I wrote exactly 200 out of the 6000 words I needed to write today. I don't know what it was about today that made me so unproductive, but at some point you need to throw in the towel, so despite the fact that I was almost trembling with guilt at this point, I did. I gave myself two hours, some Jake Chudnow music (listen to him he does Vsauce's soundtrack), and told myself that I was going to get over my art block and stop feeling bad about my ability or lack thereof by just drawing something that didn't fill me with anxiety.

Somehow, I ended up with my planning document open for all the "auxiliary" Chronaverse material, that is, stories that have not been written or will not be written that fall out of the domain of any published or in-progress material I have. Ten months prior, in October, I did the same thing and drew Evan, Adam, and Will for the first time, which was why I decided to write Deja Vu in the first place. Some of these stories have been rotting on that document since then, some are new, and some are never happening anyways. Still, I think it's fun to show my readers a side of the Chronaverse they don't always get, so here are my auxiliary characters. 

Feather (smug little kid, front and center) and her unnamed harpy eagle roc are from Feather (well, that's the current title). The story is one of those conglomerates where I had maybe five ideas and figured "let's knock them all out because potatoes". I was looking at some sidewalk cracks and was thinking about the size of the megaflora if you scaled them up- imagine that, huge plants bursting out of canyons. Then I had Feather from some earlier doodles and a few spare scenes. Currently, the concept is "Chronaverse for actual children", that is, Chronaverse that doesn't involve a third-act twist that gets everyone in the party murdered and contains less profanity/mature themes. A lot of my recent stories have been dark and I've been considering stepping away from that... this one's pretty new, though, so we'll see where it goes.

The Fox Woman doesn't have a story. She's never getting a story. Her deal is that she wears masks. Under the mask is a mask. When she is close to people, there are less masks, but you wouldn't know because if you take off all her masks, she'd die. It's a metaphor.

The Sanguine Delegation was inspired by a dream I had where a friend... no, not a friend really, but someone I know in real life... was taken in by this literal cult downtown. He's a somber, bitter person in real life but he ran up to me and my friends blindfolded (cult thing. Don't ask) and he looked so happy, he was actually smiling. I remember following him back and finding no one in the building, not even him. There were just steps and landings made out of marble, going up and up as far as I could walk, and I was growing increasingly frustrated and panicked. The Sanguine Delegation in Deja Vu was born from the finer details not mentioned above, but they grew away from the dream. Still, to this day that expression and that building haunt me. 

If you can't beat them, join them.

I kind of hate how much this looks like Mimsy. Anyways, this is Claire, from Heathens, which is even more of a joke premise than Deja Vu was (sure as hell isn't a joke now, the angst is real). Anyways, a bunch of middle schoolers run the newspaper but also secretly host a non-school sponsored chat where the juiciest drama and the tastiest lies fester. Said newspaper team must hide this from their sponsor, from their friends, and essentially run the school from the shadows. It's an entire story about pretentious middle schoolers being pretentious and bad inside jokes.

Claire signed up for the wrestling team but through shenanigans ended up here instead. In case you couldn't tell, she's not happy about it.

A character from an unnamed, unfinished story about things that catch fire. She doesn't actually burn herself but there are a few people I can't say the same for.

Another short story: this one I haven't even started. Two clinically depressed people, likely girls, end up with the power to start and stop time, respectively. I have no idea what happens next, hence why I haven't started, I don't know their names and their appearance and personality changes often. Above is a timeline where time stops, one girl takes as many pain meds as she can before the other can get to her, and the survivor, who happens to be the one who could stop time, is stuck forever. It's not going to be a happy story no matter how I tell it, but it'll probably be at least a liiiiittle more hopeful.

Trip is my spoof character. He's like Orca's weird LupisVulpes inspired third cousin. I can't write him into anything because he'd need serious characters to bounce off of and none of my serious characters want to share headspace with this beanbag waste of breath. He makes puns and ruins timelines.

I still have no name for this pretty lady, though I'm leaning towards Sarah or Brooke. As for some quick design notes, yes those are pimples and not freckles, and no I don't know if undercuts work that way but let's go with it. She's an oneironaut who after two intercontinental moves would rather live in her head than the real world, where there are people. People who don't like her. People who are generally terrifying. She's not sure if living in her head makes her weird, because she'd rather not be weird, but she'd also rather not be around people in general, who are definitely weird and confusing.

A character from the above book. As you can tell by the unrealistic standards for women (why do people expect us to have a shield of holy light around our heads at all times, anyways? Unfair.) she's the love interest. The problem with this is that said character (let's call her Emora?) isn't real.

 She's a figment of Sarah/Brooke's imagination because real people, as mentioned earlier, are more stressful than Fictional Girlfriends. Is it a healthy coping method? Is Emora self-aware? Will this story ever get written? 

Find out, eventually, probably never. 

Allison Rhodes is Dead is a story about Allison Rhodes. The story starts when she dies. 

Since Allison so happened to be screwing around with the fabric of spacetime prior to her death, she gets sent to Hilbert's Hotel, a purgatory full of logical contradictions and fridge horror. The above shows her asking where she is and what the hell is going on to one of the many robotic attendees. What follows is her attempt to throw a chair at said robot, which would be harder to draw. 

Nyx (no that's not her real name, it's her 'screen name') showed up in October's aux round, but it's pretty safe to say that Karen is essentially the same character, even though Karen got powers and didn't have to put in the work to learn how to hack. I also keep butchering Karen's arc because it would derail the main plot too far, but hey, what can you do. Nyx is still pretty cool and if I ever do learn how to code I might just have two near-identical badass hacker ladies running around in the Chronaverse. 

Blink (or Flinch) is a story about a detective who has been rejected from several dozen agencies due to being a crackpot conspiracy theorist and a young apocalyptic survivalist, who lives outside of his house in a bunker made out of materials she should not have enough money to buy. They live in a world where people have installed devices that connect directly to their brain, but when these begin going haywire, Real Life Consequences ensue. Together they crack bad jokes about their inability to function in society, laugh about how everyone else is a mindless sheep, and then eventually get around to solving the case before the world ends.

No clue who this guy is, just wanted to mess with some expressions. He's from Death of the Author, another middle/high school drama in my favorite genre... urban fantasy. I don't have more than a concept for this, but said concept is that someone is anonymously submitting stories to the literary magazine that tell the future. As people begin to realize this, a final submission claims that someone in the school will die. 

Hemera is from A Dolor, one of the more fleshed-out auxiliary ideas that hasn't gone anywhere, which is more or less her fault. In the universe of A Dolor, strong emotion generates magic, but the most powerful emotion (love is second, fear is third) is pain. Hemera uses small knives to make cuts (like paper cuts, though she'll go bigger for important fights) in order to harness this power, but I really don't want anyone getting the wrong idea from this, so this idea is going nowhere. 

In this particular image, Hemera is wearing pantaloons. I don't know how I ended up here but for the record, she's never shaved her legs once in her entire life. Some pains are too great to bear. Also razors aren't really a thing yet, at least for her caste. She's kind of a street forager who makes most of her money off of gladiator-esque battles. She's a good fighter, sure, but it's not a good way to make a living, even if people are actually throwing money at you.

Livewire is a temporary name for a story and character who are one and the same. She is the only irregular thing in her entire universe. The world is normal. It's just this one girl with powers. There is no evil for her to stop. There is no reason. There is no purpose. 

The original name came from a song I like, but now I just have to give her electric powers. Far as I'm concerned those are frayed cables in her hair. 

If anyone's ever heard of the Purity Rice test (called the Purity Salt test in this universe), I took it, got a 95, and thought it was hilarious for a book idea. Originally it was a meta commentary on how far people are willing to go to fit societal norms but that sounds pretentious. It's a book about a society where having a lower damn Purity Rice score is a badge of respect. Higher scores are the same, but it's more of a curiosity than anything. People get their scores tattooed, destroy their lives to go lower, etc. It's a mess.

(Also the 'king' of the school is named Benedict. I love that name. Benedict.)

In the middle is Lily, formerly homeschooled, who due to economic reasons must survive public school... and hence becomes the first 100 to enter their school.  Bellatrix, to the right, is a senior who entered some dangerous situations to get lower and was cast aside when she refused advances from someone at a party. Shunned from her former friends, she's determined to protect Lily from the insanity of their souped-up high school. Amy, on the left, is ace/aro, but her score is pretty low because she has no regards for personal safety and needs a drink to survive math class. Vodka is clear, kids.

(We here at ChronaLilly advise you not to try anything stupid with vodka. Your teacher will know it's vodka. Don't bring vodka to school.)

Anyways I'm not doing this one because 1) teenagers, 2) teenagers, 3) I'd be uncomfortable writing it, 4) I've never been to a party in my life, 5) teenagers, and 6) I think it's kind of a funny idea but I don't think real people would ever go this far so there's really no "point" to get across.

No name, but she's immortal. A god took her as a wife and made her immortal so they could live together, forever, but after she slipped away she found herself adrift in the mortal world. She's gone on like this for centuries.

The Chronaverse is full of lonely people.

So I love the "lab kids" cliche because... monster children are my aesthetic... but seriously if you can pump up these kids full of superpowers why would you not do it to yourself. That would be the idea behind Pantaphobia, which is just "escape the lab" but on nightmare fuel, and then you put the nightmare fuel to sizzle on a Chronaverse brand pan, and then you heat that up at maybe an 11. 

I don't think I'll ever write this, either, but if I'm ever original enough to come up with some monster kids that don't reek of every other monster kid out there I'll let you know. Same for Creepy Lab Men, but Competent Lab Men. 

Finally, Bad Break is about the world's edgiest character. Like a lot of the ideas above, it started as a thought experiment/straight-up joke. I will name this gremlin later but I love his cuffed sleeves/shoulder pads/nose tape/dyed hair/eyepatch combo. I was going to give him scars too but I feel like he's more of a poser this way. Fake edgy. Probably bottom of the barrel anime.

Anyways he's a character someone made up in fifth grade, totally fell in love with, and promptly forgot about. As a fictional character who interacts with the "real world" on a limited plain of influence, he can only affect trivial, random events, like dice rolls or coin flips. His goal and the cure for this are linked: if his creator knows he exists, he gains minimally more influence, but he wants to gain said influence so he can flag down his creator, who he was created to be in love with. (He hates this but physically can not hate her.) The bright side is that she's a single liberal arts major who doesn't go outside unless she has to eat or go to class, but the downside is that he doesn't exist and that he's an OC from fifth grade largely inspired by other properties. At the very least it would be nice for someone to acknowledge he exists, especially because he's stuck with her other characters, mainly her older ones, who are in his own words "the biggest bunch of pansies I have ever met".

Oh yeah, he paints his own nails.

ANYWAYS. As you can tell from the above a lot of my ideas tend to overlap, which is why many of them don't make it past planning. There's also character, plot, and who knows what else to account for, but some of these stories will make it there eventually. If not them, stories that were on this list a few months ago and have since been moved to "drafting" will. I had a lot of fun with this even though it's 1 AM right now and I think maybe half of this document is coherent. Regardless, hopefully someone reads it because I put three hours of work into this. 

Good night.