What's Annie's background? How did she grow up? How did she end up in the Archives business? (I haven't been able to focus on the show itself, but I can tell this is something you're very interested in and therefore I MUST KNOW)
okay so uhhhh
background - annie is the daughter and sole heiress of two very wealthy parents, the cliffords, who are one of the richest families in britain
how she grew up - until she was 11, annie spent most of her time with her father, newton, who was devoted to her and his wife, lamia. lamia was extremely ill most of the time (as a result of choosing to cut herself off from the Hunt, but this wasn’t known to anyone but her) so annie barely ever saw her. it was an open secret that she’d only started getting really sick after annie was born, so she always felt responsible for it somehow, and guilty about this.
when she was 11, her father was replaced by a Not-Them, which only annie could tell the difference between the original. the Not-Them terrorized her for several weeks before attempting to flay her alive and take her skin, however her screams brought her mom running onto the scene and despite being unable to tell the difference between the Not-Them and newton, she couldn’t believe that the man she married, who adored his daughter, would ever hurt her, and tapped into her Hunt Avatar form to fight and kill it. unfortunately she was too weak to avoid sustaining fatal injuries in the process, and died shortly after.
annie was taken in by her extended family on her father’s side, who are a Web cult, though she wasn’t aware of it at the time. annie was routinely manipulated and abused by them in an attempt to get her to transfer her inheritance of the family fortune over to them and in an attempt to convert her to the Web, but she managed to resist and out-manipulate them, cutting them all off and publicizing their years of abuse in every major newspaper and talk show she could get her words in in order to ruin them utterly.
how she ended up in the archives business - she spent several years studying and then dropping degrees at university, becoming bored with each. she was extremely lonely and during her second masters’ degree she met michael shelley, who she soon formed a close friendship with, in a coffee shop. she was never really in the archives business, but she ended up spending a lot of time hanging out there to be around him while he worked. they had a bad argument shortly before he got spiralled, but after he ‘died’ she started investigating his death once she found out about it due to the lack of information surrounding it making her suspicious of a coverup. after several years and encounters with Avatars and Entities she learned enough to know she was in a lot of danger, and made several powerful enemies. she faked her death, burned down her house, and became an Avatar of the Desolation, dedicated to destroying other Avatars and their plans.
okay so uhhhh
background - annie is the daughter and sole heiress of two very wealthy parents, the cliffords, who are one of the richest families in britain
how she grew up - until she was 11, annie spent most of her time with her father, newton, who was devoted to her and his wife, lamia. lamia was extremely ill most of the time (as a result of choosing to cut herself off from the Hunt, but this wasn’t known to anyone but her) so annie barely ever saw her. it was an open secret that she’d only started getting really sick after annie was born, so she always felt responsible for it somehow, and guilty about this.
when she was 11, her father was replaced by a Not-Them, which only annie could tell the difference between the original. the Not-Them terrorized her for several weeks before attempting to flay her alive and take her skin, however her screams brought her mom running onto the scene and despite being unable to tell the difference between the Not-Them and newton, she couldn’t believe that the man she married, who adored his daughter, would ever hurt her, and tapped into her Hunt Avatar form to fight and kill it. unfortunately she was too weak to avoid sustaining fatal injuries in the process, and died shortly after.
annie was taken in by her extended family on her father’s side, who are a Web cult, though she wasn’t aware of it at the time. annie was routinely manipulated and abused by them in an attempt to get her to transfer her inheritance of the family fortune over to them and in an attempt to convert her to the Web, but she managed to resist and out-manipulate them, cutting them all off and publicizing their years of abuse in every major newspaper and talk show she could get her words in in order to ruin them utterly.
how she ended up in the archives business - she spent several years studying and then dropping degrees at university, becoming bored with each. she was extremely lonely and during her second masters’ degree she met michael shelley, who she soon formed a close friendship with, in a coffee shop. she was never really in the archives business, but she ended up spending a lot of time hanging out there to be around him while he worked. they had a bad argument shortly before he got spiralled, but after he ‘died’ she started investigating his death once she found out about it due to the lack of information surrounding it making her suspicious of a coverup. after several years and encounters with Avatars and Entities she learned enough to know she was in a lot of danger, and made several powerful enemies. she faked her death, burned down her house, and became an Avatar of the Desolation, dedicated to destroying other Avatars and their plans.
i’ve decided that if i ever die then i’m not going to leave any messages warning people about the curses and misfortunes they’ll unleash if they disturb my tomb. you might think that’s fucked up but if anyone decides to not only disrespect my grave but also ignore all the urban legends and cautionary tales that will no doubt surround the mysterious circumstances of my death then that’s THEIR problem that’s on THEM.
the one experience that unites all 90s and early 2000s kids is experiencing at least one work of fiction with a deceptively adorable illustration of cute animals on the cover who live in societies with an established political system, hierarchy of leadership and culture and are driven from their homes by human activity and/or engage in violent conflicts with other animals in similar communities that lead to many of the characters’ brutal deaths, which are described in graphic detail and which left you briefly emotionally traumatized by being confronted with the concept of your own fragile mortality before you were 10
the closest things on earth we have to old eldritch abomination gods are the sun, the ocean and nuclear radiation
the sun:
unfathomably ancient, and will outlive all of us by billions of years
the light coming from it is so strong that brief exposure can burn or blind you even from millions of miles away
once worshipped as a god by various religions and cults who made sacrifices to appease it
will eventually expand as it burns out and dies and consume us in a desperate attempt to extend its lifespan
constantly making incredibly loud noises which would cause agony and eventual deafness if we could hear it, including ‘screams’ before emitting solar flares
an enormous, singular mass that’s constantly heaving and tossing its bulk against the land we build our homes on and gradually ‘eating away’ at it
also extremely old and likely to outlast any of our lifespans
countless people, ships and even entire landmasses have vanished into its depths, never to be seen or heard from again
so vast and dangerous that it’s still mostly uncharted, and less is known about its deepest areas to us than our solar system
full of teeth and tentacles, enormous storms and even more unknown terrors none have ever returned from to tell the that tale of that can and will consume you without thought or reason
also historically worshipped as a god and often characterized in myths and legends as an vengeful, merciless entity
those who sail on it tend to be deeply superstitious and respect its power with a reverence bordering on awe
a single one of the superstorms it brews on a regular basis can devastate vast areas of civilization
will eventually rise and consume us
nuclear radiation:
even brief exposure can cause long-term and irreparable damage, including bleeding, burns, hair loss, premature ageing, internal bleeding and the growth of tumors which cause a wasting disease that consumes your healthy cells until you die
cannot be entirely contained of blocked out, only ‘shielded’ by thick barriers of lead and concrete
radioactive waste is so toxic that it’s buried deep underground and/or entombed within a ‘sarcophagus’ of multiple layers of shielding to prevent it from escaping and infecting the ground we grow and raise our food on, the water we drink and the air we breathe
areas where it has escaped or been set loose and leaked into its surroundings are evacuated and abandoned for hundreds of miles, and anything that survives within them is shunned as a carrier of the infection and contained in ‘exclusion zones’
ghosts are so funny. they’re people who were just like “actually, fuck dying” and decided to cause problems on purpose for the rest of everyone else’s lives. goals tbh.
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