Scrivener and Shifte

Well, ok. I'm not sure if these guys are really superhero's. They kind of count I suppose in the sense that they have special abilities and have been known to use them to help people...but none the less.

I am cheating a little bit, since I have done some work with these two before and I'm posting some of the sketches I've done of them prior to receiving Rie's awesome challenge. I figured "what the hell, why NOT work with these two." For quite some time now, I've been wanting to do something with them...the problem is...I haven't totally figured out there stories. I know how their story ends...just not totally how it starts. I thought I'd take this opportunity to see if we couldn't get some of their narrative ironed out.

Let me tell you what I have so far.

The girl is Co Dawes (alias Alice Scrivener) and the blobby blue guy is just named Locke (though he can take on different shapes and will occassionally call himself "John Shifte").

Co Dawes - A shy and quiet girl from a small, rural town in Nevada. She grew up feeling terribly out of place and alienated. Her shyness and social anxieties were downright crippling, and as a result, she never developed much of a voice. Look up "wallflower", and she's pretty much what you find. Despite having such a hard time speaking, she did really want to be social, she just didn't know how.

So, despite an intense social anxiety, she did have a fairly normal life. Until the day that "The Edge" appeared near her small town. A huge, gaping, mysterious black tear in reality. She was sadly nearby when it appeared, wrong place, wrong time. When the Edge appeared, she was too close to it, and ended up getting zapped. When she woke up she found that when she spoke, the words literally came out of her mouth (ok, it only works with nouns, but none the less). Say for example, she lost her house keys, she could just say "house keys" and they'd manifest in her throat...so yeah...it's both gross and really dangerous. She's never tried it, but she does have nightmares about saying anything like "car" or "tree"...it probably wouldn't be pretty.

When it's discovered that this has happened to her, she's rounded up by the government, along with several other people who seem to have all been affected by The Edge's appearance. And it's there she meets Locke.

Locke (John Shifte)-

Locke confounds everyone, even himself. He was found near The Edge when it appeared. He has claimed that he was once a normal human man, but that The Edge altered him. It made him into the strange, pliable, blobby thing he is, but he has no memory of his life before it happened. He can take on nearly any shape he wants with relative ease, but human forms pose a problem to him. Oh he can do them...he just can't do them for any length of time that would be practical. Despite all of this, he actually has a very upbeat, kind, naive sort of personality. Where as Co is constantly tense and shy, he's almost too trusting and very outgoing. He can be friendly to the point that it can be annoying, or even get him into trouble. Co often has to show up to redirect his behavior if he's getting too wierd, or to get him out of trouble. There is a lot about his behavior that is pretty child-like.

Whatever The Edge did to him, it wrecked his memory so badly that he can't remember even basic facts about being human, things like how family structures work, common courtesies between people (like he'd just walk into a ladies restroom to find someone and not realize or consider what might be wierd about that.). He eagerly and enthusiastically consumes any information about humanity that he can, but there are times when his desire to regain his lost humanity seems a little strange to Co...It seems a little more to her as though he's learning and discovering all this information for the very first time, rather than recovering it.

It doesn't always work, but Locke can sometimes "read" people's minds when he touches them. (Actually it's a bit closer to figuring out what you mean or intend as opposed to concretely and distinctly knowing what you are thinking.) This is why he hangs out with Co all the time. Her inability to speak is a huge, huge handicap to her. Yeah, she can write down what she wants to say, but that's slow and can be a clumsy way to communicate (and over time, it starts to seem that writing words might be having a similar effect to speaking them.). Locke will very often hang out with her and go around with her to basically serve as a translator. (She reallllly wants him to pin down that whole taking on a human shape thing as a result.)

The scientists they were kind of captured by were at first pretty hesitant to let him do this, but inevitably they decided it would be interesting to study and so they let them keep at it. This is a bit of a strange experience for Co though, at first it was strictly a relationship where Locke was figuring out what she wanted to say and then interpreting it...but as time goes by, she actually starts developing it with him, almost like a psychic backwash. Locke had been getting careless with the whole process, a little too lax, and she started seeing a few things he might not have wanted her to see. She started to suspect that his whole story about not remembering anything about his past might not be true...that maybe he wasn't really ever a normal man.

Somehow, I'm not totally sure how though, they do get out...whether they straight up escaped, or if they made some deal with the scientists, I don't know...but yes, they did get out.

So yeah, bear with me guys, I'm trying to figure out the whole story with these two. I'm not totally doing a "superhero" story, but I'm still running with this. Really, for me, it was just trying to pin down these two and figure out how they tick. It feels really disorganized to me still and kind of sloppy, so if anyone has any suggestions, that would be totally appreciated.