In an earlier story, Elysse came clean about her name. I wasn't thinking very much about it, then, her just coming out of left field with this "my name isn't what you think it is" was just Elysse suddenly realising that Orson probably knew her far better than anybody ever had before (that she could remember), and felt funny about having him calling her by a false name. Having Orson react the way he did was just a cheap ploy to suggest there's more to this little girl than meets our eyes or his, and that there might be something more to hide than just that "which she is become".
There was speculation surrounding this in the discussion thread, and at the time, it just didn't seem important, so I basically quipped "Aw, come on, a girl has to have a few secrets, doesn't she?", thus relieving me of the responsibility of creating yet more backstory.
As Dracula observes, "the blood is the life", isn't it? Oskar had been baptised in the blood if his enemies, as had Owen. No clue what Abby's story is, and Eli's (according to canon) is murky enough to leave all sorts of storytelling doors open. Orson, it seems, was also so baptised, but Elysse doesn't have to be such a mystery.
As if being a tween isn't confusing enough in a million different ways, let's let Elysse struggle with some pretty heavy memories.
Some notes:
I tagged it "LMI", because the software requires a primary tag, but Elysse is neither Abby nor Eli (it's not even clear that she's a vampire), nor is Orson Oscar or Owen. This story probably drifts quite a bit further afield than does anything else I've written.
It's also unfinished. I wrote a little, proofread a little, wrote a bit more, proofread a bit more, and when my eyes started going funny, and I realised I wasn't sure where to go next, I yelled "!@#%@$!!", copied it out of the word processor, pasted it into the forum software, and let the bits and pieces fall wherever they may.
More will be coming after I can get my eyes to point together again, and I'm less inclined to yell "!@#%@$!!".
These kids don't speak English between themselves when they're alone, unless they're practising. Exactly how they wound up in the Anglosphere is a mystery to me. They're French, or something rather close, but have a care! French is spoken around the world, and has been spoken for many centuries on continental Europe in enclaves large and small outside the present French borders. As with any other widely flung language, it has its dialects, some of which are partially mutually incomprehensible.
I chose to have Elysse jabbering away in something resembling early Modern English for the sake of fairly easy verisimilitude. Even if I could (I can't), it wouldn't benefit anybody to have her babbling away in whatever form of French might have been prevalent around the time the meat of the story took place. Even if I could (and I'm far from sure about this), it wouldn't have done most forum members any good for me to write the silly thing in modern French.
This brings a few small problems to people who can understand only fully modern English, chiefly in the forms of address and of subjunctives.
Forms of address? Briefly, if I say "Are ye not well?", I'm implicitly putting a "Sir" or "Madam" in there somewhere; it's formal, and if used wrongly, can be insulting. Likewise, if I say "Art thou not well?", there's a "dude" in there somewhere; this is how family and close friends address each other, and if you can see yourself walking up to the King or the Prince and asking "Hey, dude, can you (canst thou) spare me a smoke?", power to you, but it's still just wrong. A professor might say "thou", "thee" and "thine" to a freshman, but said freshman needs to answer "you", "ye" and "your". I usually used "ye" in place of "you", even though this is incorrect, just to keep the accent going.
Subjunctive? Again, the other languages I can speak or read all have them, except that English uses them only very rarely. One example of a subjective is when you say "It's imporant that he go"; it's grammatically incorrect to say "It's important that he goes". Subjunctives are often used to express uncertainty or conditions contrary to established fact - "If I were rich" (but I'm not); more elusively, "If I be rich" (although common practise is just to say "If I'm rich"). "If I be rich", one could wonder, "why do I not have enough cash to buy myself a hamburger?"
In the story, this line appears:
It's less grammatically incorrect than speakers of modern English might believe at first glance. Once upon a time, in early modern English, there had still remained an agreement between subject and verb form, much more so than is presently the case. I be, thou beest, and for all I know, he beeth. This is a subjunctive (probably contrived), and if rendered into modern street English faithfully might have come out more as "Yea, right, my [butt] we're married!"Elysse wrote:“Ye say unto me that we been wedded one unto the other!?”
To this very day, I can't follow the King James version of the Bible. I get lost in all these 'hither' and 'thither' and 'whereupon', and suchlike, and so on. A great deal of the English-like language is drawn more from the German I knew as a child. I cry pardon, in other words, to those gentle readers to whom bringeth this strange speech pain. If it's any consolation, writing it gave me a skull-popping headache.
