Now, dear readers, I do apologise for what follows. I realise just how boring it seems, but I feel I need to describe our community, if only for reference. I'll try to keep it entertaining. At least it's jazzed up with Amelia's photos and stuff.


Dessler – the Desslers moved here just a few weeks ago, apparently under witness protection. It was a bit strange, because it was all so secretive, and in a town this small there aren't really any secrets. We don't know their real names, but we do know about the witness protection part, which we're technically not meant to know. There's Marie and Anthony Dessler, and their children Nathan (who sulks a lot but has great hair) and Joanna (who's pretty cute for a seven-year-old.) They keep to themselves a lot, and we don't bother them.


Druitt – Rosie Druitt is a lovely person with an ugly disease, which causes great scar-like lesions to randomly appear on her skin and stay there. None of the doctors have a clue what's wrong with her, and when the disease began to show, her shallow D.H. of a husband decided to divorce. She moved out here with her son, Julian, whom I greatly dislike (and everyone knows it). He's arrogant, smug and patronizing. He's into philosophy and politics and all this other stuff, and always acts like he knows everything. The jerk. It must be hereditary. Paternally.


Guildenstern – a family of vampires. This, of course, provides a great opener when they meet someone in an Eridessa pub:
"Can I buy you a drink?"
"Sure, can you get me some blood? With a little paper umbrella in it, thanks."
According to Victoria, she actually tried that line on a guy who tried to pick her up once. She said he looked confused, but was probably too intoxicated to remember anything anyway.
They do share some similarities with the popular fictional vampires of literature, but they also lack some famous vampiric traits too. For instance, they don't drink blood at all. They eat regular human food. However, they cannot be exposed to any sunlight (they don't 'glitter', they burn), they can turn into a bat at will, they all have very pale skin, they are supernaturally strong, they are perpetually freezing, and - oh, yeah, they just happen to be immortal.
Because of this lack-of-mortality, the Guildensterns have a big family. Sophie and Edward's first child was Victoria, who has been twenty five for several decades. A little more recently, they had Oswald and Anastasia, who are currently teenagers, followed by Casper and Catherine, who are children. (They do 'grow' older, at an extremely slow rate, and stop growing when they reach what would be the equivalent of about 30 human years).



Larson – Enter yours truly. My mum's a biochemist, by the name of Doctor Jamie Larson. She moved our family here when Adam and I were two (we're twins), because she was deeply involved in researching some special plants, and she'd discovered an enormous population of them growing natively here in Solitaria.
Dad was a little unhappy at first, because he knew it would be difficult for him to find any work out here. He's a professional musician who used to accompany solo singers for their concerts, but now he works as a freelance composer. Instead of playing for the upcoming Australian Idols, he writes for them!
And if you think that's not much of a claim to fame because the hit songs for Idols are always stupid and sappy, it's because he deliberately makes them that way. Then he nearly kills himself with laughter as they're performed, and even moreso when the hit single starts rising up the charts. It also brings in some nice royalties.


Meyer – the most singularly weird family in Solitaria. Consists of Dream Meyer, Arthur Meyer, and their three children. My best friend Amelia belongs to this troupe, and she once so perfectly described them thus: "I'm a teenage girl striving to be normal in a household full of fruitloops. My mother thinks she's a Wiccan, my father thinks he's Neo and has to choose a red or blue pill, my sister's a goth who only speaks in Evanescence quotes and my brother's an emo who cried when I killed an ant. But none of them actually are what they think they are. Like, my mum isn't actually a witch, and Artemis isn't actually an emo, they just try to live up to their perceptions of what a witch or a goth or an emo is. We all have stupid names thanks to my mother and we have the strangest house in the entire country. How am I going to survive?" Her name is, in fact, Spiritfire, but she demands that everyone call her Amelia, which is "much more normal and a really pretty name."


Mink – a glamourous couple straight from the pages of gossip magazines. When the gossip got too much to handle, Yvette and Liam Mink decided to retire from their media-saturated, paparazzified lives early. Yvette was a well-known exotic dancer and actress in some dubious films, while Liam was also a famous actor from some big movies. Their equally glamourous daughter, Tia, is about as stuck-up as they are.


Reilly – A mostly ordinary family. Clarisse and Tom were a normal family with two charming daughters, Hannah, 14, and Kelly, 8. They lived an ordinary, happy life until one day Hannah was violently struck down and killed by a drunk driver while crossing the road. Her family was devastated, and were so desperate to get her back that they consulted a Vodun mystic who claimed to have a phone with a direct link to the underworld. She promised, for a fee, that she could return Hannah from the dead. Clarisse and Tom paid the fee she asked, and – surprising everybody – Hannah was indeed brought back to life.
Sort of.
Hannah came back as a zombie. Her parents, horrified at what they had done and what their daughter had become, fled their comfortable suburban community and settled in Solitaria to try and rebuild their shattered lives. Hannah's quality of "life" has fallen far lower than it had ever been before the accident. She has trouble communicating and can barely walk. Thankfully, we've accepted her for who she is, and not what she is. A truly tragic situation.


R'hu – Lou runs the shop, which I told you about earlier. His real name is Ul'udru R'hu (I think it's pronounced 'ool-a-ood-roo ra-hoo', with 'oo' as in 'book'. What a tongue-twister) and he's a genuine article alien - you know, green skin, pointy ears, black eyes, the whole shebang. I got kind of excited when I first met him, because I'm a huge fan of Doctor Who, and I thought maybe the Tardis was parked just around the corner and the Doctor was transporting some random alien back to his home planet but had difficulties and was stopping for repairs.
My imagination sometimes runs away from me. It's hard to get it back.
He's a really decent guy, despite being an alien. In fact he's surprisingly human. I'm not sure exactly how he ended up here. I am sure he makes great coffee, though. I know this because I regularly drink his coffee.


Rosencrantz - They're a mostly normal family. It's just that the father, Christopher, is a werewolf. Naturally, someone who turns into a man-wolf every time the moon is full wasn't a highly valued member of society. Luckily he found a sympathetic girlfriend and decided to move out here to start a family. It's good for us, because Christopher is a fully qualified policeman. It's ever so helpful for difficult criminals to be arrested by a werewolf. They become so much more compliant. He married an ordinary woman, Debbie, and they have three ordinary children: Tamara, Jake and Anna.

So there you have it: our totally bizarre congregation of citizens, here in Solitaria.