#cascade falls stuff

Cyril Jones is a city boy through and through.  Born and raised in the California Bay Area, he's about 1/4th Japanese on his mom's side and not necessarily super in touch with his heritage( aside from the times when his grandma would drag him all around Japantown in San Francisco when he was a kid).  His life was pretty normal.  He got drunk with friends on weekends and covertly picked up a smoking habit at sixteen.  Then his dad died of a stroke when he was seventeen, and that left him and his mom messed up.  Suddenly they had money problems along with needing to take care of the funeral.

Cy was weirdly closeted throughout his high school years.  He staunchly claimed to be bi but only dated girls.  He met and started to date Shaina when he was eighteen, around the same time that he started toying around with modeling for various photographers around the bay.  For a long while, he thought that Shaina was the one, or at the very least was the only girl he could make family life happen with.  Until Shaina sat him down and they had a long talk about what the hell Cy wanted out of life and why he was so fixated on family.  Turns out it was mostly because he'd feel guilty being gay and not having kids.  

They broke up, and worked through it together.  Shaina convinced Cy to come out, and his mother and grandmother handled it better than he thought they would.  (Grandma does, however, spend some time looking for adoption agencies just in case Cy ever settles down.)  Shaina is one of the best friends that Cy has ever had, and she's one of the most important people in his life. 

Cy's modeling career shifted into erotica, and he ended up taking it a step farther and going into porn.   He was pretty good at it, too.  He did porn under a pseudonym while he was going through college, and it was a pretty big part of his life for a while.  The company he was with was good, made sure everyone was clean.  But the years can wear the shine off of anything, and his company went under and the other places that were hiring didn't exactly inspire confidence.  Plus it was getting exhausting, dating people who knew him from porn.  There were always expectations, always ideas, and baggage, and Cy started to regret.  

    Cy finished up his degree (English, he's not very creative) and got out  of porn.  (Shaina got him a shirt that said Tired Of Sex as soon as she heard the news and Cy is still incredibly amused by it.)  He stuck around the Bay Area for a while, and then moved up the coast to Portland when he felt like he needed a change of scenery.  He's had extremely bad luck with work; somehow he keeps getting recognized as an ex-porn star and it's lost him a few jobs.  

The real kicker was when Cy met Alex.  Alex was sweet and cute and a little out of his depth - he'd moved to Portland right out of small-town life.  The town?  Some shitty little place up in the ass end of Washington state called Cascade Falls.  Cy didn't think anything of it; he started dating Alex, and things were okay.  For a while.  Then it got weird, and Alex got obsessive, and Cy wanted to break it off.  That ended with Cy being threatened with the business end of a kitchen knife.  

Now Cy is in Cascade Falls and regretting it horribly.  He ran to the one place that Alex said he'd never go again, because he wanted to get away, and now he can't get away. In a case of the worst timing ever, Cy ends up with car trouble in Cascade Falls right before the first heavy snowfall. Now he's stuck and fighting to survive the winter, and the only other person he trusts is Ceremony, who's in the same damn position and who he met maybe half a week ago.  

On a normal day (that is to say, when he's not trapped in snowy isolated hell), Cy is snarky as hell, in love with overpriced indie cafe cappuccinos, and loves making fun of shitty action and horror movies with friends.  The horror movie thing is a little bit ruined for him now, for obvious reasons.  He's so bad at cooking that he's boiled water out of a pan on at least one occasion, and he's terrible at talking about feelings, electing to curse like a sailor instead.  It makes him feel better.  

Right now, in the middle of the shitstorm that is Cascade Falls, Cy is mostly just terrified, and he accidentally slept with Jet which is kind of a big fucking problem because Jet isn't normal and also happens to have pinups of Cy plastering the walls of his apartment.  He's desperate to stick with Ceremony because he actually likes Ceremony and Ceremony is actually trying to get them both out alive and (mostly) unharmed, and, oh, yeah, apparently Cy can get injured in dreams now so he's having a little trouble sleeping.  

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Marty Scholl's story is one of the saddest.  He grew up in Cascade Falls, married his sweetheart out of high school, and together they started a small general store.  They had a kid - a daughter - and for a long while there, Marty's life was pretty glorious.  He loved his wife Sarah, loved his kid, loved his store, loved his town despite what it was.  He had a good few years.  

Then his daughter Rowan got lost in the woods.  

She was only eight at the time.  They figured it out quick when she didn't come home right after school; Sheriff DuBois knew as well as anyone how limited their timeframe was.  Kids alone in the woods don't usually last long, not on their own.  

They searched as afternoon started to fade to evening.  Deputies, other parents, they combed the woods - missing kids matter, kids matter in Cascade, because they don't always grow up.  They didn't find her, and then as night fell Marty asked - begged - and Jet went looking.  

Jet found Marty's daughter and brought her back.  For a little while it looked like it would be okay.  Rowan didn't talk.  Didn't do much of anything.  It was easy to explain away as shock, but then things started going strange.  She would stand for hours and do nothing, she would sit in the shadows alone.  Marty and Sarah both had some idea what was happening, but they avoided talking about it, like saying their suspicions out loud would somehow make it more real.  

One night, Rowan called for them, and Sarah went to check on her.  She walked into Rowan's room, and she never came out. 

Marty doesn't touch the door to Rowan's room.  Occasionally roots will grow out from the crack below the door.  He clears them away when they come too far down the hall, and they bleed red when they're cut.  

Marty lost his daughter and his wife.  He mourned, in his own way, but for the most part he continues with life as though it hadn't happened.  He's friendly with everyone in town, affable enough, and he likes the kids that come into his store.  

No one talks to him about his family, not anymore.  If anyone asks, people just say that Marty's kid is sick, and his wife left.  

They're not wrong.    

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Tandy is quiet.  

Another Cascade Falls native, she's still pretty young.  Only in high school.  She's not very popular, in part because she's quiet, but also because for a long time she had panic attacks.  She had the misfortune of catching a glimpse of Jet, not in his human form but in the shape that nightmares are made out of, on the night that Jet pulled Rowan out of the woods.  The panic attacks have faded, but the nightmares still haunt her.  

Her dad's gone, left when she was too young to really remember him.  She doesn't care.  She's got her mom, and she gets along with her mom, for the most part.  

Tandy doesn't like Cascade Falls, not really.  She doesn't hate it - it's all she really knows, after all - but she doesn't like it.  She's not as afraid as most people are.  She realized somewhere along the way that if she's careful, she can sneak up on some of the monsters instead of the other way around.  She doesn't bother the Cascade Falls mountain lion population, but the Watchers, the things that look like trees?  Those are fine.  Then there's the one that the kids call daddy long legs, and he doesn't move as long as you're looking at him; as long as you know what you're doing, you can get pretty close.  Plus, honestly, she's more afraid of Jet than most of the things in the woods.  

Tandy likes the internet a lot.  Everything in Cascade Falls is spotty, so she doesn't get to sit on it all the time, but she runs a couple of blogs just for herself.  She thinks that it's stupid that the weird things that happen in Cascade Falls are kept secret.  She wants to tell the whole world, wants someone to come in and figure it out and maybe make it stop.  Her classmates are dying, everyone is dying, and it doesn't sit right with her.  But everyone is keeping quiet, and there's not much that she can do alone.  She's only sixteen.  

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Thornton Blackwell is more of an idea, right now, than a fully fleshed-out character.  He's also… odd.  There's not a lot of people who move to Cascade Falls by choice.  Thorn is one of them, and that in and of itself makes Thorn unique.  

Thorn is kind of but not exactly a werewolf.  He goes feral some nights and runs around in the forest, and because he smells like monster he's mostly left alone by the things out there.  He's unaffected by the moon, and it's genetic rather than a bite - his mom was the same thing.  The thing is, if he loses too much control - if he totally gives in when he goes feral instead of holding on to the part of him that's human - then he'll actually change, turn into something bigger and meaner and hungrier, and there's no coming back once that happens.  The first winter in Cascade, his mom lost it and became one of the things in the woods.  

Aside from that he's a sweetie.  He's a jeweler and his favorite stone is labradorite, because it's not pretty until it flashes.  He sometimes eats chickens but he always pays back the farmers when he does because he feels guilty.  

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Bob is the assistant manager for the little grocery shop in Cascade Falls.  He's perpetually frustrated and a little bit of a coward, and he shaves his head instead of letting his male pattern baldness show.

There's also a park ranger who I haven't named, but he spends a lot of his time in the forest and is more feral than most folks.  He's a loner, but when he does come into town he's friendly with Tandy (who you will see in part four) because she reminds him of himself when he was young.  

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Alex is Cyril's ex.   Already on the fragile side, he didn't like Cascade Falls at all, and his only urge was to get out.  That got put on hold when he started playing around with Jet right out of high school.  And uh.  It didn't go well. When you're fucking a semi-immortal demon creature, it usually doesn't.  

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Sheriff Luther DuBois has a lot of responsibility.  Another Cascade Falls local, he grew up fighting tooth and nail to survive, like most of the kids there did.  He had his fair share of run-ins with the local monster population, and the scars on his face are from an ill-fated attempt to harass a Cascade Falls mountain lion when he was a teenager. (Nothing like a normal mountain lion.  Trust me on that.)  

Luther has known Mary since they were kids.  When they were teenagers, more often than not they were partners in crime, and they might've been a Thing for a short while, but Mary went off to medical school and Luther went to the law enforcement academy.  He toyed with the idea of staying out of Cascade when he went to the Academy, but eventually went back out of feelings of family duty.  He did his thing, fell in love with a tourist who elected to stay even after getting the it's-not-safe lecture, got married and started a family, the whole shebang.   Ended up with a kid and everything!   

His wife eventually died - not in a monster-related accident, amazingly, but in a car crash.  He dealt with the loss by throwing himself into his work, and it was Mary who bullied him into taking care of himself and his kid again.  

Luther is well aware of everyone's problems.  He was there when they pulled Marty's kid out of the forest (more on Marty next), he's pulled more tourist parts out of the woods than he can count, and he does his best to protect his kid and his deputies and his town but he knows he's fighting an uphill battle.  He visits the high school to give a don't-poke-monsters-and-be-careful-after-dark-and-in-the-woods-seriously speech at the end of every school year.  

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Doctor Mary Monroe was born and bred in Cascade Falls.  Her family's been there for a long damn time, and they've all been doctors.  She learned half of what she knew from her dad before she even went to medical school.  She came back, when all her schooling was done, because Cascade Falls is where she belongs.  Like a fair number of the locals who leave, she went back, because there's nowhere else on earth like it (and the level of trauma that most folks endure growing up in Cascade means it's a little difficult to adapt to the regular world where there aren't things waiting to kill you in the shadows). 

Mary is a partier. She hasn't settled down with one person and probably never will.  Doesn't mean she hasn't had partners - she's had plenty.  She smokes and drinks and sleeps with a gun by her bed (that's not all that unusual in Cascade Falls, though).  She's just all around harder than a coffin nail.  Which is funny, because by virtue of being the only doctor in town, she's also the coroner.  

Mary doesn't get attached to people, with the exception of the Sheriff (who we'll get to in a minute).  She's affable and she knows everyone in town, but she's also expecting most of them to die.  Hell, she's expecting to die, too, which contributes to her live-life-like-it's-the-last-day kind of attitude.  She's practically made of black humor. 

At this point, she's in her fifties and gives approximately zero shits.  She can usually be found at the bar, or in her clinic, or out with the sheriff looking for dead people in the woods.  Her house is just the place that she sleeps.  She drinks her coffee so black that it absorbs light and spends her free time (what little she has) practicing her shooting.  She's afraid of absolutely nothing.  In fact, Jet (remember him? immortal demon guy that people are afraid of?) is intimidated by her.