Line work is my favorite part of any page. Colors are second, but line work has a subtlety matched by nothing else. Good lines will make or break a picture. Bonus, this page will have some really awesome lines: right now, Amity and Damien are in the middle of the Battle of Sands, where Orcians and Earthens clash for control of the capital city of the desert lands.
Monstrous Sea involves a lot of elemental-type powers, very anime, so most fights have great lines. Especially when Amity and Damien are there, because they fight with crystals and fog. Angles and curves. Delicious.
The commercial ends before I get a chance to really do anything. I set down my pen and turn back to the chat to find a few noticeable newcomers among the flock.
LadyConstellation: I hope no one caused any trouble during that commercial break.
rainmaker: Define “trouble.”
Fire_Served_Cold: Trouble: n. def: This guy.
rainmaker: Smooth.
Fire_Served_Cold: I try.
Below that quick exchange come a flurry of excited “rainmaker!!”s and a few “The Angels are here!”
The Angels they refer to are the group of five fans who took names based on the Angels in Monstrous Sea, the guardians of the planet Orcus. I’ve never really interacted with rainmaker and the other Angels of the fandom, but I’ve seen them around the boards. It’s kind of impossible not to see them around the boards. They’re almost as popular as I am.
The music on the TV hits a crescendo. I turn in time to see Jane find out she’s pregnant with Spencer’s baby before it cuts to another commercial. They really are going for an issues episode here. Back to main chat.
LadyConstellation: Another pregnancy?! This show already kept a baby, gave a baby up for adoption, and had an abortion! How will they tackle this problem and still stay relevant to REAL TEEN LIFE?
rainmaker: Hahahahaha
The reply pops up immediately, and a strange warm feeling flutters in my chest. Other people laugh, but rainmaker’s response is the one that does it. He’s the most-read fanfic writer for Monstrous Sea. I’ve seen some of his stuff. He’s really funny. Like, really fucking funny. Like, I couldn’t make Monstrous Sea that funny if I tried.
So him laughing at something I said feels like winning a lottery.
Then he replies with this:
rainmaker: PLOT TWIST it was actually Jennifer’s baby. Jane was cheating on Spencer long before this. When the baby is born, they name it Janifer and live a happy lesbian life in the suburbs and never think about Spencer again.
I nearly spit water all over my computer screen at “Janifer.” The rest of the threads going on in the chat, all the other voices, fade into the background and my eye only catches rainmaker’s when it appears.
Fire_Served_Cold: Wait, how did two lesbians have a biological child together?
rainmaker: Um excuse you no one said it was biologically Jennifer’s. Blood=/=family. Amirite? Anyone?
LadyConstellation: Sorry, I’m still trying to process “Janifer.”
rainmaker: Liked that one, did you? ;)
Oh god, a winky face. The most provocative of all emoticons. A blush creeps over my face and I rub my cheeks to hide it, even though there’s no one here to see. What a confident, cocky bastard. Boys at school never do this to me—I don’t know if it’s because I can see their faces or because they can see mine or what. I only have feelings like this for people I meet online, and honestly, rainmaker’s the first one to drudge them up in a good long while. It’s like in this whole chat, he’s only talking to me. Like two people sitting next to each other on a couch in a crowded party.
Now, here’s the new issue:
Do I say anything back?
My fingers hover over the keyboard. A commercial for acne medication flashes on the TV, then a commercial for the show coming on after Dog Days. I type:
LadyConstellation: Oh, you know it. ;)
What a cop-out. At least I got the winky face in there. Maybe it sounds coy enough to make up for the complete lack of cleverness. It’s stupid because that’s what I like about the internet—that it gives you time to think about what you want to say before you say it. But my brain isn’t working right, I’m not sure it’s wise to publicly flirt with someone as LadyConstellation, and I don’t even know who rainmaker is. He could be some forty-year-old living in his parents’ basement with Cheeto dust on his fingers and a collection of vintage Star Wars T-shirts that no longer fit his ever-expanding stomach.
I turn back to my line art. My shaking hands go still against the screen of the pen display, and the lines come out smooth and bold. Drawing gives me something to do as I think about that winky face, and the winky face I sent back.
Amity, with her cloud of white hair and her sharp orange eyes, comes into being against the blank background one line at a time. There’s no color on her yet, but I see it in her every time I draw her. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be the person whose color comes through even when standing still. To be someone so vibrant, others can’t help but notice you. It’s not Amity’s eyes or her hair or even her skin that do that. It’s just her.
I save the mass of knifelike orange crystals growing along Amity’s right arm—pulled back, ready to strike down her foes—for later. The show is back on.
Rainmaker hasn’t said anything else in the chat. I pop in every now and then to comment on the show, but for the most part I sit back, stop thinking, and enjoy a group of pretty twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers, making astronomically bad decisions and learning from their mistakes. Every once in a while, a troll account will take over the chat window with screaming caps or strings of emoticons, and the account Forges_ of_Risht appears to block them.
A message from Max appears on my phone.
Apocalypse_Cow: forges, reporting for duty with the banhammer.
MirkerLurker: Excellent work, soldier.
Apocalypse_Cow: see, there’s a reason you hired me for this job.
MirkerLurker: Yeah, so Emmy doesn’t have to do that and take care of the website.
Apocalypse_Cow: har har.
MirkerLurker: But really, great job. No one wields the banhammer quite as well as you.
Max sends more emojis. A lady dancing the salsa. Nail painting. A lightning bolt. He routinely pesters Emmy to make emojis part of Monstrous Sea forum chat capability, and she refuses because she thinks it’s funny.
Emmy says something in the Dog Days chat that sets off a flood of replies so fast I can’t scroll back up to see what the original comment was.
Max and Emmy aren’t the only two people who help run the forums, but they are the best. And they’re the only ones who know me not as LadyConstellation but as Eliza. Before Max was my bouncer, even before he shared the link to Monstrous Sea on Masterminds that drew in the fans, he was an anal-retentive plot theorist on the Children of Hypnos forums. And Emmy—before Emmy built monstroussea.com and the forums and the shop where I sell my merchandise, she was the life of the Children of Hypnos party, an eleven-year-old with enough fangirl energy to power a small city.
If it weren’t for them finding my fan art, none of this would have happened. It was both of them separately who found my dead art thread on the Children of Hypnos forums, and it was in that thread where we carved out a little space just for us.
I do have friends. Maybe they live hundreds of miles away from me, and maybe I can only talk to them through a screen, but they’re still my friends. They don’t just hold Monstrous Sea together. They hold me together.