SADIE VALENCIA
Human
Posts: 100
Age:
28
Occupation:
Author
Status:
Single
Played by:
Ange
Last seen Nov 1, 2024 17:05:25 GMT
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Post by SADIE VALENCIA on Jul 27, 2024 18:50:56 GMT
It wasn’t sex therapy. That was for when you had trouble getting it up in the first place and there definitely hadn’t been any issue with that. It had been sex as therapy. Right after desensitisation with the good kind of magic, the really good kind. Most therapists would tell her it was the wrong way to deal with a trauma, but she hadn’t even seen one since her guidance counsellor in the 12th grade. Her coping mechanisms were working just fine for her, thanks.
Windows down, music blasting from the stereo, Sadie drove back over Wickery Bridge and towards town. It had always seemed like there were two kinds of people in Mystic Falls – the ones who were happy to stay put and those practically chewing off their own leg to get out of here. Her mom had been one of those who was only going out of here in a box and that was only if she could be buried with her dad, if not she’d end up right here in the town cemetery. Once upon a time she’d dreamed of heading to New York or LA, becoming one of those authors who could sneeze out a book and have it immediately become a bestseller just because she was Sadie Valencia. These days she wasn’t so keen to leave, but, hey, she had made it all the way to Boston for a signing with the last book.
As though it might’ve vanished in the time it had taken her to drive back from Richmond, Sadie reached out to touch the box on the passenger seat like a mother might a sleeping child. In a way it wasn’t that different. This was her latest book, fresh from her copy editor. Inside the pages were probably liberally scattered with correctipns, but until she opened it and had to deal with them she just felt proud instead of momentarily chastised. The first book in her new series would be released in just a couple of months.
Her face ached from grinning about it, but there was still a boost in her smile’s wattage as the song changed and a familiar drum intro echoed through the car. Peeling a hand off of the wheel she smacked it against her thigh in time to the beat. ”I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord.” Hehehe. She broke off, snickering as Phil Collins carried on singing. Oh, she’d felt it from the air already and had been panting out praise before they were done. It had been proof that not everything in the magical world was ugly. Like with the normal, human one it just could be from time to time.
The printouts of her novel weren’t the only thing she’d brought back in the car. Arriving in Richmond a couple of hours early she’d headed for the Main Library to dig through its newspaper archive. What she’d printed out had made her glad her editor had insisted on a celebratory cocktail to kick the meal off, and dessert after, but it had also provided some seeds of ideas for book 2. The sort that might wake her up at night for a little while if Darcey didn’t tell her it was all bullshit.
Stories about the weird shit that happened in Mystic Falls had littered the local newspapers her entire life. They’d helped fuel her imagination plenty, but she’d seen Stand by Me too often as a kid to develop too macabre an interest in digging too much further. Now she was second guessing the whole thing. How many of those weird animals deaths had a magical component? Shit. Up ahead she saw flashing emergency lights bathing a side street. How many normal cop calls were anything but normal?
Flicking off the stereo, Sadie turned the corner and parked at the end of a line of cop cars and an ambulance. The fact that there was a coroner’s van pulled up close to the house didn’t bode well. Sadie got out of her car and ambled up to the crowd of lookie-loos pressed up against the police tape. A crowd of sheriff’s deputies and a guy in an expensive suit were gathered at the side of the porch, moving aside slightly as two guys bent to pick up … oh yeah, that was a dead body at their feet alright.
Sadie squinted, trying to get a better look before she glanced at the woman next to her. ”Hey. You got any idea what happened? Looks like half the sheriff’s office is out here.” Which probably meant another story in the papers tomorrow, speculating on all sorts of crazy shit that might not come close to the truth. As she glanced back, she saw the body hauled up towards a gurney. Its head lolled back, its neck as limp and twisted as a wet noodle, its face practically looking down at the ground. ”Holy fuck. What happened to that guy?” Like an owl his head was twisted well past where it should’ve been.
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EDEN FOSTER
Human
Posts: 35
Played by:
Jodi
She wants to love and radiant light
Last seen Oct 13, 2024 11:40:44 GMT
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Post by EDEN FOSTER on Aug 19, 2024 19:10:44 GMT
Were those police things illegal? One her listeners had written in and suggested Eden bought one. It was a way of tapping into a police radio so she could listen to things unfold real time. It seemed kind of morbid at the same time though. Rushing to be the first person at the scene of a crime for the purposes of research. It was easy to forget these deceased people were once members of society. They could have kids or a partner, or even a cat or a dog. Eden was careful when it came to reporting on such things. To her it wasn’t just about an unsolved mystery. She was desperate to tap into a world she was convinced existed. Eden gripped the steering wheel a little tighter as she turned down the stereo, her pulse quickening with every flash of the emergency lights up ahead. Boston had its moments, sure, but Mystic Falls? She'd always known there was something off about the place, and now she was starting to think those old stories she'd been told about weren't just small-town gossip. The realisation something was going on in Mystic Falls was hitting home more and more everyday, but she just wasn’t getting to the bottom of it. Every corner she turned led her into a dead end. She got out of the car, her heart pounding with a mix of dread and morbid curiosity. This was the kind of scene she'd read about, the kind that usually ended up in her manuscript. But this was real, and it was right in front of her. A coroner’s van? A crowd of deputies? This wasn’t just some routine call. Eden tore her eyes away from the body for a fraction of a second to look at the woman next to her. “Nah mate. I’ve only just got here. I was cruisin’ along and saw the coppers and ambo.” The way the man's head was twisted—far beyond anything natural—sent a shiver down her spine. Eden balanced on her tiptoes for a second, just to get a better look. “Looks like a snapped neck. Probs been murdered.” Poor bastard. Her hand was itching to draw out her phone so she could make some kind of notes, but she held back. “Bit weird dumpin’ a body out here. In the open for anyone to find.” They could have thrown a few crumbs of dirt over it to try and hide it. SADIE VALENCIA |
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SADIE VALENCIA
Human
Posts: 100
Age:
28
Occupation:
Author
Status:
Single
Played by:
Ange
Last seen Nov 1, 2024 17:05:25 GMT
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Post by SADIE VALENCIA on Aug 25, 2024 18:23:09 GMT
Staring at the body, Sadie was fucking glad she didn’t recognise him. She hadn’t considered it when she’d hopped out of the car, filled with morbid curiosity, but there was a risk of it. Mystic Falls wasn’t some two street town, but with a population that always seemed to hang around the 7000 mark despite all the disappearances and deaths, it felt like she knew practically everybody here at times. She’d ridden down all these streets on her bike as a kid (probably further than her mom had wanted her to), had gone to what felt like a town event every other week when she’d been growing up. Most days she couldn’t walk down the street here without stopping to chat with at least a half dozen people she knew by more than sight.
Curiosity killed the cat, she reminded herself, it also almost got the cat torn up by a rabid coyote. Maybe the cat should’ve paid a little more attention to the consequences and stayed put in her car. She could’ve been back at her apartment by now, cracking open a bottle of champagne, or getting changed to hear down to the club for a celebratory night of cocktails. Finding out about the death as she hunched over her kitchen table mildly hung over in the morning would’ve given her some distance from it all, the sort most smart people kept.
Sadie swallowed back her doubts, tossing a question out to the woman standing next to her. The one who had six inches on her and the sort of supermodel body she’d desperately wanted as a teenager when her own had gone straight from zero to pin-up proportions. The Australian one, or maybe she was a New Zealander, she’d never heard enough of either accent to decide, but the lilt was unmistakable, and, she was pretty sure, familiar. ”They might as well have written an announcement in the sky,” Sadie snickered, the sound cutting off quickly. This wasn’t exactly an occasion for laughing. ”I saw the lights, stopped to rubber-neck like everybody else.” Her mom would’ve called them all vultures, hovering around on the outskirts of the crime scene to see if something exceptionally gruesome had happened.
Holy fucking shit. The words echoed in her head with the extra emphasis as she stared, more than a little horrified at what now looked like a prop out of a horror movie. Another little laugh spilled out of Sadie’s mouth, but this one was tinged with anxiety. ”A snapped neck? He’s practically looking backwards. If he was murdered it had to be by the Hulk. ’The suspect is a 10 foot tall green beast with anger issues. If you see him don’t approach.’.” People always threw around the idea that special forces trained operatives could snap a guy’s neck, but it was all bullshit, it took far more strength than most possessed. Magic could’ve done it though, she’d seen what had happened to that coyote’s neck when it hit whatever spell Tobi had thrown at it. Her mouth fell open for a second before her brain caught up. Nah, Tobi wasn’t a killer.
Eyes that were still a little wide drifted back up to the woman. The more she spoke, the more certain she was she knew that voice. Not the face, she definitely hadn’t seen her around, but somewhere she’d heard her. Maybe she was some local disc jockey, her voice providing part of the soundtrack of her writing sessions – one of these days she had to gather together some back-up playlists for when her usual ones just weren’t hitting the spot. ”He could’ve lived around here. If you were strong enough to snap someone’s neck, you’d probably be strong enough to carry the body away after … unless it’s one of those animal attacks the newspapers are always announcing. You think something like a bear could do that? A weirdly strong bear.” Or an evil witch.
Turning away from the body slightly – the shifting gurney remained in the corner of her gaze, but it was thankfully out of focus – Sadie peered up at the woman. ”Do you work around here? You seem kinda familiar. Sound familiar, you’re on the radio right?” It hit her then, sending a buzz through her like she’d shocked herself with her own taser. ”You are! You’ve got that show … the one about all the weird shit!” The one she’d started tuning into after Darcey had explained things to her. She’d lay in bed, snickering over the obviously bullshit stuff – werewolves and ghosts? Please! – feeling her heart race in her chest at the more believable stuff.
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EDEN FOSTER
Human
Posts: 35
Played by:
Jodi
She wants to love and radiant light
Last seen Oct 13, 2024 11:40:44 GMT
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Post by EDEN FOSTER on Sept 16, 2024 14:18:29 GMT
If she didn’t know any better Eden would say the person on the floor was sleeping– sleeping with their head back to front like an owl. At least there was no blood surrounding the body or a huge knife jammed into the poor guy's heart. That could have given Eden some kind of nightmare since seeing a brutally murdered body wasn’t part of your everyday duties. As the woman speculated about the cause of death, Eden's mind wandered to the countless stories she had covered on her show. The bizarre and the unexplained were her bread and butter, but this wasn’t screaming bizarre. There were no bite marks or huge claw marks down his face like she expected. Clearly it wasn’t just some random natural causes of death though. She glanced over at the woman, a flicker of a smile on her face, “Necks are pretty fragile… but yeah fair point.” It still wasn’t screaming supernatural though. Why would a vampire twist someone's neck around when they had sharp pointy teeth to do the job? But then again who was she to question a vampire’s killing habits? Eden’s ear perked up though when the woman mentioned a bear attack. She’d been reading the newspaper articles too. Were people really believing bears were killing everyone in Mystic Falls? Her listeners had warned her not to listen to the official stories. “No fucking way. A bear would just tear him all up.” And there wouldn’t be a collection of cop cars at the scene. She glanced down at the woman as she spoke. She was about to mention the podcast but the woman beat her to it. “Yeah that’s me!” She replied with a beaming smile on her face, trying her best not to seem too excited that someone had recognised her voice. “Things That Go Bump in The Night.” She added quickly. “It’s the whole reason I’m in Mystic Falls to be honest. A few listeners told me to head down to her. Said there’s some weird shit going on… like bears who snap necks.” SADIE VALENCIA |
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SADIE VALENCIA
Human
Posts: 100
Age:
28
Occupation:
Author
Status:
Single
Played by:
Ange
Last seen Nov 1, 2024 17:05:25 GMT
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Post by SADIE VALENCIA on Sept 28, 2024 16:40:57 GMT
Spending time with her dad’s team as a kid had always been exciting, their arrival at the house meaning that she’d have some part of her dad there for a few days. They’d tell her stories about him, leaving her mom laughing half the time, putting that sad look in her eyes the other half. They’d do the stuff with her that dads were meant to do with their kids, playing in the yard, taking her camping out to the woods (back when they’d felt a lot safer than they did these days), slumping on the couch to watch movies with her. Watching action movies with them had always been the worst though. When they hadn’t been bragging how they could do what Stallone or Arnie were doing, they were practically wetting their pants over the things that absolutely couldn’t happen in real life, like people snapping someone else’s neck merely by twisting their heads.
Unless a spell like the one Tobi had cast could turn a head around – Darcey’s use of a similar spell had been gentle and one hundred pleasure, not pain – nobody human could’ve done it. She was pretty damn sure the Hulk wasn’t walking around trying to twist people’s heads off of their necks. God! Could that actually happen if you twisted it around enough times? Bile made a play for the back of her throat as she thought about it. That was one mental rabbit hole she didn’t want to plunge too far down, not if she wanted to sleep in the next decade. She couldn’t imagine Darcey would be too happy about her trying to crawl into his bed for a little magical sexual healing.
Sadie made a low sound in her throat of agreement, her smile a little stronger than the woman’s, but still pretty damn twitchy. This was something weird and if either one of them had been entirely sane, they’d have just got back in their cars and headed home, where they could throw the locks on the doors and maybe stack some furniture behind them and in front of the windows just in case.
Throwing shade at the local bears (not that she’d ever seen one around here, but she hadn’t seen coyotes either until one had decided to come flying out of the dark at her) had kinda been a joke, but the woman hadn’t laughed about it. She’d taken the suggestion seriously. ”True,” she puffed. ”They’d probably have been scraping him up in buckets, not carrying him away. It’s got to have been something big though. Something powerful.” Not saying someone hadn’t been easy. The world had seemed a whole lot fucking weirder since that night and it wasn’t so easy to blame everything that happened on humanity now.
A quick dig through the internet had proved she wasn’t the only one who thought that way. There were crack pots everywhere, blaming everything from global warming to the sinking of the Titanic on the supernatural. Some of it made sense though, enough sense that she’d followed Reddit threads, and started watching more and more of those shaky found footage videos of creepy shit going down in the woods in the Midwest. Podcasts had taken the place of TV shows while she was eating dinner, and fuck yeah, that was where she’d heard that voice before.
”I fucking knew it,” Sadie crowed, bouncing on her toes as she said it. She beamed the woman a smile, forgetting all about what had brought them together. ”I love your show. I binged the entire lot after I heard that episode about that haunted farmhouse.” Ghosts were one of the things she was still on the fence about, but if magic existed, it wasn’t that big a push to spirits. ”Those stories have been going around here for literal centuries,” she said with a chuckle. ”Like all the way back to the Civil War. I’m not surprised they got out eventually. Is this the only thing you’ve like seen for yourself?” She could have told her about the coyote, but outing Tobi to Darcey had already felt like blabbing enough. Instead, Sadie offered her hand, throwing her hair back like she could make herself look more impressive. ”Sadie Valencia. I’m a huge fan.”
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EDEN FOSTER
Human
Posts: 35
Played by:
Jodi
She wants to love and radiant light
Last seen Oct 13, 2024 11:40:44 GMT
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Post by EDEN FOSTER on Oct 13, 2024 11:41:05 GMT
Eden’s parents were of the opinion running a podcast wasn’t a job. It would bring in a few bucks every month, but they were worried Eden was ready to throw all her time into this one thing and come out with nothing in the end. There was a sigh of relief when she told them she’d also got a job in the ice cream shop. She wasn’t solely relying on the income from the podcast, even though it was gathering enough followers that she believed one day she could do it full time. Her knowledge on bears was pretty fucking limited. They didn’t have them over in Boston and most certainly didn’t have them in Western Australia. The only thing she worried about was finding a spider in her boot or losing an arm while surfing. “Something bigger than a bear?” She questioned, her gaze still locked on the body as they watched emergency services throw a blanket over the poor dude. After this she’d sink off to her hotel room and wait for the newspaper article to emerge with the vague details as to what happened or maybe they wouldn’t report it at all. The less the locals knew the better it seemed. Another death going unreported. While the circumstances were depressing, there was a small chance Eden could squeeze a story of this for her podcast. Someone out there knew something.
“No way fucking way!” She exclaimed, a grin stretching across her face and practically tickling her ears. She couldn’t wait to tell Billy and her parents afterwards. Some random person in the wild recognised her voice purely from the podcast. “Oo yeah the farmhouse. That was one of the early eps.” The bizarre farmhouse out in Utah where families moved there only to pack up and leave a month later claiming the place was haunted. You could brush off one reporting of the supernatural, but five? Nah. “A listener recently wrote in saying that in eighteen sixty four about twenty something vamps were rounded up and placed in some kind of tomb here.” The writer never said whether the vampires were still held in the tomb nor where the tomb was. “Kinda. When I was a kid though I was home alone and someone started playing the piano upstairs. I’m a firm believer it was my great, great, great nanna.” Her brother argued it was the wind, like the wind could gather enough energy to play the piano. His theory was more ridiculous than hers. “Eden Foster. I’m super flattered!” She shook Sadie’s hand. “So you're a believer too?”SADIE VALENCIA |
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SADIE VALENCIA
Human
Posts: 100
Age:
28
Occupation:
Author
Status:
Single
Played by:
Ange
Last seen Nov 1, 2024 17:05:25 GMT
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Post by SADIE VALENCIA on Oct 25, 2024 17:58:00 GMT
After had Darcey had told her that the supernatural stuff in her books was eerily accurate at times, Sadie had started to wonder if she’d seen more than she’d thought growing up in Mystic Falls. Sure, she’d heard all the stories the other kids had – the vampires that had supposedly been through here sometime during the civil war (that still smelt like BS to her), the folks that would turn up dead in the woods every now and then (hiking was a dangerous business, especially now that she knew for sure that the wildlife around here was extra spicy). Maybe there’d been times she’d seen something too and had written it off, thinking she’d just been the victim of too much imagination, or more likely, a little too much drinking.
She was stone cold sober now, unlike the night Tobi had killed the coyote, and this shit still looked weird. A guy with his head entirely twisted around and thoughts of how the coyote’s neck had snapped too fresh in her mind. Sadie stared at the side of the woman’s face as she looked at the body, not wanting to take another look (it wasn’t like Darcey was gonna be on hand every time she needed to push those thoughts of her head). ”Something bigger, maybe something stronger. We’ve got some freaky wildlife around here.” Given the woman’s accent she was probably used to that sort of stuff, although those spiders that were the size of dinner plates and jumped at people facehugger style couldn’t go snapping necks either. This felt like something new – or something she didn’t want to consider given that she now had two people who could do that to a coyote at least in her in life.
Both of them were gonna hear about this later. Tobi would probably push another cocktail at her, warning her about maybe revealing too much to random folks who were rubbernecking as hard as she was. Darcey’s face might settle into those grim lines, and yeah, he’d probably warn her too. Both of them had been clear about keeping her mouth shut about what was out there. Not everybody loved Harry Potter enough to be excited about the whole magic thing, some folks would have pitchforks out the minute they heard about it and she didn’t want to see either one of them hoisted up like a prize catch on one of those things.
Woah. It turned out she needn’t have worried about outing either one of them (although her lips were still sealed on just who she’d really heard about this stuff from). The podcast had still been impossibly wild in places, but she would’ve sworn that she’d hard some hints of truth in the stories this woman and her parents had told. Sadie snorted, looking at her as though she was the second coming. ”It’s a small world. I never thought I’d actually run into you guys in town.” Although the odds of that had probably grown shorter when she’d started poking her nose into this stuff.
”Did you ever think about heading out there, seeing if there was anything there yourself?” Considering how far Utah was from Mystic Falls, that probably wasn’t all that feasible, especially when they had a plethora of supernatural trouble on their doorstep. Making a low sound of agreement in her throat, Sadie bobbed her head. ”There was a story like that going around when I was in high school. People would go looking for them, nobody ever managed to find it though. The real story was that some church around here burned down by some soldiers.” That sounded plausible, but coverups must’ve been easier to come up with in the days before the internet.
Sadie’s eyes went wild as the woman started telling her about her first experience. Maybe she’d have taken that over nearly being bitten by a rabid coyote before it was killed, or maybe not. She would’ve had to burn the apartment down or move to another town if that happened to her. ”Could she play a decent tune?” Sadie asked, snickering slightly before the sound broke off. She raked her teeth over her lower lip, then let out a breath, deciding to at least tell most of the truth. ”I wasn’t, but I am now. I had a close encounter of the spooky kind in town. Went walking home after a night out at the club and there was this coyote. It must have been rabid, but it ... uh ... had a little accident. Bones broke, it died, and I got interested. I’m an author, this is the sort of crazy shit I’m meant to write about, not actually end up in the middle of, if you get what I mean?” Another quick glance at the body had her shuddering. She needed to pick her lane, decide if she could handle this or if this was proof that she ought to bug out now and bury her head in the sand again (except for magic could be fun).
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hope to see you in the discord! 
