04.28.04 - 5:42 p.m.

So, I do RP. And I've made a new character, in honor of Fountains of Wayne's song Radiation Vibe, a new character. Just, saving it here for... whatever reason. Heh.

Summer Anne Adkins

Cliath Coggie Ahroun

Character history:

August 11, 1987

King's Crossing, Nebraska

- sixty miles north of Grand Island

It was a hot day, late summer. The wheat was ripening, and the soybeans, but the corn was scorching beneath a blaze of blistering sun. The rain gauges hadn't been filled for days and weeks, and instead, the farmers who could afford it were bringing out their lumbering irrigation apparatuses. The Wood River was barely a trickle, no more than a mudhole, really, and the north fork of the Platte was rumored to have gone dry out by Pine Ridge or Dean or someplace similar.

The sky was blistered, white, and it looked like it could pop open at any time, the way it gets that time of year: mercilessly oozing heat, the kind that crisps your skin in three seconds flat, the kind that can cook a three-course brunch on the sidewalk. No longer blue, the blue was lost to the white-heat. The sky looked like it had been painted with latex over oil, and the latex had withered and shrunk and peeled away, leaving on the scraps of the old oil paint and bare nothing beneath.

People who had 'em hid away in their air conditioned houses and trailers. Those without a/c headed to the Opera House for the afternoon matinee movie, some nothing that they could watch in air conditioned in the cool, rich dark. Next year, the theater would go belly-up and the town would be the next decade scraping enough cash together to keep the turn of the century brick building from ruin and anyone who wanted a cool dark movie would have to drive an hour and a half to two hours into Grand Island to see one, which wasn't hardly worth it to anyone.

Harold Adkins was out in the back forty, worrying over his organic soybeans and adjusting the drip-hose irrigation system he used to keep them lush under such circumstances when he heard the blare of the horn. It came as a series of quick blasts, some short, some long: Morse Code. SOS. The retired extension agent shut off the water and headed back to his isolated farmhouse - just another bare impression on the precise grid of dirt roads that define Nebraska farm country - and found an uncommon though not unexpected group of visitors, a group of kids, really, in a pair of beat-up vehicles headed across the country. Garou pack, chasing something or on the run. Wasn't Harold's place to ask.

Their Alpha, a pretty girl who didn't look no older than the clerk at the Feed 'n Seed, was having contractions real close together and the pack needed a place for the girl to give birth. Probably they heard about Harold at the nearest Sept, which was pretty far away. The farmhouse, nice and isolated, was an open secret and a brief haven open to any Gaian Garou that needed it. So the group of kids crowded into the barn, then accepted Harold's offer of the house, then the master bedroom, and that night - Harold remembers the full moon shining through the kitchen windows as he sat up, keeping the kids full of coffee and whatever they needed. Toward the end - the pack, panicking, the Alpha was their Theurge - Harold went up and give 'em a hand. He'd delivered his fair share of calves over the years and this wasn't much different. He had a fairer hand for it than the bristling young boys who didn't want to get that close to their Alpha's nether regions, for obvious reasons.

It was a girl, with a headful of her momma's hair and eyes the color of the new dawn sky. He declared it to the pack, but they didn't look too excited. Just wondered how the Alpha was - that's what they called her, didn't give no name - and grunted at Harold and ate his biscuits and hashbrowns and home-cured bacon like they ain't never had food they whole lives.

Harold left the newborn with her momma, alone in his bedroom for the first feeding, the first bonding, and remembered how he'd done the same for his own wife, his own girls, his own boy. He headed back to the kitchen and drank hisself two cups of coffee and wondered how he was gon' make it through all the chores that day on no sleep. Watched the sky lightenin' with false dawn while those boys ate his food right up. The pipes groaned and shrieked - probably the girl was havin' a bath, maybe she was givin' her baby a bit of a wash, too, even if he'd already done that. His wife had been like that. Wanted to do it all herself. Harold smiled fondly at the memory.

He was on his third cup of coffee when the stairs creaked their usual protest against havin' to bear anyone's weight, and he looked up and saw the girl, fully dressed, wet hair drifting down her back like a desert snake, with her baby in her hand. "We gotta go," the girl said, with her voice from nowhere. "You watch her for me?" Questions like that from Garou like this weren't so much questions as orders, even to fifty-something men who'd earned a bit of rest after a long, hard-workin' life, but the girl must have sensed his reluctance, his surprise. "We'll be back."

Harold watched her a spell, opened his arms to the babe. "What's her name?" he asked, as he looked back up at her momma.

"I'll figure that out - " she said, the momma, already shoeing the boys together, gettin' up and outta his kitchen, " - when this is all over. I'll be back." And then they were swinging outta the kitchen - sauntering, swaying, the overconfident boys and the overconfident girl, ten times too young for the lives they led, and Harold took the nameless infant girl out onto the porch to wave and watch the pair of pick-ups peel outta his driveway, to watch the dust-clouds they kicked up on the gridded dirt roads until they were entirely outta sight.

It was the last he ever saw of them.

After two weeks, Harold gave up callin' the newborn 'girl' (his own daughter, calling him from college, told him it was time to give the girl a name. The momma wasn't coming back, whether through plan or tragedy wasn't ever clear) and named her himself. Summer for the time of year, for what his momma made him think of, and Anne for his own wife, a Garou lost twenty-years and more ago, who had given him three good kids to raise and whose memory still brought tears to his eyes.

Small town life is different than living in the big city. It ain't that people are better, just that you know 'em better and you have a little more space. If you've got more space, it ain't so hard to move back and give some other folks space, too, when they need it. Harold didn't have much trouble getting Summer Anne a birth certificate, with his daughter, Mary, her official mother, and his eventual son-in-law Elliot her official dad. They said it was a kindness he was doing his daughter, taking in her kid like that so she and her fianc� could finish college. In truth, it was a kindness Mary done Summer Anne, pretending she'd got herself knocked up before she got herself married.

King's Crossing was a good place to grow up. Harold was past the anxieties of adulthood that tend to make someone overbearing or grasping, if those had ever affected him at all and he had a fine hand with the girl. Let her run wild until it was time to stop runnin' wild. Let her be a girly girl when she wanted to be. Let her be a tomboy when she wanted to be. Let her be scared or brave or whatever come naturally to her, and taught her what lessons he could about life and growth and kindness and how love something chokes you so hard you think you can't breathe, but really you can if you just remember that the sun keeps moving through the sky whether you want it to or not.

As Summer Anne grew older, sometimes she stayed with Harold on the farm and sometimes (especially in winter) she stayed with Mary and Elliot in town (they both finished college and moved back. Mary was a nurse-practitioner at the local clinic, Elliot was an extension agent like his father-in-law), on the thought that the bus ride from Harold's would be too long especially when the days were that short and the storms like to come as not, piles of snow as tunneled and sculpted by the wind into drifts sometimes as high as the porch railings, sometimes higher.

Harold made sure she always knew the story of her momma, and made equally sure she knew that most townfolks wouldn't understand it, and that's why they had to keep it hush-hush. It made Summer Anne feel pretty special to have a secret like that, hiding out under her skin, and Harold would sometimes tell her - with a melancholy the child couldn't understand - that she looked just like her mother Summer would squeal and pretend she was Garou, chasing down the monsters that lurk in every closet and crawl out from under every bed.

Summer Anne was a pretty girl, and life was pretty ordinary. Beyond the distant romance of her pretty momma, the great defining feature of Summer Anne's formative years was her constant rivalry with Kelly Jane Francis or KJ, as folks called her. KJ was the daughter of the owner of the local grain silos, the local Food Lion, AND the 5 and 10, and was therefore town-princess heir apparent from the day of her birth.

Summer Anne had a vibrancy and an athleticism that marked her out, and the two girls played with each other and against each other for many years. KJ always got the lead in school plays and won class president year after year. She won awards from the Modern Woodsmen of America for patriotic oratory (even if there weren't no woods in King's Crossing) and was definitely the smarter of the two. Except for one fluke-filled year when someone outside the orbit of the elementary school's twin star-princess-girls won the spelling bee, KJ won it faithfully and once even made it all the way to Washington for the national bee.

Summer Anne, however, was the sports star. She was the pitcher on her softball team, and the star forward on her soccer team and always won the races they had at the annual town picnic, and later on was a King's Crossing Middle School track star. And Summer always won the "Little Miss Cow Patty" beauty contest that happened at the summer fair when the carnival came and everyone ate fresh sweet corn roasted over coals, slathered with homemade butter. Hands down, Summer won, with KJ the runner-up. No one else came close. Even if Summer was tearing her ridiculously frilly dress (begged from Harold, paid off with stable-mucking chores and other hard-labor tasks) off within five minutes of the end of the competition and running off to participate in the frog-spitting contest, well, she was ridiculously proud of her accomplishment and just -dying- to participate in the next level of the contest, "Miss Queen Cow Patty."

Miss Queen Cow Patty. It started off as a joke in 1918, sponsored by a huckster who sold Miss Amelie's Famous Tonic Water at the traveling sideshows, but eventually the Knights of Columbus came to sponsor the contest, and eventually it got tied in with some national contest (not that anyone cared about the damn national contest) and came to be nearly the biggest thing in the county, ever. After the theater closed in 1988, it was almost the only thing that filled the Opera House, and proceeds from the contest were dedicated to preservation of the Opera House by the Knights of Columbus from Our Lady of Perpetual Hope.

Every year, Summer Anne and KJ sat - rapt - in the turn-of-the-century theater. They sat next to each other, a brief truce in their ever-present rivalry, barely breathing as the "Miss Queen Cow Patty" tiara was awarded to the prettiest girl ever. Even if the contest was open to all girls from age 15 to 24, it invariably went to a teenager and never to one of the older girls - who smoked, slept around, sometimes had babies, and were generally too human for the members of the Knights of Columbus judges.

Something went funny during Summer's freshmen year of high school, and somehow the whole world changed. Sure, Summer won the JV state championship in the Girl's 100 and 200 and 400 meter sprints and hurdles but otherwise Summer was getting a little - how to say it? - restless, is how her folks (all three: Harold, Mary, Elliot - her folks) would say it, maybe a little surly and her trademark sunny smile was less often seen.

The following summer, both Summer and KJ had *just* turned 15, and both were eligible to compete in the Miss Queen Cow Patty pageant. The town had been looking forward to the contest for years, and everyone was all a-twitter about who would win. None of the older girls stood a chance, really. The outcome was for-ordained. But then -- in a stunning reversal of every genuine truth the whole of the town had known since time immemorial -- KJ won the title and Summer was... runner-up. .RUNNER. .UP.

She was devastated.

Two days later, Summer stole the crown. Shimmied up the tree outside of KJ's window in the big frame Victorian in the center of town, right in the dead of night, crept into KJ's bedroom while KJ was off at a slumber party at Britney Morgan's house and STOLE the CROWN. Summer's kept it ever since, being as it�s hers by rights.

Four days later, Summer Anne had her first change. No one died, she just had these dreams: dreams of running, dreams of movement, the ripe summer corn parting like water and she ran headlong through the rows, the green stalks thrumming against her ribs in rhythm with the double-time rhythm of her gait, forepaws sinking into the mud at the edge of the Wood River, the few scrub trees lining the bank obscuring the moon as she bent down for a drink.

Mary and Elliott didn't know the signs, but Harold sure did. His wife was full-blooded, and their oldest son had been, too. The same day, Summer was withdrawn from school and shipped out to the nearest Gaian Sept outside Lincoln, ready for training.

And so, Summer got her training. It worked out pretty well, her being an Ahroun. She knew something about Garou, but only from a kinfolk perspective, but she was fast and sure and physical as anything. During her training, it came out that she had Get blood in her, just a little tiny thread of pure Get blood, and when it came time to choose she was given the option. Much as she loved the image of her momma, the romance of it, she loved her daddy Harold and the things he taught her without ever realizing he was teaching her, these things came out in the girl. She meditated about and she dreamed about it, and in the end, she chose to become a Child of Gaia.

Summer likes to sunbathe, loves to dance, and has a huge crush on Orlando Bloom. The poster of Legolas is affixed to the top of the camper-attachment of her pickup, so that she can fall asleep staring at him. She uses her laptop mostly to watch her LOTR DVDs, but she also keeps an online diary, in which she mostly posts the results of various online personality quizzes she takes. It's not like she can talk about fighting the Wyrm and whatnot.

Summer also loves music, almost any kind of music (though country, pop and southern rock are high on her list), and is trying to learn to play the guitar. At the moment, about all she can manage is the first thing anyone ever learns to play on the guitar: the melody from Stairway to Heaven. Well, she's not sure whether she wants to play guitar or bass, actually, because the bass is cool. Chicks who play bass stand around and dance the way she does alot, from the hips, and plenty of times she imagines herself playing the bass while she's dancing, up on stage and everyone watching her and envying her and all that. Not that it would ever happen that way: dreamer that she is, Summer still has a good grounded core.

Except, you know, she's not very good yet, and it's a little embarrassing, so she tries to practice only when her packmates can't hear her, which isn't very often. In fact, despite her physical confidence and her confidence when surrounded by her packmates, Summer is -very- prone to embarassment. She might hoot and holler with the best of them in a crowd, but alone she becomes frustrated and tongue-tied, and frustration is not a good thing for an Ahroun, since it leads to... well, the attraction that she sparks in boys and young men is almost always paired with a nervousness that makes them uncomfortable that makes her uncomfortable, and invokes the domino theory and leads to some sort of disaster, so she stays away from them. Even if most humans didn't react subtly to Summer's rage, she would STILL feel uncomfortable in interpersonal situations like that, but what with the whole rage factor, she has a very hard time of things. Sometimes, Summer envies Cin her easy sociability and Pinky her sweet-faced obliviousness.

Beneath that, Summer has an inborn sense of justice, rightness and wrongness that has a place for people and for the rest of the world. She doesn't like to see people hurting, and doesn't like to see suburbs eating up farmland, and doesn't like to see farmland eating up rangeland, and doesn't like to see rangeland eating up wilderness, and she knows a lot more than she knows she knows, but she can't quite grasp it all sometimes and it rises real thick and she feels it, that connection she has to the whole damn world.

Appearance:

Dark blonde/light brown hair that goes all golden when blessed by the sun (and Sun-In, by which Summer swears), a deep even tan from all that sun-worshipping, and hazel eyes, the darker background color speckled with the color of early wheat, or the first spring leaves, the moss-golden light that eventually falls through a thick canopy to the forest floor. She has a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose (too much sun), a bright, easy smile and straight clean teeth. Her hair is long and wavy, but usually she pulls it back into a ponytail, sometimes a pair of braids, and hides it beneath one of several cowboy hats given to her by her boyfriend from freshman year. Her boyfriend from BEFORE all this, whose picture is still tucked into her wallet as if he meant anything (and he really didn't).

At 5'9", Summer is tall and seems to be still growing. Even though she has not yet come into what one hopes would be her full strength (as an Ahroun, she needs that strength), she is lithe and fast, with an inborn athleticism she takes for granted. Her wardrobe consists mainly of jeans, cut-off jeans, t-shirts, bikini tops, half-peasant-style bikinish tops, and Grateful-dead-style swirly skirts. For jewelry, well, Summer has a huge collection of Mardi Gras beads that she wraps around her wrists and drapes around her neck, usually when she's going for a Bohemian look (with the Grateful-Dead swirly skirt and whatnot). She especially likes the ones with little plastic lobsters on them.

Theme Music:

"Pass You By" - Gillian Welch

"Fruits of My Labor" - Lucinda Williams

"Radiation Vibe" - Fountains of Wayne

"Sweet Jane" - Cowboy Junkies

"Two Girls" - Steve Earl & the Dukes

"All You Fascists" - Billy Bragg/Wilco

"Hell No I Ain't Happy" - Drive By Truckers

"Feels Like Summer Again" - Wallflowers

"All Her Favorite Fruit" - Camper Van Beethoven

"All Kinds of Time" - Fountains of Wayne