Cozy Little Horrors - Tumblr Posts
She seems really cool! Hopefully through the course of the story she finds faith in the world to be intriguing again
Elizabeth Barbara Patrikson
Moodboard:
[Image description: A picture of a part of a book and a cup of tea in a white teacup of a gray tablecloth is in the far left. A row of big, old-looking hard-cover books is in the top part of the middle. An photo of small, yellow-orange flowers with black centers in the bottom part of the middle. They aren’t picked, so the background is blurry green grass and other flowers. Top right corner is a book open in front of a window. Light-yellow light is radiating from behind the window. A hand is holding the book at the bottom left corner and a some hair is hanging from the top left corner. The bottom right part of the image is a a white cup of coffee on grayish-brown tablecloth, surrounded by coffee beans and with grayish-brown bags of coffee beans in the background. End ID]
Picrew:
[Image description: a digital cartoonish bust picture of a woman with light-beige skin, brown eyes, big, round glasses, short, wavy red hair, a light smile and lots of freckles. She’s wearing a white fully buttoned shirt and a green coat. She has fang-like gray earrings. The bachground is pure white. End ID]
Character intro time! The narrator, the POV character, the dare-I-so-say protagonist of Cozy Little Horrors.
Name: Elizabeth Barbara Patrikson
Nicknames: Beth, Liz. Calling her Betty may get you a trip to the hospital
Age: 21
Occupation: 404, Page Not Found. She just graduated college and wanted to become a literary translator, but the literary world mostly runs in closed circles she isn’t a part of.
Sexuality: Asexual
Species: human
Ethnicity: Irish-American
Other information:
Beth is an overall smart, quick-witted young woman. She saw her future quite promising, graduating high school, and, as a result, college, a year early, but reality disheartened her a bit. She is very grounded and rational, hiding her child-like optimism deep inside of her.
She speaks a few languages, her main focuses being English, Spanish, and Russian. She likes languages and books, so her choice of profession seemed obvious. She is not the type to get into conflict but will react quickly to new and potentially dangerous situations.
They are very cool. I love mysterious characters, especially those whose backstories aren’t included, not knowing about them is part of their appeal and it gives a sense of depth and privacy
The disaster duo
Lev
[Image description: a bust drawing of a man with very pale skin, short, straight black hair with bangs, and dark-red eyes. He’s smiling. He’s wearing a 18th-century style white shirt, and a black jerkin with gold trimming. There’s a monocle in his left eye. End ID]
Evgeny
[Image description: a bust drawing of a man with pale skin, short, straight hair combed back, dark-red eye, the other eye being covered with an eyepatch. His face is covered in scars. He’s wearing a white turtleneck and red coat. End ID]
Name: Lev (monocle boy), Evgeny (eyepatch boy)
Nicknames: Who in their right mind would upset two vampires and two principles at the same time? (the students call Lev the shadow’s shadow behind his back because of how he follows Evgeny around)
Age: >200
Occupation: principals, folklore characters
Species: Vampire
Sexuality: Homosexual (Lev), Bisexual (Evgeny)
Ethnicity: lost to time. They both claim to be Transilvanian for that good old-fashioned feel, but nobody’s sure how true that is.
Other information:
These two are a package deal, a two-for-one situation. They claim to be rivals. They have been persistently claiming that for the last 200 years they lived (does “lived” apply to vampires? existed, maybe?) together.
Lev is the vampire and Evgeny is the vampire vampire hunter. Or maybe it’s the other way around? When you live with someone for so long, you stop separating their person from yourself. To be sure that they’re right about who’s who every once in a while, they switch every few years.
These two are co-principles of a magical academy. They wanted it to be a regular academy, but supernatural things tend to attract each other, so they eventually gave up and embraced the weirdness.
Like the other dwellers of Quiet, they think they (and their academy, of course) are the only unusual thing in this town and try to keep a low profile. Evgeny is very confident and sometimes over-the-top dramatic, while Lev is quiet, shy, and empathetic, but you don’t want to be near him if he snaps. During the time of the story, Lev considers himself the vampire and Evgeny the vampire hunter. They mostly live off of donated blood (small amounts, knowing how many people need that), but Lev often wonders why there are no mice or rats at the academy.
The poor taglist folk I torture with my obscure rants: @47crayons. Contact me to be added/removed from the taglist!
They sound so cool! Librarians often seems so mysterious, so it makes sense why no one knows much about tis librarian
I feel like they’d have a great book club
The Librarian
Moodboard:
[Image description: a picture consisting of five elements, four rectangle images on each side, and a square one in the middle. The top rectangle is a page of writing in cursive. The words aren’t legible. The right rectangle is a photo of a marble statue of a woman holding a hand to her ear, either attentively or in a protective way. The bottom rectangle is a photo of a row of old books. The left rectangle is a hand, reached out in front of a dark background, catching the light. End ID]
Picrew:
[Image description: a bust drawing of a person with dark-brown skin, brown eyes, and grey hair in small, tight braids put away in a bun. They’re smiling. They’re wearing small silver earrings and a simple black turtleneck. End ID]
Name: unknown
Nicknames: the Librarian, Silver Tongue
Age: unknown
Occupation: librarian, local mystery
Species: unkown
Sexuality: pansexual
Ethnicity: unkown
Other information:
At some point, someone decided that the town needs a library. Maybe in a normal town they would’ve built it, or rearranged some building or something, but in Quiet, buildings sometimes just… appear. It’s almost the norm at this point. What’s unusual is for a building to appear with a person. The librarian was found in the library, at the desk, readily greeting any client. They can offer any book, and I mean any book. It sometimes seems that the library’s corridors are endless, and it’s a miracle how they can find something in there. They don’t leave the library often, and nobody really knows where they eat, or sleep, or anything. Even though they’re quite friendly, they don’t talk much about themselves or their past. They seem to know a lot of things. Some suspect that they somehow read every book in the library, or maybe every book in existence.
Oh and the library itself is an interesting place. If you can get lost in a book, in a library you can get so lost, you actually make a full circle and get all the way back to found. It’s true about any library, but espacially about the library of Quiet.
Poor taglist folk: @47crayons. contact me to be added/removed!
He is very funky and I would like to drink tea with him
Uncle Seb
[Image description: a moodboard consisting out of four photos. The top left one is a photo of the galaxy. The top right one is a picture of a white teapot pouring tea into a white teacup on a small white saucer with a teaspoon on it. The background is blurry-brown. The botom left is a photo of an octopus in dark water, focusing on the tentacles. The bottom right one is a sandclock with green sand on a dark backround. There is a red blood-like droplet in the corner. /end ID]
[Image description: A bust drawing of a man with pale skin, shoulder-length black hair combed back, gray eyes and a smile. He’s wearing a dark-turqoise shirt and a black coat. /end ID]
Name: Abutseba
Nicknames: Seb, Uncle Seb (preferred)
Age: somewhere over 13 billion
Occupation: Devourer of stars
Sexuality: you go ask a blob of tentacles and darkness what his sexuality is. Not doing that.
Species: Eldritch God
Ethnicity: ?
Other information:
Uncle Seb is a generally okay guy. Showed up in Quiet by accident when a cult went off the rails and summoned him to devour the Sun. Thankfully, Beth’s great-aunt, Eve, was there, they had a nice chat, and now he shows up for tea sometimes. The picrew is his tea-drinking form. You don’t want to see the other ones.
He doesn’t really understand Earth or care about it very much, but he isn’t evil. He started somewhat appreciating humans after meeting Eve - they only live up to a measly hundred at best, and they still manage to learn to think and stuff! Fascinating!
I want to be her friend so bad. Lizards are badass. She is badass. With magic?? And chaos??? With each new character being introduced from CLH I am getting more and more excited
Pat, the teen werelizard
Moonboard:
[Image description: a moodboard consisting out of six photos. The top right one is a close-up photo of a lizard’s eye. The one under it is a square photo full of flames. The one under it is a full moon. The top right one is a photo of a dark, short-haired silhouette in front of a sunset with the words “rebel, rebel” written on top of it in neon red. The two photos under is are a green lizard posing on a leaf to the left and a silhouette of a biker jumping in front of a sunset. /end ID]
[Image description: a bust drawing of a girl with light-brown skin, brown eyes with vertical pupils, and a Mohawk-like hairstyle with the long part dyed red. There are strands of longer hair on her shoulders, also dyed red. She’s wearing black lipstick, a short black ribbon-necklace, and a black hoodie over a redshirt. She’s also wearing two earrings in each ear, black hoops. /end ID]
Name: Patricia
Nicknames: Pat, Liz (short for Lizard, for close family and friends only)
Age: around 15
Occupation: Academy student
Species: unkown, presumably werelizard
Sexuality: lesbian
Ethnicity: unkown
Other information:
Pat was found by a family of werewolves as a child and raised as one of their own. There were attempts to find her biological family, but they were all fruitless. She appeared near the town limits of Quiet, which isn’t that uncommon. Sometimes magic-folk that don’t have anywhere else to go just appear there.
Because she’s quite an unusual type of were-creature - a lizard, more specifically a monitor lizard, - Pat had to learn to fend for herself, growing up in a pack of young competitive wolves. That caused her to develop a reserved personality and thick sarcasm armor. She’s spiky and very free-willed, quite a headache for her parents and older siblings.
She’s also the only known were-creature to have magical abilities: not the instinctive tricks some types of werefoxes and weretigers have, but actual magic abilities, such as some humans possess. That caused her to eventually enroll in the Academy ran by Evgeny and Lev. That makes her, an unruly, chaotic, and deeply irresponsible person the only one in Quiet to know more than one of its secrets. This, in turn, means she’s also Beth’s headache, considering that Beth is supposed to keep this town functioning.
The poor, poor taglist folk: @47crayons @odysseywritings . Contact me to be added/removed!
The zoom into earth was so cool! And I could feel the nervousness about not looking at Uncle Seb initially
Braking Barriers
A little one-off short story for Cozy Little Horrors. I’m not particularly happy with it, but I wanted to get a feel of the genre I’ve never written in before. The events of this are canon and may or may not be somehow featured in the story itself.
TW/CW: blood. If you find anything else, please, please let me know!
Word count: 2022
Braking Barriers
Where a bunch of teenagers bond over almost destroying the Earth. Again.
Keep reading
It's still creative. It may serve as motivation later in. And it seems worth it to me. It looks SO GOOD!!
Guess who made a bookcover mockup instead of actually writing?
OoH he looks cool!
Mike
Moodboard:
[Image description: a moodboard consisting out of 5 images. The top left image is a mess of colorful paint splashes on a canvas. The top right is a messy table, with books, food, and drawing instruments splattered all over it. The bottom left is a collection of artist’s pastels arranged to form a rainbow, with pastel shavings continuing it. The middle bottom image is a hand, stretched towards the viewer through a white cloth. The bottom right image is a palette with white, brown, and red paint, and a paintbrush being dipped in brown. /end ID]
Picrew:
[Image description: the bust drawing of a person with dark-brown skin, pink hair tied back in a puffy hairstyle, and different-colored eyes. One eye has a white white and a brown iris, the other has a black white and a white iris. They’re wearing a white, unbuttoned shirt and golden hoop earrings. /end ID]
Name: Michael
Nicknames: Mike, Knock-knock.
Age: 20 years alive + about 15 in post-life existance
Occupation: previously Eve’s appretice, currently haunts her house
Sexuality: Pansexual
Species: ex-human, ghost
Ethnicity: African American
Other information:Mike, my demiboy, was Eve’s apprentice, learning how to keep Quiet organized, not end the world, all those important things that Eve was doing. Unfortunately, about 15 year ago he died under mysterious circumstances. Now he exists in Eve’s house and sometimes messes with people ‘cause he’s bored.
Normally appears fully human - both eyes with white whites and brown irises, sometimes goes for the black whites and white irises for that scary-scary ghost effect.
He dyed his hair pink 15 years ago for the summer. He wasn’t able to get the paint out since then. Cons of being a ghost is that you can’t change your appearance all that much.
Taglist folk: @47crayons @odysseywritings
That's brilliant
Okay, so Lev and Evgeny own an academy, and I realized that it's quite expensive - like, before you start getting tuition money, you still have to build/buy a building, the land around it, employ people, etc. But my idiots aren't the type to have a lot of money, and even if they did they'd probably waste it instead of saving up. So I needed a convenient way to have them get the money.
Long story short, it's now official that at some point the two threatened a prophet into giving them a run-down of each century's easy cash grab. The academy is built on the money they got from investing in Apple.
This is so gooood!! I love Lev and Evgeny together, and their kinds of morals are my favourite. Knowledge (or magic) is a tool, and nothing makes it dark but the users purposes
The Gays: Unburied
Word count: 999 words
A/N: reposting because I'm an idiot and accidentally deleted the original. The first short story I wrote for CLH
TW/CW: brief mention of violence
Two things could always get under Evgeny’s skin: Lev being in trouble and uncertainty. In the face of both, all of his self-control was channeled towards not ripping out the throat of the next person that would say they don’t know anything or that he should calm down.
Ms. Angelica needed the services of a necromancer after an accident with the time-traveling field trip, and Lev volunteered to teach her class in the meanwhile. Evgeny gave him the “don’t start with “back in my day”, you’ll be teaching the 18th century, some students might feel uncomfortable” talk. Everything was going fine. And now, Lev, never-misses-a-deadline-Lev, loves-teaching-more-than-anything-in-the-world Lev, was missing.
Evgeny found himself in front of the door to a small summoning chamber and, in the irrational motion to check everywhere, even if the place was abandoned for years, pushed it.
The door opened with a creak, scratching against the stone floor.
A younger student was quietly crying in front of a demon-trapping circle. Inside the circle Lev sat cross-legged, flipping through some big, dusty book. Notes were scattered all over the place. The circle gave out cracking noises, and blue sparks ran across it whenever the tip of Lev’s shoe touched it.
“Oh, hi, Zhenia!” Lev gave Evgeny a quick smile, pushed back his glasses, and returned to the book.
“Mr. Evgeny,” the student mumbled, inching away from a visibly furious vampire.
“Lev. What, in the name of common sense, are you doing?”
“Well, this young lady here came up with an exquisite trapping circle. We’re testing it out.”
“Don’t you remember about your class? Couldn’t you at least tell me that you’re going to be gone for”- he furiously checked his watch- ”twelve hours??”
“Well...” Lev scratched his head, making the remains of his bun fall apart, “I… made it sound more deliberate than it is. The fascinating thing about this circle is that it can’t be broken - at least by any methods we’ve tried - from the inside or the outside”.
“Wonderful. Did you draw a copy of it?”
“Yes, but why-” Lev broke himself off as Evgeny approached the circle and punched a hole through the floor. And another. And another. He went all around Lev’s improvised prison until the stone and the remains of the floor beams crushed to the story below.
“You’ll be able to study it later, then. Come. We both have classes to teach” Evgeny said calmly, snatching Lev out of the air.
Everyone got out of the room, the floor being in a condition far from the one planned by any architects. Lev, a bit shaken, went to find his classroom, and Evgeny now had to try and teach a bunch of kids how to raise the dead.
That was far out of his usual monster-hunting arsenal of spells. In fact, raising the dead is the complete opposite of monster hunting, but there were kids here who needed to know how to do that, and Mx. Elin was busy resurrecting Ms. Angelica.
It shouldn't be so difficult, right? Resurrect, bind to the necromancer's will, watch over the kids while they do the same. Easy.
***
“Who-” Evgeny dodged another swing of the rusty morgenstern- “in their right mind-” he jumped over the cemetery’s fence- “buried a monster hunter-” he almost slipped on the wet grass, hardly regaining balance, now only a few feet away from his destination- “in a small village’s graveyard?” Evgeny jumped through the classroom’s window, the reanimated corpse following close behind, holding on to its decrepit weapon.
“Lev!” Evgeny managed to squeeze out.
“On it!” Lev, who already chased the students out of the classroom, was hastily drawing on the floor.
Evgeny made a couple of seemingly uncoordinated jumps, and the newly undead monster hunter found themself in a demon-trapping circle. Many useless attempts to break out later they settled in the middle of it, staring at Evgeny with all the hatred they could convey.
“Won’t it… get out?” Evgeny sat down on the floor to catch his breath.
“I used the new circle,” Lev beamed, “I’ll have all the time I need to study it now. Judging by their weapon, they’re from your order, right? Maybe they’ll be able to help me.”
“I won’t do anything for the likes of you!” an unexpectedly loud, clear voice came from inside the circle. The two ignored it.
“So, necromancy class didn’t go that well?”
“Can you believe it? Some idiot buried a monster hunter here! Here! In this backwater cemetery! Why would anyone do such a thing? Monster hunters should get proper burials in the Order’s grounds”.
“Like you did.” Lev nodded along, quietly sweeping away the mess left by the fight.
“Exactly! Like I did!”
“Wait,” came the voice from the circle, “you there, monster!”
No answer from the two.
“You were a hunter, too?”
“Yes. And what of it?” Evgeny repositioned himself so that he could look down at the undead.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Tormenting a place where the Order used to teach?”
“We aren’t tormenting anyone here. This is still a place of knowledge, believe it or not.”
“Yeah, right. What do you do here really? Some type of human-hunting, dark magic, evil...” the figure began, then stopped themself, noticing the topic written on the blackboard, “...history?”
“History, among other things!” Lev chimes in, grinning, “we do languages, maths, physics- magic, too. Anything the young magefolk need to know to function in the human world.”
“Dark magic, I presume?”
“Any magic they might need, and yes, what you call dark magic, too. Magic is just a tool, and the wielder is the only one responsible for the results. Here, we try and teach the kids to be good wielders.”
“And keep them from dying,” Evgeny adds.
“Yes, that too. We’re better at the first part, though.”
The figure in the circle gives the classroom and the vampire couple a good, thorough lookover.
“You don’t actually know how to run this place, do you?”