"I know because I read...Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating." ~Libba Bray

Being a bridesmaid. Cowboy hat and boots with pink dress are compulsory. Need to buy all new hat and boots because mine are grey and dusty. Whine whine whine.

^ Haha no I'm not. Never enough sexy vampires.
I wanted to give the knight a horse but I couldn't find one. So I gave her antlers instead, which I quite like, but I'm still not sure about a knight without a horse. So imagine it grazing just out of sight.
I was tagged by @vampirkaninchen (thank you very much!)
 
Quizzy thing:
 
My favourite quote:
"It's not really my problem if they think I'm weird."
-Sid Vicious. Overused, I know, but still good.
 
Best friend on Polyvore that you don’t know in real life:
I love everyone. :)
 
Can you remember your last dream?
Yes. I was making cornstarch/water goop at the bottom of my laundry hamper with Freddy Krueger.
 
3 places you’d like to go on vacation?
I'd be super pleased to go anywhere at all, but my first choices would be London, Jamaica, and Prague.
 
Do you like chocolate?
Yep.
 
Which is your favourite part of the human face and why?
Eyes. I've never met a person who didn't have fascinating eyes.
 
Do you like rainy days or snowy winter days more?
Rainy days, because snow makes work difficult, and it's not a novelty here, whereas rain is, kind of.
 
Which is your favourite four legged creature?
Horses. I could talk forever about how awesome horses are, but I mostly like them becuz they're generous and useful.
 
Do you like spicy food?
Yes.
 
Do you remember your favourite teacher?
I'm not overly fond of teachers, but my favourite person who happens to teach is my current English teacher. I hope that makes sense?
 
Tell me about your favourite book.
I couldn't possibly pick a favourite book! I've read too few of the billions of books to be a good judge. But I really liked Going Postal and Wintersmith(anything with Feagles, actually) by Terry Pratchett, and I Capture The Castle, by Dodie Smith, and The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks.
 
Tell me about the last movie you watched.
The Hobbit. I left the theatre with a new appreciation for beards and swords and certain actors.
 
Tell me about your favourite music/band.
Again, couldn't possibly pick a favourite. Right now I'm listening to Amanda Palmer and The Grand Theft Orchestra and Flatfoot 56.
 
3 favourite foods?
Pizza, ice cream, and oranges.
 
Do you like to shop?
Yes, actually, if I have plenty of money to spend and good places to spend it.
 
Are you usually late, early, or right on time?
Since I started driving myself, I'm usually right on time.
 
Are you happy with your life for the most part right now?
Yes.
 
What would be harder, telling someone that you love them or that you don’t?
I feel like if I actually loved someone, telling them would be easy. So telling someone that I don't.
 
What’s your middle name?
Claire
 
How big is your bed?
'S a double.
 
What music are you listening to right now?
The Black Parade. Mama picked it up at a thrift store, and I'm liking it insanely.
 
Who was the last person you hugged?
Outside of my immediate family, the teenaged Santa stand-in at my school's Christmas concert. His idea.
 
How is the weather right now?
Dark and clear, -20 Celsius.
 
Are you a different person now than you were 5 years ago?
Fu.ck, I hope so. Five years ago I was a whiny, angsty eleven-year-old.
 
Favourite fruit?
Oranges and tomatoes.
 
Do you have a collection of anything?
I collect pretty glass bottles.
 
Have you ever had a crush on a best friend?
Mmm, no.
 
Would you ever tell a person you have a crush on that you like him/her?
Maybe if I was drunk.
 
Do you consider yourself popular?
My school is so small that no one is popular and no one is unpopular. I don't trouble myself too much about it.
 
Have you ever cut yourself on purpose?
No.
 
Would you ever date someone older than you? Younger than you?
It'd depend on the person, of course, and on how much I liked them.
 
Have you ever been on a diet?
Tried once, just to see what it was like. Lasted about 4 hours, haha.
 
Have you ever gotten detention?
No.
 
Do you usually prefer books or movies?
-Books. Usually.
 
Have you ever written a love letter?
- No.
 
Are you a morning person or a night person?
Both. I don't sleep much.
 
Do you make wishes on shooting stars?
Occasionally.
 
Celebrity role models?
Mmmm, not really.
 
Who would you want to be tied to for 24 hours?
Back to back or face to face? It changes things enormously. But back to back, Stephen Fry or Terry Pratchett, or Helena Bonham Carter. Face to face, gonna go with Aidan Turner, though I'd probably expire from the high concentration of sex appeal before my 24 was up.
 
How many piercings do you have?
None. I'm planning on getting a few, maybe.
 
What is the longest crush/relationship you have had?
I don't know. My crushes fade in and out.
 
What is the meanest thing anyone has ever said about you?
What hurts me most is being told I'm withdrawn. I don't like to think of myself that way, but I fear I am. :(
 
What is the best compliment you have ever received?
I really like being told I'm funny. Or pretty(which I hate about myself).
 
What does your username mean?
Absolutely nothing. I just like thistles.
 
Have you ever made a prank phone call?
Nope. Call display, man.
 
Do you smoke?
No.
 
Have you ever been drunk?
No. I drive myself everywhere, so I can't drink.
 
Have you ever cried during a movie?
Yes. I cried during Brave, and almost cried at the end of The Hobbit when Thorin hugged Bilbo. :3
 
Do you take the shampoo/conditioner bottles from hotels?
No.
 
Do you always smile for pictures?
Or I make a face. Or glare.
 
That was fun. ^^ I have no idea who's been tagged, so I'll leave it open?

Halloween approaches. A crucial question demands your attention: Should I be a zombie? Or a pirate? Or, indeed, a zombie pirate? Decisions, decisions.

So I see that HMS has disappeared, which is all right, I imagine. For a long time I'd wanted to do a group photograph event for the Sweethearts, and I found this half-finished story about it and thought it might as well go here. It's definitely not the definitive Sweetheart ending flourish, as I know HMS wasn't all cheerful, chirpy shenanigans for everyone.
 
“A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate."
“They look pretty happy to me, sir” said the photographer’s assistant to his superior, a heavily mustached man with sweat beginning to bead on his brow. An array of obscenely cheerful young women were milling around in front of him, cackling and turning cartwheels and throwing knives. A girl in a cowboy hat with a snake wrapped round her neck was arguing fiercely with an older woman with extremely curly blonde hair. Another pair were taking turns standing on each other’s shoulders.
“Hey Mister Wilberforce, can we take the picture like this?” He shook his head, probably in confusion than in denial. A slight twitch developed below his eye.
Not too far away, a pretty ginger girl was explaining to a squalling child why it had to wear pinchy shoes and an itchy dress.
“I put up with it for sixteen years, so you can manage for an hour, darling. Besides, you do look so very sweet…” the ginger girl said, straightening a bow in the child’s hair.
“Get your damned parasol out of my face, Lillian, you’re going to put my eye out.”
“Absolutely NO torches, Addie! Put those down!”
“But Lillian’s got her parasol…”
“Not for any longer. Give me that, you strumpet.”
“That’s me mum yer thinking of, Jack. I’m a tightrope walker.”
The photographer tugged at his cravat and smoothed his mustache back. Mustn’t be intimidated, he thought, it’s only a flock of girls. Ridiculously athletic girls, he amended, as one of them turned a back handspring, narrowly missing his tripod.
“Have you seen my rabbit anywhere?”
“No, have you checked your hat? Har, har.”
“You amuse no one, Professor.”
You’d need a fishing net to gather them all together, thought the photographer.
“This historical moment needs some accompaniment. Get thee to the piano, Oliver.”
“Wonderful idea, Pippi, but there appears to be a spare curtain draped across it.”
“That’s not a spare curtain, that’s the photographer’s backdrop.”
“Is it? I thought it was your new costume, Pippi.”
“You’re beastly, Rayka.”
Why did I take this job? I’ve got nowhere near the constitution for this.
“Girls! Girls, please arrange yourselves…” said the man who was the closest thing to “in charge” in this anarchy.
“Let me, Jack,” interrupted a dark-haired woman with the aforementioned squalling child on her hip. Up onto the stage she stepped, and cupping her hands to her mouth, roared “Girls! I ask that you, as the heart and soul, the blood and bone of the Hanged Man Theatre, take your places as directed by this gentleman here. If you’re quick about it, there’ll be time for tea before we start preparing for this evening’s show.” She pointed towards the photographer, who gulped, but squared his shoulders and began shepherding circus performers into an approximation of five rows. In the very front, the infants and their mothers, seated in chairs as becomes proper ladies. Between them, on the floor, a sweetheart with her knees in a place where knees don’t often reach, looking very nonchalant. Displayed around them with very little pattern are the Sweethearts in their varying shapes and sizes, some wearing foolish grins, some looking (perhaps falsely) demure, some distant and disengaged. All of them looking interesting. And behind them, the gentlemen. Unlike the Sweethearts, they are uniformly tremendously proud, heads held so high that their necks will ache for a week afterward.
If you care to remember them (and they have no idea why you wouldn't) leave the scared, lonely, broken girls they arrived as in peace. Whatever they once were, they're now The Hanged Man's Sweethearts, and as they began, they intend to go on: a bunch of self-reliant hussies, who can throw knives and tame tigers and light themselves on fire and rock a pair of tights and a corset like the latest fashions out of Paris.
And that's who the poor photographer eventually manages to capture. As he drags his equipment out the door, he reflects that it's a very good thing they haven't gotten into politics.
Yet.

Poor Elvie, she didn't get very far off the ground. Not even a story for this one.
Featuring Stephen Fry as Elvie's favourite professor.
For my 16th birthday this morning, my dear mother gave me a full size vintage cotton Union Jack, made in the early fifties, and wonderfully aged. I love my mother, she knows me so well.

Perhaps foxes are overexposed. I don't care.

“And Charlie says he once saw her tearing a dead chicken apart in a back alley! With her teeth!!”
“Charlie spends an awful lot of time with his nose in a beer mug though, doesn't he?”
“Her teeth!!! And the man on the night shift says he saw her climbing down the side of a building head first, like a flippin squirrel or somefing!”
“Well, we do call 'em the Scalers, Pete. They're probably trained in the ancient art of hanging on bloody tight.”
“He's got a letter what fell out of her pocket!!”
“Keeping it as a memento, is he? What's it say?”
“He hasn't read it, sir. He's not suicidal!!”
“Evidently. Nothin' wrong with stealing a letter, but for God's sake don't read it!”
“She killed her first man by stabbing him wiv a letter opener!! She's psycho, sir! A danger to us all!!”
“No, Pete, she's Captain Espina Glint, and she makes a damn good one, too. And I'll ask you to shut your gob about it now.”
“You're only sayin' that coz you're scared of her, sir.”
“Shut up, you insolent bastard.”
 
None of the above tales about Captain Espina Glint are true, except for the one about the letter opener. Such fallacies are only spoken by Ernest, a lowly office boy, not much different from what Glint herself started out as. Before joining the Scalers, she had worked as a secretary for an eminent thaumaturgologist. She was absorbed by the police force after she stabbed a potential assassin in the back with a letter opener.
Glint has been in the force three years now, and still she refuses to wear the uniform.

Chantilly Breen
Age:17
Occupation:Debutante, and part-time host to a demonic presence
Chantilly and her sister Porcelain, the toasts of the massive Breen corporate empire, are to vengeful ghosts what fresh bones are to hounds. They both practically live in white nighties, which /probably/ doesn't have anything to do with it. In fact, their instances of possesion are so common that their families hardly look up when they start speaking in tongues and spinning their heads around. It's a bizarre case which has attracted the attention of Saphraxen's foremost Spiritualists, whose theories are a subject of much ridicule to the Breens, who mostly don't concern themselves with their daughters' afflictions.
Model:Esme Wissels
 
Porcelain Breen
Age:17
Occupation: Debutante, and part-time host to demonic presences
Like her sister Chantilly, Porcelain is a positive magnet for supernatural entities. They find themselves sharing their heads with foreigners at least twice a week, usually at importune times, and mostly separately from the other. It makes the business of courting very tricky, but the twin's mother has, with the cunning that helped to forge their enormous fortune, collected a whole tribe of devoted suitors ready for marriage. It only remains for Porcelain and Chantilly to make their choices. The tribe is starting to seem more than a little cultish, which worries the girls somewhat.
Model: Rasa Zukauskaite
 
Elecampane Farrar
Age:25
Occupation: Poisoner
Elecampane and her daughter Eyebright dwell in Saphraxen's Botanical Gardens, and live off the plants Elecampane tends, and the occasional pigeon or dormouse. The Botanical Garden's boffin patrons know of her presence, and tolerate it in exchange for the cabbalistic brews and powders she concocts, which are useful when their enemies start to get noisy. But if Elecampane makes her living as a poisoner, she takes far more pride in her work as an apothecary and midwife to Saphraxen's poor, a service for which she takes no payment.
Elecampane is not completely human. Certainly, she's got far better eyesight than she has any right to.
Model: Jourdan Dunn
 
Step-Lively Montserrat
Age:18
Occupation: Lunatic
Step-Lively is not actually a lunatic, but rather a veiler, which is the Saphraxen term for someone with second sight. She sees the city's enormous population of spooks, clankers, goblins, and wailers going about their business, which is tormenting mankind. Step-Lively longs to escape her confines in the upper floors of her family's enormous house and wring the neck of each and every demon that trots past, but as no one else can see her enemies, Step-Lively is classified as a lunatic, rather than a crusader against the unseen nemesis. If she had been born among the city's superstitous lower classes, Step-Lively would probably have been able to find gainful employment hunting spooks, but her retired colonel father and filthy rich mother are staunchly anti-superstition, and believe Step-Lively's talent is a mental illness.
Model: Georgia Fowler
 
Whippet Leblanc
Age:21
Occupation: Middle Priestess to Madam Patience Webb
The cult of Patience Webb is one of the dozens of tiny cults that has sprung up among Saphraxen's spiritually creative. Madam Webb herself is a misty figure, possibly real at one point. She is the guardian of sausage vendors, seamstresses, prostitutes, and, strangely, aluminum bakeware. She demands monthly sacrifices of knitted bondage gear, burned on a pyre in her temple on the full moon. As a Middle Priestess, it is Whippet's job to knit the harnesses and handcuffs Madam Webb requires. Whippet's mother is the High Priestess, who is often too busy to pay much attention to her only daughter. Whippet sometimes considers leaving the priestesshood, but she sticks with it, mostly because she likes the uniform.
Model: Karmen Pedaru
 
Dulcet Edwards
Age: 26
Occupation: Governess
Those who know Dulcet will tell you that she's like a stew to which honey has been added in order to mask the taste of rotted meat. She exudes a kind of winsome appeal, concealing beneath an angelic visage an avaricious, malevolent nature. As if that weren't horrible enough, she's devilishly cunning and her memory for grudges has no equal. Loyalty and trust are nothing more than qualities to be exploited in others.
That being said, Dulcet has one redeeming quality: she is exceedingly good at her job. She is very fond of children, and she protects her charges with exuberant ferocity, which is just what is called for on the streets of Saphraxen. She's employed by the Williams family for their three daughters, who adore her.
Model: Ginta Lapina
 
Zadie Gershvitz
Age:19
Occupation: Owner of an opium den
When Zadie's mother ran off to join a band of travelling minstrels when Zadie was 17, some people might have worried what would become of her and her younger sister. Zadie, for one, had no doubts. From her mother, she not only inherited a thriving opium den but her mother's organizational skills and her head for business. Under her competent hand, the opium fiends of Saphraxen are amply satisfied, and Zadie and her sister are living like princesses.
Zadie is a natural leader. She believes that through logic and proper planning, you may accomplish anything, and so far she hasn't been proven wrong. The gangs that squabble over the area territory have tried to recruit her dozens of times, but she refuses to bring herself and her sister into "that world”. It's a source of perpetual irritation to the gang leaders that this comes from the owner of an /opium den/.
Zadie is practically a giantess in Saphraxen, being over six feet tall.
Model: Milagros Schmoll
 
Tzeitel Gershvitz
Age:16
Occupation: Co-owner of an opium den, though “indentured labourer” might be more accurate.
Tzeitel is very much different from her drill sergeant of an older sister. She is as tactless, clumsy, and haphazard as Zadie is efficient, with an added tendency to be sulky and rebellious. Zadie has forbidden her to talk to the patrons of the den, thinking that they exert a negative influence on Tzeitel. Of course, Tzeitel does it anyway, for she is the author of what will be the most detailed treatise on the subject of opium addiction to ever be written. She marks down every twitch, every stutter, every mumbled word she witnesses in a giant ledger she keeps under her bed. Tzeitel knows more of the mysteries of the drug than any well-respected doctor, to say the least. And when it's finished (probably in a year or so), she'll send it off to be published. She's already got her pseudonym picked out.
Model: Marcelina Sowa
 
This was going to be the start of a roleplay which I eventually decided I had no time for, and so was left to molder away in my brain for ages and ages. I have decided to kick these girls out of the drafts. If anyone likes these characters, you may take them. Take the whole roleplay if you like.
It was meant to be a kind of dystopian steampunk fantasy, but after a while the steampunk got dropped, and the dystopian-osity seemed too gloomy for them. These are resolutely cheerful girls, just like the rest of the Saphraxenians, given that they live in a wretched excuse for a city.
Gotta admit, largely inspired by Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork.

I was tagged by Mona (yay!) to make a set using one item from her set and those from my page 5 in the editor. I used her crossbow, which of course made me think of Ankh-Morpork's Night Watch in the Discworld series. Here is Captain Vimes' room at the Watch buildings, pre-Lady Sybil, as evidenced by the bottles of whiskey at the foot of the bed. The left picture is probably a lady of negotiable affection who has leaped the gap of respectability to become an artistical model. The right one is Ankh-Morpork looking gloomy.
 
I believe everyone has already been tagged, so I tag anyone who feels like doing a tag right now.