People I Know

I wanted to make a page about people I know, and in particular, people I have to deal with as part of my work with Redoubt. Some of these folks are my friends and are pretty cool but some are total jackasses. I’m not worried people will find this page and get mad because it seems like nobody in my town except for me knows about neocities. Plus, I’m using aliases and obfuscating, so things should be okay. Anyways, meet the people of my locale! If I meet anyone new and interesting I will update this page too, and also sometimes if someone seems cool I’ll do little art of them, or if they deserve if for other reasons…

Normies

I have two friends IRL worth mentioning. Pls don’t fucking laugh at me. Count. Count on your goddamn fingers. How many IRL friends did you have when and if your life was ever this out of control? How many friendships you think you could juggle with this going on? I’m not saying I don’t have several close online friends, either, but that’s private because they like to keep things private, so I’m only going to share about the people I know IRL. They’re the most relevant to what I’ll be talking about on this site, after all.

Dwayne

Dwayne is about the same age as me. He works at the Freeze-n-Fry alongside me as a line cook, but usually they give him better shifts because he’s got seniority. I don’t really mind at all, given everything he’s done for me. Originally he comes from Arizona, and I have no fucking clue why he decides to move to a place like this instead. He says the cost of living out there is astronomical but still.

He’s my roommate ever since I moved down here. I met him on the Official Pretentious Edgelords Nostalgia Discord server back in the day and it turned out we shared a lot of interests. Plus, he was able to get me a job at the Freeze-n-Fry, which helps during the times when Redoubt has no contract work for me. We share a one-bedroom apartment and he sleeps in the living room because he likes access to the kitchen. I don’t mind the bedroom. Nice solitude. It’s actually really cozy and not much of a problem?

We have a large (older) TV set I got after my most recent contract with Redoubt. We like to watch cartoons on that and get zooted. My favorite is Courage the Cowardly Dog and Dwayne really likes the Rugrats. We even have VHS tapes and a way to play them so it’s pretty fucking sweet. Mostly we just stream stuff though. Dwayne’s kind of the only person I really trust right now, but he has no idea Redoubt exists.

He studied computer stuff in high school a bit and actually helped teach me some HTML and CSS, but he has no idea what I’m doing with it. I had to jump through a lot of hoops for Redoubt to secure my operations here and keep Dwayne from finding out that the occult exists. So far, so good. Most of my tools are locked in the closet guarded by an enchanted scarf, which seems to have literally worked like a charm.

It’s eerie, because I’ve covertly tested it a bit, and he’s totally unable to approach any door draped in that scarf. I don’t get it but it works. I just hope that the things I’ve had to do to “help” him ignore my magical activities aren’t causing him some kind of mindfuckery in the longterm, and I’m constantly watching for signs of that in the guy.

Starlight

Starlight’s in her early twenties. Yes, sorry to say, that’s her real name and pretty much everyone I know who knows her is jealous af about it. I am slightly jealous myself. Star originally met Dwayne at a local game store I think? I get the impression the situation started out with him just tolerating her, but now we’re all kind of friends??

Anyways, she’s part of my three-person Dungeons and Dragons group. Or was, anyways, until Dwayne stopped running the games because he was too busy trying to “become a manager” at the Freeze-n-Fry. She keeps saying she’ll act as dungeonmaster herself and run her own campaigns, but we can’t find anyone else that we actually want to be around right now, so we’re just not playing anymore. Not to mention she’s getting insufferable lately?

She “matriculated” at Delamarche College a while back, but still lives with her parents. Star’s majoring in French (oh ffs) and at this point I seriously got the impression that she believes speaking it perfectly, falling in love, and moving to Paris will fix all her problems. I’m not going to worry or jump to conclusions but since she went to college, school is all she’ll talk about. She makes promises to do other things, but when we end up together, it’s just France France France and stuff about her classes and the professors.

We still hang out sometimes, but not as often as when we were actively gaming together. She’s um a little too much sometimes.

Star does cosplay really well. I don’t know the genre but it’s kawaii-type stuff and things where she has to cover her hair with a wig. A lot of it looks super-uncomfortable and I don’t know why she would go that far just to portray a character from some anime but she does. Half the time she sews her own stuff though which is amazing, and she could probably make a ton of money on Etsy someday.

She works night shift at the Frogspot in front of Amity Plaza part-time now when not doing French class stuff, usually by herself. I like to stop by and make sure she’s okay when I can, even if we’re not hanging out much.

Magical

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve met countless mages over the past ten months, mostly through training seminars and exercises and such. Some of them I even met online when we had to do training lectures on there. But most of them didn’t really stick in my mind, because they were once-off encounters and didn’t exchange contact info with me.

It was like we were actively discouraged from doing that. They kept saying we needed to keep work (ie, Redoubt stuff) separate from personal life and not make friends. So, I don’t know any mages except my immediate superior locally. I hope this changes, because it’d be great to learn from more people. Smirk can be difficult. Anyways…

In magic, or at least within whatever eldritch structure Redoubt has adopted (and told me little about), people get to have a second magical name. This is kinda like a military callsign as far as I can tell? I guess each one probably has some deeply intense meaning to the bearer, but I have no way of knowing. And each is preceded by an honorific - Soror for women, Frater for men, and Consor is gender-neutral. Smirk told me I’ll either be given one, or figure one out on my own eventually. Until then, I’m Frater “Can I Leave This Blank For Now?”

Soror Smirk

I think her real name is Ruby. I could be wrong.

She dusts her eyelids with a light shimmer of pale blue. She wears it with a light frosted peach lip gloss. Her lips are thin, and her expressions often hard to read unless you really stare into her eyes. It drives me crazy because I can’t tell whether she’s angry at me sometimes, which is a problem when someone is technically your boss.

I met Smirk on a writing forum. She posted a gig request, offering a really sweet rate for a college creative writing assignment. I took up the job, churned out a final product, and she paid me. I thought that’d be the end of it, but she came back later to say that the story I wrote for her “college assignment” reminded her of “real magic,” and she thought I had “potential.” Yeah, no. Turns out she wasn’t even a college student, and the whole thing was some kind of dumb recruitment trick, like when an interviewer asks you a sketchy question before hiring you for some horrible startup?

I still went with it. Why? The first time I ever met her in person, it was unexpected, and she started humming the song that was stuck in my head. I guess I’ll have to explain more later.After hashing out some details, she enchanted me, and I began my magical training. She’s taken me to Chicago, back up to Cleveland, and to countless online training seminars, practiced with me through strange exercises, and my Cashpipe app dings without fail every time I complete a task. She’s my liaison for Redoubt officially, and the trainer I’m assigned personally until I match her skill level magically.

She wears glitter spray on her clothes, I think. When she visits, her jeans seem to sometimes leave a bit of it on my sofa. It reminds me of some kind of weird dim glow from better times, like high school or something, some era when things seemed optimistic and worth looking forward to. Weird.