone else, and the bride was a robot duplicate of his true love, so it probably doesn’t really count. But still, as the authors who put him in that situation, we ought to at least remember it. And so, it was time to update the Dramatis Personae, for newcomers, stans, and for ourselves. Dammit, we all deserve nice things.

We’ll start with an update on our main dude himself. He’s still unnamed, but at least he doesn’t go around calling himself The Protagonist, like some movie characters we could mention but won’t.

Our Protagonist (we’re allowed to call him that because we’re his creators): Though we have yet to learn this man’s name, we do know that it is five syllables long. As per family tradition, he was born at the North Pole. He is not English, but he is part-Indian, immune to jellyfish stings, and spent at least part of his childhood in a cult. One summer when he was a child, his mother pitted him and his twin brother Jason in daily wrestling matches. He is a graduate of the Hopscotch Academy, with a degree in Advanced Duplicity. While at the Academy he learned how to defend himself against ninjas, how to control the minds of others through an odd vocal technique he calls “hypnotoading,” and also how to break through most hypnotic trances using something called “goldfishing”. For someone who attended boarding school, his French is shockingly bad, though he does know several dead languages quite well. During senior year he was voted Most Likely to Become a Sasquatch King, and was actual King of the Senior Prom, having won a wilderness survival competition against his classmates. He was on the Academy’s Beatnik team, and is adept at the bongos. While enrolled at the Academy, he impaled his friend John’s foot with a harpoon. This earned him extra credit from the school, and a lifelong grudge from John. He learned everything he knows about stealth during his time as a stowaway on a tramp steamer in the South China Sea. He has excellent hearing, and is allergic to seagull feathers. Our hero always dreamed of a career in skates, but wound up in a career involving both crime and espionage. He sometimes uses the codename Ludovico, sometimes Winifred. He’s not a theatre critic anymore, and one of his brothers owns a weather control machine. He has the layout of at least one Hall of Mirrors memorized, and can imitate any kind of bird or beast. Unlike his twin, he can sleep anywhere. He can often taste what Jason is tasting, while Jason can smell what he’s smelling. He is a full-on karaoke person, his favorite tune to belt out being YMCA. Thanks to his many prophetic dreams, he knows that his death will not come from being sacrificed by, or to, clowns, nor will it involve clowns at all. He used to have blond hair. He has blue-gray eyes and a super hairy chest (and back, also, it seems). There is a tattoo hidden under his chest hair, given to him by Tessa. It contains, naturally, a hidden message. His toes are very ticklish, and he has quintuple elbows (it’s like being double-jointed, only moreso). His tongue is covered with a golden tattoo, to commemorate the birth of his first children. It’s a Contrarian thing, obviously. He lives by the river, if his house hasn’t been washed away in the long, long, long time since he’s been home. He is married to Fleur, daughter of the Warlord of Contraria, but they have an understanding. They are parents to twins. Additionally he acted as proxy when Fleur’s sister Isolde married the odious Harry, and on their wedding night as well. Later he impersonated Viscount Arlo of Svenborgia during his wedding to the second Tessabot (it was her idea – they were tricking the guests, not the bride), and even later Fleur gave the okay for him to act as proxy again for Hildegard’s wedding to Chartreuse Pamplemousse. Things went a little haywire during that ceremony and he wound up legally wed to both Hildegard and Chartreuse. His wife’s half-brother inadvertently started a rumor that there was a coveted miracle substance in his semen, which led to many many women throwing themselves on him and bearing him children. Fleur made him a general in the Contrarian armed forces. His first command was the mountain garrisons in the Paradoxica Region, but he’s recently been promoted to head of the entire Comedy branch of the services, which is no laughing matter. He has many resplendently spiffy uniforms, some with small brass squirrels atop the epaulets, others with fringed boots and a lamp in the shape of a dove that dangles from his hat like he’s an anglerfish. Most recently he was seen wearing his ceremonial polka dot footie pajamas. It was a wedding reception after all, and one must follow protocol.

Now, about all those babies.

The women call themselves the Toboggan Club (because everyone took a ride), and they are all currently aboard Fleur’s Contrarian Royal Airship. The children are all considered part of Fleur’s royal brood, being fathered by her husband. He’s a twin, so obviously these are all multiple births. That’s just science.

A non-exhaustive list:

• Fleur – his wife (mother of twins)
• Isolde – her sister (mother of an uncounted number of children)
• Svetlana – John’s sister (quads, and is possibly pregnant again)
• Tatiana – Tessa’s sister (twins)
• Titania – Tessa’s other sister (unknown number of children – we haven’t checked in lately)
• YoYo – a yodeler from the mountain garrisons (twins, even though she doesn’t believe in them)
• Yesterday – wife of Fleur’s half-brother (unknown number)
• Olga – another of John’s sisters (unconfirmed, but likely)
• Betsy – a spy (unconfirmed, less likely but still possible)
• Marnie – a nurse and retired tap-dancer (unconfirmed but quite likely)
• Hildegard – John’s ex-wife, our dude’s current accidental wife (unconfirmed but extremely likely)
• Dr Ferguson – evil eye doctor and reality tv divorcee (unconfirmed but likely)
• Vera – she’s on the airship, but our dude doesn’t remember her

For more info on these lovely ladies, see their individual entries in the Dramatis Personae. They’ve all been lovingly updated.

This entry is outrageously long, so we’ll save the summary of the new characters and stuff like that for next week.

A writing partner is someone who puts up with (nay, encourages!) all your batshit ideas.