My question is similar to lilith_sternin, when setting up scenes, how and where do the characters live? In the same house or different houses? Also, in the hospital. Is it like a residential or community lot?

aikea_guinea: No one really lives anywhere. They all exist in this perpetual state of limbo, floating around in the ether waiting to be called upon to act out their roles. As far as the houses seen in the series go, those are all actual fully decorated houses. Each of those lots has a 'place holder sim' (a random game generated sim that never appears in the series and never moves off the lot) so as I'm teleporting everyone all over creation the lot doesn't inadvertently become empty, thus losing all the decorating.

That hospital… what a nightmare of a lot that is!! It's this amazing building I downloaded from MTS2, and it's a residential lot, but it's so HUGE that even my computer lags like mad when I'm on it. No one is ever going to the hospital again. If they need medical assistance they can go to a smaller facility somewhere in town. XD

In many of the episodes, the sims drive their car to another sims house. Do you temporarily have the characters all move into the same house to play out the scenes with them driving or do you use cheats?

aikea_guinea: All I do for that is have the sims sit in the cars and use moveobjects to stick the car in the road. Add in a few creative angles and I'm able to make it look like they've driven large distances when in reality they've hardly gone from one end of the lot to another.

Do you normally work with only one neighborhood or do you have more than one custom neighborhood? (For instance, when explaining the past of James/Tristan, did that involve a custom neighborhood or just a block was set aside to play it out?)

aikea_guinea: I have a total of 10 custom neighborhoods in my game and have since deleted the default Maxis ones. There's a town of Deception Pass where most of the action takes place, the Underworld got it's own neighborhood, and the others are just random towns where I can test certain genetic things out like skin tones without cluttering up the other neighborhoods with a million clones.

Just for the record, next time we revisit James and Tristan in the past that will be getting its own neighborhood as well. In the time since that initial episode was shot I've gotten a hold of some flat-out amazing lots I'd love to use.

When showing the characters as children/teens, did you age them down or are there Emily/Mary clones running around somewhere in your game? :)

aikea_guinea: I aged them down, but there are also an insane number of clones running around. In this outtake I had two Jamesessess (Jamesi?) on top of each other in order to do a trick shot with double exposure. There were also two Marys used to create the illusion of a mirror in the scene with the 'Mirror of Truth' game. You don't even want to know how many Tristans there have been.

Have any of your characters gotten married in the sim world? Had kids? etc.

aikea_guinea: Well… my me!sim has spawned with Andy and Tristan (*hides face in shame*), Andy and Jade have spawned (the result of which was the scariest ass toddler I have EVER seen), and a really long time ago I spawned Tristan and Emily. I never saved the results of any of these strange genetic experiments. And when I say 'spawn' I mean 'spawn' using the tombstone of life and death. I don't breed sims really. No one's gotten married, and no one's ever died. I mean ever. I still have my very first sims running around-I couldn't even let them age to elders.

Last one, promise. Just like all good soaps, certain secrets may carry on and on. Will Mary/James ever realize that they kissed and liked it!!!??? Okay, that might be a spoiler. Maybe I should ask, will more of Andy's dark plots start coming to light in the next season??? (hope that's safer to answer...)

rosewalker: We haven't even seen the half of Andy's dark plots. Hell, I don't think we've even seen the eighth of them. ;)

aikea_guinea: muwhahahahahahaha…

In most literature, there is a character that speaks primarily for the reader-- the person who says what we all really want to say. Of the main bunch, who would you all say serves this role?

rosewalker: Probably Markus, who is sort of what Mary is (or should be) striving for. Although with all the crap we keep putting him through, he may not be able to stay that way. He's the rational one, and I identify with that. He's the reader who pulls back from the story and says, "They're going to do what?!?! That's insane!" We do like to sort of spread the rationality around a bit, especially in exposition scenes. I think that Mary has been an observer for a lot of things, she's been the only one to see that Andy is bad, that Tristan loves Emily, and that Deanna is the total rebound girl. Meanwhile all the things that are happening directly to her have to get pushed aside while she tries to force everyone else to see what she sees.

Which character do you each identify with personally? Were any of the characters in the original stories shaped after the writers?

rosewalker: I identify with at least some parts in nearly everything. If there are characters I don't identify with, they sort of mirror me; Chris has been the embodiment of many of my fears and a few of my desires, but he's never really been fleshed out enough for me to identify with. Hopefully that will be forthcoming.

Mary has always kind of been "my" character. I've given her a lot of my own fears, hopes, weaknesses and experiences to work with. I did want to explore some things within myself without making her a Mary Sue clone, so I took a few very specific experiences and ideas and magnified them. One of the most important things is her very black and white world, where everything is clearly defined and there are no gray areas. I'm not sure if it will ever come out in the story why she's this way, but it has served a very specific purpose for her. It makes her life simpler for much of the time, but when she starts to run into gray fuzzy areas like emotion, it makes her downright crazy and she goes to the strangest extremes. This is what she's going to spend a lot of time trying to overcome.

But she's also quite different from me, which is what makes writing for her so much fun. She's quick with her tongue and doesn't ever seem to consider the things she says, whereas I quite often agonize about what to say and usually end up saying nothing at all. She's loud, and she's kind of ditzy, although if she wants to learn something she can be pretty resourceful. But she really doesn't care about knowledge that doesn't serve an immediate purpose just as she doesn't like to dwell on what-ifs.

Then there's Emily. I have a hard time expressing why I identify with her. One of the biggest reasons is her attraction to Andy. She's so used to crap relationships that she intentionally forces herself into something that seems "normal" and "good" on the surface. This is definitely somewhere I've been, and although my "normal" guy didn't turn out to be an evil mastermind, he did turn out to have horrendous personal hygiene. I also identify with Emily's relationship to Mary's parents. Although I do have two parents of my own, Danielle's mom pretty much raised me through much of my middle and high school life. Except she's way cooler than Mary's mom is. Emily is also the caretaker and the down-to-earth responsible one. She's also not quite sure who she is yet, especially who she is not in relation to someone else, and I'm looking forward to her journey to figure this out in the coming season.

And Deanna - oh yes, I've been the rebound girl. Sucktastic. If she was a stronger woman than I, she'd get the hell out of Deception Pass immediately. Sadly, I like her far too much, so she'll probably need to kid herself and stick around awhile longer.

Markus - I identify with his rational side. His normalcy, and his reaction to the chaos surrounding him.

Tristan - I identify with his geekiness. He's a nerd. A cool nerd, but still a nerd, and I love him. He's smart, quiet, a little shy, and he's can't get enough books to read.

James - We wanted to give James a very realistic duality. He's incredibly charming and romantic, every woman's dream. But he's also a player. BUT, he's also extremely loyal and loving and will do anything to help is friends. DOUBLE BUT, he won't take people's shit, he'll lash out if he's being attacked. I think that duality is in everyone to some extent.

aikea_guinea: Just like Sara, I relate to certain aspects of everyone, putting a little bit of myself in all of them to a certain extent and at the same time making sure that none of them are carbon copies of myself.

Tristan is probably the character most like me. He's my artistic and creative self coupled with my (not-so) inner geek. He uses music to express himself where I use words and art, and if we don't have an outlet for that we go a little crazy. He's got this darkness to him, but he hasn't lost his sense of humor. We both may mope a lot and appear to be afraid of our clothing involving color of any kind, but that doesn't mean we don't know how to laugh. We're both highly uncomfortable in social situations, rather awkward until we get to know someone, and we're both dreamers. And right now we both have purple hair.

At the same time, there are differences. He's meticulous-very neat, tidy to a fault. He's a bit more forgiving than I am, though he's far quicker to anger.

I think Emily is second closest to who I am. I haven't been through exactly everything she has, but I took things out of my life and sort of twisted them around to something else that I felt was comparable without putting too much of myself out there. We both moved ungodly amounts growing up, we were both lost until we found our soul-mate. She's as emotion-driven as I am, we both feel things very deeply and we're both weepers. We've both fallen into the trap of measuring ourselves against our relationships with other people rather than who we really are. We're both huge slobs, too. I think Emily is a much younger me.

Deanna represents my feelings of always being on the outside looking in, of watching everyone in their own pre-formed groups not fully opening up to me. We both struggle with wanting to fit in and hating that we feel the need to at all. And I know she's going to kid herself and stick around. I can't bear to let her leave. She has amazing potential. I can't wait to utilize her more in the coming seasons, to play her off others and watch how everyone reacts.

Mary is a bit how I wish I could be. I love the way she's not afraid to just come out and say what's on her mind. I think a lot of the things she's not afraid to say, but I could never bring myself to actually come out and say them.

Markus and I are both in very stable long-term relationships. He's a great balance to the anarchy around him, though he surely can't be immune forever.

James- what can I say about James? He's been around me for so long… he's like another older brother to me. As a matter of fact, much of his relationship with Emily is based on interactions I had with my older brother growing up-the pet names (though my brother called me things like 'Grub'), the feeling of being watched over and cared for without judgment, and he always kept me laughing even when it felt like the world was falling down around me. James is a hero, but I like to think he's a realistic hero with faults and failings like everyone else.

Andy is slightly more evil than I am, but we both have the same sort of control issues. We're both terribly manipulative and fundamentally insecure.

Jacob is the embodiment of my fears, of getting to the point where the voices in my head drown out the sound of my own voice. Not that I'm Schizotypal exactly. I'm starting to get ahead of myself now.

Do you secretly let any of the characters sleep over each other's homes? Are there spare rooms when everyone is at one spot? Can we see pictures?

aikea_guinea: Like I said, it's perpetually 8AM on Monday in Deception Pass. No one ever really sleeps. No wonder they're all insane…

In game, who has the most chemistry bolts with whom? Who's in love with whom?

aikea_guinea: No one has any chemistry bolts with anyone. In reality the sims hardly know one another! I'll occasionally change their relationship scores if I need a certain reaction-for instance, if I need a scowl I'll make sure that the scowler has a very low relationship score with the scowlee. (Ker and Andy are a good recent example of me using this technique.)

Do you keep playable versions of the DP folks?

aikea_guinea: Nope. Sometimes I wonder if I could even play the game anymore. I briefly tried to run a business when OFB came out, but gave up and cheated my way through it.

Where does Abigail live when she's not visiting? Does she have a house too?

aikea_guinea: Abigail lives in Los Angeles and is a psychic to the stars. She does indeed have her own house-it appeared in the very beginning of the dream arc. Or… at least she used to have her own house. It may have been lost in a recent reinstall. Regardless, if need be I'll build her a new one. ^_^

How old are James, Jacob, Deanna, and Chris exactly?

aikea_guinea: Here are everyone's birthdays and ages as of posting. If you're really into Zodiac signs and the like, these are the dates you should be going off rather than whatever signs the sims ended up with--

Emily, 27: Feb. 10, 1979
Mary, 26: September 6, 1979
James, 143: August 17, 1862
Tristan, 144: March 6, 1862
Markus, 29: September 25, 1976
Andy, 38: October 31, 1968
Chris, 78: April 7, 1928
Deanna, 42: May 8, 1964
Jacob, 18: July 7, 1988

I always wondered how you get the perfect facial expressions for the shots, though. Does it take a long time, and do you often have to redo some parts because the sim's face wouldn't cooperate? (or something like that) Especially in the shots with multiple characters, and they all have to look correct...

aikea_guinea: I sometimes wonder if my neighbors think we have a large number of very uncooperative children with the amount of yelling at the screen I do. ^_^

Actually it's not all that difficult to capture the right facial expressions as I constantly run the game at slowmotion 3. Once in a while I'll slow it down to 6 or 7 if I need to get something exactly perfect. Synching everyone up is a challenge, and I have to admit repeated dumb luck and the patience of a madman for the success of multi-character shots.

How do you figure out the actions your Sims have to use to get the desired effect? I noticed that in the last episode, you had Mary handcuffing someone (I believe?) in order to look right.

aikea_guinea: I spend an ungodly amount of time messing around with the different animations I've pulled (nearly 900 now), running test shots and basically burning the look of the actions into my brain. I take several thousand screen shots as a way to sort of practice and come up with different ways of combining actions in new and strange ways.

Sometimes I'll run a scene through once or twice to see which animations work better for what I need the person to be doing.

How difficult is it to stage the objects and people in your shots correctly? It can't be easy…

aikea_guinea: I don't find it overly difficult unless I'm trying to place a pair of sims close to one another. They tend to like to stick to each other's hands when it's most inconvenient. A lot of the time if a shot isn't working because something is in the way, I simply move the thing out of the way. Objects and sims are moved around as needed.

My questions are related to the simming part - I would like to know whether Tristan was in-game born sim or CAS or Bodyshop made. You had several versions of him, but then you imply that he looks like his father which makes me think you eventually used a sim born in game for the final version.

aikea_guinea: Tristan was one of the first sims I created using Bodyshop (Mary was another very early Bodyshop sim). He was the first sim I made based off an actual person (a young Simon Gallup, bass player for the Cure), which I think is what makes him unique.

I believe you're referring to me saying he looks like his father in one of the random pictures in my gallery. I just meant that he looked like the clone I made of him and slightly altered and stuck in Victorian clothing in order to represent his father in the story. ^_^

Second question is about animations, maybe you and gelydh would like to share your knowledge with the rest of us and post a tutorial on how to pull animations from the game. It will be much appreciated.

aikea_guinea: gelydh and I followed a tutorial put together by echo here on MTS2. ^_^

I'm another one who wants to know how you manage the characters! :D How do you get them all in the right places? Do you have clones of all the characters on each lot, so that you can directly control their actions, or do you invite them over? Which lots are community and which are residential? How does it all WORK?!

aikea_guinea: I get everyone on the right sets by using the tombstone of Life & Death to teleport whoever I need.

I actually don't use community lots at all. I don't like having random extras wandering around trying to get in the scenes. All the sets you see are residential and just made to look like a community lot by use of unlocked community objects.

As far as how it all works… it's probably far more boring than one would expect. I see scenes play out in my head and do my best to translate that with the Sims. It involves hours of tedious work.

And no free will EVER!

Will we ever get to see screenshots showing the layout of each house? I'm always curious as to how other people's lots are planned out and built.

aikea_guinea: Absolutely! Take the guided tour of 'The Lots of Deception Pass and Slightly Beyond'!

Does the fact that half the main cast are vampires and can't be exposed to the sun ever affect your simming?

aikea_guinea: There's a huge challenge involved in constantly shooting nighttime scenes. The lighting is particularly difficult to get right, finding indoor lighting that isn't too harsh.

On the other hand, I don't like shooting in the daylight either as it's even more harsh than some of the indoor nighttime lighting, but without the ability to be (easily) controlled.

None of the cast are actually vampires. If I need them to have fangs I just use a set of fangs I have that are accessories, and I've made all the vamps their own custom red vampire contacts based on their own eyes. Before Night Life came out I photoshopped their fangs.

How do you make sure you only have your own NPCs in the background rather than default Sims2 ones which aren't dressed properly? (Or which look ugly.)

aikea_guinea: With moveobjects on, I just pick up random ugly sims and delete them from the shot. ^_^ Other extras (such as the nurses, orderlies, and doctors in the hospital) are spawned with the T of L&D and given touchups as needed, like custom eyebrows and new hair styles. If they're overly ugly, I delete them and spawn a new one. Having nice custom default eyes and skintones helps a lot.

How much editing do you do to the pictures you take for the body of the episodes?

aikea_guinea: That depends. I try to avoid post processing as much as humanly possible, but sometimes a scene needs a touch of special effects. Most post processing is blatantly obvious, though once in a while I have to edit out some damned Zs from a sleeping sim or add in something that just doesn't exist in the simulated world. I don't have the time or desire to go through and work a filter on the 300+ pictures that make up an episode. (400+ for each half of Episode 22!!) Pretty much what you see are straight screencaps.

I want to know more about what Tristan did when he went away and met Deanna. I want to know about Deanna. And more about the Akiras. And more Markus!

aikea_guinea: I'd love to do a flashback scene of that part of Tristan's life if we can fit it into the plot somehow. The whole thing played out in my head when it happened, down to every last detail. There was a lot of snow at first, and a very long drive…

Is it just me, or does Jade have a teeny tiny crush on Andy?

aikea_guinea: She does, and I'm insanely excited you noticed! It's one of those things we don't want to overplay, something that's just a subtle part of her character.

Is Serge just a normal guy, or is there more to him? I've been suspicious of him since he first appeared.

aikea_guinea: You can relax. He's normal. *shifty eyes*

Are we going to find out why Mary doesn't date artists?

rosewalkerProbably at some point. If we don't do anything to explain it specifically, it'll come out in the little details over the course of the story (there are a few in place already).

Has Andy done the whole "making a girl love me then dumping her on her ass" thing before, and does he realize how absolutely silly that is?

aikea_guinea: He's played people before, that's what he does-he's a user, a manipulator. It's a power thing. He's not done it exactly this way, however. He's not the type to do the same sort of thing more than once, as it's the challenge of new and different silly games that he enjoys.

How did you choose the character names? The Tristan/Emily Isolde thing is a very neat piece of handiwork and some of what compelled that is obvious. But what about James? Eminently English, yes, but is there something more compelling that? Is there a biblical element to Mary's name? I can see some parallels between her story and Mary Magdalene's, but there was also some "Mary as redeemer" work going on in the last chapter. (Mary as a Christ-figure? *puzzled*) Okay, next question . . .

aikea_guinea: Why, yes! All of those really deep reasons are PRECICELY why we named them all what we did! *shifty eyes*

Ok, not really.

Tristan used to be Simon lo these many years ago now. Then I met and married him so we had to give him a new name. I've always loved the name Tristan, and I happened to be going through a lot of J. W. Waterhouse's paintings at the time I was starting this up again and found myself transfixed by his painting 'Tristan and Isolde'. I'm starting to wonder if I was also listening to the song 'Tristan' by Dead Can Dance at the time. It wouldn't surprise me. It was the right name, I knew that much. Almost like it was being whispered in my ear.

Emily used to be… well… the base-character was everything from Danielle (gotta love writing yourself into a story) to Elise to Deanna to god knows what else at this point. I chose Emily for this incarnation because I wanted a soft feminine name. She was very briefly Emma before I started posting anything, but that didn't seem to fit her. Emily is one of my favorite female names of all time.

James has pretty much always been James. He was James Anderson for a very long time, even briefly when Deception Pass first started going online. Then Sara discovered that the 'James Anderson' LJ was taken, so she decided we needed to come up with a less common last name for him. A quick search of surnames brought us to Selwyn. 'James' is from Robert James Smith, front man of the Cure. Even at the tender young age of 12 I couldn't quite bring myself to come right out and call him 'Robert'. I think the fact that my dad's name is Robert could have something to do with that. There was one version of the stories where he was inexplicably renamed Robert. I'm still not sure what was up with that.

rosewalker: Oh, he was definitely named Robert in the very first version of the stories. Robert, Simon, Porl, and later on we added Roger and Perry, I believe. The band was the Cure. Only as vampires. I think the original original stories are what is known as "AU Fanfic." *cries*

aikea_guinea: I dunno… the only time I've seen him referred to as 'Robert' was in the 'Single Piece of Recycled Notebook Paper' version of the stories, and that had Porl, Roger, and Perry in it. That was definitely a mid-pre-Deception Pass version of the stories, I think from when we were 14 or 15? If there's an earlier version with Robert in it, I've blissfully erased it from my mind. XD

rosewalker: I think we changed his name when we typed up the first version. I think it was Robert in the very first hand-written stuff, you know, that notebook that Joss Whedon stole? Right up to the point when Mary got brought in and we realized we couldn't have Mary as Robert's wife and as me, so we decided the Cure would just be another band that looked exactly like the Cure only more single. And far more sensitive to sunlight. And named the Epidemic. It was a bizarro-world Cure. Hey, remember Roger's evil twin? Bwahahahaha.

aikea_guinea: Moving along…

Mary is from Mary Poole, Robert Smith's wife. We already had a Sarah in the story back when we started, so we couldn't name her Sara. Interestingly enough, Sarah became Laura and died in a tragic and purposeful house fire after we stopped talking to the real Sarah. Nobody seemed particularly upset by the loss. Sarah/Laura doesn't exist in Deception Pass, just for the record.

I don't know why Andy is Andy, but he's always been Andy.

What authors/works would you say most influenced your writing/story? What areas of mythology do you draw from the most? Are there any authors/works/sources that you purposefully avoid? You were all over the mythological landscape in the last chapter, and the treasure hunt for references was a ton of fun. If you had to make an "If you like DP, you might also like . . ." list, a la Amazon.com, what would be on it?

aikea_guinea: Neil Gaiman is a recent writing style influence, though when we first started I was reading a lot of Stephen King and P.N. Elrod. Later there was some Anne Rice, but her influence is minimal I think, and rather purposefully. We still to this day insist that Joss Whedon ripped us off when he made Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We even have a notebook where we were scribbling out future plot ideas and one of the girls would become 'a kick ass fighter' and the other would be a 'magician of some kind'. Hey Joss, I want my notebooks back! Still, I do love Buffy and most of Angel. Firefly is amazing and shouldn't be missed, either. I'm on board with Sara's idea for a House/DP crossover, too. XD

As far as areas of mythology, anything goes. I personally love it all. There's endless potential in it.

rosewalker: And don't forget that in our original story there was a vampire named Spike, who predates the Buffy Spike by at least a decade! Damn you, Joss!

I second Neil Gaiman. I've tried very hard not to rip him off, but some of his mythology in Sandman is so ingrained in my head that I didn't even realize I was kind of stealing the Furies from him in episode 22. I actually bought the hardcover of American Gods when it first came out, years and years ago, but never got around to reading past the first chapter. When we first came up with the idea for our season one finale almost a year ago, I desperately wanted to finish the book, but I purposefully avoided it so that I didn't totally rip it off.

As for my influences, anything with character development. Television has influenced me a lot just because of the visual nature of Deception Pass. I see the scenes played out in my head, I hear the music in the background. Buffy, Angel and Firefly were all great character dramas. As for current shows, I'm really loving Bones and House. I like CSI (just the original) because of the characters, even though it's more of a procedural show, though if you notice any similarities between that and Deception Pass, THEY ripped US off. Seriously. I'll be watching an episode and someone will blurt out this line that's word for word from Deception Pass. Weird.

As for books, I've been reading a lot of Alice Hoffman lately. I'll pick up anything that sounds like it has an interesting main character. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold was pretty excellent, also. Jennifer Weiner's humor has influenced me a lot, as well. These influences may not be strictly obvious, but they're there.

How do you (Danielle and Sara) overcome being separated by such a large distance? Do you IM a lot or have you perfected psychic communication? Or is it more like MST3K, and you're actually trapped in space, while a weird-ass "scientist" sends you missions?

aikea_guinea: Personally I do my best to not think about it. Once I do I start getting really really depressed and sort of slump in the corner for a while. We don't IM as Sara doesn't have the internetting at home and can't get away with it at work, so there's loads of emails exchanged. And we share a brain.

And now I'll be singing the MST3K theme song for a few hours.

rosewalker: What she said. Emails galore and plenty of phone calls. Actually it's probably good we live nowhere near each other, because it seems like whenever we're together we're either in tears from laughing very hard over god knows what, or huddled under blankets in the elevator lobby of a hotel talking about Really Deep Things. Not much actual writing takes place… could be all the vodka.

Who gives you the most trouble while simming? The characterization in the story leads me to Mary, but there is a certain twinkle in Tristan's eye at times, and I think Andy must be a drama queen. ("I will not cooperate until all the brown M&Ms are removed from my dressing room and replaced with green ones. And I said Evian spring water, not Dasani! I want to talk to my agent. Now." Then Chris comes along and pulls down Andy's pants and everyone has a giggle.)

aikea_guinea: Mary is one of my best actors, actually. Even before I had the ability to pull animations she was always right on target with the perfect expression just when I needed it. James and Emily are the troublemakers-they tend to want to do their own thing and will get around to the acting when they feel like it. Tristan can't seem to stop grinning and waving at everyone. I often have to remind him that he's supposed to be angsty. Chris is a 'one take' guy. He's rather serious about getting things right the first time and moving on. Andy is spoiled rotten, but rewards me with good… bad? …behavior.

How do you group the characters together in your mind? There are a lot of, um, entangling alliances that can make sorting them difficult. Who do you have marked as a loner? Who needs people? The story obviously revolves around Mary, James, Emily, and Tristan, but how do you sort the others? What relationships are more important--those between lovers or those between friends or between family members? There seems to be a definite preference to the family-you-choose, rather than the family-you're-born-with in your writing--see the relationships between Emily and her parents and between Mary and her parents, and contrast those to the relationships within the main quartet of characters.

aikea_guinea: First and foremost this is a story about friendships. Lovers can come and go, but there are ties that bind beyond that. It's an exploration of the kind of strains that can be put on a group of friends and still have them come out intact so to speak.

rosewalker: Hey, that was beautiful. You're the awesomest!

aikea_guinea: My 4AM ramblings were bound to come in handy sooner or later! ^_~

What's up between Markus and Abigail? Is he still experiencing culture shock when it comes to the paranormal, despite have a voudon priestess for a grandmother and two vampires as best friends? Or does his troubled past compel him to wash his hands of things and let fate take its course?

aikea_guinea: He's definitely more rooted in the real world. He can take things in stride, deal with them, but at the end of the day I think he's more likely to keep his feet planted firmly on the ground.

rosewalker: I think maybe his mother tried to keep him away from the voodoo stuff. He can deal with it, it doesn't seem too bizarre to him, and he doesn't have a difficult time believing in the paranormal, but he'd rather it kept its distance. It's sort of like violent crime. You know it happens, but you won't really freak out until it happens near you.

Is Abigail a voudon priestess or a voodoo queen or is she just some general practitioner of the dark arts? Why no sacrifices of black roosters? Ever tempted to have her make a voodoo doll of Andy and poke it mercilessly with pins?

aikea_guinea: General practitioner of the Dark Arts. And no, I've never been tempted to have her make a voodoo doll of Andy because I love him to pieces. :D

rosewalker: What Danielle said. I think her roots are in Voodoo because that's where she grew up, but I think she quickly moved beyond that to find the truth in all things magical.

How did James and Tristan come out like they are? They were born in the 1800s, correct? They're definitely different than then; hair, clothing, tattoos.

aikea_guinea: When I think of Tristan's tattoos I start to laugh at the absurdity of it all-a vampire better make damn sure they want what they're getting tattooed on their skin because they have to live with it a hell of a lot longer than most of us would.

rosewalker: They're quite different than they were, yes. Appearance-wise, at least. But then, I'm a lot different looking than I was just twenty years ago, and Danielle, please don't pull out pictures of the 80s Claw of Doom bangs. So they've just evolved with the times like everyone else.

aikea_guinea: I'll keep the 80s Claw of Doom bangs hidden if you keep Spiral Perm from Hell far from the light of day.

rosewalker: Oh wow, I forgot about the spiral perm. And the Sun-in! God bless the 80s. I'm suddenly really glad I didn't meet you until after my own spiral perm from hell.

aikea_guinea: But yes, even as people change appearance-wise through the years, subtle changes also take place with personality and the like. It's not necessarily anything drastic, but outside forces influence your perspective on the world. James and Tristan aren't time travelers, they aren't Victorian men thrown suddenly and violently into the modern world-they've had a leisurely stroll through time, adapting to the changes going on around them. They're still fundamentally the same people they've always been, just with a lot more time to think about it. As such, they can sometimes come across as somewhat outdated, but never exactly foreign.

I've done a lot of thinking about how people act at different ages. James and Tristan don't act like 145 year olds, Chris doesn't act like anyone's grandfather I know. To me, it's not about the age. People treat you as they perceive you, whether or not it's fair or accurate. If everyone around you thinks you're in your mid-20s they're going to treat you like they would treat someone in their mid-20s, even if you're in your 70s. With the absence of any of the typical physical changes from aging, without the aches and pains of growing old, I think you'd continue to act as you always had, just adapting it to the social norms of the present.