The Origins of Anthony Rousseaux (Part One?)

I realized last night at about 11:50 that I had a blog post due in nine minutes.

Needless to say, I did not make the deadline.

So anyways!

In my very first post, I promised to explain to you all what a Shadow Mark is (and probably Anthony, too).  That was back in September.  Welp, here we go.

     A little more than a year ago, four of my friends started this collaborative story thing on a Google Doc.  I'm not gonna go into detail about all of it because it's really long and most isn't mine (maybe I'll talk about it later), but I will explain my part of the story.  

     So this story, "the RolePlay," was kind of insane, and really just awful in the beginning, but most things are, no?  There were four high school girls of varying ages who lived "in the city of Townsville!"  (Nobody was very inspired that day.)  They had a slumber party and they went out in the woods and it was suddenly revealed that one girl was a werewolf (Lizzie), one an animal shape-shifter (Shade), another was a waterbender (Skyler), and the last girl (Bea) had a slight variation on Geass (I've never actually watched "Code Geass," but basically it's a form of mind control).

     Then another of our friends joined in and a ninja girl, Shizuka, came out of the trees.  Then I joined and brought in my character, who...actually, was not Anthony.  Her name was Raven Black, she had no powers, she was sixteen, and she was on the run.  Actually, they were all secretly on the run.

Raven Black
(image source: nobody knows.)

     From an evil magical secret society called the Shadows!  The Shadows hated people with magical powers even though they also all had magical powers, so they went around finding everybody who was magic and either recruited or killed them.

       This is roughly where Anthony comes in.

     So there were a lot of other over-complicated and under-polished things, but basically Anthony was Dakota's (Raven's older brother's) best friend when they were fourteen.  They were both Shadows together, but then Dakota realized the Shadows were evil and tried to leave.  Anthony was one of the recruit-or-kill people, and the Shadow leader ordered him to kill Dakota.  

     Anthony was practically a part of their family, so nobody knew or suspected what had happened to Dakota until Raven found out a few years later.  Anthony had since climbed to the top of the Shadow ranks, but when Raven learned what had happened, she freaked out and ran away from home.  Because it was Anthony's responsibility to make sure no one learned about Dakota (and to keep track of his family), when Raven ran away, Anthony lost everything.  He'd had a reputation to uphold, but when she disappeared, his house of cards collapsed.  (Eh?  Eh?)

     So Raven came barreling into the back-forests of Townsville, but with really horrible timing so everybody started trying to kill her all of a sudden.  (They were really irritable that day.  Especially Lizzie and Shade.)  THEN Anthony came in, and was a bad guy Shadow recruiter person.

So...um...yeah.  This is getting pretty long, so I'll probably continue on in other posts, later.  I did, however, promise to explain the Shadow mark to you all.  The Shadow mark is basically a magical brand burned onto someone when they join the Shadows.  Anthony has one on his left wrist.  It's inky black, a picture of a snake holding a sword between its fangs.  On the blade, there is the Shadow motto, "Show no Kindness, Show no Mercy, Show no Weakness."  

UPDATE: Here's a picture I drew of the Shadow mark a few weeks ago.  The snake should actually be more S-like and its fangs...should look like fangs...but you get the gist of it.  (There has been some debate as to whether it's supposed to be coiled or not, but I think coiled is cooler.)

Thanks for reading!

-Allie

P.S: all the Shadow-parts of our story were technically Sara's idea.
P.P.S: except for the internal conflict of the Shadow (to be addressed in a later post), which we all copied off of Siri.