Birdwood, NE

It was early evening, and the sky had shrugged off the violent blue of the day, assuming instead a bleached, purplish color which made the evening star seem too bright and too large. Down the middle of the street, in an erratic pattern, came a young girl. Anyone observing her would find her progress strange, as she walked in unpredictable, sideways jolts, and sometimes came to a complete stop before choosing a new path. At one point she stopped, sighed loudly, and looked upward at the dimming sky, which held no sources of light except the bright star that blazed at her like a shrewd eye, and the dim remaining glow of the vanished sun. She then studied the ground for a moment, and purposefully stepped forward in a diagonal direction. There she stopped, studied the ground again, and again stepped forward in a not-quite-straight direction. In this manner she wove her way slowly forward, and the pattern that emerged was that while she never left the middle of the road, she also never stepped on any crack in the worn and battered asphalt.

Finally, she came to a stop in the center of the street. Or, more accurately, the streets. She had come to a place where the road forked in a Y-shape, and come to a stop in the exact center of the three streets that yawned away into the growing dusk. There was no traffic here, no cars driven by men eager to get home to the picture-perfect dinners prepared by their housewives, no young women with baby strollers casually walking, and no children playing. The girl tossed her blunt-cut, shoulder length blond hair back from her face and removed her backpack. Her eyes flickered uneasily toward the grassy area directly in front of her, and then darted away. She didn't let herself look too long at the gravestones there; they always looked like teeth to her, almost glowing in the fading light.

From her backpack, she pulled a piece of white chalk. Bending down, she drew a quavering circle between herself and the left-hand fork of the Y-intersection. She filled it with two dots and a wobbly line, and the result was an upside-down, squashed-looking face. It seemed to peer dimly down the road. Turning, the girl then drew exactly the same thing again, but this time facing the right-hand fork. And lastly, she turned completely around and drew a third face, this one facing down the long road she had come down.

Next, she carefully pulled three foot-long branches of coniferous leaves out of her pack. Each branch was speckled with bright red berries. She carefully set them down above her white faces, each branch looking like a hat.

And last, she pulled from her backpack a rustly plastic bag which said "Farnsworth's Food and Drug" on the side in pink letters. Inside, dripping with blood, was a freshly cut rump roast. This she set down in the center of the three faces, so that it was in the exact center of the three roads.

This done, she stood up and squared her scrawny shoulders. "At the meeting of the two worlds, this I offer, Trivia," she said into the still evening air, "Queen of Ghosts, with favor look upon me."

She stood for a moment, her mouth set in a grimly satisfied line, and then she turned back the way she had come. This time the light was much dimmer, and she had a difficult time getting over to the sidewalk, where she breathed a sigh of relief. Here, the cracks were much more manageable. She started forward at a jog, her eyes on the sidewalk, and when she had gotten about 100 yards away from the crossroads she yelled, still running, "And HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"

She did not notice, because she never turned around, the long and lean black shape that followed her home.

An Open Invitation:

You are all invited to take part in an open, collaborative writing effort. The idea behind this project is to have a group story in which each writer contributes a unique storyline, but also tries to build on the ideas of the others who have already written. No one "owns" this idea, and you should NOT feel shy about introducing your own ideas, heroes, conflicts, villians, etc. This story will belong to all writers. However, we do have a basic premise we would like to start from; there are enough inhabitants of our basic world that you should have no trouble finding a faction, family, or character to start with. You can start your character connected to someone else's in some way (some collaboration on this would, of course, be necessary) or you can start your own mini-storyline with characters who don't seem to be tied in to the other storylines, and can meet/interact with other people's characters later, if you choose. You have complete freedom, so long as you stay within the basic world parameters, which are as follows:

For most of the citizens of Birdwood, NE, life in their small town is normal--it's a railroad town that never really entered the information age, and which is, like many small towns, sleepily preoccupied with its local gossip and dimly existing from one day to the next. However, there is far more to Birdwood than most of the inhabitants know. Located at an extremely potent meeting of ley lines, this town is a haven for several different factions of witches. Operating without the knowledge of their own families, these witches present a smiling front to the town, but in secret they have their own triumphs, ambitions, and of course, problems. In addition, because of Birdwood's powerful energies and its fairly central location, some of its witches participate in a very old underground railroad program, moving and protecting witches whose secret has been discovered and who need to migrate to new locations. Thus there is quite a bit of new blood in town at any given point, though whether they stay long or short varies from case to case.

In terms of magic, our desire is to let you be as creative as you would like, but we are going to hold to the Rule of Three for all our witch characters. This ancient rule basically states that, when using magic, whatever you do to someone else will come back upon you threefold, whether good or bad. This is a good reason to be nice to people, and also a good reason to limit your evil...however, dark witches use familiars, which are animals (any animal) whose soul has been linked to the witch's. One of the most important uses of a familiar is that when the Rule of Three comes for you, its evil can be reflected, to some extent, upon the hapless animal instead of the witch. Other real/traditional witchcraft rules such as the power of names, as well as a person's hair or belongings, to control people, can be used. If you can come up with a real aspect of witchcraft you'd like to use, you're welcome to incorporate it. We'd like to stick to "real" rules of witchcraft as much as possible, but there is some room for flexibility here.

The witchcraft has to stay low-key, but there are also the standard ways in which it is exposed to society-at-large: love potions; faith healings; hexes, curses and bindings; the rule of three, as well as a strong tendency towards addiction, keep most of the casual magic users in check.

And lastly, The ley line and the heavy use of magic has also drawn other magical creatures to the area, but friendly and not.

So there it is. Pick a faction, pick a character, pick a conflict, and jump in!