A Continent of Banalities

Detroit, 1946. When people think of a woman assassin, they think of some Rita Hayworth-looking glamorpuss. That’s not Arlene. She has that kind of reassuring face you’d like to see in a doctor’s office or behind a lunch counter. Arlene is an assassin though, and has eleven confirmed kills to her name. Don’t hesitate, don’t stand out. That’s words to live by for a contract killer. Arlene made her first kill in the jailhouse. She was inside for knocking her (ex)husband down with a bottle, and stealing his wallet and car. While inside, she strangled an officious trustee who tried to blackmail her. Arlene got away with it, and the only other witness, Astrid Felton, knew to keep quiet, up to a point. When they got out, Astrid admitted that she’d told her boyfriend Eugene Farrugia, “a big man in the COMMISSION”. This turned out to be a half-truth at best. Gene was a go-between, and quite squeamish for a made man. Still, Arlene found that they could do business. She’d do the hits and Gene wou

Casey is a professor of mathematics. He has a fairly cushy tenured position at Morgan State University, but at this point in his career, the unassuming little man has taken up a second job as a monster hunter.  For many years Casey worked alongside psychologist (and almost Nobel Prize winner) Paul Höst. They collaborated on studies in consumer behavior, models for predicting suicide attempts and much more.  Neither of them had ever married, and behind their backs colleagues and students called them ‘the bromance’. They did have their disagreements though. Casey was frustrated by how poorly supported many psychological studies seemed to be, while Höst felt that Casey was too timid in his conclusions.  It all changed one Summer evening when Höst arrived late to one of their meetings with a young man, an assistant professor named Alex Hendry. Höst seemed inebriated or euphoric, while the young man was decidedly subdued. There were things, he said, that science had not even touched on. Ext

Once again it's time for 31 Days Character Creation Challenge! We start with a modern day Whitehack character In Scarlet Town you fight your father’s foes Up on the hill a chilly wind blows You fight ‘em on high and you fight ‘em down in You fight ‘em with whisky, morphine and gin Diane Carlsson lives in Preston, Minnesota, the ‘trout capital of America’. If you’re not an outdoorsy type, there’s not much to do in Preston, but Diane is a girl with a calling of sorts. Diane’s a caver. She’s kinda had to become one, because of her father. When Diane was little, her father would tell her stories of Scarlet Town. It’d be mentioned in bedtime stories, sometimes just in passing. Sleeping Beauty’s castle was in Scarlet Town, and the Hundred Acre Wood was just outside of it. Diane was almost twelve before she realized that Scarlet Town did not figure in any of those stories. As she grew older, the stories changed too. Where they’d been fairy tales in her childhood, her father now talked abo