𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒘𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒓𝒚 𝒑𝒂𝒕𝒄𝒉

anya tran can’t remember living anywhere but her little cul de sac in strawberry, nebraska. her entire life, it’s just been her and her mother.

her mother is a divorce attorney, a noncommittal hardass who catches onto anya’s shit before she even realizes she’s doing it. she’s good, so anya had to learn to be better. it’s not that her mother is a bad parent, she’s damn good honestly, they’re just two incredibly strong and conflicting personalities. anya wants to run straight in the ocean, her mother wants to soak in the sun. needless to say, some rules were bullshit from her perspective.

the whole punk thing is nothing new. she found a few old tee shirts deep in her mother’s closet. and, from what little she knows of her father, he was a real rocker. also, apparently, she’s just like him. anya.. is certain this is an insult, but she can’t help but push those buttons, proudly wear the title of daddy’s girl. if she knew the guy, she’s sure he’d think she was hilarious.

an old grudge match cassette sits on her night stand. if anya were honest, she’d admit to not being the biggest fan, but she blasts the insufferable noise constantly. both to be annoying, and give off that vintage cool girl image.

most of anya’s whole getup is for image, honestly. sure, she enjoys the leather and dark makeup, and has a lot more fun taking her motorcycle to work than her mom’s shitty car, but she’d really rather jam out to the spice girls, or watch something pleasant and not so fucking scary she can’t sleep. tough as she may be, she wishes she had the capacity to be proudly soft as well.

she’s lived in strawberry her whole damn life and it’s been H-E-DOUBLE-HOCKEY-STICKS. growing up with the same faces, hearing the same gossip every day, it gets annoying. there’s not much room to run in such a small town.

speaking of running, that’s exactly what she always does. she can’t remember when it started, why being so close to others is so scary to her, but assumes it’s whatever gene has her mother bringing home other hotshot attorneys when she thinks she’s sleeping. the tran women just can’t fucking commit, it seems. she can’t believe they’d ever considered being anyone’s anything.

where she lacks in romantic skills, she makes up for by being the most loyal friend. come for her friends and her tiny ass WILL jump on you. probably with a weapon.

wanted plots !!!!

CHILDHOOD BEST FRIEND: y’all seen uhhh the edge of seventeen? i want that level of power in this friendship. need i say more?

EX PARTNER: yeah, you probably got cheated on, buddy.

GOOD INFLUENCE: someone who isn’t a leather clad demon for her to care about. tell her about actually pleasant shit in the world. be the person to get her into the spice girls lmfao.

wilbur was six years old when the first computer science degree program was established, and he already knew what it was that he wanted to do. they were a family of the future, his parents would say, already visualizing the days of flying cars and robot butlers that were to come. 

he was twenty years old when, halfway into his degree, he dropped out of cambridge university, chasing an offer across the world in strawberry, nebraska. his parents had worked hard to get him to england, but he threw it all away the moment an easier method came along. wilbur had always been that way, finding shortcuts and cheats to life. it had done him well up to that point, he had no reason to think otherwise.

when you treat life like a game, you get played. that was the first real lesson wilbur had learned when a year later, he hadn’t heard a word about the months he spent developing his game. he continued pitching it, working full time at strawberry’s local hot dog shop to keep his room in jacque bateman’s basement while his parents ceased funding him. it was 1978 when he met sarah, and 1980 when his game hit arcades across nebraska. the catch? his name wasn’t attached to it.

by this time, he and sarah had their own place, and conrad was six months old. wilbur had only wanted to get by at this point, be a half decent father. they were never together officially, staying together out of necessity and to get off on occasion. conrad’s conception changed everything, of course. they threw together a shotgun wedding, and not a year later, arcades had changed everything. if they weren’t together before, his months of work on his next game, the one he swore would make them rich, had buried their relationship 6 feet under.

they got their shit together when conrad was 7 years old. by then, the two of them had gone their separate ways and worked out a custody agreement. on weeks without conrad, wilbur would continue work on his game. on weeks with him, he had taught his son all he could about computers.

the strawberry patch came along right when he’d gotten fired from the local arcade, and there was babbage’s right on time. wilbur quickly rose in ranks at the store, and on occasion he’d tell his fellow mallrats about how his own game was just a few storefronts away in the chuck e. cheese. not that they’d ever believed him.

he tries his best to be in the know, having younger coworkers and conrad, now 17, update him as much as possible about pop culture and slang. he says it’s for the job, makes him more relatable, but honestly wilbur just can’t quite accept that he’s not 25 anymore.

with good samaritans like peter blooth coming for his position as most easygoing elder at the mall, he tries his best to be as laidback as possible. literally think about that english teacher that like sits on desks and tells you to call them by their first name. that’s essentially wilbur except it’s more like “fuck yeah dude you can have that game i ain’t a snitch”. yeah, he loses babbage’s some business, but he’s cool doing it.

cat cavanaugh lives life under a single principle: whatever she wants to be, she can be. what she always wanted to be was remembered, loved, respected. so she did it, easily

custody of cat was given to her guardians early on in her life; they were family friends, and her parents got their selves thrown in prison before she was even crawling. from what she knew, it was drug related. from what she could tell, her new guardians weren’t any different.

she wasn’t given the best hand to start the game of life with; working class family, timid child her own age sharing a bed with her, and too-big hand me downs. cat had to build it all up herself, become someone worth looking at.

while her adoptive sister flew under the radar, growing more bitter by the day, cat joined the ranks of her sister’s tormentors. it was only the smart thing to do. if you don’t want to be bullied, be better. simple, she thought. it was all about mindset.

she believed she was better, so she was. she stole clothes from nordstrom racks, did her makeup in school bathrooms, always left the top few buttons undone. and just like that, she floated through high school, dated who she wanted, walked out with a pretty prom queen crown and a football player on her arm (promptly dumped in front of everyone an hour into the graduation rager at kelly ostroski’s house, duh)

who cat made herself just made it harder to identify who she was, though, and life after high school was hard to navigate. it was hard to tell where her bitchy act ended and where she began, but maybe that was for the best. it was easier to treat people like pawns, to hold herself on a pedestal, it showed people that she wasn’t as weak and pathetic as her sister had been, at least.

the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, she would sometimes tell herself at parties, pupils blown wide and mixes of god-knows-what running through her system. the difference between her parents and her is that she can stop. she swears she can.

p-plots?

FWB: she’s been in a lot of relationships before, but her lack of commitment ruins it most of the time. cat prefers a simple friends with benefits situation... try not to complicate things (;

EX BEST FRIEND(S): i imagine they were at the top of the world together, and then cat pulled some fuckshit and their entire friend group was divided into two sides

DEALER: enable this stupid bitch do it. dealer and fwb are also things that might come as a package tbh

CASUAL/PARTY FRIEND(S): she tries not to get too close to people. someone here for just a good time is perfect, and tbh probably getting more respect than those she’s actually close to bc she is a shitty friend

raised in a shitty trailer park with two disasters for parents, chrysanthemum didn’t stand a chance at being normal. but that was fine with her, she embraced everyone’s differences, celebrated her flaws and her parents flaws. even when they abandoned her, she never quite blamed them for it.

her father had anger issues, but he never exploded on them, always walked away from a fight. chrysanthemum admired him for it, her mother demanded more. she had an innate need to know everything, how everyone was feeling, and she couldn’t be satisfied with the fact that her husband wasn’t telling her what was on his mind. that, chrysanthemum assumed, is what caused her to follow after him when he left them. not love, not a need to make it work, but chasing answers.

that was three years ago, and chrys is still by herself in her trailer. it isn’t so bad, she enjoys living on her own. she’s able to set up an actual altar for aphrodite now, able to buy all the frozen foods she wants and not get a single vegetable. it’s the small things that please her. she doesn’t ask for much.

chrysanthemum believes in love. she believes in love of people, of animals, of our environment. she wants really is for everyone to understand that it’s okay to be different, oh and also to fucking ACCEPT THAT ALIENS EXIST

she loves working at claire’s because it’s just such a feral place. the accessories are strange, maybe a bit cheesy, and the most embarrassing demographic (10-14 year old girls) shop there the most. there’s a power to that, a shamelessness that you don’t often find in other places.

also important for you to know she’s the world’s biggest saved by the bell fan like she has a serious saved by the bell problem. she likes toxic men hence a crush on zack morris. thank you.

final bullet point i want you to know that she’s certain she was marilyn monroe in a past life.

gimme plots !!

TINFOIL HAT BUD: a fellow weirdo, someone to smoke with and share all her strange theories on life and the universe.

SOULMATE: okay, not really, but she thinks so. it could be small things, like the lines on their hands matching up or having the same favorite color, but chrysanthemum is sure the universe has a plan for the two of them. not that she would say that