Okay, it took three weeks of literally being right on the sand where I could hear the waves day and night, and several days where I just lazed on the beach in the sunshine, but I dare say I’m a real California coast resident who’s feeling better. Which gets me to brainstorming about some not-so-real California coast residents who are feeling…not-so-better?
I’m talking, of course, about the characters in my unpublished but completed story “Children of the Storm” and what becomes of them around the time of when news of first contact reaches Earth from Proxima Centauri: 2064, which is 18 years after we last see them, in 2046.
The cousins Aoifan and Aoife fall in love after the Great Christmas Blizzard, and they have exactly one child, a daughter, named Marina, who grows up to be absolutely gorgeous, and no doubt would be raised as a mini-me of perfect Malibu surfer girl mother.
Her father is less well characterized as of 2045, but he’s a pianist (taking after his grandaunt Katenka), and he’s a self-described “storm watcher” who wants to follow his grandfather Hernando’s footsteps in chasing after tornadoes (in an aircraft no less). Interestingly, the storm that Aoifan wanted to accompany him in claimed Hernando’s life, possibly inspiring him to continue the storm-chasing legacy out of some twisted sense of survivor’s guilt. In any case I don’t envision him having all that active of a role in her upbringing compared to the mother.
Though the mother, as someone who just likes surf and sex (when her husband is around), might not be the best hands-on parental figure herself; fortunately grandmother Katenka is nearby (she lives in Malibu), and she’s just 37 when Marina is born (the wonders of teenage motherhood over two consecutive generations…), so she’s in more than good enough shape to help out.
But what would Marina’s characterization be? Just making her the perfect Malibu surfer girl too only prettier would just be too boring, yet all other characterizations I’ve thought of I’ve found wanting…until in my hotel room the other night I came across a History Channel show on the TV that brought (for the first time in years) my attention to people who have been struck by lightning, as well as acquired savantism. Aha.
Now, it sounds wild, but consider that lightning strikes are a tremendous bolt of electricity. Usually they just injure or damage you, but on rare occasions they can shock the brain into a different state, one in which new extraordinary abilities in highly specific fields may manifest (savantism, only acquired by shock, rather than born in a person from the get-go as is usually the case). Since Marina is supposed to be perfectly beautiful and lightning often leaves disfiguring burns and various unattractive tics, that might be thought of as compromising that part of her characterization…but there have been cases where lightning left neurological effects but didn’t leave any visible marks on the body at all. Aha.
Even better, among the endeavors most likely to get you struck by lightning is…*drum roll* surfing! The reason is that water is an excellent conductor of electricity and on the ocean a man standing up is often the tallest object around, a perfect recipe to become a human lightning rod. So all the pieces fit together.
For the purposes of the story it might be even better to suppose that Marina and both of her parents are out surfing, and she comes out of it the most unscathed.
I’m thinking mother Aoife is just killed right there by the lightning strike, a direct hit: she’s such a carefree and youthful character, it’s hard to imagine her as a middle-aged or elderly person…and honestly both more pleasant and more interesting to me to write her as having died by the time the next story takes place, by 2064 but a fond memory and a gorgeous picture on a shelf as she was back then. By 2064 she’d have been 34 years old: still young, but having died perhaps sometime in her twenties adds a certain tragic poignancy…and underlines to Marina that as the sole heir of the family (and this is a rich family, by the way) the entire legacy now rests on her.
The father, I’m less decided on: he perhaps dies too. Though I have the idea of him emerging with some injuries and disfigurement, but with the brain effects being much more pronounced, though not good in his case: retrograde amnesia, where his memories of his past life are all but erased, but the kind of amnesia where skills and emotional associations are all still intact. Needless to say this could easily make him even more distant from his immediate family, since the reminder that he should remember but can’t would just be too painful.
In any case the parents are both out of the picture, leaving her in the care of her grandmother Katenka, and perhaps her grandfather Kolya…and manifesting some unusual abilities. My thoughts turn to savantism in the arts, as well as in mathematics, coupled with neurological changes that induce obsession, mania, and all that good stuff: specifically, what if she was scared of thunderstorms and the like before but after the lightning strike experiences a polar reversal, being irresistibly drawn to being out on the beach, on the rocks during storms, painting oil on canvas as waves crash against the shore, displaying uncanny and world-class talent that would easily be the equal of Ivan Aivazovsky at capturing the essence of the water, happy as a clam being out there painting like a maniac for days on end until she collapses into slumber, only to do it again, interrupted only occasionally by being sated with her work, and carting the canvases off to her home to refresh her lovely self and eat a hearty meal or some such? Mathematical savantism might not even be overtly apparent, but she might intuitively “get” mathematical properties that almost all artists struggle with or take years to master, which greatly aid her in depicting the waves of the ocean with uncanny beauty.
Katenka would no doubt be encouraging (she’s something of a daredevil herself if her favorite vice of racing her cars down Pacific Coast Highway is any indication), as would family best friend Gunston Roadhouse, who is about the same age as Marina and is her childhood best friend, having been raised on a boat in Japan with his mother Georgia, baby cousin of Marina’s great-grandfather’s second wife Decca Roadhouse (that’s a mouthful…). They’re crazy about each other every time they can visit, but it doesn’t bloom into romance until later, when they both reach adulthood, after the accident…which has a gothic touch to it, in as much as Gunston was himself conceived during the lightning-rich Great Christmas Blizzard, by the hand of a ghost…at least if Georgia’s and Decca’s stories of what happened that night in the Shenandoah are to be believed.
The accident lends them both a certain uncanny quality, which might deepen their bond and make them a good match, which then ties into some of the ideas I already had for the meat of the story.
As for the other characters from “Children of the Storm”, I still really like the idea of Fia’s obsession with youth taking her to a dark place, which is hinted at in the story: what if, instead of hanging around until first contact, when she’ll be 52, and old and ugly and washed-up no matter what sort of near-future beauty treatments are on the menu, she kills herself before the story even begins? Perhaps she decides the eve of her fortieth birthday will be when she’s had enough of life, and she ends it all right then and there, with her twin brother Fintan following her into the afterlife (yes, that means he kills himself too; they were twins and were extremely close to each other, so Fintan making a suicide pact with her would be in-character). That would take us to 2052, or 12 years before the events of the story.
I can’t help but pity Katenka: her father Dobrynya is killed in the Great Christmas Blizzard in 2045, her husband Fintan kills himself in 2052, and then afterwards her daughter Aoife is killed by a lightning strike while surfing. But despite being a sweetheart she always struck me as the type who could handle all of that. One might think she’d still have her mother over in Kamchatka, but by 2064 she’d be 94 years old and likely deceased as well. She had a brother as well, but he didn’t make the journey to California, and he was never all that close to Katenka to begin with, being much older: by 2064 he’d be 75, as contrasted to Katenka’s own age of 55.
So what would Katenka still have? Her nephew Kolya is alive and kicking, and has been close to her from the beginning, through the time they moved to southern California (indeed, his own pursuits in the video game industry over in Ventura (and underwater adventuring) are why she moved to the region in the first place). They’re close in age: as of 2064 she’s 55 and he’s 54. They’d make a fine pair to raise their granddaughter Marina, after she (effectively or literally) becomes an orphan. It helps anyway that they were heavily involved in her upbringing to start with. They might be the last men standing, as far as being a parental figure to Marina is concerned.
I might think Georgia could step in, since she’s a rather maternal figure without much else to do, and through her son’s friendship will likely be close to Marina emotionally, but her home being Japan and living on a sailboat imposes physical distance. Decca, however, is a wild card: she had a dance studio in Nashville, but she’s trained up an apprentice, Henrietta, to largely replace her by this point, so she’s free to live in Slovenia full-time and drink all the wine she pleases: she even could acquire a winery in the Slovenian Alps, was my thinking. But how long could she stay away from dear cousin Georgia? Not to mention her dear cousin’s son’s little friend, who’s in desperate need of a mother figure. Would she just fly in from time to time, or would she relocate yet again, perhaps this time to the south coast of California?
Then there’s the triplet Slovenian orphans who occupy the penthouse of the Grand Ole Opry Tower in Nashville: they have their own family to take care of (one of the boys got himself a fine girlfriend, and they have a prolific number of children), but might they take an interest in little Marina’s upbringing, now that she’s an orphan too? Far from being lonely, Marina might be almost smothered by the friends and family trying to dote on her.
It makes me think that Katenka might just take some kind of action in terms of the family’s residence: as a billionaire heiress she can have whatever she wants, but what if she witnessed Aoife be killed right from that lovely little home she was renting in Malibu? Ouch. She might want a different address, and perhaps one that would permit everybody in Marina’s little life to live together. That means room for Katenka, Kolya, Marina, Georgia, Decca, and the Slovenian triplets (plus one wife of one triplet). That’s at least nine people who need to live in there! Not even counting the triplets’ children, who could number a dozen. Plus household help: interestingly Katenka didn’t seem to need any live-in help at her home in Malibu as of 2045, but since it was just her and Aoife living in there (plus the occasional visit from Kolya) it wasn’t as much of an issue.
So we’re talking about perhaps a 20-bedroom/20-bathroom structure, which would be monstrous. Perhaps somewhere else in Malibu would suffice, but then I thought that it would remind her of too many bad memories, so perhaps Palos Verdes? Intriguing choice: it’s similar but different enough that it could represent a fresh start.
But then, I thought…20 bedrooms is an awfully large house, and them occupying some acreage in an old-money enclave is a bit boring. Then I wondered if Katenka might want to move out to somewhere like Ventura or beyond, more toward the central coast: after all, her nephew is (or at least was) based there for a long time; the only reason she rejected it for Malibu was to be closer to the fun in Hollywood, but perhaps in her fifties that doesn’t matter to her as much as it did. Marina might still could do with some fun, but perhaps she needs somewhere really peaceful to heal after losing her parents? Hmm.
But then I looked at a map and thought…why not Anacapa Island? It’s already made an appearance in these stories before…as the host of the medical spa that Aoife herself got her cosmetic upgrades done at when she was a teenager. A rather striking scene, in as much as the whole environment was a tour de force of the most California-beachy housing that it’s possible to build (beach stones in jars, surfboards on the walls, driftwood materials, sea glass wind chimes, saltwater pools in the suites, and that’s just the beginning). It’s also the place Fia got herself made over as well.
What’s even better is even as of 2029 in these stories the proprietress of the medical spa, Vindicta, is described as an older lady. She’s very much still active as of 2045, but for all we know she’s already, say, 60 as of 2029 then by 2045 she’d be 76. By 2064 she’d be 95. So by the time this story takes place she’d easily be out of the picture due to old age. She is famously a perfectionist and has a specific agenda: what if she’d rather close the doors of her medical spa altogether upon her demise rather than let it fall into anyone else’s hands and be ruined? Ooh…
Katenka might be a known and trustworthy character to her, and she certainly has more than enough money to ensure the place is taken care of properly, so after Vindicta’s demise and the facility’s closure, perhaps Katenka makes that into their new residence? There are certainly at least a couple dozen luxury suites that the whole family-and-friend group could live in. Indeed, the facility might actually be about the right size to accommodate them. Do some renovations and reconstructions keeping the essential character of the place, and it would make a perfect mansion for the whole group, with a heritage deeply tied to the family in gothic but not traumatic fashion, the perfect touch for a story like this (which draws on prequels that are themselves of gothic inspiration).
It would also be a suitably dramatic backdrop for Marina’s newfound obsession with painting the sea, as well as Georgia’s and Gunston’s visits by sailboat, echoing the old seafaring stories, and perhaps permitting the two young people to enjoy the island, and the sea, in the same place Aoife did, but in an entirely different way. Yes, I’m liking these ideas…