Carie Miles

Carie Miles

She never wanted to come back to northern Georgia; she was satisfied with how far she'd come, living away from the past. Yet her life was utterly wrecked when Carie found out her twin Erica had died during that damnable winter. It wasn't the first time her life, their lives had been messed up, either, and it didn't take a magical Death Blizzard to do it.

The Twins

Twelve summers ago, when the twins actually looked like twins, Carie and Erica lived a plebian existence with a good mother and a typically absent father who nonetheless always had a hug or a kind word for the girls before he went about his business. She wasn't as outgoing as her sister but at an early age she showed a musical aptitude, in particular for a beat up old guitar her Grandpap left in the attic. The twins were prone to bickering harmlessly with each other before making up, Erica being bright, Carie quiet, but thoughful. Typical early childhood that didn't have an end in sight, really.

The cops took care of that, though.

They swarmed into their house like demonic ants, overturned furniture, ignored the screams of children and wife alike and brought down their dad. Still shouting, they pummeled him to a pulp before he could even surrender. All the private land he owned out in the sticks past Atlanta was being used to cultivate pot, or so the cops and the judge had said. To everyone else's knowledge, it was dried out farmland patches that Dad had never been able to sell. He would meet his end shortly after he was jailed, by a shiv, with no explanation by the penitentary who'd done it, or what the fight was even about. With everything that was theirs falling apart, the twins' were swept up by mom, taken to live with their grandfather in the Appalachians of North Carolina.

It'd be wrong to say that everything returned to normal, or as close to it as could be. Changes had been made, though not all of them what you'd expect from a broken home family. One twin grew to love the forests and the hills now surrounding them, the other found herself wistfully missing Georgia... unexplainable instincts acting up in her case.

The Sisters

Six autumns ago the sisters weren't much of twins anymore. Erica grew in beauty and charms, but Carie... she just grew. Unlike her social butterfly sister, she lived a rather introverted, scared life for the most part. Too shy to make many friends, too afraid of performing to display her guitar talents. Too annoying to be of use to her twin. Erica prodded into her life too much and the sister's bickerings didn't always get resolved.

It was strange, though. At first it was just about normal things two polar oppisite girls would argue about; music, why Carie didn't like half of Erica's friends, refusing a double date, that sort of crap. Carie put up with it for years. But then Erica kept prodding Carie for memories of their father, if they hadn't shared them all already. If she ever had weird dreams about dad, or the fields the cops busted him over. If she ever wanted to go back to Georgia (Carie didn't.) Around the time graduation was nearing, Carie noticed Erica was going through some of their father's things, stuff the cops left. Making calls to old "family friends" and supposed uncles, or friends that assumed such monikers. The biggest argument of all, the most confusing, despairing one, happened a few nights before Erica finally left for good. She wanted Carie to come with her back to Georgia. At the time, Carie was too scared of her sister to go along, her own feelings aside. Erica had grown demanding, violently testy, and looked as if she'd been losing sleep, even getting into fights so she'd heard their mother complain about. She refused. Erica stormed off in the middle of the night, with half her bags packed, and never came home again.

The Only Child

Three winters ago, they finally pacthed things up, before that, losing the support of her once-better half had, oddly, a positive effect on Carie.

Not at first; at first she became once more the scared little girl, now with no daddy AND no sister. More withdrawn and depressed, Carie barely managed to graduate high school and mail off half-assed college apps because the void left by her sister was more than she'd thought. At least when they hated each other, Erica was still around. She never broke promises or spilled secrets. Both twins, it would turn out, missed each other.

Carie even quit playing the guitar for an entire summer, forced to take it with her when she finally was shoved into her second choice school. Plucking a few strings brought her out of most of her funk, but not all of it. Not until a rainy autumn night when she returned to her dorm to find her roomate bitching about Carie's cellphone. it'd been ringing for 15 minutes straight.

It was Erica.

They had a long talk over nothings and small talk, but whatever Erica had gotten herself into, she sounded scared, a bit overwhelmed to the point where she just wanted to talk to someone she could trust. Carie was never trusted with what *specifically* Erica was doing, but from then on, the twins kept in touch, calling one another now and again. She had enough faith in her sister to believe that Erica wasn't up to no good. This also bolstered Carie not only with something to look forward to, but newfound gumption. She became ever so slightly more outgoing. Not much, but enough not to flee when more than seven people were in the same room. Eventually it was enough that she tried making contacts with other musicians, and even got to be in a few gigs. She almost made it into an indie band, too.

But the audition CD Erica was sent got returned back to her in the middle of last winter, Return to Sender. The calls stopped. People called both Carie and her aged mom and grandfather asking about the properties her father (as it turns out) left the twins. She finally admitted to her mom that Erica had kept in touch, and a missing persons report turned up nothing.

School got put on hold. No sign of Erica seriously debilitated the health of her mother, and Carie has rights to the damnable property that caused all of this. With her college funds going to the travel expenses and housing, she's come back to the area surrounding Atlanta in order to find out just what the hell's been going on. Will she sell the property? Find mroe of her dad's/Erica's friends and find out what the hell happened? Get back to school, find another band to sign on with and perform in bars for her bread?

Who knows?

Only that ever since the Winter, Carie's been feeling strange. Not just a dull ache, an unrecognized void in herself (because deep down, she's realized without despair that Erica's possibly gone...) and her dreams are even weirder. She even feels hot at times, like she's on the threshhold of unbearable heat...

Appearance: A willowy girl who screams "I went to a liberal arts college" with her all denim wardrobe and beat up motorcycle with sidecar that typically carries a guitar case. Carie's hair is combed back, no bangs, to form a black curtain down past her shoulder blades which she only clips up when she's riding the aforementioned bike, with two or three bead strings woven into her locks. She's got a pretty-ish face, but she's too tall and lank to be considered attractive by alot of standards otherwise. Yet with hazel eyes that seem more green, or more brown depending on the light, she's got striking features nonetheless. Her hands are long fingered, and she wears no jewelry apart from the beads.

It's her eyes and face that would remind people of her sister; they were twins, though not identical. Carie would look like Erica if she were shorter, blessed with all the right curves and brown, not black hair that shown like bronze.

Persona: A little mopey at first glance, and still shy in some circumstances, Carie has a stronger resiliance than you'd think. She can weather large(ish) crowds if she's performing with a guitar, has enough gumption to ride a motorcycle without being terrified of it (or the ungodly hell that is Atlanta traffic,) and won't give a bully the satisfaction of their trade. She's rather aimable and a bit non-confrontational when you get down to it. Not that she's liable to wilt without extreme pressure, she's the toughest passive person you'll ever meet, and there is an almost uncharacteristic sense of determination if it's prodded enough. Aside from western and country (the two are demonic brothers) she seems to be a very ardent afficionado of most kinds of music, and has a love of Floyd, Hendrix, and the other "Greats." The music she writes reflects these affinities. Has a gift of common sense, though she doesn't always voice it.

(Basic concept: Former shrinking violet, current musician, three steps away from going werewolf. I hope I made it obvious what her dad and twin were, (and more specifically that it rhymes with Guy Ron Blasters,) and have some basic ideas pertaining to her becomming a potential Hunter in the Darkness looking for what happened to her sister and/or the old hold outs of the forsaken.  Not an easy task, though, I imagine. No matter what though I'd like her first scene to be her First Change)

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