Anime Your Characters: The ‘These Other Doors’ Edition (part 2)

by Thea van Diepen
Fantasy, Just for Fun, These Other Doors

Last time, you got to see the anime versions of the main characters of two of the stories of These Other Doors (created using this dress up game), entitled The Tree Remembers and Mermaid’s Grotto. For this post, none of the stories have proper titles yet, so thank goodness for code names. Two of these I haven’t started writing yet, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and planning for them, so that’s where all of this is coming from.

Before this gets started, I do need to give a disclaimer: Considering how early I am in the writing of these stories, the details I give here may change. And they may change a lot, depending on what happens in the planning and writing stages. So be warned.

Psychic Bookstore (code name)

That’s Arcadia, also known as Arcady. Just don’t call her Cady or Charity (her middle name). She hates that.

Arcadia has the rare ability to pick up on psychic imprints, the traces of emotional events left behind in inanimate objects. It’s because of this ability that she gets hired in a very unusual bookstore, home to a number of paranormal beings, including the psychic remains of its original owner and several friendly poltergeists. Since normal people can’t see these beings, it is Arcadia’s job to be the human face of the store and to manage the paranormal goings-on of this store which has soaked up so many imprints that it has become almost sentient. Otherwise, the store would close, and the self-esteem it provides to these helpful beings would be destroyed.

The only problem is that Arcadia is more sensitive than they expected. When she starts prying into a mysterious ghost the others want to ignore, she stirs up more psychic emotions than she can handle. Will she find out who the ghost really is and how she connects with the store’s original owner… or will she remain trapped in the store’s memories forever?

Bus Phobia (code name)

This character currently has no name, but this is her just before she goes on a fateful bus ride. See, she has a very specific phobia: If someone sits next to her on the bus and blocks her from the exit, she’ll be too scared to go past them and will, as a result, have to wait until they get off before she can. She has numerous tricks to keep this from happening but, one day, those tricks all fail her and she gets stuck, but not just on the bus. When the person next to her finally gets off, she follows only to find that the bus has taken her to another world, like her own, except… not.

In order to get home, she will have to use her wits as she gains the help of creatures she never thought existed as she navigates the eerily familiar landscape.

Hag Rocks (code name)

The main character of this story (also nameless so far) is pictured when she sees her fairy friend again for the first time in years. When she was younger, the main character used a hag rock (a stone with a natural hole in it) to see fairies, and that’s when the two became friends. For some reason, the they get separated for several years. When they reunite, it turns out that the fairy is in trouble and only the main character can help her.

What neither of them know is that it was the main character’s use of the hag rock that got the fairy in trouble in the first place.

As promised last time, the next post will be the protagonist and antagonist from a story codenamed Ghost Girl, which is going to get a teaser at the end of These Other Doors if I decide to go through with my plan of having some of these characters team up in a vaguely superhero manner with the main character of Ghost Girl.