A PRINCE HEREAFTER

vadum asked:

hhi phantom. i searched through everything and i still can't find anything on this, which is weird because i had a really strong feeling that this has been asked before. oh well. anyways, do any of your characters believe in ghosts or supernatural beings? (either related or unrelated to any faith) and would any of them actually seek to communicate with them or summon such entities? or do things like 'ghost hunting'.

HEEEEY SEXY!

There was once an ask that involved the Grimms and Fantomes and Abstrials and Phanlockes who are all these interlocking families who have a lot to do with the paranormal, especially ghosts, but I don’t recall if there was ever a specific ask on that. And if that was the specific ask, it was like one of the first CSS questions I ever answered, so you know, it’s been awhile and I’m fine with answering again.

Anyway!

Quite a few of my characters have belief in ghosts and supernatural beings. Some of the most prominent are those families I mentioned above.

The Fantome family, which is just down to just Celdiere and her younger brother Arcaterxes, in particular are surrounded by the supernatural. They live in a haunted house, their uncles are vampires (one of which lives with them), there are ghosts and doppelgangers and werewolves and demons somehow involved in their property and even though they don’t always know what the supernatural things are, they’ve seen enough to believe that these things do exist and aren’t some hoax or coincidence.

Then there’s the above mentioned vampire uncles who are the last of the Abstrial line, Anon and Mercutious. They actually haven’t seen much of the paranormal happenings in the Fantome house, but being supernatural themselves has given them a belief that other supernatural things can exist as well. I should note that Mercutious is entertaining the idea that maybe what they are is caused by something scientific and not something unexplainable.

Then there’s the Phanlockes (cousins of the Fantomes), who have all died out now. There were five generations, the only before mentioned characters of this family being Obsidian and Jayce, of individuals who were involved with the supernatural. Two of which were monster hunters and three who were paranormal investigators.

And last but not least of these interwoven families is the last of the Grimms, Montague. Montague’s just a teen, currently homeless, and has the ability to see spirits and ghosts. I’m mentioning him because he is apart of this family, but I should note that he doesn’t actually believe in the supernatural and is under the assumption that he’s just crazy.

Some other characters include:

Davide, who believed in demons enough to summon Jesse at the least.

Isabeau, who not only attempted to bind Jesse to her, but also had a… knack, you could say, to find demons and to manipulate them. In her last years she became paranoid and thought that there were spirits surrounding her everywhere she went.

Saint George, who had a bad run-in with some kind of demon and now fights the supernatural for the SAFETY OF HUMANITY.

Matthias, who has the same abilities and skills as his mother. He also attempts to summon a demon for certain knowledge and he is, in fact, successful. But the situation scares (and perhaps scars) him so much that he’s wary to try it again. It should be noted that he believes in angels, demons, and ghosts- but doesn’t believe in a God.

Jesse believes that the most reasonable explanation is the most likely, but that there are often things that can’t be explained. Or might not be explained now, but will be in the future. In other words, he thinks that anything can be possible. But not that the supernatural is hiding around every corner or anything like that.

And then not related to the world that all of those above characters exist in:

Commodore Septimus believes in spirits. She thinks there’s good and bad spirits and that sometimes they walk around like people and that they have their own agendas most the time and shouldn’t be trusted.

Selidor believes in ghosts. No real reason why, he just does.

Oh, and last character of note is James/Jellybean who DOESN’T believe in ghosts or the supernatural DESPITE having the ghostly figure of Haedyn following him around in space.

Whelp that was a lot. I hope that kind of answered your question. And thanks for asking it!

verhkrys asked:

I meant to ask this before but APPARENTLY I DIDN'T. I wanted to know more about the Fantomes. The place Celdiere and Arcaterxes inherited sounds nuts so do they know of all the crazy things they have under their roof or are they mostly unaware? What'd Celdiere go to college for and what's Arcaterxes up to?

Celdiere went to college for buuuusiness. She really wanted to get into law, but didn’t know that when she first started college and kind of just… went with the flow. She thought it was too late to change and so she didn’t, but now she has a master’s degree that she has no clue what to do with and is kind of lost with what she wants to do with her life.

Arcaterxes (he likes being called Arc, but more often than not he’s called Art/Arty because of teachers who mistake his name- but he’s shy and never corrects them.) is about twelve, very quiet, and gets very nervous in social situations. He was going to a public school by his parents’ “city house” but was since taken out and as it’s the summer in their story, he has not gone back to school yet. Celdiere is thinking of homeschooling him. Arc is frustrated by the lack of connection in the mansion, from cell phones to computers, but finds comfort in the library.

Yes, they become pretty aware of the strangeness of the house pretty early on. Celdiere remembers some pretty weird stuff as a kid, but she thought they were just playing pretend and that sort of thing. But when they start living there, they meet the Library Ghost (who is the classic definition of a ghost- see through, kind of floats, etc. and it’s hard to not notice that she’s not something normal) and they begin looking for the other crazy stuff- and, well, they find it. I don’t think they know that most of the occupants are specifically, but they get the idea that they’re… supernatural, at the least. I also think the one that would really surprise them is their crazy uncle being a vampire.

verhkrys asked:

What's the largest family you've created? (Like, the largest amount of characters created who are related to each other).

That would be the Phanlocke/Grim/Abstrial/Fantome family. (yeah, I know, half of my names are related to something phatom-like) These four families mostly branch off from the Fantome family, and there are only a few characters from each that are important- but for some reason I just… really got into the genealogy of them for some reason? Also, these families have a lot of interactions with the paranormal. And… with p.Jesse, for some reason. He just kind of sneaks his way in there a lot.

It’s kind of hard to decide which line to start with because they’re so intertwined, but I think I’ll tell you that the Fantomes are the “most important” because they’re the main line of the families, but I’ll start with the Phanlockes because… well, they’re probably the most recognizable of my characters. p.Jesse, in the Victorian Era, helped a man fund a Paranormal Investigation Agency. This man was Obsidian Phanlocke. He was part of the small, unknown family of Phanlockes whose only importance in the city was being the lesser and much poorer cousins of the prestigious Fantomes. Obsidian was an older gentleman, married, quiet and usually thought a lot over anything before acting upon it. p.Jesse liked him very much, but thought him overly optimistic. The other character of importance in the Phanlockes is Jayce Obsidian Phanlocke, who is the grandson (or was it great grandson? I’ll have to check) of Obsidian Phanlocke, and has some unique experiences that lead him to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, much to his conservative family’s disdain. Obsidian, his wife, and his family moved to the Americas near the end of his life, and Phanlocke was born in the south, though he lives most of his life in the Saint Louis (Missouri) area. 

The Fantomes are a prominent family in Learillow- the kind of people that if money is involved, so are they. If there’s an important party, they’re there. That kind of family, no matter what age or era- though the Victorian Era was the pinnacle of their wealth and importance. They have some aristocratic blood in them, and somewhere I have a family tree drawn out from the start of the Victorian Era to present day- however, the most important characters are the two remaining Fantomes whose story takes place in the present day. They are Celdiere Fantome, a young lady who just finished college, and her much younger brother- Arcaterxes. Their father had a thing for older sounding names. Their parents also just recently died in a car crash and they inherit this mansion up in the mountains by this little French village. Turns out the place is haunted by several things, and also has a lot of strange workers there. There’s the ghost they call Antonin Dvorjak, and also the Library Ghost. They have a maid who’s a witch, a butler who has contacts with vampires, an uncle-twice-removed-or-something who IS a vampire, a stable-girl who’s a werewolf, etc. And on top of that there’s a more malevolent haunting from their grandmother, Treztia Fantome. Oh, and at that time in his life, p.Jesse is kind of bored and so he takes a job as their cook. In so many words, le Manoir des Fantomes is absolutely crazy with the paranormal running about.

The Italian (I think they were Italian at least) house of Abstrials married into the Celdiere family, and they’re the kind of people who are so rich that you’ve never heard of them. They also like their privacy, which doesn’t help. I think the two most important characters are Anon and his brother, whose name I can’t find anywhere. I think it was something like Mercutious Abstrial. They were born just after the Victorian Era. They are interesting because they are, in fact, vampires. And the uncle-something-times-removed mentioned living in the Fantomes’ mansion was in fact Anon. Mercutious still resides in Proprietà Terriera del Abstrials, which was the kind of rival in architecture to le Manoir des Fantomes. However, the Abstrial mansion (despite one cross vampire) is abandoned. Anon was also cursed with his eyes being devoured by darkness every morning or something, so he had these continually bleeding eye-sockets that would slowly heal while he was awake during the night, then be reopened after he was in his coffin. Or something like that. I don’t even remember why. At some point in time, one of Jayce Phanlocke’s investigations lead him to Anon, and they both go to Proprietà Terriera del Abstrials together and have to fight Mercutious.

And then the last part of this family are the Grims, who aren’t as intertwined because they’re kind of the even poorer cousins of the poor Phanlockes, and have no direct connection to the Fantomes. The character worth mentioning here is Montague Grim, who is also the last of the Grim line, is a teenage boy, lives in modern times- but is also homeless and basically living in the gutters of Vegas. He has the ability to hear and feel ghosts, but not see them. He thinks he’s crazy because of this, and tries to keep it under wraps.

I also considered having the Fairechilds (as in Isabeau Fairechild, Matthias Fairechild, Atticus Fairechild, and Luciliana Fairechild) related to the Fantomes, but I’m not sure if that would work or be probable.

I probably should have mentioned, but my dad’s a genealogist (or at least that’s his main hobby, but he has done things with ancestry and finding people’s relatives which he’s been paid for) which is probably why I think about family lines a lot, especially for my human characters. Sorry for rambling on about this.